Roku
Miho supposed turning 15 should’ve been exciting.
Every plot point before canon that should’ve come to pass, has either passed better than canon, or never happened at all.
Which is also better than canon.
She supposes, she is most happy about Yudai’s survival.
She had resigned herself the past three years that he would probably die anyways.
It gladdens her, that her traitorous heart(in the fact she got attached to easily-at all) at least chose strong people to attach to.
Takumi and Yudai both survived.
(They have three more years before the main character born to the worshippers of the Ramen Gods becomes a ninja.)
Both Takumi and Yudai are Male Scions of their clan, close to twenty at this point.
Both are also rather accomplished members of their team, which has gained plenty of awareness from people from their success.
Including a Bingo Book entry for their team, and separate pages for each of them.
Team Suzaku was known to be relentless in capture.
And if someone did manage to come close to escape.
They were simply executed on the spot.
For the dead or alive ones.
For the ones the village specifically wanted alive…
Miho may not be a sealing master, but knockout seals were relatively easy.
Back to her older brothers being Male Scions.
It was a bit too political for her, but she also mastered laws to survive.
Learning a bit about clan politics, to keep an eye on her brothers.
Easy.
Both were looked at as high prizes for all sorts of young ladies.
Both were also rather uninterested and thus allowed their clans to make the pairings.
With the acknowledgement that any match made, the girl would have to get along with the younger sister.
That brought her back to their separate reputations in the bingo book.
Suzaku was a Nara, the leader of the team and labeled accordingly as dangerously intelligent.
Most disregarded that, due to the Naras reputation as lazy, which worked well for their team.
So well, she assumes it must have been something from the Warring Clans era, so well done they forget why they did it.
Takumi, while not as brutal as Spider, was also seen as efficient, with spies in Konoha giving more info about his mask outside work.
The Doll Like façade made many aware enemies wary, and the unaware soon learned their folly.
Yudai’s reputation was similar, the only difference being his façade leading to plenty doubting his sanity.
Someone might think, isn’t his façade just that of a brother?
And Miho would remind you that Yudai is an Uchiha.
An Uchiha Brother.
She believes that the case is now closed, your honor.
Oh.
She is talking to herself again.
Meh.
Back to the topic of reputation.
It should be short after all.
Just her own.
…Ah. Well perhaps not.
Miho’s reputation had grown to the point that even if she wore a dull shade of pink. Most would see bright green.
Despite being known as utterly silent on missions with her team.
She was also known for sharp, bright smiles, background sunsets and Wise Words of Youth.
Her Wise Words of Youth had spread far enough that there was a warning in the Bingo Book to avoid speaking with her, even if neither party was hostile.
Apparently, charming a rogue ninja into joining a village was dangerous.
Who could’ve possibly known?
She would have batted her eyes innocently with a pout upon her lips if she hadn’t only been having a conversation in her head.
Speaking of having a conversation in her head.
Or is she not speaking much of anything at all?
Only… ruminating.
Yes, ruminating works.
While she’s ruminating, she makes sure the sunset of youth surrounds her and that her teeth begin to shine.
She registers the shifty movements of other Shinobi in The Bush.
(Haha get it, she always finds the name of the shinobi bar hilarious. After all, leaves are always on bushes similarly like trees, but bushes always look more drunk than trees. Well most tree’s, she’s seen a few particularly drunk trees)
Being the baby of the team means being spoiled often, it also means that her big brothers and sensei -father figure, if she were to continue with the whole family thing- watched her closely in bars.
Most assumed it was so she didn’t over drink, but Miho never liked alcohol of any kind, even in her previous life. Of course, in that one, it was even more stupid to do than this one, where they have chakra that enhances everything about them, including everything alcohol affects.
Either way, she doesn’t drink, even if watchers would assume that making sure she didn't drink was why her team watched her in bars.
No, they watch her because she has a habit of stabbing people who touch her in bars. Mostly because she can fake being drunk and knows other shinobi can fake being drunk. Which means she can never know who is drunk, and who isn’t. It leaves her exceptionally paranoid of who might come near her.
What if they are trying to poison her, so they can kidnap her and use her body for horrible things, or sell her, or-
Well, she’s paranoid, doesn’t matter much because now a days her team watches her to make sure she doesn’t stab other Konoha-nin.
