***
Chapter 13: :Ame futte chi katamaru
after rain, the earth hardens
***
There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man – with human flesh.
Dune
***
Present Day
: :Konohagakure: :
Something you're going to learn as time goes on, Fugaku, as you notch more and more battles and fights and wars onto your belt-
I don't usually wear that kind of belt, sensei.
Shut up, brat, I'm being insightful.
Yes, sensei.
Anyway, something you'll learn is that no matter what, every battle you fight is a loss.
That doesn't make sense.
Sure it does. Do you lose people in battles?
…not always.
Does the enemy lose people in battle?
Not always.
Brat. The loss of human life renders all battles a loss because there's no war worth the cost it charges.
Not even against Kaguya?
How do you weigh the value of one life against another? Especially when they're young? When they haven't grown and figured out what their contribution to the world is? You don't know what you've lost, so what have you gained? Nothing is worth the cost of a human life, so nothing that costs one is a win.
So what am I supposed to do?
Oh, there's nothing you can do. It's just something to keep in mind.
….Thank you for the lesson, sensei.
She'd laughed at his tone, unconcerned that he'd still been so young he hadn't had his temper under control.
That conversation was one of the many that replayed over his mind as he floated in the nothingness that was the void between the living world and the Pure Land.
It was a strange, oddly comforting place. Suspended between the two worlds where humans could be found, and yet, for all that you floated in nothingness, you were not falling. There were no chains to bind you, no ropes to hang from.
Just an endless blackness, like being wrapped in a blanket that blocked out all light. No weight, no pressure, no pull in any direction.
Bare existence. A void, a limbo, that was not enough to remove who you were but enough to stop you from becoming something else.
There were glimpses of the living world. Enough holes in the veil to allow the Sharingan some reach through. He could catch glimpses of his children, their lives and battles, their happiness, which seemed to become rarer and rarer over the years, and their sadness, concerningly more common as time went on.
Obito had wandered so far and then, for a brief, heart-wrenching moment, disappeared completely before the slow, steady growth in the distance signified his return.
Iruka had never left. A solid blanket spread over the village and intertwined with the very wards that protected it. Slowly fading away, but not so much that he couldn't still put up a fight twenty years later. It wasn't just his looks that had set Iruka apart from the rest of his family; where most Uchiha's first instinct was to attack, Iruka's had always been to defend. Fitting for the Tenshi Heisoban.
Itachi was finally close again. His depthless chakra as impossible to capture as those stains running through it. Like a single black thread in a white blanket. An illness of some kind, not enough to kill outright, but not something that could be cured either. No doubt Itachi had managed to hide it from everyone. His third had always preferred to keep his own council until it was absolutely necessary.
Sasuke's fluctuated wildly, a flame strong enough to generate its own wind, and he would have cried if he could when it had left the village that first time.
And now, for the first time since his death, all four of his sons were inside the walls of Konohagakure.
Even their cousin Shisui was back and wrapped up in Hana's bloody chakra in the Inuzuka Compound.
Everyone was finally coming home.
In the abyss, he could feel Mikoto's chakra, an unrelenting flare, somewhere nearby but never so close he could touch.
And all the others, beacons in the void, but it was still the void. Like stars in the night sky, you knew they were there; some part of you could sense them, but you couldn't actually tell where they were. Never within reach, but never gone completely either.
When his father had first explained the wall to him, he hadn't understood. Hadn't been able to comprehend what it meant when Isamu said, "The service of the Uchiha does not end with death."
That had been back when he was still proud to be part of the village before the bitterness and the rage and the miasma had sunk too deep to ever remove. What had started as a mark of pride had become a weapon against his clan, a reminder that no matter what they did in life, no matter how hard they fought or how high they climbed, it was never enough.
Isamu, ironically given his blood, had never been much of a thinker, but Fugaku was, and he'd always wondered if Madara would have still bound them to the village if he'd known how it would go.
Had it even been Madara? Or that thing that had slithered under his skin and rotted him from the inside out?
In all the Uchiha's memories of the Calamity, he'd never accepted chains of any kind until Kaguya's grip had been so strong not even he could fight it.
But why would she want the Uchiha kept? She wanted them burned to ash; the Sharingan eliminated completely.
As twisted as it was, Fugaku had come to the conclusion that the chains were Madara's way of fighting back. Of ensuring Kaguya's miasma couldn't kill them off completely before she returned.
Uchiha are born half-dead, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to be fully dead, Grandfather had always said.
