Chapter Text
Itachi’s biggest skill has always been following orders. Horrendous orders, horrific orders (Danzo explaining so calmly how Sasuke can live if every other Uchiha does not), but orders that Itachi ultimately understood in practice if not always in principle.
He is not an intelligence officer, at least not beyond the training all ANBU receive. His skill is far more in assassination and interrogation than it is in spycraft. He doesn’t have the innate curiosity that his mother has, or Sasuke, or a number of his ANBU teammates.
But a former Root member just called Nara Shikamaru a Commander of the Allied Shinobi Forces—a title that the village does not use for a group that does not exist, placed on a child who is not yet a genin—and Shikamaru did not dispute the claim. He was surprised, but it was that the Root agents knew the information at all, not about the content of that information.
Itachi knows Shikamaru saw him react, and that is something that will have to be handled, but he doesn’t think Shikamaru will have him killed.
Doesn’t think a Commander of the Allied Shinobi Forces will have him killed, and when Itachi fits that title around his understandings of Nara Shikamaru—as the head of a prestigious clan, as a pre-genin, as the shinobi who held Itachi in a jutsu long enough to keep Itachi from massacring his entire clan, as a body that Itachi put his sword through and that then walked into the Uchiha compound and asked for Itachi’s training despite fear so strong Itachi could nearly taste it on his tongue—it fits uncomfortably around jagged edges, but not as uncomfortably as it should.
There is something fundamentally wrong with Nara Shikamaru, something broken in a different way from what is broken in Itachi.
Commander of the Allied Shinobi Forces, and they do not make pre-genin commanders of anything, which means that Nara Shikamaru is not Nara Shikamaru.
But yet the only jutsu more complicated than those taught to genin that Itachi has seen him use are all Nara clan jutsu, hoarded the way the Uchiha hoard knowledge of the Sharingan.
Commander of the Allied Shinobi Forces, which means that there were allies. There was an enemy big enough to bring them together, beyond their differences.
And now they are in Suna.
And now Nara Shikaku-dono is building alliances.
Nara Shikaku-dono is building alliances, and Nara Shikamaru who may or may not be Nara Shikamaru is antagonizing the Suna jinchuuriki and befriending the Konoha jinchuuriki.
There is something wrong with the Suna jinchuuriki’s seal.
That’s what he said, with too much certainty to be a guess, no matter what he claimed. There aren’t a lot of things that can make a jinchuuriki that unstable, so my guess is that there’s something wrong with his seal. There is something wrong with his seal.
Itachi remembers the kyuubi attack. All of that raw power, that chakra that felt like acid through their veins, like being buried alive, like drowning.
What if you could steal that power, harness it, turn it into a blade or a jutsu or a weapon?
What could the sharingan do, with the power of a bijuu behind it?
What could the sharingan do, with the power of every bijuu behind it?
“Secure the suite,” Shikaku tells the two Root agents. “Defensive actions only, minimal force to protect your life. Warn rather than prevent entry.”
“Don’t antagonize the Suna shinobi,” Shikamaru adds hoarsely.
The Root agents nod to both of them, then flash out of the room.
The room is still warded tight, so Itachi says, “Commander of the Allied Shinobi Forces.”
Shikamaru closes his eyes, which is as good as an admission.
“Are we here to steal Suna’s bijuu?” Itachi asks lightly, and both Naras startle. “Or just the jinchuuriki?”
“Neither,” Shikamaru says sharply, and when he opens his eyes they’re like flint, ready to spark a fire. “You don’t touch him, you hear me? Keep your fucking hands off of him.”
It’s more vehement than Itachi has ever heard from him, and it’s not the sort of reaction Shikamaru should be having about a creepy kid whose only interaction with Shikamaru has been threatening to kill him.
They can’t have met before; pre-genin are almost never taken from the village, and Itachi would know if the Suna jinchuuriki had been brought to Konoha.
“We are here to build a genuine alliance with Sunagakure,” Shikaku says, looking at Itachi like he’s a puzzle Shikaku wants to solve. “We are offering support with their jinchuuriki’s broken seal.”
They’ve never needed Suna, nor particularly cared about them; they are largely not competing for missions, geographically, and the massive fucking desert in between them makes direct attack in either direction unlikely.
Itachi has rarely been curious.
But he is now.
–
There is something odd about Neji-nii-san.
He has been odd since the events with the Uchiha, training with her, kind rather than just polite, and that kindness hasn’t gone, but it feels strange now, almost the distant kindness of members of further branches of the family.
And then she opens a training dojo door to see him training the Eight Trigrams Palms Revolving Heaven jutsu, which she only knows so far as to recognize when performed, and which he should not know at all.
For one brief, bloody-mouthed moment, Hinata thinks her father has selected Neji as his heir and taught it to him.
But he would not, no matter how much she knows he wishes to be able to. A member of a branch family cannot become heir unless all members of the head family are dead.
