panacea

Kakashi’s dogs have been sent back to Konoha to fetch help, as there are too many children to be safely escorted, and not all the staff were killed on sight. Some will need to be taken back to Konoha for interrogation.

When Itachi looks down at the silently shivering Hyuuga Hinata, the usual discomfort he feels regarding torture fails to arise.

The children are sitting on a pile of cloaks from the ANBU’s packs, as none would stay inside the facility, and the squad hadn’t felt inclined to force them. Hinata sits in the middle, legs politely pressed together, hands in her lap, the picture of manners.

Itachi bends down to address her once again, concerned by her unchildlike calm. Half of her face is livid with colour from where she had been struck. Her assailant had not held back. Neither, Itachi muses grimly, did Hinata.

“Are you alright, Hyuuga-san?” He asks.

She had struck the man with a fatal blow to the heart the second it became necessary. Her goal was blocking the doorway and thus protecting the children, and right as a guard threatened to slip past her, she stopped him. She did her duty even when the only method available to her was lethal.

How could a child Sasuke’s age be capable of taking a life? Itachi cannot question the mechanics of it – indeed, he himself had done that and more when even younger – but he wonders how, in the aftermath, could a girl so young look so composed?

She looks up at him with the same veiled trepidation she’d shown the second he’d removed his mask. She’d recognised him as an Uchiha and had found the revelation troubling to say the least. He’d noticed her reaction but couldn’t quite understand it. Yes, their clans had an unspoken rivalry stretching back decades, but was that something she would already be aware of, let alone invested in?

Though she was the heir, after all. She was effectively his equal, a social peer. It was entirely possible her father had drilled all manner of ideas into her head about which clans were appropriate to associate with, and which were not. The Uchiha clan, as powerful as it is, was barely above persona non grata status in polite society. Some of the dark rumours swirling around them had likely reached even little Hinata’s ears.

“Yes,” Hinata answers. Her voice is toneless – carefully so, in a way that stands out to Itachi’s ears, used to Sasuke’s inability to modulate his speech. His little brother couldn’t hide his feelings no matter how hard he tried. Even their father rarely chastised him for it, recognising the futility in expecting a child to master themselves as an adult would.

She isn’t huddling against the cold the way the other children are, though the tip of her nose is pink. She is sitting seiza-style, head slightly lowered to show deference, and her hands rest in her lap.

Either Hyuuga Hinata is unnaturally calm in the aftermath of an extremely traumatic experience, or she is unfathomably skilled at hiding her feelings for her age.

Three of Kakashi’s dogs stayed to warm the children. One of them, Bisuke if Itachi is not mistaken, leans against Hinata’s back. He lets out a comforting rumble as if encouraging her to relax. She does not seem to notice, too intent on her perfect posture, and her attempts to look at Itachi without actually looking at him. Avoiding his Sharingan even when it wasn’t yet activated. This is a level of hypervigilance Itachi typically encounters in veterans, the type who battled against Uchiha to the death and clearly wish to never repeat the experience.

“Don’t worry,” Itachi says, “we’ll be taking you home soon enough.”

Faint lines tighten around Hinata’s mouth, the ghost of a frown she won’t quite allow herself to wear. Her hands briefly lose their polite pose, shifting in a restless movement. Stress, Itachi notes, and intense enough to break her composure. Can it be possible for a child to view going home as more stressful than being kidnapped?

Itachi can’t help but eye the hand the little girl used to take a life not even an hour ago. It shifts back into place in her lap, undisturbed. Once again, she appears the picture of tranquillity. It is Itachi that is unsettled.

A dog lays its head in Hinata’s lap. She pets it without too much enthusiasm, unlike her peers, stroking its ears with great care and focus.

Itachi hasn’t seen enough to make any kind of real judgement call here, but what he has seen is interesting. The child isn’t cold like he was at her age, deliberately cut off from her emotions, more focused on efficiency and results than anything else. She’s quiet, too careful, and holds herself with an unnaturally calm demeanour. She isn’t what he’d half-suspected after seeing a man fall at her hands. On the surface, she appears polite, mature, and at ease. Whatever dwelled within her psyche was a mystery, but he suspected it wasn’t half as dark as his first guess. No agent of ROOT would’ve shown the fear of going home, nor would they pet the dog with such a gentle hand. They would’ve playacted as a normal clan child, frightened of the appropriate things, desperately relieved to be rescued, awed by the ANBU surrounding them. They would’ve copied the other children, roughly combing their fingers through the dogs’ fur and squeezing far too hard.