The only ones strong enough to decide when we die are us, Kikyo had always taught, which was ironic, given her own refusal to die.
You're all stubborn as fuck, Minato had muttered over and over, usually when they'd been drinking.
Get back up. Just one more time. Always, just one more time, Fugaku had told his sons. As long as you do that, you will win.
Clearly, they'd taken that lesson to heart. But why did that scare the rest of the world? What was so terrifying about someone determined, someone unwilling to lay down and die?
Wasn't everyone like that?
Fugaku had never fought someone who'd simply agreed to die when he showed up. Even the weakest of his opponents had at least made an attempt to survive.
It was inconceivable to imagine someone willingly allowing another to kill them. He didn't have a single memory of a Uchiha dying peacefully. They died in battle, they died of poison, they died of disease, they sacrificed to bring the Sharingan out in another and to feed the wards, but they did not die quietly.
And some of us, he mused, floating here in the void, simply didn't die at all.
They just waited until they were needed again. Until there was another war for the Uchiha to fight.
Fifty years, four world wars, a dozen shadow conflicts, and only a handful of those fifty years had actually been something you could call peaceful. Considering those numbers, it was surprising it had taken so long for someone to call on them.
They'd all felt Kaguya's return; blood called to blood, after all, but she'd faded almost as quickly as she'd come.
A trap, no doubt.
When had she ever gone down so easily?
And what had happened to Madara? His chakra had spiked suddenly and then completely disappeared. Someone at his level should never have faded so quickly, so where had he gone?
Did it even matter?
If, by some miracle, he'd survived Kayuga's possession, there was no way he'd be physically strong enough to fight. Perhaps he'd finally found some measure of peace, and Fugaku would have the honor of meeting him in the Pure Land when both their duties were done.
He would like Fugaku's children, he thinks, slightly ashamed of his own ego in thinking the greatest of their blood would even deign to notice his offspring. But he can see it so easily. He'd already trained Obito, but he would argue with Iruka, their passion equal in its heat. His talent a match for Itachi, and his love a match for Sasuke's.
Madara had never had children of his own despite wanting them, and his loneliness was a palpable, painful thing among the clan memories.
The pull started slowly, weakly.
Flickering in and out, like the requestor couldn't decide if they were committed or not, but eventually, they must have made their choice because a cold hand pushed its way into Fugaku's chest, took a firm grip on his heart, and pulled with conviction.
The icy grip offset the pain as he was pulled through the void until gasping breaths and the smell of dirt drove his eyes open for the first time in two decades. The pull didn't weaken as the slates of the coffin came into focus, so he forced his atrophied muscles to move, dug his fingers into the old wood, and pulled until it splintered.
After the wood, there was hard-packed dirt, but it crumbled easily enough, and suddenly, there was fresh air followed by a blue, blue sky.
But there's no time to wonder as he rips apart the rest of his coffin. The sounds of battle and the smell of blood and rotting flesh fill the air.
The wards are active, sparking and cracking in places under the onslaught. There aren't enough surviving members of the three clans to maintain them, and these are Shinmoro's yokai. Ink and blood and chakra. Easy to summon and hard to kill, but not very intelligent. Mindless monsters bent on destruction.
Kikyo had helped seal Shinmoro hundreds of years ago, and every Uchiha visited the memories of her battles with the Useless Demon Summoner and the carnage he'd wrought growing up.
The wall around the village had come down. Nothing but a ring of dirt and broken coffins as the rest of his blood breaks free. There were fifty of them after Fugaku and the handful of his generation were added. The oldest of them from back during the First Shinobi World War and the first years of the village before Madara left.
There are a few Inuzuka and Aburame mixed in, those who hadn't wanted to give up the fight or who'd become so intertwined with the Uchiha that they'd followed them in death.
And Sakumo, of course.
But mostly, they are Uchiha. Mangekon Sharingan bearers whose loyalty and strength doomed them.
When he was very young, Fugaku entertained foolish thoughts of freeing them all from their chains and giving them peace, but like all of his blood, the years and the memories of those before him brought wisdom and the realization that nothing mattered more than defeating Kaguya.
Some had to suffer in the name of saving many.
It was a duty that came with the privilege of bearing the Sharingan.
So Fugaku stood and brushed off the dirt and stretched out stiff muscles. Looked around to gain his bearings as he sorted through the knowledge shared between their dojutsu.
The village had responded strongly, desperately. Every shinobi capable of fighting manned the edges of the village while the older academy students led the evacuation efforts.
