Derecho

Kakashi is waiting for them when they get home, standing on the front porch with the rest of the pack surrounding him, eight dogs from giant to small seated around his legs.

Sai and Mayu come to a halt just passed the front gate, a humid breeze sweeping across the yard and rustling the green, swaying stalks of grain behind their house. Kakashi extends an arm, beckoning, and waits, patient.

It’s like an unknown tension snaps, the poise and forced geniality crumbling like soaked rice paper and Mayu’s face crumbles with it. Tears dripping down her face and neck, staining the collar of her shirt. It’s the first time she’s cried since that night, it’s the first time she’s been able to.

Mayu throws herself forward, collapsing into her dad fully, arms clinging around his neck, face buried in his uniform shirt. Around her the pack closes ranks, snouts, and paws pressing into her, soft canid whines drowned by her muffled sobs.

Kakashi clutches his daughter back just as tightly, and looks to his son still standing in the yard.

Sai has always struggled with emotions, both identifying what he feels, and what he should feel. His son deals with this by simply liming his emotional perception to very few people, and one of these very few people has been taken from him in a very sudden and traumatizing way. Sai seems to have settled on rage, Kakashi severely doubts it’s rage at the appropriate parties involved. No, Sai is truly Kakashi’s son, and so his anger is directed entirely inward.

Kakashi extends his other arm, hand coming up to rest on Sai’s cheek, the teen having drifted up the porch steps, absent in his rage. Fathomless black eyes meet his own slate gray, and Kakashi can see easily past the anger and into the hurt and sorrow. Like the raw edges of a wound.

Kakashi pulls his oldest child into his embrace, and endeavors to wrap his whole self around his children, perhaps to protect them from the rest of the world. It’s a foolish notion, he’d have to burn this wretched place to ash first. Kakashi’s fire release isn’t the best of his repertoire.

Both of his children have come home to him, safe and whole. But they’re changed now, different, older by years though it’s only been four months. Kakashi would take this hurt from them if he could, but he can’t and torturing himself over ‘What ifs’ will not help his children.

Only time will tell if they will grow greater than this pain, or be withered by it.

_______

Team 7, plus Itachi, are settling nicely in the Uchiha District.

It’s been a week and four days since they’ve returned to Konoha, and Kakashi-sensei was all too happy to solidify Mayu’s temporary ruling in Wind Country, on the condition that Itach’s “house arrest” take place in the old Uchiha District. Out of sight, out of mind as it were. Though Naruto doubts that’s the last of any kind of political or legal fallout, Kakashi-sensei is just busy with his own family at the moment.

So Team 7, plus Itachi, had picked out a nicely sized townhome in the newer end of the Distrtict far away from the more traditional styled heart of the compound. As well as Itachi and Sasuke’s childhood home. It’s an airy two story home, with four bedrooms, a basement, and an attic. It hadn’t been owned by anyone before the massacre, so all that the home really needed was a good scrubbing and a few replaced pipes. Well, and furniture, but with the full coffers of the combined Uchiha wealth furbishing a townhome was laughably easy.

Settling into a home life together was never a worry for Team 7, they already lived in each other’s pockets after all. It was Itachi that was proving to be an off putting housemate, and not in the way one would think. He wasn’t some nightmarish entity lurking in the dark corners of the house, nor was he a slob leaving his dirty dishes and unwashed laundry everywhere.

No, if anything, Itachi was falling into the whole “home life” thing with a startling ease and, dare he say it, enthusiasm. The house was scoured from top to bottom, repainted, re wired, and furbished within days of their arrival. The kitchen was always stocked with fresh food, and homemade baked goods and containers of savory snacks could be found set out on the counters every day. All of this, of course, headed by the eldest Uchiha. Even now it was not uncommon to see the man cleaning, fixing, cooking, or decorating something.

Sakura called it nesting, but referring to Sasuke’s S ranked missing nin of a brother in such a way made Naruto slightly hysterical.