“Aren’t you all happy to be going home?” Itachi addresses the crowd of children, who all dutifully give a chorus of affirmations.

Hinata stays silent, mouth pressed into a thin line, lips blanched white.

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 Itachi put his mask back on before help arrived, uninterested in the scolding he would receive for the breach of protocol if he was found bare faced in front of civilians. Civilians and Hinata, of course, as she could hardly be considered one of them. She was now the first of her year to have a confirmed kill. She had been an academy student for less than six months. She had to be either four or five, depending on her birth month. Sasuke was born in late July; the most precious bounty summer had ever offered Itachi. Was Hinata born in the same season?

It hardly mattered.

Itachi stands perfectly still and straight, blending into the wall, watching Hinata out of the corner of his eye. It took time and practice to nail the angle to do such a thing while wearing the mask, but Itachi had it down pat.

It didn’t matter if Hinata was still four or had just turned five. Kakashi had given Itachi a grim look that told him everything he needed to know. Hinata’s actions would be recorded in full on the mission report. They couldn’t risk leaving it out only for Hinata herself to innocently admit to it, or worse, for the Yamanaka to pull the detail from her mind. Any kind of censorship or lies of omission were serious matters in ANBU, worth a meeting with the Hokage, likely with Danzo dripping poison into his ear.

Hinata is sat up in her hospital bed, using the reflective tray holding medical instruments as a mirror, while doing an excellent job of pretending she isn’t. She tidies her hair up and fixes her hospital gown. A sympathetic nurse had placed two pillows behind her, helping to maintain her perfect posture.

“Very small for her age,” the nurse had remarked under her breath, the sadness and anger still audible, “too small, I’d say.”

She wouldn’t say it to Hiashi’s face, Itachi knew. No one would.

At that point, Itachi wasn’t much concerned about Hyuuga Hiashi. His mind was on Danzo. He had an unquenchable thirst for power that seemed impossible to sate. It seemed unlikely that even he would target Hinata, the heir of one of Konoha’s most eminent clans, but she did have a sister, Itachi remembers. She wasn’t irreplaceable, even if she would be missed. There was a spare to replace the heir, if she should happen to disappear. She had already been kidnapped twice, once by Kumo, once by Orochimaru. How hard would it be for Danzo to stage a third kidnapping, this one successful?

Hinata doesn’t need to turn her head to check her reflection. Her opal eyes, even inactive, see more than most. Itachi wonders how far Danzo would go for those eyes.

The nurses had promised to treat Hinata as soon as they had all the children settled, since the rest were visibly in much worse condition than her, but it seemed cruel despite the logic of it all. Hinata didn’t seem to mind, even with the livid bruise covering half her face, her hands and wrists a mess of cuts and bruises. Itachi knew there would be more hidden beneath her sleeves. Despite it all, she showed no signs of pain. The other children, once confident they were safe, had begun to weep, complaining of all their various ailments and injuries.

Itachi stands against the wall, not allowing himself the luxury of leaning against it, and silently counts the minutes it is taking for Hyuuga Hiashi to arrive.

Tenzo and Kakashi took off to debrief with the Hokage the second reinforcements arrived, leaving Itachi to lead the chuunin to escort the children back to the village. He stayed with Hinata, leaving the chuunin to divide themselves among the rest of the rescued prisoners, knowing that his mission was with her.

Yamanaka Inoichi slips into the room wearing a fatherly smile for Hinata and a hard glint in his eye for Itachi, who receives him with a barely-there nod. The sight of him coaxes a shy smile from Hinata, who recognises him at once, presumably as the father of her classmate. She relaxes, ever so slightly, leading Itachi to belatedly realise how tense she had been up until then.

The second realisation is that the head of the Analysis Team arrived before the family. Was Hiashi waiting for a written invitation? The Hokage had described him as practically frantic, and the Sandaime was hardly a man prone to exaggeration.