How long had it taken the Hokage to wake them? Most of the Konoha shinobi, including Hatake and the Hokage herself, were smeared with blood and sweat. The nearest buildings were nothing but smoking piles of debris, and the triage section was overflowing with injured. There was no trace of the Inuzuka or Aburame on the battlefield, which meant they were powering the shield with Iruka and the others.
Except Obito, who stood at Hatake's side with a concerning grin on his face.
"You could look less pleased," Fugaku tells him without meaning it.
It just makes Obito's grin widen. "No way, old man."
The shield above their heads cracked. The chakra supplying waning, there was only so much blood in a single human, and it only took so long for someone to bleed out. With the low numbers among the three clans that fed it, it would have only lasted a day or two at the most, depending heavily on the strength of the attacking demons.
The longer Shinmoro moved freely, the more yokai he could bring to life, and he was halfway to bringing the shield down already.
"Wakahisa."
The emergency doctor, one of Tsunade's most trusted and experienced medi-nin, stiffened. She'd come up in the same generation as Fugaku, but she'd never actually spoken to him before. Fugaku knew her through Iruka's memories of bringing a young Naruto to the emergency room. One of the few nurses who would treat the boy without a fuss.
For her part, Wakahisa knew the Uchiha from being one of the first responders to the Uchiha Compound when the alarm had sounded. She'd been on battlefields less bloody than that place.
She was a professional, though. Not just a shinobi, but a doctor. Lives rested in her hands long after the fight ended, and she was used to field shinobi fighting over who was in charge.
She trusted Tsunade.
Fugaku had just crawled out of his coffin. "Send your medics to the Inuzuka, Aburame, and Uchiha compounds. Putting bodies on the field is more beneficial than maintaining the shield."
She glanced at Tsunade and found the Hokage looking back.
Fugaku didn't even bother looking over, eyes pinned on the writhing mass invading the forest. "The shield is already falling. When it does, they will all be dead, and not even a healer as skilled as the Godaime will be able to bring any of them back."
Tsunade straightened, "Go."
Wakahisa went.
"What about the compound wards?" Tsunade asked, stretching her arms as she stood behind him, readying for another round as a centipede several miles long rose above them.
"Oh dear," Okuniushi crawled off her shoulder and scuttled across the ground. "Bright Eyes, welcome."
"Kami-san."
"Taciturn as always." The spider paused, blinked a thousand eyes up at them, and then tapped the ground with one slim leg.
The world shook, and the wards fell out of the sky like shards of glass.
Fugaku had no doubt there were questions. Many, many questions that all needed answers.
There were plans that needed to be updated, needed to be made, needed to be scrapped completely and redone.
There were mouths to feed. Homes to rebuild. Wounds to bandage.
Hearts to heal.
Reunions to hold.
But for now….
For now-
There is only one thing to do.
The Uchiha stand to his left and his right, eyes forward to the forest and the approaching mass of demons.
For now, there is work to be done.
It's been decades since he has given the order, but he still remembers the thrill from that first time when he was still young and there was still glory in battle.
"Uchiha, to the line."
***
Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved.
Martin Luther
***
There is an old story about the Uchiha. A fairytale, really, that Kakashi heard many times when he was growing up.
They'd whisper it whenever the Uchiha did something, anything worth gossiping about, which was pretty much just breathing in those days.
That they shared blood with demons, their red eyes a sign of demonic contracts or rotten blood.
Nonsense, according to his father and Minato-sensei.
But the whispers came from older stories, from the times of Waring Clans and the Land of the Ancestors.
When yokai were said to roam the land, and nightmares were real.
The story went -though it looked different according to every source, but one thing stayed the same- the Uchiha hunted demons. They sang war songs as they walked through fire and burned away the shadows that had claws and teeth.
Before they'd learned the truth, many had believed the Sharingan had been a gift to the clan in return for their hunting.
It made much more sense that they'd hunted demons because they bore the Sharingan.
Obito had always told ridiculous, exaggerated stories about his ancestors hunting giant centipedes and spiders fast enough to bite off a limb before you noticed they were there. About corpses that picked themselves up and bones that never rested.
Kakashi had never taken him seriously.
And now that he found himself facing those stories come to life, he couldn't help but wonder what else Obito had said that he'd dismissed as he watched Uchiha Mikoto leap into the air, hands moving so quickly even he couldn't catch all the hand signs.
Flames erupted around her, coalescing into two huge shuriken that cut through anything she turned them on, her movements more akin to a dance than anything else.