The blond sighs internally as he quietly makes his way downstairs, stopping in the kitchen to snag a handful of almond cookies, before continuing on his way out to the backyard. Sasuke and Sakura are still asleep, their chakra signatures still and gentle in true sleep.

The sky is dark, nearly black, with a single soft strip of peach stained light behind the horizon of trees. It’s a horribly humid morning, even for Konoha standards, and Naruto already feels sweat beginning to drip down his face. He looks across the sky, and observes the wispy clouds, it’s the fourth day since they’ve been back that the incessant rains have stopped. The gentle storm had never swelled above a soft rain, but after a solid week the streets had begun to flood, water sloshing up to your ankles.

The light of the very early morning is soft and diffused, but it illuminates the kneeling figure in the yard perfectly fine. With the inside of the house nearly perfect, and the storm finally receding, Itachi has recently turned his attentions to the outside, namely gardening. The man has dug and turned over a sizable flower bed extending from the house, now he appears to be planting fox gloves.

Itachi greets him quietly as Naruto comes to sit beside him, and the blond finds himself almost surprised by the sight of sweat staining the Uchiha’s face, long strands of dark hair plastered to his forehead. It’s almost funny, the fearsome Uchiha Itachi suffers in Konoha humidity just like the rest of them. It makes him impossibly human.

“Having fun?” Naruto offers the man one of his almond cookies, and Itachi’s lips quirk up on one side as he pulls off one leather gardening glove to accept the offered confection.

“Yes, actually. Pursuing hobbies isn’t a very easy task when surrounded by S class missing nin twenty-four seven.” Naruto knows Itachi’s not just referring to the gardening, and smiles, mischievous.

“Well, if your hobbies continue to include cookies, you’ll have all the support you could ever want from me!” Itachi huffs a soft laugh.

“It’s a deal.”

Right now the civilian side of Konoha are ignorant to Itachi’s presence in village, and only very few shinobi are in the know.

Naruto knows very well how terribly shinobi tend to gossip though, so he really wouldn’t be surprised if the whole of the shinobi forces have realized what’s really going on. He gives it another week before the civilians are clued in as well.

Until then Team 7, plus Itachi, will have some much deserved peace.

_______

Mayu and Megumi fall into a delicate sort of quiet as they work, it’s not a bad quiet more of a gentle silence.

The last of Team 18 had come to Genki’s apartment to close his lease, and sort through his things. They’re in Genki’s bedroom, Megumi emptying Genki’s desk and Mayu sorting through his closet and dresser. The tired Nara had a truly staggering amount of mesh underwire in every cut and color, and Mayu sets a pair of sea foam green mesh leg guards into the keep pile. She’s also keeping his whole collection of tiny, poisoned, knives and Genki can just fight her over it in their next life. Haru-sensei is busy in the kitchen, taking care of the leftover food and his dish ware.

Mayu pauses in her inspection of a fuchsia, mesh wire suit, there’s a sizable hole in back of it but it should be an easy patch if she can find the right colored threads.

Haru-sensei hadn’t been able to come on their mission to Wind Country, busy with Clan business, and though the Hyuuga hadn’t explicitly said so Mayu knew he was feeling much misplaced guilt. Haru-sensei had the same look in his eyes as her dad did when she was really little, and he was thinking about his old team.

Guilt, self hatred, self loathing, self blame. Mayu and Megumi had bolstered each other in the face of their grief, knowing as they did that Genki wasn’t really dead just on to the next adventure, but Haru-sensei didn’t know this and had been distant since they’d returned. Reluctant to reach back to his students open arms.

Megumi lets out an excited exclamation from his place at Genki’s desk, snapping Mayu out of her small spiral. The younger teen looks over her shoulder, blinking at the bottle brandished in her teammates hand.

It’s a sake bottle, a very very expensive bottle, with a note attached to the neck by a soft green ribbon.

‘Happy Birthday, Haru-sensei!’