She personally thinks they’re doing something pointless anyway. Konoha shinobi should all be as paranoid as her and not drink potentially poisoned sake because their guard is down while drunk. Or even if they insist on doing something stupid, not approach another shinobi in a bar while their guard is down.
Her guard isn’t down, but most should assume it is down, and are taking it for granted to approach her.
Really, they should just let her stab the interlopers, teach them a lesson.
CONSTANT VIGILANCE
Back to why they are in the village shinobi bar in the first place.
Her older brothers are expected to get married, and they have alerted their clan elders that any marriage partner should get along with her first.
She’s had to deal with quite a few civilian women attempting to manipulate her into liking them. Clan civilians, but still civilians.
It’s horribly insulting. If Uchiha Satomi tries to manipulate Miho one more time while she shops for her groceries, Miho is killing her, borrowing Takumi’s flesh eating bugs, digging a very large hole, burying Satomi’s stupid bones, then killing the woman's pet cat and burying the thing above her.
She is mad enough at the woman to bring the witch's cat into it.
She grumbled this all at Yudai after putting her groceries away, which led them to whisk her away to The Bush so as to unwind.
It left her feeling guilty. It's not her that has to get married, even if she is a condition in the marriage.
She firmly pushes that guilt away to make her smile just a bit brighter. But enough brighter that more people shift warily, there is no sunlight to make it glint the way it does after all.
Why should she feel guilty? Her big brothers are making her the test for all of these women who would’ve originally been their problem to sort through.
She watches her big brothers get drunk, still keeping their facades on, making sure to utilize their superior but mostly unknown medical knowledge to stay only slightly buzzed.
They, unlike her, are socializing with a few other shinobi she recognizes as their ANBU teams.
She would do the same, if not for her team's avoidance of the bar for different reasons.
Honestly, she doesn’t blame them. She would also prefer to not be here. She wants to scowl, so does so in her mind. The only one who might come here at all is Deer.
She very firmly redirects her thoughts as she munches on Mochi her brothers brought for her.
They did remember that she didn’t like alcohol before dragging her here.
She sits as far from the door as she can, with a full view of the room, her back to the wall, and senses all currently chakra enhanced. She knows that most would consider her too paranoid for a shinobi her age. But she doesn’t want her brothers dying, and unlike others, she knows that traitors are in this village.
To some point, all shinobi acknowledge that there may be spies from other villages in the village at any point. They all also acknowledge that said spies are caught and handed over to Torture and Interrogation quickly enough.
Miho also knows this, on the other hand, she also knows about the Pimp Daddy, she remembers that they currently have Orochimaru out there. An S-Class threat to Konoha that came from within. Not just within, but from the top.
She feels disdainful that the Hokage was the main instigator of the traitors. His student, traitor, his best friend, traitor, his other student, while not necessarily a traitor, still having defected and stolen a child whose only claim she had was the previous lover of the child’s uncle…
The Hokage, who should’ve been the village's greatest defense, instead lets civilians be in charge of a shinobi village, panders to them even. He trained two shinobi who betrayed the village. He lets a man who attempted to kill him stay near him and in a position of power.
She may hate the pimp daddy. But he wasn’t wrong. Sarutobi Hiruzen was weak. She serves him, because he is her superior. She does not love him, or revere him. She does not trust him to put the village's best interest first. The man put the village's interest before his family, but he put his students and best friends before the village. And he lets the civilians get away with too much.
There are plenty of civilian ran villages they could live in, but he lets them rule a village of shinobi.
She disdainfully takes a bite of her Mochi, this one is strawberry, and feels her smile stretch her face into a feral mockery of the previously youthful shine of the other.
She feels a few people flinch and narrows her eyes. Feels her face go blank as she watches the drunk shinobi pale.
Then she laughs loudly, and free. Watches them through crinkled eyes as they all relax and go back to drinking. Dismissing her as a threat. Forgetting that all of them are threats, that they have created some of the most powerful shinobi to ever grace this world, to walk the ground of the elemental nations, and one of them turned traitor so easily.
She knows how easily she could, how she would sooner watch this world burn then let anything happen to her precious people.
All of the idiots in this village, who let themselves be fooled into trusting her. Who have no idea that if she lost both of her teams, she would leave.
That's seven people in this stupid place she is attached to.
Seven people to stop her from leaving.
