Chapter 6
In the following weeks, Masaki and Mirai began to form a pattern. It was comfortable for them this way. It was better to figure out some sort of schedule than simply do things when they were needed. So, even when he didn’t like it very much, he entered a room he didn’t like and one such like it was His office where all the scrolls and books were kept.
He was a little worried about their money and had to figure it out, even as their house held quite a few resources. They would still probably need money, and since the man didn’t work, Masaki had to figure out where all the money was coming from.
He spent quite a while in that office trying to figure out things.
Obito and Obaasan come by every other day to figure something out, mostly to deal with cooking, cleaning, and washing. Washing was a bit difficult with some of the bigger things. But overall, Obaasan was satisfied with his efforts and complimented him on them.
About ten days after everything happened, he asked Obito to help them visit the hospital. He didn’t seem to mind and took them there. Masaki looked up at their sleeping mother, still in that strange position; her belly looked bigger. He didn’t say anything, so he took her hand, and Mirai joined him. It was just that. They just held her hand.
They returned home with Obito, who showed where he and Obaasan lived. That was also about the time when Masaki noticed a cat and pointed it out to her.
“What is a wolf?” she asked, and Masaki wondered if she could remember that halting conversation he had with their mother.
“Hey, you have a library. Don’t you have books with pictures?”
“No, everything is text,” Masaki said simply. Now that he was forced to interact with the boy, he began to notice things about him. He was a little over the top, but he wasn’t stupid. He noticed things, and most people often dismissed him, but he wasn’t talentless like so many were calling him.
In a way, the other boy was in a similar position in the Clan, just like he was. The Clan didn’t like either of them. Thankfully, that same statement didn’t apply to his sister. He could see it in their eyes. They were condemning his actions. He knew it was unfair. How can they judge him? They had no idea what it was like to live in that house.
He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about it.
He couldn’t care what these people thought. They weren’t there, and they couldn’t possibly understand what he had to go through. What kind of torture had his life been? How can they judge so easily? Did they even know anything about what happened and how they had to live? It didn’t matter. People always judged without knowing a damn thing.
“Why do they look at you like that?” Masaki asked instead. The looks the Clan people gave him and Obito were too similar, and he didn’t like them.
“My parents are dead. No one is talking about what happened to them, what they did, but the way everyone keeps looking at me. I’m guessing they did something wrong.”
“So, you don’t know?”
“No, and no one is telling me anything either,” he said, the frustration palpable in his voice and features.
They walked quietly toward their house on the clan grounds and said goodbye at the door. Obito wasn’t in the mood to entertain them anymore. He could see it; it had been his fault for asking about the looks. He didn’t know and couldn’t have known either way.
Obito visited the next day, and Masaki was in the room where he usually did his weapons training. He was simply going through some katas with a Tanto-sized practice blade. He could feel the fluidity of the moves as he moved from one stance to the next, his breath coming out just right.
The door was pulled open, and he knew Obito was there. He expected him to stay and watch as he usually had done this far, but something had ticked him off again. He picked up a few practice blades and jumped in front of him, crossing the blades.
He stopped for a moment and looked at him. He was angry and impulsive right now. He could assess this much from just a glance. He didn’t know what it was, but he apparently needed some sort of outlet, and Masaki wondered about his own ability and if he could use this blade in a fight.
Their blades crossed: Masaki’s Tanto-like blade and Obito’s two practice kunai. They jumped apart; no words were said for the time being, and then the blades crossed again and again. He kept his mind sharp, his feet light, and his breath right. It looked like it could be good, but then Obito did something to mess up his rhythm, and he nearly lost his balance.
He was beginning to play dirty. Alright, then, he would play dirty as well. Only they were inside, and he didn’t want to pick up more weapons. Masaki hoped that if he didn’t, Obito wouldn’t either. So, he switched up his moves and added more kicks to them.
It threw Obito for a bit, but he didn’t take long to counter. Masaki was starting to feel frustrated that everything he kept throwing at him did nothing or was countered quickly. His emotions were beginning to bubble, and he cringed at the thought of his ‘father’ scolding him about being emotional.
“Emotions in a fight will only get one killed.”
Those were his words, and even though he didn’t want to take that as a piece of advice, he did, as emotions killed people more often than they saved them. So, even if that flinch clouded his judgment for a moment, and thanks to that, he got kicked in the stomach and tumbled over.
He pressed down his emotions and moved to attack once again. He had switched his hold on his current weapon, as it looked like he couldn’t use it as he had been practising. He had to think and look at Obito.
Only a moment later, he lost his weapon and had to switch to simple hand-to-hand combat. He somehow even managed to take one of Obito’s weapons. Obito hissed and complained about that, but it seemed like most of his irritation was beginning to dissipate.