Megumi smiles, wide and a touch bloodthirsty. “I think I know how to take that stick out of sensei’s ass.”

Mayu smiles back just as sly.

…

So day drinking is apparently a very good coping mechanism.

Once Megumi had opened the sake and forced a cup down Haru-sensei’s throat, Team 18 quickly lost themselves to the call of alcohol and any hope Mayu had of her dad not finding out about her unwise decisions flew out the window.

The three of them drank, they cried, they confessed some truly heart wrenching things and revealed some very fragile, and vulnerable emotions. At the end of it they were only half way finished with the apartment, and the bottle lie empty between the three of them.

Haru-sensei sniffs from his prone position on the floor, eyes red rimmed and face blotchy from crying. If she were any less drunk Mayu would laugh at the fact her pretty, prim, and proper sensei was an ugly crier.

“You know,” Haru-sensei’s voice is slurred and creaky from crying. “It really shouldn’t be us doing all of this, it should be his damn uncle.”

The mood immediately sours as the three of them remember Genki’s unfortunate relation to the Worst Nara Ever.

“Yeah, stupid fucking guy. The least he could is show some fucking remorse for his own nephew.” Megumi’s face is quickly turning dark, and a drunken berserker is the last thing Mayu wants to deal with today.

The fourteen year old sits up from her sprawl across the couch, a sudden idea taking hold of her.

“He’s home this week.”

“…What?”

Mayu sits up straighter, turning near manic eyes to the other two.

“Nara Isshin, he’s home this week, dad told me so. Mandatory Mourning leave. He’s home right now, probably eating dinner.”

The three are silent a moment, before matching, bloodthirsty grins slowly stretch across their faces.

…

Nara Isshin is eating dinner in his cold, empty home when it happens.

It’s the first time in years that he’s been forced to dwell in this place for more than a few days. The walls are almost a physical press all around him, claustrophobic. But he refuses to be outside fro longer than he needs to be, the mix of resentful or pitying looks from his own clansfolk are unbearable.

He knows, alright? He knows he fucked up. He knows he should’ve done better, should’ve done everything differently. Hindsight is truly a bitch. While there was never any love lost between Isshin and Genki, he’d never wished harm onto the boy. If he’d been a wiser, kinder man, he’d have sent the boy to live with Isshin’s own mother after Fuyumi died. But he wasn’t, and he still isn’t, and even now if he dwells on it for too long those old, stale feelings of resentment and misplaced anger begin to stir again.

He is truly a pathetic, resentful old man.

So he sits, alone in his cold, empty house eating two day old takeout that tastes like ash in his mouth.

Then, well, he supposes he gets robbed.

It’s three people, dressed in black and faces concealed under ski masks. One of them, the tallest, kicks his front door in so hard he shatters the floor boards, the other two crashing through his living room and kitchen windows.

Isshin throws a flurry of senbon, the tall one batting them aside with ease, and grunts as he shields his face from a thrown chair from the second one. Before he can do much else the short one moves in on him, cracking a metal bat across his knees so hard he topples with a yell.

He just got his kneecaps broken by a midget, what the fuck?

What transpires next is a confusing series of events including a thorough ass beating from the short one and the second one, while the tall one rages through his house and steals everything of value. All things considered the theft is over in about five minutes.

Isshin is left lying on his kitchen floor, face swollen and nose bleeding, knee caps very broken, and utterly confused.

…

With their pilfered money and goods Team 18 continue their mourning party late into the night and early into the morning. They get so drunk Mayu starts unleashing small, localized thunderclouds indoors getting them kicked out of one too many bars. The night ends with Megumi holding back Haru-sensei’s hair as he vomits into Genki’s toilet, Mayu crying in the tub gnawing on a stale red bean bun.

Her dad is Not Amused when she trudges into the house the next day, smelling strongly of vomit, alcohol, and bad decisions.