As he watched, the giant centipede fell, then a cockroach the size of a horse, then they rebounded and changed direction mid-air to cut a three-eyed crow in half.
Chakra-controlled then.
Impressive.
There was a steady stream of smoke climbing into the air now that the Uchiha had taken the field, and several fires took on a life of their own in the forest.
Trust a bunch of Uchiha to start a forest fire, but it did seem to be forcing the demons-
Ah.
They were herding them. Using the fires to corral them into tight groups where a single jutsu would take out more than one at once.
Lines of effort and measures of effectiveness and all that.
Obito seemed positively gleeful, leaving Kakashi's side for the first time to fight alongside his clan.
The grin on his face was somewhat disturbing, stretching ear from ear even as he faced a twisted, rotting dog as tall as Kakashi and turned to laugh with a clan mate wearing a uniform from the First Shinobi World War.
But then, Obito had never really had the chance to fight alongside his clan, had he?
He'd spent most of his time fighting with their genin team and died young, and unlike other Konoha Clans, the Uchiha had clung to the practice of fighting together in larger conflicts. It had happened several times during the Third World War, but Obito had always been too young.
Kakashi forced his attention away from his old teammate to take stock. They were coming up on their second day of fighting. With the wall down and every able-bodied shinobi fighting, there was a small open space between the forest and the nearest buildings, but it wasn't enough to protect the village, and several of the nearest buildings were already destroyed.
The medics were struggling to keep up with the number of wounded, though Okuniushi had unbent enough from the rules of the gods to assist and spun healing webs to buy time for treatment over the worst of them.
With the wards down, there was no protection for the village beyond the shinobi fighting, and several demons had already slipped through, though they'd been contained before they could do catastrophic damage.
The initial lines of defense had already been redrawn twice. The Hyuga's Byakugan could easily track the demons, even when they had natural camouflage, but their Gentle Fist was surprisingly ineffective. Likewise, genjutsu and kinjutsu were largely ineffective, and the Sarutobi, Yamanaka, Hoki, and Kohaku, who specialized in them, were useless. As were Jiraiya's seals. The brute force of taijutsu and elemental and pure chakra-based attacks were by far the most effective and the most draining on the shinobi using them.
The appearance of the Uchiha had managed to stem the tide, but wasn't enough of an advantage to turn it completely, and now they were entering their thirty-first hour in a bloody battle of attrition.
Waiting to see which side would give out from their losses first.
The demons had to come from somewhere, but Kakashi couldn't spare the forces to search it out.
There'd been no update on the Inuzuka and Aburame, or Iruka, Itachi, Sasuke, or Naruto. All of whom were assumed to be in the Uchiha compound and in a similar state to the Inuzuka and Aburame.
Sakura had brought the remaining members of the Rookie 11 to the front immediately after the attack, but the absence of those three clans and Naruto was notable in their ability to fight.
And the demons were still coming.
"Kakashi," Asuma, out of breath and suffering from several minor injuries. "We need to make another run to the hospital."
"Already?"
"The casualty collection point is overflowing. Even with Okuniushi's help, they can't take on any new injured."
"Eternal Rival!" Gai landed with a bang, as always. One of the most valuable fighters of the day, per usual, he'd been leading the front line since they'd realized taijutsu was the most valuable technique they had. "We've had some success bottle-necking them with the fires, but for every one destroyed, two more appear."
"God damn it." Asuma cursed, "We need to find the summoner."
"We can't afford to take anyone off the line."
Tsunade and Jiraiya were holding the center. Shu, Shin and Hiashi the left, and Kakashi and Gai the right.
And all of them had had to forgo commanding to fight just to hold the line steady.
One of the resurrected Uchiha appeared a few feet away with an injured kunoichi over his shoulder.
Instead of moving to the collection point, he whistled sharply, and a medic-nin raced over to take her. "Internal bleeding and broken ribs."
"Understood."
The medi-nins seemed to be the ones most accepting of the sudden resurrection of the Uchiha. A blink, and they were back to work. Kakashi was going to put every surviving active-duty shinobi through emergency medical training when this was over.
"Amaterasu."
Black flames rose in place of the wall, the tips of the outer flame reaching the clouds far above the village.
There were more than a few startled screams from Konoha shinobi, but they were quickly drowned out by the demons caught in the black flames.
Itachi himself appeared amid the flame, his Rinnegan practically glowing. He cut an elegant figure, even in Iruka's hand-me-down uniform. So calm and collected that even Kakashi's perfected laconic slouch didn't match up.