“Hello, Hinata-chan,” Inoichi says warmly.

Hinata manages to wiggle her fingers at him, almost a greeting.

Inoichi sits at her bedside, the place Hyuuga Hiashi ought to have been thirteen minutes ago by Itachi’s count, and rests his hand on the mattress, nowhere near close to the tiny child. Giving her room to feel comfortable while still reaching out.

“I heard something scary might have happened to you,” Inoichi says, “is that true?”

Hinata thinks about this. Itachi wonders what it is that’s causing her hesitation to answer – was it the ‘might,’ indicating some kind of doubt on Inoichi’s part, or the ‘scary,’ which Hinata might bristle at with the typical defensiveness of a child?

“I woke up somewhere I’ve never been before,” Hinata says, which is an interesting way to summarise abduction, “there were lots of children there, though I didn’t know any of them. And adults, who wore white coats like scientists, and other ones that looked more like guards.”

Children describe things with feelings, usually. Sensory descriptions like colours they saw, sounds they heard, emotions they felt. Hinata was reciting events like a shinobi might to their superior in the wake of a mission.

“Do you know how you got there?”

Hinata looks thrown, blinking rapidly, “N-no. I just woke up on the floor.”

“On the floor? Not restrained? Tied up, I mean, sorry.”

“On the floor,” Hinata confirms. She says nothing about restraints. Itachi eyes her wrists. It’s possible any rope marks left have since been covered by the injuries she got fighting the guards.

“What happened then?”

“I used my Byakugan,” Hinata says, going on to inform them of the exact distance she’d found herself from Konoha, “I saw I was underground and there were people on different floors. Children, too. I went towards them.”

“Why?” Inoichi asks. He didn’t say anything about the incredible range Hinata just admitted to having. Itachi wished he hadn’t heard it either. Plausible deniability is a wonderful thing.

“I wasn’t supposed to be there. They probably weren’t either,” Hinata says simply.

“You wanted to help them.”

“Save them,” Hinata corrects absently, “they were very little. And they must have been there for a long time. Some of them were tied to operating tables. Restrained,” she adds, as if she can’t help but demonstrate she does know the word after all, “I helped them get free. All of the scientists were civilians. I was careful, I didn’t hurt them. But I did knock them unconscious. I had to, they wanted to restrain me too.”

I was careful, I didn’t hurt them. Another point in the Not-ROOT column. Not the care she’d taken, the need for Inoichi to know about it. Strange for a child to even understand the concept of accidentally harming or killing someone in a fight, how the odds of it increased if one’s opponent was a civilian.

“What happened then?”

“The other adults came, the ones that weren’t scientists. They wanted to get into the room with the children, but I wouldn’t let them. They were all armed, you see. Not like the scientists. They would hurt the children. Had hurt the children. I had to stop that from happening. So I stood in the doorway and I didn’t let them in.”

 “You were very brave,” Inoichi says admiringly, hamming it up a bit for her sake.

Hinata looks unconvinced, pale face twitching a little, “I just didn’t want the little ones to get hurt.”

“Did anything happen after that?” Inoichi asks. Leaving an opportunity for Hinata to lie about killing the guard, to skip straight to the rescue. Itachi realises Inoichi must have already been informed about the events of the day. And he’d still got here before Hinata’s father.

Itachi feels a spike of irritation.

Emotions ripple over Hinata’s face. If Itachi’s Sharingan had been active, they would have frozen in time forever, etched into his memory. He still catches most of them: sadness, fear, veiled apprehension, the horror that breaks through it, followed by nothing, her face smoothed out into practiced blankness.

“I killed one of the guards,” Hinata admits, all solemn eyes and unnaturally still hands.

Silence swallows them up.

“I see,” Inoichi says, a beat too slow, but his tone is carefully free of judgement, “why did you do that, Hinata-chan?”

“To save the children,” Hinata says at once, resolute.

Did she not know that she was a child? That she wasn’t even the oldest among them, was in fact one of the youngest?

Itachi looks at her and feels reflected. If he had been in her place, at her age, he knows he would have done what she did. He hadn’t had the luxury of being a child for a long time. Was it the same for her?