_______

Mayu prowls along the floor, staying low and silent on the pads of her feet, and the tips of her fingers. On the other side of the room Suzu creeps forward, just as low and silent as herself. Surprisingly enough the Great Dane hasn’t quite finished growing yet, but on all fours Suzu’s shoulders are equal to hers.

It’s eight days before the Meeting, but today is a Very Important day and not one to be messing around.

Crawling across the ceiling like a demented spider, Sai is a near imperceptible shadow. The three Hatake children had wrapped their chakra up as tightly as they could before they’d even made it into the building, having snuck in at the earliest, black hours of the morning.

Their target is asleep in the middle of the room wrapped up tight in their blankets, unaware to the world and the multiple threats approaching silently.

Mayu and Suzu halt at Sai’s signal, on the ceiling the older boy pauses to observe their quarry. After a long moment he raises one hand, twitching two finger forward in a short movement.

‘Now’

The three leap, converging on their target in less than a moment. The previously thought inert target surges up suddenly, startling the three, but it’s too late to pull back. Too late to correct their trajectory.

From the bed Kakshi throws his blankets out and around himself, using them as a makeshift net to catch his two human children, and his one canid child. He bundles them up tight and collapses back onto the bed, holding his blanketed hostages fast.

“Ow! Sai, you just elbowed me!”

“Your knees are digging into my spin Mayu, I feel we’re even.”

Suzu is the first to wriggle her head out of the blankets, meeting his dead pan expression with a happy ‘Whuf’ and a lick to his nose. The other two pull themselves together shortly after, wrestling their upper bodies out of the blankets. The two send him appropriately bashful looks, Sai is getting much better at puppies eyes.

“Good morning, Dad!”

“Good morning, Father.”

Kakashi rolls his eyes, “Why, oh why, would you do this to your poor dad?”

Mayu sends him an unimpressed look, and he gets the sudden realization he’s probably forgotten something important.

“Uhhh…?”

His daughter rolls her eyes right back at him, “Haru-sensei’s appointment as Clan Head remember! You have to go because you’re Hokage, but I got an invitation because I’m on the ‘close friends’ list.”

Ah, he remembers now. However, that doesn’t explain, “the ceremony isn’t until the afternoon Mayu, why would you do this to your dearest father so early?” If anything she appears even more unimpressed with him.

“Dad.” Uh-oh that’s her disappointed voice. “Today’s the annual civilian council meeting. You scheduled it so early, so you’d have enough time to eat and get ready before you had to get to the Hyuuga compound.” Oops, he did do that didn’t he?

“An impressive example of foresight not usually see in you, father.”

Ouch, Sai. Right where it hurts.

…

Mayu sighs from her place sitting at Megumi’s vanity. The teens are getting ready for Haru-sensei’s ceremony, and Megumi insisted on doing her hair.

She’d enjoyed ribbing the older boy about his “cannon” breaking again, what with an entirely different person taking up the mantle of clan head when Hyuuga Hiashi was supposed to remain as such for years. Apparently Hyuuga Hinata wasn’t even in the running for heir anymore, being both seven at the moment and now a member of the branch family. Hyuuga Hizashi had ended up having a son years earlier than in cannon, making him the twin most eligible for clan head. This son is Hyuuga Haruka, older brother to Hyuuga Neji and today he is being appointed Hyuuga Clan Head.

Neither Megumi, or Genki, had realized that Haru-sensei was related to Neji-ni, and the fallout of that discovery had lasted days; both boys had nearly ripped their hair out at such a huge change to their Plot. Mayu had of course known that Neji had a brother, and once they’d been introduced as teacher and student she’d put two and two together fairly easy. She’d just neglected telling the boys.

Personally, Mayu didn’t see the point of worrying. Haru-sensei had been born years before any of them, it’s not like it was something they could’ve interfered with. Besides, all the three of them existed in this world to right? You’d think Megumi would’ve made his peace with cannon going out the window by now.

