Author's Notes:

I got no excuses. I simply had too much fun in real life. But here's another chapter and I hope you enjoy it. Massive thank to blackgremlins and to the amazing guest for your comments. You input means so much to me. And also thank you to the kudosers! ILYSM.

2nd of May

Shiori was asleep for what felt like an eternity until a blast of chilly air blowing against her face made the pain on her cheek so unbearable it forced her awake. Despite feeling somebody's arms around her, she recognised the unmistakeable sensation of free-falling. They stopped with a jolt, as if hitting something solid. The sudden loss of momentum made her right eye flutter open.

'We must be up in the trees,' she thought. All she could see surrounding them were leaves and branches. Occasionally there would be a break in the canopy and a star-dotted indigo sky would peek at the empty space. She blinked once before turning her head to the right, peeking at the person holding her. From her vantage point she could only see his chin, the tip of his nose and the mass of dark hair fluttering around his face. It was a profile she had encountered so many times before. Every cell in her body recognised him and yet her brain found it difficult to process who was in front of her.

He must have noticed her staring because he tilted his head down to look at her.

"…Itachi." She dared to say his name, willing him to disappear. That was always the case in her dreams. The minute she caved in and began to believe that he was back, she would say his name and she would either wake up or he would morph into someone else.

This time it was different.

She remained awake. He didn't vanish.

"Let's get you somewhere safe," he said. She felt it more than she heard it, vibrating against her arm with such certainty she wanted to chuckle mirthlessly. The safest place on the planet that she could think of had been her flat. Her attackers had debunked that belief and now she doubted if she could feel safe anywhere.

"Itachi." She said again, still willing him to disappear so she could wake up from this nightmare. Perhaps then she could get back to the boring life she had fought so hard for.

"Shiori, I'm right here," he replied. "I'm not going anywhere." He gave her a look, letting her know that he read her mind.

Shiori sighed in defeat and curled up against the warmth of his chest as much as she could, once again succumbing to the mind-numbing effects of the drug still running in her bloodstream. It garbled the words of the voices surrounding her, including her mother Yugen's.

It was more of a memory than a dream. And from how it felt, she could tell it wasn't hers. This was a Reading. Shiori took a deep breath and looked up. Four different memories from the same person ran simultaneously in front of her. The premise looked bone-chillingly similar. In each memory a person was seen being held down. Two of them were restrained on beds. One was on a metal gurney. The last one was the most gruesome for the young man had both wrists and ankles nailed on to the wooden floor. All four looked fearful enough in the beginning. This fear only grew as the lady would appear on this man's vision.

She was whom they called the Seamstress. She had silver hair which were so long they went past her hips, ghost white skin and a small face with delicate features, a small nose and thin lips. She looked delicate, even timid until she would shoot them a look with her dead-looking amber eyes. In each memory a shiver would run down her spine. Shiori understood why. It was her whole aura.

She felt cold.

Ominous.

Lethal.

The Seamstress barely greeted the retrieval team before she would turn her attention to the two subjects in the room. One was the victim. They were the ones either screaming bloody murder or weeping silently on a corner. The second subject would be another individual who was always asleep in the beginning of each memory. She put her arms out in front of her and she would start siphoning chakra on the first subject. With each minute that this process went on the subject would grow weaker and eventually lose consciousness. One made a handful of rattling breaths before going completely still, eyes wide open yet unseeing. The Seamstress would walk over to the second subject and would infuse the foreign chakra she held on her hands onto the chest of the sleeping person. Each subject would walk up healthy with an ability to wield a kekkei genkai they didn't possess minutes ago. Some would laugh manically. Others would nod once, pleased with their new purchase before jumping out of their resting place and making a beeline for the exit.

"A pleasure doing business with you too." Shiori felt her lips move but the voice was that of the man who attacked her.

"Fucking bastards," another man spat out from across the room.

And then all four memories simultaneously paused. Even Shiori found herself stuck in the man's unmoving body.

"I know you're in there," a chorus of soft voices echoed around her. Slowly, in each room of each memory, the Seamstress would turn around to look at her knowingly, acknowledging her presence.

"And I'm coming for you."

Before she even realised what was happening, she could see a steady stream of her chakra leaking out from her chest. The tips of her fingers began tingle and she grew lightheaded, similar to the sensation she always felt when she was on the verge of blacking out. Breathing became difficult. Her heart fluttered in her ribcage before staggering painfully, losing its rhythm and stagnating the blood on her veins. She was terrified.

She was dying.

Shiori gasped as her eyes flew open.

Beside her, Amai jumped in surprise. "Damn, you scared me!"

She sat up, hands clutched to her chest as she struggled to catch her breath and steady the drumming of her heart. She scanned her surroundings warily, unable to recognise the sterile grey walls. The room was mostly empty, save for the single sized bed she was lying on and a room divider made of metal and a long piece of cloth sitting a couple of feet away on her right side. It looked like a spare room and somebody had hurriedly thrown random furniture in the centre of it.