“How do you feel about it? Killing the guard, I mean?” Inoichi asks, leaning forward a fraction in his seat.

Hinata is calm and poised, has been for almost the entire conversation, but Itachi sees the moment her composure breaks. Right after her mouth opens to reply, something cracks down the middle of her face, and a great wail rises up within her. It bursts out, her shoulders shuddering beneath the weight of her sobs. For the first time, Hinata shows raw, unrestrained emotion, and she doesn’t seem to know what to do with it, body listing from side to side like a heeling ship.

Inoichi makes a soothing noise, but unfortunately, it’s at that moment that the door opens, and Hyuuga Hiashi finally arrives.

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If someone had asked Hinata what she thought it would be like to turn into a child again, she would have assumed her mind would remain the same, and the only real difference would be her height.

She would have been wrong.

She clutches the bedsheets, grief, shame, fear all writhing within her, all far too hard and complex for her to cope. She can’t register anything, she knows what happened and why, she knows she did what she had to do, she knows how she should feel, and yet inexplicable emotions consume her, alien and beyond her ability to rein in.

The door opens, her father coming into view, and dread sinks in her stomach like a white-hot lump of coal. She holds her breath, the only surefire way to instantly stop crying, and tries with all her might to stop shaking, too.

Her father looks down at her, bruised, cut up, face wet with tears, shaking, and distaste creeps into his expression. The sight of it wounds Hinata, sobs finally silenced for good. She stares down at her hands, forcing her breathing to return to normal.

“Hiashi-san,” Inoichi says in greeting. Hinata is aware that the term of address is acceptable for them as peers, both the same age, graduated from the same class, both occupying the same rank, both heads of their respective clans. However, it is not acceptable for Hiashi, who gives an unimpressed sound in reply as he steps further into the room.

Hiashi looks past Hinata, sees Itachi in his ANBU garb, and snaps his fingers. “What happened?” He demands.

Itachi looks at him and says nothing.

Hinata realises, with a guilty, suppressed flicker of glee, that Itachi does not owe Hiashi any respect at all. He is not Itachi’s superior. They are not from the same clan. Hiashi is not in ANBU, nor, in fact, is he even an active shinobi. While Itachi wears the mask, Hiashi is just another jounin.

Itachi outranks him.

“Otou-sama,” Hinata begins, wanting to head off the inevitable cold fury that was sure to follow Hiashi being so blatantly disrespected, “I –”

“How were you taken?” Hiashi rounds on her. “You were present at dinner, but none of the servants could confirm if you even went to bed. Did you wander off?”

Inoichi cuts in, an unexpected reprieve, “I’m so sorry, Hiashi-san, but Hinata-chan has almost finished giving her statement. She has yet to receive treatment, thanks to the hospital being short-staffed today. If you would be willing to wait perhaps an hour –”

“An hour?!” Hiashi explodes. “I have waited all day! It is unacceptable for an entire ANBU squad to have so much trouble retrieving a single child –”

“Actually, there were more children –”

“ – and to waste my time with signing forms and useless questioning before I could even enter the damn building!” Hiashi ploughs on as though Inoichi hadn’t spoken, face tight with anger like Hinata hadn’t seen in him for years. She blinks. Someone had waylaid him with forms and questions?

“That damn Hatake!” Hiashi grouses. Hinata fights a smile with a valiant effort. Oh, Kakashi. “I will not be disrespected in this manner. Hang all the bureaucracy and just tell me what happened to my daughter!”

I killed a man, Hinata almost says. She wants to, desperately, if only out of morbid curiosity. Would he be shocked, like Inoichi, or perhaps proud for the first time in Hinata’s life?

“We’re in the process of finding out what happened to your daughter,” Itachi speaks for the first time, sending a jolt through Hinata. His voice is quiet, soft, and there’s nothing about it that should disturb her. Somehow, it does.

“Yes,” Inoichi seizes his chance to further the point before Hiashi can interject once again, “it won’t take long. We’re still waiting on Hinata-chan’s treatment, too. Unless, Hiashi-san, you feel it best to delay…”

Hiashi’s face ices over at the implication. The cold seeps into his tone, “very well. Send for me at once the second it’s all done.”