It was hard to believe he and Obito were related, let alone siblings, as Obito tripped and flailed amid his fight against a snake yokai a few hundred feet away.
"Kakashi-sensei!"
Kakashi turned, and never in his life had he been so relieved to see someone as Naruto and Sasuke raced towards them.
Of course, some of that relief turned to apprehension when he saw the Nine-Tails running alongside them.
He heard Asuma mutter, "God damn it, Iruka. You're supposed to warn us before you do that shit."
And the Academy sensei himself appeared in a puff of smoke and leaves. His sleeves were soaked with drying blood, but his eyes were bright and red and spinning.
Kurama let out a howl of glee as he leaped through the flames and took to the field.
"I figured this could be an exception, you know, since we're all about to die."
"No. No exceptions." But Asuma was grinning as he threw an arm over the young shinobi's shoulders.
And before Kakashi could even start to think about the repercussions of Iruka releasing the Nine-Tails, a great howl echoed, and the earth shook.
"Another demon?" Genma squawked, barely standing.
"Wrong direction," Gai responded, turning away from the fight and towards the village.
Another howl and then a chorus in response.
"It's the Inuzuka!" One of the medics shrieked as the first of the clan's nin-kin appeared, their shinobi hot on their tails. Only Gaku paused briefly to locate Kakashi.
"Give me a team to find the summoner."
"I don't have anyone to spare."
"You will."
The ground shook again, so powerfully that it raised them all into the air.
Kuromaru, the size of a small building now, lept those few still standing in a single jump.
Perched on his shoulders, Tsume laughed as they passed through the flames. "Get a move on, brats. We've finally got a fight worth enjoying!"
"She's insane," Genma muttered, and those around him nodded in stunned agreement.
"Kind of inspiring, though," Raido shrugged as Tsunade apparently took Tsume's laughter as a challenge and stepped through the flames herself before her guards or Jiraiya could stop her.
A dark shadow fell over them before Kakashi could point out that it still wasn't enough.
A giant black cloud above the village moved steadily toward the battlefield.
"What the hell is that?"
"The storm," Okuniushi said, "The flame, the wild, the storm. Those are the three we tasked with defending this world, and here they stand once again."
"Bugs. It's the fucking Aburame bugs!" Someone yelled as the cloud descended. The hives separated to swallow any demon in the air as the Aburame shinobi, led by Shibi, fell from their living clouds like gods answering prayers.
Tenzo appeared at Kakashi's side. "Senpai, did you know they could do that?"
"….No."
"It's not as intimidating as it looks. They're just using their bugs to anchor chakra nets that can carry them for limited stretches," Iruka said, and Kakashi nearly punched him then and there.
Fuck this, Kakashi thought, resigned to the madness of this new world. I'm retiring if we survive this. Tsunade can just be Hokage until she dies.
***
There will come a time in your life when you lose something that matters to you. You'll fight for it, and you won't win. But what really matters isn't the war you're waging; it's that you don't lose the person you are in the midst of the battle.
J. Sterling
***
Present Day
: :Forest of Death, Konohagakure: :
He cackled to himself as he painted, ignoring the cramps forming in his hands and the lightheadedness from the blood he was spilling into the ink.
It wouldn't be long before his demons broke through and overran the village entirely.
He'd already painted hundreds, and the three clans weren't strong enough anymore to fight them all off. Finally, they would perish. All those fools who'd called him useless and weak and told him he was wasting his time.
All those great Shinobi about to be ripped apart by what one had once called Shinmoro's childish scribbles.
He giggled. Even the Nine-Tails and the gods couldn't take on an army of yokai and defend the humans. Something would give, and it would always be the humans.
Weak little insects that they were.
All those years trapped in that terrible seal, and finally, finally, Shinmoro would get to laugh over their corpses.
"If only the bitch was still alive, I'd dance on her corpse!"
"You're welcome to try, summoner, but I don't think a thousand years is enough time to make you that strong."
A chill he hadn't felt since his sealing crept through him as he turned to the figures stepping out of the shadows. "You're not here. You're just a ghost! Humans can't live this long!"
"I'm special," Kikyo smirked, and the golden-haired man at her shoulder rolled his eyes.
"Let's get this over with. I want to get back to the village as soon as possible."
***
You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You've hit no traitor on the hip. You've dashed no cup from perjured lip. You've never turned the wrong to right. You've been a coward in the fight.
Charles Mackay
***
~tbc~