Chapter 7
After Obito told him about the Elders, Masaki grew wary of them and began going through documents in the Office, one after another, often forgetting to eat. Obito had found his obsessive reading in the Office strange, and Mirai simply brought him something to drink while he was there. Obaasan simply tinkered in the kitchen when she managed to come by.
He couldn’t find anything and was getting frustrated about the whole thing. Everything around the Office seemed almost useless, so where in the hell did that horrible man keep his most prized treasures, scrolls, and books?
Because nothing he read right now was useful to anyone. Even the training scrolls weren't here, and there wasn’t another room in the house that could hold these things. Maybe there was, and he simply hadn’t found it yet. So, he began to look through the house, inspecting each room like looking for the Room of Requirement in Hogwarts.
He was looking for something that might not even be there. Two days and nights of searching later, he finally found it. It was in the Office, but finding a way through wasn’t something he could easily come up with.
There must be some kind of a key. The Office window was open and blowing the papers on the table, causing a mess. He frowned, closed the window, noticed something peculiar and pulled on the curtains. He wasn’t exactly sure what he had just seen.
There had been a person in the tree. It was just a moment. He was pretty sure that it wasn’t his imagination. Someone had been watching… why would someone even watch their house?
So, he did something strange instead and went to the kitchen, took a bit of flour, and, upon returning to the Office, dusted a very light coating of it on everything. Hoping it would look a bit like dust. After that, he pulled out a Uchiha children's book. Why did that man even have it? He had no clue; besides that, it was the only one. He began reading slowly and even finished it before Mirai came looking for him and rubbed her eyes. He took the book with him and started reading it like a bedtime story to her.
He was determined to let Mirai have as much of her childhood as possible. They shared a room, and that wasn’t about to change any time soon.
When he returned to the Office the next day, the window was closed, and the curtains were still drawn, but the light dusting was gone. It had been so small that no one would probably notice, but now he had an idea that someone was watching the house, even entering it.
Why would people watch the house? He was now more interested in that than the documents, but currently, the documents take priority.
After reading that children's book last night, he finally realised that his father’s red eyes at the time of his death were Sharingan, a Dojutsu, only the Uchiha Clan people could awaken. He guessed he probably had them, but there were no instructions on how to activate them.
But logically thinking, if emotions could awaken it, then those same things could probably activate his eyes now. He just had to think of an emotional event in his life.
He wondered what he should think about the emotional events in this life or the emotional events in his previous life. He tried to stay safe and recall the memory with perfect clarity of his ‘father’s’ demise. He let himself be filled by the horribleness of what the man was just about to do and then opened his eyes.
Nothing seemed different, but then he caught sight of a class surface of his eyes, and they were shining red; he turned away, not wanting to linger as Sharingan was supposed to be draining even to the Uchiha. He looked toward the wall full of useless materials, which was the thickest in the entire house and could finally see it.
The Uchiha symbol was painted on the wall of the Office, and he thought it was some sort of a reminder for the man, but it wasn’t. Now he just had to figure out how to open the damn thing, as the place didn’t seem to have any way to open it.
He began to feel tired and remembered his own damn eyes. He stopped whatever emotion activated them and shut the doors that held all those terrible memories. He leaned back toward the table and wondered if anyone could get here and open the secret door. Or would it be a cabinet in the wall?
He couldn’t muster much energy to think about it. Those damn eyes of his were stupidly draining. Instead of gathering energy and starting to figure out the secret in the wall, he picked up another random book from the useless shelf and simply read. It turned out to be a book about Uchiha Clan Laws. It was a boring read, but he thought that it might be useful if those Elders tried something, and the Laws may prove to be helpful. He wasn’t actually hoping to get anything from it.
Obito thought he was mental when he returned from the Academy that day and saw him reading the boring thing, but by that point, Masaki had gathered enough energy to do something else. For the time being, he wasn’t really interested in training, and both his sister and Obito looked at him like he was crazy.
“Can we just… I don’t know, play something? I don’t even know any games… can we play a game?”
“Err… sure,” Obito replied awkwardly, with a frown. He could probably guess that Masaki wasn’t normal by this point, and he didn’t intend to hide that he wasn’t normal. He did intend to keep quiet about his eyes, and Obito was already familiar with how messed up they were.
“What is a game?” his little sister questioned with a tilt of her head. No matter how Masaki looked at her, she looked like a cat, and no one would ever say anything different because she was a cat. He did wonder how his mother assigned those animals to them. And how in the world was he a wolf?
“A game is something when people have fun. It could be an active or not-so-active, even stationary, where people sit around a table. A game's purpose is to play, which means having fun. A fun game should make people smile. You remember that warm and fuzzy sort of feeling, right? It's something similar, but it does depend on the game,” Masaki kept an eye on his little sister to see if she was keeping up with him. He did notice when she didn’t, but that was okay too. Even hearing but not understanding hard words can be a learning experience.