In front of her, Neji turns to a halt, chakra dying down around him, so graceful on his bare feet that he finishes his turn perfectly facing her. His hair is dishevelled, not a proper shinobi braid that would keep it in place for such a technique, but his face looks relaxed, almost placid.
“Excuse me for the interruption,” Hinata says with a bow.
“Hinata-sama,” Neji says with a bow in return.
“May I—” Hinata swallows, then shores up her bravery and says, “Your hair is coming loose from its binding. May I braid it for you, Neji-nii-san?”
Neji blinks at her, then reaches back and touches his hair, slipping loose of its tie. “I—yes, if it would not be too troublesome.”
He is so much taller than her that he ends up sitting cross-legged on the floor with her up on her knees behind him, carefully combing her fingers through it before separating it out to begin braiding it. Hinata has had short hair since entering the Academy, but Hanabi’s hair is long, and sometimes Hinata braids it for her.
Braiding Neji-ni-san’s hair is not like braiding Hanabi’s very much at all.
He is larger, for one, and covered in sweat, and she can feel him trembling just slightly as she touches him.
“Have I angered you?” she asks as she braids. “You defended me when my father stopped by during our training, after you had defeated me, but if he was harsh to you, if he—” She’s stammering, and she stops herself the way Neji-nii-san has recommended she do, taking a breath. “If I have harmed you in some way, you have my sincerest apology.”
“You have not harmed me,” Neji says. He half-turns as though to look at her, then stops, stymied by her hold on his hair. “Hinata-sama, you have not—you could not—”
“Then why do you seem so hurt, Neji-nii-san?” she cries, realizing only as the words leave her mouth that that is what she is seeing from him: pain.
“Your father has—” Neji stops, and she can feel his entire body trembling under her still fingers. “That is, Hiashi-sama has—he has bid me not to speak to you of it.”
“Did he hurt you?” she demands fiercely.
Neji laughs under her hands, or perhaps sobs. “I do not know what to do, Hinata-sama. I am without direction, I am lost—”
Hinata drops his braid so she can scramble around in front of him, where he hides his face from her. She doesn’t want to bring him shame, so she just kneels before him and touches his knees and says, “You are as loyal a Hyuuga that we could ever ask for. If father plans for you to train Hanabi instead of me, or for you to learn those techniques that he does not think that I am suited to, as his heir presumptive—”
Neji jolts, looking up as though he is genuinely surprised by her comment, though she has no idea what would have surprised him about it. “A technique—fuck.” He blinks at her. “Don’t repeat that.”
Hinata giggles despite herself, because nobody has ever said that word to her before, and Neji smiles back at her, and that horrible shaking tension eases in his body.
“Thank you, Hinata-sama,” Neji says. He takes her hands in his, and she doesn’t comment on how they’re a little damp. “You will be the best leader the Hyuuga have seen, and I will serve you until my death.”
–
There’s another Hyuuga kid at the Uchiha gate, and this one freaks Mikoto out even more than the last one.
Mikoto was just on her way out to go shopping, so she’s the one who opens the gate to see the Hyuuga heir—a tiny slip of a girl about Sasuke’s age—standing just outside of it. There’s no hulking Hyuuga escort in sight, but Mikoto can feel a few lurking in the bushes, giving their heir the illusion of having ventured out on her own without allowing any true risk to her.
She pities Hyuuga Hiashi for the time this girl becomes a genin and he has to wrangle half his clan back from following her around like particularly conspicuous shadows.
“Uchiha Mikoto-sama,” the girl says, and bows deeply to her.
“Are you looking for Sasuke?” Mikoto asks. “He’s out practicing with shuriken, if you are.”
“I hoped to speak to you,” the girl says.
Before she can hold her tongue, Mikoto blurts out, “Tell me you aren’t being followed, too.”
The girl looks directly at the bush where one of her Hyuuga escorts is hiding, then says politely, “No more than usual, Uchiha-sama.”
Right.
Well, Mikoto doesn’t need to go shopping quite yet. She says, “Please, come in.”
One of the Hyuuga escorts glares at her from the bushes. Mikoto smiles at them and ushers the girl into the compound.
She’s not as eerily polite as her cousin, but she is very soft spoken, allowing Mikoto to fill the air with light chatter about the weather and the trees on the Uchiha compound grounds.
People give the girl odd looks as they pass, but the looks are less odd than they would have been a few months ago, and certainly less hostile.
“Would you like some tea?” Mikoto asks once they are inside.
“Thank you,” the girl says, and says nothing else while Mikoto prepares tea for the two of them.
Finally, once they are both seated on cushions around the table, Mikoto asks, “What can I do for you, Hyuuga Hinata?”
The girl looks down at the cup cradled in her hands, her fingers twitching around it. “The Hyuuga and the Uchiha are enemies, often,” she says quietly, “or rivals. But of all the clans, I could not think of one that is more similar to the Hyuuga than the Uchiha.” She bows over her tea, a move that looks almost reflexive. “I fear for my clan, Uchiha-sama. I fear my father is hurting my cousin, and I do not know what to do.”
Well, Mikoto thinks. Fuck.