With that, he storms out of the room, and Hinata can breathe.

She sees Itachi, how his head turns ever so slightly to follow Hiashi’s movement, and the one emotion clear in his body language is anger. Bold, unmistakable anger. One of the specialist subjects Hinata had learned under Kurenai had been body language, how to feign it, how to interpret it, how it differed from person to person, and how one should never assume they’ve read someone correctly from just one look.

It was impossible not to in this case, when Itachi’s gloved fingers twitched at his sides, the same reflexive twitch she’d seen so many times before. It was one of the clearest warning signs that a fight was about to break out.

Why would Itachi want to fight Hiashi?

Hinata wished she knew more of the wayward Uchiha, what he’d done and why he’d done it.

“Now, Hinata-chan, do you know what my clan’s special jutsu can do?” Inoichi asks.

Hinata bites the inside of her cheek, the only way to prevent herself from flinching at the question. He wouldn’t ask unless he was planning to use it on her, and wanted her permission, as useless as it would be from a child her age. He hadn’t asked while her father was here. How strange, to know her father’s security clearance was not enough to know exactly what had happened to her.

They must know, or strongly suspect, Orochimaru’s involvement.

Hinata can’t think. Her first instinct is that no one can know she’s from the future. She isn’t worried about convincing them – Inoichi himself, has the tools to do it for her – but rather what they would do with what she knows. She knows about ROOT and Danzo and more besides, but she doesn’t know specifics – how could she? Her security clearance probably never reached her father’s. She doesn’t know who exactly was in ROOT. If Inoichi discovers her secret, he will share it with people she doesn’t know. If even one of those people is connected to Danzo, what will happen to the future she knows?

What would happen to Sasuke, Danzo’s destined killer?

Despite herself, she glances at Itachi. She doesn’t need to turn her eyes to see him, but the child body she’s in lacks her ingrained habits, and she’s dismayed by how often she has betrayed her feelings since becoming a child again.

“You can look in people’s minds,” she answers a little late.

“That’s true. It makes it easier for people to let me know what’s happened, so they don’t have to remember everything perfectly or explain it just right. Would you mind if I took a look in your mind, Hinata-chan?”

“I don’t have a choice,” Hinata says frankly. Too frankly, she judges, when Inoichi’s smile stiffens. “Ino-san says her dad is very important. And I don’t want to be a bother. So you’ll have to look. It’s okay.”

“Thank you very much, Hinata-chan.” Inoichi says, and then his hand is on her forehead, and it feels as though her eyes roll back, and her hands clutch the sheets, and –

Hard hand round her wrist like iron, she’s said the wrong thing again, can’t look up at the red angry face above her, so she looks down, scared –

“Again!” Her father barks, and her hand strikes in response, fingers chipping against the post. Bones splinter and she shrieks. Her father is angry and she is hurt –

She’s hiding under the wooden steps again, trying to forget that she’s scared of the spiders that live here, and her father’s walking over her without knowing it, and she’s trapped –

“Fool,” her father seethes into her ear –

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Seconds pass after Inoichi sinks into his jutsu and Hinata’s eyes glaze over, but Itachi doesn’t have time to relax.

Hinata lets out a cry of fright, scrambling to get away from some unseen enemy, and Itachi is at her side before he knows it.

She’s trembling with animal terror, hot to the touch. He realises too late that he’s holding her up, that she’d almost fallen out of bed.

A nurse breezes into the room, comforting platitudes pouring out of her mouth, and Itachi gently props Hinata back up against her pillows. She’s slack, unresisting, face no longer blank by choice, but the result of her fugue state. The hospital gown clings to her, damp with sweat.

Itachi meets Inoichi’s eyes through the mask. They both silently agree to slip out of the room, leaving Hinata to the tender care of the nurse, who is too professional to give them accusing looks, but almost certainly wishes she could.

It’s quiet in the hallway outside Hinata’s private room, Hiashi thankfully absent. Inoichi takes a seat, and Itachi notices for the first time that he is strangely pale.

“Do you know how traumatised a child has to be for my technique to fail?” Inoichi asks him, voice low.

