the red mirage (Naruto OC)
Hatsue stood in front of the man, unblinking.
"Why did you choose to come here?" he asked after a pause.
He was surprised. By her audacity, perhaps. The sheer nerve of her, to kneel in front of a foreign leader and offer her measly skills. Loyalty is a precious thing in the hands of the worthy, but somehow she doubted that the man found much worth in the scrawny twelve-year-old in front of him.
"I'm an older sister," she said as if it ought to explain everything.
And it did, but the man did not have the context to comprehend it.
"Oh?" he murmured. "And where are your siblings?"
She tensed, then forced herself to relax her shoulders.
"Safe. I'll bring them here if our meeting goes as I hoped."
"And if it doesn't?"
"Then you'll either kill me or drag me back to Konoha in chains. But my siblings will still be safe."
No Yamanaka would pry their location from her, she made sure of it.
Rasa hummed.
"Why not other villages? Kumo would have welcomed you. Iwa would too, and they are both strong enough to protect you."
We might not be, was implied, which was dangerous in itself. A village aware of its own weakness would be more willing to give them up to Konoha.
"Because you're a man of good sense," she said with a raised chin. "Kumo would have me pop out a few babies before killing us all. They would want our eyes, not our selves. They seek short-term benefits, and they do not see the value of clans." They practised dehumanisation to the point that some of their ranks were named after letters, for Sage's sake. What did they care about the Uchiha legacy? "And Iwa would kill us at the slightest provocation. You are aware that there would be more long term benefits to the survival of the Uchiha clan in spirit as well as in body."
She could say more. She could say she did not trust Kumo in the slightest. She hated the way they operated and would never entrust her siblings to them. Bloodline theft made her skin crawl, and the fact that they chose to steal women when a willing man could impregnate a hundred consenting and loyal Kumo-jin instead did not bode well for the way their society was structured.
She could say Iwa would not let her siblings live their lives as civilians. They would be forced to join the Academy, just like Konoha would have if she had gone along with her original plan of going back there after the Massacre. She had wanted to say their father faked their deaths and took them away, but that he died and she wanted her siblings raised in their ancestral land. Konoha would have gladly welcomed five more loyal Uchiha. But that would have meant entrusting her siblings' lives to Shimura Danzo and accepting the fact that her precious family would be forced into the ranks.
Jirou wished to be a glassblower.
Hibiki yearned to spend her days playing the shamisen.
Keiko, Shouta and Asuka were too young to know what they wanted yet, but she dreamt of a home that would give them a chance to find out.
And she hoped Suna might become this home. Rasa needed to be made to see the wisdom of allowing some Uchiha to remain civilians. They could not afford to die out on the battlefield before an Uchiha Clan loyal to Suna was properly established in the village. He had a lot to gain from this. A noble clan in his ranks would be welcomed by the Kaze Daimyo's court, who disdained the current forces loyal to him in favour of outsourcing missions to Konoha because Suna's best and brightest were not deemed prestigious enough to serve him.
And most importantly, a properly trained Uchiha could control the Ichibi for the foreseeable future.
The Kazekage dipped his head. Silence filled the room for unbearably long seconds as he considered her unspoken offer.
"Very well. Let's negotiate."
Hatsue breathed a shaky sigh of relief. She bowed once, twice, before standing up on trembling legs and sitting at the table the Kazekage was inviting her to join him to.
She knew how risky this would be when she planned this mad gambit. But she had more bargaining power here than she did in any other village. Kumo and Iwa might not have listened to her. They did not need her. They might like to have her, sure, but if she turned out to be a liability, there were other ways to make use of her without having to take her wishes into account. They were shinobi, not samurai. They were not held to their honour.
She was not naive. She did not trust the man who would soon seek to ally himself to Orochimaru either. But she trusted in his pragmatism and his desire to see his village prosper.
Hatsue had planned this since the Kyuubi laid waste to Konoha and the Uchiha were subsequently segregated to their old compound, in which they hadn't lived since the Warring Clans Era. Since her older brother Arata died during a so-called training accident, and her grieving father doomed them by joining the Elders in planning a coup.