She wishes it could be more. How different was she in ten years, that she only cared for 10 people, her two dead parents and herself included.
Not that different. Even who she was before, the dead woman whose memories she had, that woman had also been like this. It was why she didn’t even bother fighting the child. That woman had lost all of her people in her death. She would never get them back, but the child she now was could have a different sort of chance.
She abruptly lost her rumination when she noticed someone coming in her direction.
She wasn’t yet sure if he was walking in this direction for her, but she wouldn’t let that stop her from focusing her ears onto his silent steps.
She stabbed a mochi with a chopstick and stared into his eyes blankly despite the bright smile on her face.
He had stopped at her table and gestured to the other side of the booth.
She inclined her head and allowed Shisui of the Body Flicker to sit with her.
She wondered why he was here.
Occasionally Crow was placed on Team Ro, and Crow and Butterfly got along smashingly but Shisui and Miho had never ran missions together.
She tilted her head as she chewed on her Mochi, waiting for him to speak.
He only sipped his drink, tilting his head back at her.
Finishing her current Mochi, she decides she won't be starting the conversation.
It may have been ten years since the Human Interaction with a Dolphin -which sounds like a bit of a contradiction, but the dolphin being a human puts all naysayers to a quiet rest- but she still doesn’t appreciate it, even for such a pretty voice as the one she heard five years previous.
He pulls out a storage scroll instead of talking.
And she watches cautiously. Her focus mainly on him, letting the loud murmur of the bar, fade into background noise.
She watches the man -and he was, he survived past 16 after all. The man just turned 20 sometime in the end of the previous year- remove colorful patterned paper from the scroll.
The paper is something she immediately recognizes as origami paper from the best origami shop in Konoha.
Her eyes flick back up to his face quickly. His own smile is smug as he places the paper between them and slides it slightly more towards her when he notices her hesitate.
She quickly places her seemingly unending plate of Mochi into a food preservation scroll she had made and sanitizes her hands.
Sanitizing the table to keep from getting alcohol on the precious papers, she selects a tar black paper square.
She quickly allows her mind to go into a rhythmic thinking.
Her hearing is focused back again, but everything else focuses on the folding.
Half, un-half, half, un-half, flip, triangle, un-triangle, triangle, un-triangle, diamond, triangle in diamond…
Fold, fold, fold.
She begins humming to herself, and amuses herself by producing the sunset of youth when she notices the man across from her focus on her.
She feels the wave of amusement from him when she produces her finished product for him.
She beams up at him, the small crow sitting on her palm. Her grin shifts into schadenfreude.
“Birdy.”
He pouts at her, but his eyes shine with glee.
She hands it to him, and pats his hands with one of her own before grabbing another paper.
By the time her brothers meander back over, she has folded a menagerie of animals.
(Shisui has become number eight due to this. She’s rather glad, pimp daddy never stole his eye and he never committed suicide.)
None of the colorful, yet completely accurately colored animals are named like Birdy.
Birdy at least refers to the fact that crows are birds. The other animals are named after animals that oppose them.
Mouse-Sloth, Lion-Mouse, Sloth-Horse, and it gets worse.
While her brothers are used to the way she inaccurately names her origami, and Shisui rolls with things like this -he approached her afterall-, her brothers friends who had followed them over goggled at the names each animal was named.
She smiles youthfully at them all.
One fool questions her naming choices, so a smile full of glee and mind full of mischief she gives him a totally false answer that made just enough not-sense.
A serious look on her face she looks the man straight in the eyes, “Every animal deserves a name, just calling them by what kind of animal they are would be horribly un-youthful. We name humans after animals. These animals are named after humans.”
She nods sagely, staring at the man like she expects him to bow to her infinite wisdom of the universe she had just divined upon him.
She hears Shisui cough when the man sputters incredulously.
Another one she hears mutters to the man next to him, “I have obviously drank too much.” Before he spins around, slightly sloppy and yet still graceful as he leaves the establishment.
She nods her head to herself and turns to her new friend.
“They should be dusted gently once a week. If you are not home to do so, ask a friend, or relative. Of course, if you don’t you could ask me to do so, if not, it will be a deeper clean when you come back. The crevices gather dust horribly. And keep them out of the sun or the paper patterns will fade eventually.”
As she speaks she pulls out her Mochi again, uncaring of the audience she now has.
When she finishes her speech she quickly munches on a Mochi.