In the coming months, Masaki would regret explaining that concept to her, but currently, he rather wanted to do something that didn’t involve reading, writing, katas, weapons, cleaning, and cooking. He just wished to have a little bit of an adventure, even if it was within the confines of this house.
That day, the three of them started playing hide and seek. It was a simple game, really, but even as he was young, he couldn’t really play a game like this just for the sake of playing. Most of the time, he had to hide to get away from his cousin and other people and seek if he didn’t want to get caught by them. Even now, thinking about his strange childhood as a muggle-raised wizard was something he really didn’t want to think about.
They also played other games that day, like Hanetsuki, which was played with rectangular wooden paddles or what looked to be like them. Either way, they had to keep the brightly coloured shuttlecock, Hane, alive and not let it drop. It was a little exhausting for all of them and the next thing they played was much more calmer. They tried folding paper, and they even managed to make a few simpler ones Obito showed them. They were getting tired fast that day, and Obito decided to help with dinner. Masaki extended the invite to stay over if he liked.
He wasn’t ready to broaden the invite just yet, but Obito was beginning to feel like someone he could care about. Before heading to bed that night, he dusted flour onto the Office and a few other locations in the house. Like the pantry door in the kitchen, the office, and the front of the room where he was staying with his sister.
The following day, he had breakfast with Obito and Mirai. It was much livelier than before. But he was a little distracted. The flour on the kitchen floor was gone, the pantry door had been moved, and the Office was clean, but their room had been untouched.
He had no clue what to think of this. Was their food being tampered with? He could understand the Office, but why would they go after their food, or was there something hidden in the pantry?
He hadn’t got a clue, but he returned to the Office and began to try to figure out if he could open the secret door. He believed that that chamber should hold the important documents. Unfortunately, he couldn’t figure it out that day, but fortunately, he did manage it the next day when he was getting frustrated and focused on his eyes again. When he was close enough, he could see something small and sharp hiding in the lower part of the fan, the white part, even that sharp thing was white.
Even in his last life, things tended to open to blood, so he poked his finger in, and lo and behold, the round part of the fan opened like a safe in those old movies his uncle and aunt liked to watch, but his cousin hated them.
He looked inside and found many things, including most of the scrolls from which he had been learning those fighting techniques, but he was interested in other things right now. He needed to know about the house—who owned it? And the money—where did it come from?
He read like mad for the next couple of days and finally located the source of their money: a bank account and Clan funds. If he understood the numbers correctly, then they had a pretty substantial sum for the time being, and the Clan fund being sent to them wasn’t all that small either.
He guessed that the Clan funding would drop now that their father was dead and their mother was indisposed. But the house was his. The deed to that was clearly made. So, even if something comes up, they shouldn’t be able to force them out.
Masaki had only been in that Office during the daytime, and he stopped checking with the flour. It was pointless anyway. He couldn’t stop them from coming in or out; he was fine as long as they didn’t harm his sister. Now that he was sure about his living situation. He could breathe a little easier and asked Obito if he was fine with them revisiting the Hospital.
He didn’t, and the three of them went. His mother was simply sleeping. She looked calm and content; if he was honest, she looked beautiful. And he didn’t even know her name.
He picked up her hand like he did last time, but she reacted to it and even woke up this time.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he really didn’t. He still thought that she deserved her rest.
“My wolf and cat,” she sounded much stronger than the last time she spoke. “They told me there are two,” she moved her hand to her stomach and moved her hand over it. “Twin foxes,” she mumbled.
He swallowed, not getting where she was going with this.
“I am weak,” she said, and he somehow got what she was saying. His eyes moved up to her face and to holding her hand. Her grip was weak.
“You need to rest,” he said through the thick pain that was making his chest hurt.
“Promise me something, my little wolf?”
“Okay,” he said rather weakly, holding back the pain that threatened to overcome him.
“Take care of little kitty and the twin foxes,” her voice was a whisper
He will not cry again. He would not cry again, but he lost as one tear got over the line in his eye, and the floodgates opened.
“I will, as best I can. Can you answer a question?” she simply hummed. “Your name, what’s your name?”
She smiled and looked down at him. “Kanami. Don’t cry, my wolf. It doesn’t suit you,” there was a teasing smile on her lips, and Masaki smiled, pushing the tears out of his eyes with the palms of his hands. He kissed her hand and placed her hand back on the bed.
He moved toward her head and left the tug on his shirt. Mirai was there, staring at her like she had never seen her before.
“Rest, Mum. We’ll be fine,” something seemed to reach her, and tears began to fall. “We’ll be okay,” he said confidently, even as those blasted tears kept falling.
“I will,” she said, and the nurse came to examine her condition, but then she made them leave. Obito showed the way back, but no one spoke.
Masaki knew it was probably the last time he would see her alive. She might not have been a Mum, but she did what she could when she could. And she deserved to be called that way, even if it was just once.