Before she was an Uchiha, Hatsue was an older sister.
She knew what her priorities ought to be.
***
"So this is our new home?" asked Jirou, looking around.
The seven-year-old was firmly holding Keiko and Shouta's hands in his, his serious little face taking in their surroundings.
Hatsue, with a sleeping Asuka strapped to her chest and an awed Hibiki at her side, hummed in affirmation.
"Hibiki, don't turn your head so fast, you'll hurt your neck," she warned her little sister, who hugged her shamisen to her chest and stopped contorting herself every which to take in the landscape around them.
Suna was very different from what they were used to. Gone was the ever-present greenery of Konoha, the traditional houses of the Uchiha Compound. Instead there were round clay and stucco houses keeping the heat out, with high windows wrapping around the structure and bringing in the light. Hatsue watched the colourful stalls tucked in between buildings, where the air currents were stronger and the shade protected the merchants. She spotted arabesque medallions on the bigger houses and painted patterns around the doors, proof that the landscape of Suna was not only composed of earth shades. In the distance, the desert and the mountains of Kaze no Kuni loomed, the inhospitable land sprawling over miles, beautiful as it was deadly.
There were granaries on the outskirts of the cities, she noted, just below the mountains in which the source of Sunagakure's water supply was hidden. The village subsisted on groundwater, with the support of their rare water-natured and more numerous earth-natured ninjutsu users to draw it out. And on the mountainside, agricultural terraces were used to supply the village in foodstuffs. They were recent constructions, she heard. The former leaders of the village had better relations with their daimyou and could afford to rely on him to supply them with food. Rasa started this project when he realised that he would not benefit from such an easy relationship with what was essentially his co-leader.
The first Hokage had given Suna fertile land on the border between their two nations as a symbol of friendship, but it was taken back during the First Shinobi War, then fought over for multiple decades until the two villages renewed their alliance on the cusp of the Third War. It was one of the conditions of their partnership, but the land was poisoned by Iwa-nin during the conflict and though it was still considered Suna territory, it was less than useless to them.
She was only told because she was one of the rare Uchiha who had a dual fire and water nature. Since she would not be leaving the village for another two years, she was told in no uncertain terms that assisting the Farmland Division would be one of her duties. Rasa was taking a gamble on her. It was a show of trust: she entrusted her siblings to him, so he would give her the keys to his kingdom. If she proved to be a spy and poisoned the water, Suna would not survive, and he had to know it. She must have been convincing when she swore herself to this place, she thought before dismissing the idea. The truth was that no saboteur would allow their own family to serve as hostages, not even for the sake of a mission.
Especially not a clan shinobi.
Hatsue often wondered if she truly counted as such. She didn't get to finish her last year at the Academy, after all. But Rasa had given her a Suna hitai-ate, so she probably did now if she hadn't before this.
"Do you like it?"
"It's hot," complained Keiko quietly, the five-year-old tugging at the scarf wrapped around her head, protecting her from the sun while hiding her from view. Her twin nodded vehemently.
"It's very beige and brown," commented Hibiki. "But pretty."
This part was said very quietly, but it earned the six-year-old an approving look from their jounin escort. Baki-san was stern and wary of them, but he was polite and struck her as a kind man. He was also intensely loyal to Sunagakure. She eyed the second member of her escort. She had seen Pakura in her visions of the future. She had been part of the puppet army of undead revived by one of the instigators of the Fourth Shinobi War. It seemed like whatever had caused her death hadn't yet occurred, or her visions were not entirely accurate. She didn't know more about Pakura than what was in her Bingo book entry, but what she had gleaned was enough for her to feel some measure of admiration for the kunoichi.
She hoped she would train her. Scorch Release looked like it was wielded in much the same manner as some of the Uchiha techniques she had copied from the Archives before she spirited her siblings away. She could trade them in exchange for training, she mused.
Something to think about.