She gets up, and puts her face very close to his, her grin wide and slightly threatening.
“I will be in contact.”
She then activates her portal home.
So far, she can only activate it within the village proximity, it just isn’t good enough yet, no matter how good her fuinjutsu is becoming.
But the exit sure does look cool.
Probably a bit ominous though.
She does find him.
She hunts him down between missions with ANBU and team Suzaku.
It doesn’t quite matter where he is when she decides to find him. As long as he is in the village she plops herself down beside him and stares expectantly.
They never talk much, but he doesn’t seem to mind that she is using him for paper.
She likes that he just lets her sit there. She doesn’t need to speak, he just smiles with eyes crinkled and hands over some paper, and he gets to watch her fold.
Occasionally she’ll notice him using his Sharingan to watch how she folds and she’ll hum, but shift to allow him to watch her movements better.
(She had been folding Origami since she could afford it. She uses it to unwind, and his calm presence while she does so means she's not alone. She may not like socializing but she doesn’t like being alone. It was something left over from that woman. The incessant need to just be near someone, someone who doesn’t mind she doesn’t want to speak. It was nicer here, shinobi could read body language, and as long as she projected the right thing, she didn’t need to speak.)
Sometimes, when she hunts him down, Weasel is also there as Itachi.
She never left when she noticed he was there unless the two looked tense, the sort of tense that came from an interrupted conversation.
Most of the time she just plopped herself down to continue as always.
(She shifted her mindset so easily when she called them names, she was never sure why, but she was sure it had to do with their behavior.
She calls herself Miho most of the time, but sometimes she is more like Butterfly even outside of the mask, and so she is Butterfly. And sometimes she is more Miho then Butterfly when in the mask.
Her names shifted in her mind, especially as they bonded in silence. Weasel-senpai, Crow-Senpai, Uchiha-Sama, Body Flicker-Sama, Itachi-San, Shisui-San, Shi-san, Ita-San.
Of course, the names were only in her mind. She pretty much never talked to them to refer to them as their names.)
Within a few months, both her brothers had been married by their clans.
She had spent the months after turning 15 to go on missions, to spend time with her new origami buddies, and to find chicks for her elder brothers as the world's best winged man without wings or being a man.
Aburame Tomomi, and Uchiha Michiko. They were both friendly women, Miho had quite literally shown up and become friends with them, then told them they should marry her brothers.
Both were laid back, even if in slightly different ways, didn’t mind a 15 year old telling them to marry, their clans had already expected it of them after all, and they were fond of her too.
Perfect!
Tomo-chan was a civilian, she tended to the Aburame libraries and made sure all insects that could damage books were placed into the plants of the library rather than the books.
She was calm and rational, and made for great silent conversation. She also didn’t mind being married to a shinobi, or retiring from the library to raise children.
Michiko was a medic, she and Yudai had met before and neither minded working with the other, Michi-chan didn’t want to quit the hospital, but didn’t mind passing on their medical knowledge through children, she and Yudai’s parents were still alive and didn’t mind raising their children.
So it all worked out, and Miho could spend time with them, without feeling like she was tricking them into contracts.
Lucky Satomi, did not end up dead. Miho decided to be nice, and not kill the poor cat, she did steal the cat and give it to some Merchant she met while a Peach farmer.
Said cat was now named Momo.
One odd thing she realized was that Hound-Taicho still hadn’t left. He had at least two teams before Team 7, wasn’t he supposed to be shifting out of ANBU to be socialized?
Maybe they've decided Kakashi won’t be Naruto’s teacher?
Meh.
It doesn’t matter much.
She’s already made enough butterfly flaps that even if they were a team, she still wouldn’t be able to predict the future.
It’s been a decade, she refused to write anything down, and That Woman hadn’t cared much about anything after the war.
Eventually Kaguya happens, and they achieve world piece.
That one anime came out before that woman died, of the next generation.
But she was pretty sure plenty of people just didn’t consider it canon.
And, despite how lenient she is about the future and being a butterfly. She really just doesn’t care.
It’s the real world, her every choice is a change, why should she try and figure out why things have changed.
Maybe she scared a shinobi so bad, he didn’t go on a mission he had originally failed and blah blah blah.
Miho doesn’t quite care.
It’ll happen either way.
She’s just happy to spend her time with her precious people.