Which brought her to a much more pressing matter.

Mayu eyed Megumi in the mirror, the older teen twisting her silver hair into some kind of overly complicated style. It was actually nice to have someone playing with her hair. Her dad, while dedicating to his dad duties, had only really mastered the washing, maintaining, and brushing of hair when she was little. He kept it trimmed short enough to tie back comfortably until Mayu got older and decided to grow it out herself, then she turned to TenTen for help.

“I think Haru-sensei might be one of us.”

Megumi barely keeps himself from jerking at the statement, knowing if he pulled Mayu’s hair she’d not hesitate to zap him good.

“…Why would you think that?”

“Think about it! Each of us were born into a family that directly influences the Main Plot of your story, as a totally new family member. I’m Hatake Kakashi’s daughter, you’re Haruno Sakura’s cousin, and Genki was Nara Shikamaru’s cousin. It just makes sense that as Hyuuga Hizashi’s surprise son, that Haru-sensei should be one of us too right?”

Megumi finishes her hair with a flourish, pinning it with a gold Kanzashi decorated in red gems and dangling chains with many, sharp canid fangs attached to them. It was a birthday gift from Suzu, though she had to get Mayu’s dad to actually commission it the Great Dane had donated her nicest puppy teeth to the cause.

“I suppose it does make sense, but he’s never given anything away. Not like with the three of us, no hints at missing certain technologies, or idioms that don’t translate into this world.”

Apparently Megumi using ‘Pot Calling the Kettle Black’ was what gave him away to Mayu years ago.

The older teen ushers her out of the chair and starts laying out the layers of her formal kimono, Mayu tried to dress herself in one of these once and almost strangled herself. Her dad refused to even try and help her.

“Haru-sensei was here for years before us though, so he could’ve just gotten used to it.”

Megumi ponders for a moment as he begins the arduous process of layering her robes appropriately.

“It’s worth an investigation. I assume you have a plan in mind?”

He finishes tying her Obi and Mayu gives a happy twirl, the soft red layers of her Kimono lovely against pale skin.

She smiles up at him, mischievous.

“Of course!”

The two leave Megumi’s home together, talking animatedly, discussing their nefarious plans, and making the trek for the Hyuuga compound side by side but not quite touching. Theirs a space between them now, but it isn’t an empty thing left hollow. It is waiting. This space is reserved, and eagerly waiting to be filled again.

_______

Hyuuga Haruka collapses face first onto his bed in an exhausted slump, fine robes pooling around him.

The newly appointed Clan Head is exhausted from todays ceremony, and following celebrations. He’s doubly tired at the thought of all the bullshit he’s going to slog through now that his father has retired.

At least Neji is there to help him.

Megumi and Mayu on the other hand…maybe he should speak to Yamanaka Hoshi, see if he’s still open for that grief counseling he’d offered Team 18 after their mission in Wind Country. Haruka knows with a terrible intimacy that grief can affect people in weird ways, but Megumi’s cheery dancing of “We all die, we either kill ourselves or get killed.” Is deeply concerning.

Mayu’s leading questions about men with strong arms walking on the moon could either be an odd coping mechanism, or she’s confusing real life with her day dreams again. Either way he makes a mental note to speak to her father about it.

Haruka rolls onto his back, too tired and too lazy to even comprehend unraveling himself from his formal robes. He’d shower in the morning.

The new Clan Head drags one hand down his face, long fingers coming to rest on the right side of his chest. He takes a deep breath in, feeling his lungs expand beneath his palm, holds it, and releases it slowly. He remembers a time when he’d struggled to breathe, to even sit up on his own. Remembers wasting away in his own bed, his body eaten away and decaying into an empty husk.

Consumption, though here they call it Tuberculosis, and treat it like a minor cold instead of a death sentence.

Haruka lifts his hand from his chest, looking at the thin, French inscription inked across the soft flesh of his wrist.

Victor Beauchamp, December 3rd, 1841.