Itachi doesn’t know. He indicates as much by tilting his head, asking for more.

“I barely brushed the surface of her mind and she panicked. I saw a few of her nightmares – or memories, though I hope with everything I have that they weren’t actual events that happened to her – and they all featured her father. Being worse than the pompous ass I know him to be. If I’d dug deeper to get information… Her mind is fragile, Yagi. I would stake my professional reputation on the fact that most of the trauma she’s endured didn’t happen today at that lab. Something’s happened to that poor kid. Been happening to her.”

Itachi feels himself become detached, like his soul is untethered from his body. This happens from time to time. He’s always, ironically, compared it to the Shintenshin. All the noise fades, the pens scratching at the receptionist’s desk, the nurses’ cheerful conversations, the doctors’ brisk footsteps. All vanish.

“Hyuuga Hiashi,” he says slowly.

Inoichi grimaces, then, clearly against his better judgement, nods.

Sasuke will be home from the Academy already. Itachi’s missed dinner. He’ll be waiting, probably anxiously craning his neck to peer out the window.

Itachi wonders if Sasuke noticed Hinata wasn’t at school that day.

No, she’d spent the day fighting for her freedom, if not her life, in a facility that was without doubt one of Orochimaru’s. And she’d survived it just fine, because it was preferable to the alternative of being at home.

“I suppose you’ll pretend you actually believe they were nightmares when you report this,” Itachi says coolly.

Inoichi winces, “I can’t accuse –”

“I understand,” Itachi says. Always reasonable. Never pushing. Walking the fine line between obeying his family and disobeying his Hokage. Dependable. Reliable. Predictable.

It would, he thinks to himself, cause a great upset, if one day he was not exactly what was expected of him.

***

Hello, friends!

PSA: I am not currently accepting constructive criticism on this fic.

So I’m fudging the timeline a bit. I’m wibbly-wobblying it. I don’t think it matters, since Kishimoto did it himself constantly. I said in the last chapter that Itachi was eleven, which is chronologically right, but I’m actually aging him up to fourteen. I’m sorry, but look at Itachi in the anime and manga at eleven and tell me he looks his age! Tell me he acts his age! You cannot, because that is a full-grown adult man, Kishimoto! Man went from eleven to twenty-five overnight, I swear. I assumed he was in his 20s when he massacred his family. Imagine my surprise to find he was THIRTEEN. Bonkers. I wanted to write Itachi at that specific point in the story, but his canonical maturity just didn’t match his age at all, I found myself wanting to dumb him down. Since I couldn’t do that, I’ve aged him up instead.

This also has the added bonus of making him around ten years older than Hinata. That gives him a degree of separation between himself and her circumstances, making it easier for him to see exactly how little she (and he!) deserve to be treated the way they are.

I’m still interested in what would happen if a shinobi of Konoha was reported for child abuse. Would anything happen? Does Konoha have a real legal system outside of a table of old people on a council? I assume Inoichi would be reluctant to report Hiashi because of the political turmoil that would ensue and how it would reflect on him (and his family). Does that mean he’s just going to let this go? Hmm.

I helped to write my grandma’s eulogy this month. A very strange, stressful experience, but wonderfully rewarding to hear our words read out at the funeral. It felt good to honour her. It was the nicest funeral I’ve ever been to, as weird as it feels to say.

I wrote 8k of this fic initially and then rewrote the first chapter so many times that 8k still hasn’t been used lmao. I’m still trying to bridge the gap between the new first chapter and the old 8k that has to come after it!

I use Microsoft Word to write all my fic and I have to complain. I’m pretty sure they’ve started using AI for the spellcheck, because why the fuck else would it suddenly start correcting ‘do as he says’ to ‘do as he say,’ and a whole host of other issues. So fucking annoying. I’ve become an old man shouting at clouds.

If you’re enjoying the fic, please comment so I know you want me to keep going! <3

Quick poll for fun: What character would you put in the world of Naruto if you could have a crossover?

I would have Luffy, because he would eat the entire militarised state system for breakfast and shit out freedom pancakes. And he would grab Kisame, all the jinchuuriki, and every random person who looked interesting, and they’d go on a fun adventure.