Amai sat down at the foot of her bed. His eyebrows were furrowed with worry.

"How are you feeling?"

The question flipped a switch in Shiori's brain. It was as if a floodgate was opened and her body remembered the beating it took. Pain crept back on her legs, back and head. Her hand flew to the left side of her face as she groaned.

"Oh! Kami it hurts."

"I managed to heal the fracture on your cheekbone and got most of the swelling down. But you're still going to be sore for the next couple of days I'm afraid. That shiner will go away on its own."

He motioned at her left eye. Shiori gingerly touched the skin surrounding it. It felt soft and sore. As she prodded her eye, she looked around her surroundings once again.

"Amai-sensei, I'm really confused right now. Where are we?"

"Uhm… we are in the Kage Building. Right beside his office."

"Kage Building?" Shiori repeated, sounding surprised.

The senior medic-nin looked down on his lap first with a sigh before meeting her gaze.

"Shiori-chan, do you remember what happened?"

"…huh?" She whispered.

Another floodgate was opened. The sequence of events from the night before came back to her with a speed faster than that of the Raikage's. Shiori stiffened, her back a tad bit straighter as her hands clutched the sheets with a death grip. Her grey eyes scanned the room once more.

"Where's my son?" She asked shakily. Panic shifted the octave of her voice.

"He's fine - "

"Amai where's my son?!" She asked again, barely containing the scream lodged on her chest. Her inability to keep him safe made her skin scrawl as she remembered his terrified screams.

"-Here," he replied quickly. He pointed at the divider in the middle of the room. "He's perfectly safe. But it's best you don't wake him up right now. It's four in the morning."

Shiori shot him a skeptical look. She swung her legs at the edge of the bed and stood up. Stars exploded in her vision. The muscles in her thighs felt sluggish, still recovering from the poison laced in the senbon. Nevertheless she shuffled towards the divider, her gaze laser focused on the white cloth to keep herself from blacking out. She felt Amai's hand on her shoulder which she shrugged away. With shaky fingers, she shifted the partition on one side. Shiori whimpered and lost control of her legs. Her knees would have smashed to the floor if it weren't for Amai catching her under her arms.

"I got you," he murmured.

Her eyes pricked with tears. On the other end of the room was another single sized bed with the same sterile-looking white sheets and a pillow. And in it, curled to his side and facing the wall was Naoki. He was exactly where Amai said he would be.

She held on to her sensei until they reached his bed. Shiori immediately spooned him up into a hug, her body curling around his. She buried her face on the top of his head and inhaled deeply. Naoki barely stirred. When he shifted to his back, she saw the bandages covering his right forearm.

"He didn't sustain any remarkable injuries. Just a cut on the arm which will heal in a day or two. But he was understandably shaken up when Yugen-san and the crew got you here. The paediatrician gave him a sleeping draught to help him rest. He won't be waking up anytime soon."

"Thank you," she whispered.

He paused, unsure how to proceed. "Shiori-chan-"

"-Three men broke into the flat in the middle of the night," she replied. "I didn't see their faces. They were covered from head to foot as if - "

As if they knew how her kekkei genkai worked.

"Anyway," she continued, "they said they wanted me. And they used Naoki as leverage. It obviously worked. They hit me with a laced senbon and then proceeded to beat the daylight out of my face. They made him watch, Amai-sensei." She whispered the last sentence while smoothing Naoki's jet black hair away from his forehead. She watched as his thick long eyelashes fluttered against his cheeks.

"I'm sorry," he said.

He have encountered these moments enough times to know that it was better to give the victims a silent moment to recover than to bombard them with shallow sentiments. And yet, the clinical part of him was still assessing Shiori, trying to gauge how much damage she incurred internally. He gave here a couple minutes of silence before he asked.

"Was that the last thing you remembered?"

He saw her back visibly stiffened. Shiori untangled herself from Naoki and sat up at the edge of the bed. Her grey eyes glared at the cold white tiles. Her shoulders were tense.

"I…I'm not sure if I remembered it correctly."

Seeing Naoki safe made her a lot calmer. Blood no longer throbbed in her ears and she began to pay more attention to her surroundings. More specifically, she began to notice the voices just behind the lone wooden door of the room. There were multiple people behind that door and one of them was Yugen. She could tell that much. However one particular voice caught her attention. She could barely make out the words but the timbre was one that she would recognise anywhere.

If Shiori was being honest, and she really did not want to be, it was the voice that to this day still haunted her in her dreams.

As though in a haze, she stood up from the bed and slowly shuffled towards the door, ignoring Amai who was trying to tell her something.

'Not real,' she thought. 'Not real. Not real. Not real.' Her hands found the doorknob. Before she could change her mind, she twisted it and yanked the door open.