About an hour later, after Masaki had been kicked to the ground for the fourteenth time, he looked up and noticed that Obito was done.
“It’s stupid, but do you want to talk about it?”
“No, you can't help anyway.”
“I wouldn’t,” he scoffed, “I have too many things on my own to deal with, but sometimes… sometimes talking about it helps even if there isn’t a solution.”
So, that was how Obito began to talk to him, and Masaki picked up a Katana. Obito began to tell him about his day and how everyone always dismissed him, but Masaki didn’t say more. He took up the Katana and began to swing it.
“Just because they can’t see doesn’t mean that you are wrong,” he said in the end and then asked if he would like to stay over. Obito nodded, and they walked out of the room. They then noticed Mirai huddled in the corridor.
“Mirai…” she gave no reaction. He moved closer but didn’t touch yet. “Kitty?” he asked. She looked up wide-eyed and then grabbed hold of him. “I’m sorry. I should have explained. Did you see what we were doing in there?” he pointed to the room he just come out of.
She responded with a bobbing of her head.
“Do you remember how he trained us? Did that look anything like that?”
She shook her head slowly in response.
“This wasn’t a bad thing. Yes, we were fighting, but it wasn’t to hurt each other. We were fighting to get better. Obito didn’t mean to hurt me, did you?”
“No,” he answered quickly. “I didn’t want to hurt your brother or you.”
“Right. He didn’t want to hurt us, but he wanted to fight. To boys, this is how we like to deal with most things. We want to fight it out. Sometimes, we don’t even want to win like today. Sometimes a fight is just that, a fight where someone expresses their emotions.”
“Then… then, did he do that to us?”
“No. What he did to us was nothing like this. He did not have any emotions when he did those things to us. That wasn’t what he did. He was a bad bully who didn’t like girls.”
“What do you mean?” Obito asked him instead.
He sighed. “She was treated worse than I was. I remember the day she was born. I did nothing but sit and wait beside the door. But then I heard the cry, and he hit our mother for giving birth to a girl. I’m still kind of wondering why he didn’t just… it would have been easier.”
“You’re morbid.”
Masaki turned back to Mirai. “The fight was just that, a fight where we make our skills better,” he looked down at her and thought she might recoil from it.
“Will you help me learn it?” she asked instead.
He frowned. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“I… I wanna be like Bushy. I don’t want to be like Mother. I want to be strong like my big brother.”
“I don’t think I’m strong,” he said, knowing it was true.
“You're plenty strong, even for a four-year-old,” Obito said instead. He looked up at the bigger boy, frowning, question in his eyes and refused to ask it. “You get up, don’t stay down, and continue to try harder, even when everything seems against you.”
“You do that, too,” he said, and Obito scoffed. Mirai sat down, and Masaki began to figure out what to make for dinner with Obito’s help. Obito didn’t know how to cook. He simply helped with mundane things like peeling things or cleaning up. He was a little messy, but overall, he was fine.
“Do you know when you’ll start the Academy?” he suddenly asked.
“Academy? When did… when did you start?” he asked, knowing he wouldn't if he were supposed to start an academy right now. Things were hard enough without adding some kind of school into the damn system, and he had no interest in leaving Mirai home alone.
Not when they had just begun thinking of this place as their home where they could be safe. Not when their Mothers and her pregnancy's fate was unknown.
“I started when I was about to turn six, but I was five when I took the tests and entered the Academy.”
So, this means he had time till then.
“When am I supposed to start?” he actually wanted to ask if he even had to go at all, but he couldn't ask that.
“I’m not sure. The Clan Elders will probably notify you when you should.”
“Elders?” he mumbled and brought the dishes to the table. He sat at the table and wondered. “Do the Elders decide what people do in the clan?”
“Mostly smaller things. The Clan head is supposed to deal with bigger things, like relations with other Clans, the Police Force, and Hokage. Mostly, it’s politics. The Elders deal with most of the things in the Clan, so the Clan Head doesn’t have to.”
“So… our situation… was the result of Clan neglect.” He scoffed, looked down at his food and began to eat. He didn’t even know why he thought the Clan might be a good place. Maybe it just looked safe from the outside.
The Uchiha Clan was not a nice place. He had determined that the place he grew up in, this house, wasn’t a nice place. He knew that. Then, why did he hope that this place might be something other than what he grew up in?
Yes, by this point, he had figured that his father or grandfather or someone was very special in the Clan. That was probably why they had such a huge place, such a huge house, as their home, but he hadn’t found anything more significant. He still doesn’t know if the house is his or maybe it is his mother's now. Since his mother was treated like this and his sister was treated similarly, did women in the Clan have proper rights at all?