There were five people on the other side of the door.

Her mother Yugen.

The Godaime Raikage, Darui.

His second-in-command, C.

All three were on their feet. The other two were casually seated on metal chairs as they weathered through a long and drawn out interrogation. Before the door even opened, their obsidian dark eyes were already trained at her direction, waiting for her to emerge.

One of them was Uchiha Shisui. He had an unreadable look on his face but his eyes often shifted cautiously from her to the person on his right. It was barely noticeable but he did not miss the way Itachi bit the inside of his cheek as he trained his face to relax into a blank, impenetrable slate. He stared at Shiori who was staring back at him with wide, shocked eyes. She gasped as her hand flew to her mouth.

For a good ten seconds, the silence in the room was such that one could hear a pin drop. Shiori was the first to break it.

"It can't be," she croaked. The words were painful as they ripped out of her throat. Her mouth had gone bone dry. Her lungs temporarily stopped working, making her insides burn at the same second that her skin broke into goosebumps. Manners flew out the window. She stumbled into the room. It no longer registered to her that she was still in her plaid shorts and pyjama top which now had a huge splattering of blood at the front. It no longer mattered that the strongest shinobi of Kumogakure was in the room with her. For the second time her body and mind went into shock. She looked like a train wreck and she felt like one.

Shisui waited for Itachi to say something. When he didn't, he cast a sideway glance at him. He had to shake his head. It didn't look like it but he knew his little cousin well enough to know that he was just as tongue-tied as the young lady he was staring at. He cleared his throat.

"Uhm…is she…gonna be okay?" He asked tentatively.

To this Yugen sighed and walked over to where her daughter stood. She took her by the shoulders and shook her gently, urging her to stop staring at Itachi.

"Shiori," she said in a low voice. "Let's go back to Amai-san. You're freezing."

Her daughter shook her head vehemently. "No. Okaa-san, what the hell is going on?" She hissed. "That," she pointed directly at Itachi, "can't be who I think it is."

"That's what we're trying to figure out. And to be honest I would have believed them quicker if they haven't told us this ridiculous backstory involving that snake bastard Orochimaru," she replied, trying to keep her voice calm and even. Shiori may act calm but the wild look on her eyes betrayed the fact that she was a tooth's skin away from having a meltdown. As far as she was aware, Itachi and Orochimaru would sooner go at each other's necks than get involved with one another. And then there was Shisui added in the mix. It was enough to make her head throb.

Behind them, Itachi had shifted his gaze back to the Raikage, as though he could no longer be bothered by Shiori's sudden entrance. Shisui took this as his cue to speak.

"Raikage-sama. You're a sensor type yourself aren't you? An exceptional one at that. Surely you recognise our clan's chakra signature." He clearly remembered many skirmishes against Kumo-nins during the Third Shinobi War.

"You're right," Darui replied. I would recognise that chakra anywhere. Uchihas are some of the most noticeable shinobi in the battlefield, which is why I wouldn't be surprised if somebody finally studied your chakra signature long enough to mimic it flawlessly."

"If I may, Raikage-sama," C interjected. "While it's true that there are shinobi who are gifted with mimicking chakra signature, I find it hard to believe that somebody could do so this seamlessly for extended periods of time. In the six hours that we've had them here, I have yet to notice any disturbances."

'Six hours,' Shiori thought. 'How long was I out then?'

"Fortunately for us we don't have to go on with this debate for long," Itachi spoke up. Despite being detained for hours on his metal seat he had maintained his good posture, with his back straight and both feet planted on the floor. His hands were neatly folded on his lap. Yugen noticed it, a chilling reminder that this kin killer who obliterated the Uchiha clan was in fact a high born and brought up with the expectations that he was to become their heir.

"What are you suggesting, Itachi-san?" Yugen spoke cautiously, unconsciously stepping in front of Shiori to keep her out of view. Itachi merely tilted his head to stare straight at the latter.

"Shiori. You can get to the bottom of this can you not?"

C raised an eyebrow at the casual way he was referring to Yugen's daughter. He turned to Shiori, whose jaw still hung open and disbelief written all over her face.

"Shiori-chan, if you're feeling unwell I suggest you head back to Amai-san and get yourself checked. These discussions are not fitting for one who is indisposed."

She clamped her mouth shut and shook her. She could feel something brewing in her chest. But now was not the time to let her emotions get the best of her. For her to find out just what exactly was going on she needed to keep herself together.

"No need C-san," she replied. "And Itachi-san is right, Raikage-sama. I can get you the intel you want. It won't even take very long."

"Sotome Shiori," Darui started. "You mother has told me about your unusual ability. It was one even the Akatsuki coveted. That's how you and Itachi-san got acquainted with each other if I'm not mistaken."

Shiori locked eyes with her former koibito. He remained silent, cold and stone-faced despite holding her gaze. The familiar prickly sensation at the back of her eyeballs crept up and she turned to Darui to stop the waterworks from starting.

"That is correct, Raikage-sama. Though it is one that I haven't used for this purpose in years, as per our agreement."

"Which begs the question: How well are you able to wield it? Don't take it personally but it is important that I voice out my skepticism.

Shiori swallowed her annoyance. People have been asking her to not take things personally while they personally attack her. "Understood. Which part of it do you have doubts about?"

"Will you be able to tell if their memories have been tampered with?"

"I don't see why not, Raikage-sama. Any discrepancies in a person's chakra is detectable once physical contact has been established."

"She can tell," Itachi added. "I've studied her chakra flow when she does her Readings. It is how we refer to her attempts at gathering intel from our targets. Her chakra gets in touch with everything, including a memory fuinjutsu if there is one."

Shiori wanted to jump at him and shake him by the collar of his mesh shirt. How can he sound so nonchalant while she was literally unravelling at the seams? It felt as if the earth had just been yanked from underneath her.

"Have you personally encountered a person under a memory fuinjutsu, Shiori-chan?" C asked.

"No, not specifically," she replied.

"But you have been inside enough heads to know how authentic memories feel like," Itachi spoke up again. "In the past you've been able to discern dreams from memories, and memories of actions done under genjutsu from memories of actions done without outside influence. You know when something is real."

Shisui's eyebrows flew up and he turned to Itachi.

"We still talking about memories here or what?" He whispered.

"Quite a vote of confidence you gave there Uchiha," Yugen said as she casually leaned against the wall, arms crossed over her chest.

"I know my ward," he replied matter-of-factly.

"Don't call me that," Shiori deadpanned.

Yugen shot her daughter a look. "I watched Amai-kun repair your broken skull merely hours ago. Are you sure you're going to be okay doing it?"

"Well, I wanna find out for myself," Shiori replied. "Besides the sooner we corroborate their story, the sooner we find out who our attackers are. Raikage-sama, I hope it goes without saying for you that I hold no loyalty towards Uchiha Itachi. Kumogakure is my home. I have nothing to gain and everything to lose by betraying you."

Darui nodded at her. "Go ahead then."

Shiori nodded once and slowly made her way in front of Shisui. She took in his features. He looked right around the same age as Itachi's last memories of him. Not even his topknot could make him look a day older than eighteen. He stood up and bowed at her in greeting.

"Sorry. I don't think we've officially met. I go by Ryota nowadays but I guess you can call me Shisui."

Shiori bowed back in return. "I've seen a lot of good things about Shisui-san. If you are who you say you are then it's good to finally meet you." She smiled as he took his seat. "Now we have a lot of questions that we need answers to. And I know this sounds bizarre but I'm gonna have to kiss you."

Three pairs of eyes turned to look at Shisui. He gaped and looked at Itachi in bewilderment. The latter merely nodded at him. He stared wide-eyed at Shiori.

"Uhm…I really shouldn't-"

"Not on the mouth," Shiori chuckled. "Just…sit still please." Before he could say anything else, Shiori bent down and pressed her lips against his forehead. Shisui squeezed his eyes shut, not knowing where to look. They stayed in that position for over a minute before Shiori stepped away.

Shisui looked up at her, observing how her blown out pupils slowly constricted back to normal size. He shivered involuntarily.

She let out a slow exhale before shifting her attention to Itachi. She stepped closer to him, noticing the way he was scanning her face as though one of the Akatsuki members had just returned her from a mission and he was doing his usual once over. The sensation in her chest got heavier.

'Not yet,' she reminded herself.

Once she was sure that she could move her hand without her fingers shaking, she reached out and smoothed his hair away from his forehead.

"Right. You know the drill," she whispered, leaning forward. She paused abruptly when he tilted his head to meet her gaze.

"Don't hold back."

And she didn't. She cupped his face with both hands and planted her lips firmly on his forehead.

A minute passed by.

Then another.

On the third minute mark she released her hold of him. Her grey eyes were trained on the floor, refusing to look at Itachi. After a long, silent pause she crossed the room and leaned against the wall on the far end of the office. She needed to put as much distance from everyone as she could without actually running out of the room. She couldn't let them see the way her legs shook. And she was so sure that if they were to stand next to hear, they could hear her heart hammering against her ribcage.

"Their stories check out," she said quickly. "You're looking at the clones of Uchiha Itachi and Uchiha Shisui." Even as she stated these facts, her mind was nothing but loud static noise save for one word that kept repeating itself on a loop.

Real.

Real.

Real.

Author's Notes 2.0:

I played a lot with this chapter in the hopes that I could capture the feeling of Shiori on the verge of losing her mind. I mean, it's safe to say that anybody would lose their sh*t too if faced with this situation.