Chapter 6
The Uchiha compound is creepy.
It’s the same way Auschwitz is creepy. The knowledge of the atrocities committed there, combined with all the little context clues which make it more than just knowledge.
Smashed windows, run down storefronts, overgrown gardens, doors hanging off of rusted hinges. Random objects scattered around, as though waiting for their owners to pick them up.
Brownish stains everywhere.
This is what she always imagined the aftermath of a Buster Call would look like.
Except this is.
Real.
She shudders and clutches Naruto’s hand tighter. He squeezes back, averting his eyes.
Uchiha scoffs in front of them.
She frowns at his back. What, are they not allowed to be disturbed by the scene of a genocide? Still, she’s surprised he can stomach cutting through here, even if it is a shortcut to their destination.
“Is it far to your house?”
“Hn.” He says.
She scowls at his back. So much for pleasant conversation.
Eventually they come to a large house at the very center of the compound.
There’s more brownish stains here than in the rest of the compound, but Uchiha pushes the front door open.
“...Don’t bother taking your shoes off.” He says. “Training ground’s this way.”
“Wait.” Naruto stops dead, looking around wild-eyed. “You said the trainin’ ground was near where you live.”
The Uchiha actually turns around at this. “Yeah, and?”
She stares at the dusty, dark interior of the house. She closes her eyes and counts to ten.
“Sasuke-kun.” She says with her brightest smile. “Is there anyone living with you at the moment who looks after you?”
He shudders. “N-no. That’s stupid, I’m an Uchiha. I don’t need to be looked after. And d-don’t call me that ever again.”
She keeps smiling as she buries her face in her hands and tries not to scream. For the love of Luffy, Chopper and Robin, how is this child not a gibbering wreck?
Naruto gestures wildly at their surroundings. “But why—why’d you live here?! The village gave me an apartment! Why live where—”
He clamps down on the sentence. But it’s too late.
“What? Where my an-bro-broth—where That Man murdered my family?” Uchiha sneers. “A clanless moron like you wouldn’t get it.”
Naruto flinches a little.
“Well no one can if you don’t use your words and explain this shit.” She snaps, irritated. “People aren’t mind-readers you know.”
He stiffens, lip curling, before turning his back on them again. “Let’s just get this over with.”
She throws her hands up into the air as Naruto cracks his knuckles, following him into the darkness of the house. “Bring it, jerk.”
Much like the spar at the Academy, the two of them are on even ground initially.
Also like the spar at the Academy, it’s not long until Uchiha begins losing.
Even without an audience, Uchiha has something to prove in this fight, and that distracts him instead of motivating him.
All the little needling remarks they’ve been making clearly get under his skin and making him lash out where it would’ve been smarter to play it safe, his stances and footwork becoming less precise and more sloppy as he frantically tries to beat Naruto down and make him stay down.
Whereas Naruto can easily dodge or shrug off these blows, redirecting the motion and using the openings to hit back.
She winces gleefully at a particularly painful hit on Naruto’s part. They’ve trained under Gai-sensei. One of the first things he taught them was the importance of letting your emotions fuel your resolve instead of trying to keep them separate and leaving them liable to distract you at the worst opportunity.
Naruto knocks Uchiha’s ankle out from under him and carefully controls the fall so Uchiha doesn’t even end up winded, but is definitely pinned with no hope of escape.
She grins widely, crowing. “Finished! Match victory to Uzumaki Naruto!”
Naruto promptly leaps up and begins whooping, running in circles around Uchiha, while the boy on the ground shouts that this wasn’t fair, he was only warming up, they need to go another round so they can clearly see how strong he is.
She just keeps grinning fiercely. “It’s better to accept loss with grace, Uchiha-san. Now, where’s your kitchen?”
This...
This is a travesty.
If Sanji was here, he’d kick Uchiha Sasuke so hard he’d rearrange his entire shitty face. Of course, given the track record of that move, it’d probably end up improving his looks, but still. Travesty.
There’s fruit shoved into pile in a corner and moldering, glimpses of white-green fuzz visible.
There’s packets of meat and fish in the fridge that have been carelessly torn and left open, their juices dripping down onto other items.
There’s eggs and yogurt left out on the countertop, already long curdled by the smell of them.
There’s congealed leftovers shoved into the fridge on the plates they were served on, without any foil or covers to protect them.
There’s grimy and poorly cleaned utensils sitting in a sink full of dirty water, and the countertops themselves are covered in stains from previous cooking attempts.
At least he knows milk goes into the fridge, and put the tomatoes in the cooler drawer. Even if they’re so squished together over half of them are bruised.
She takes a deep breath and tries not to choke on the stench. Sanji give me strength.
“Well.” She says brightly. “Congratulations. You’ve managed to somehow be even worse than my shittiest expectations.”
Uchiha glares at her out of a swelling black eye. “Shut up.”
She hangs her head, exhaling harshly. Not constructive Ketsugi.
“Right. Where do you keep your bin bags? The bigger the better I think.” She steps up to the sink, pulling the plug and letting the grime drain away, turning the tap on as far as it can go on “hot”.
Naruto makes a face at the rattling sound the drain makes, the expression pulling at his fat lip. She sighs. “Rubber gloves too, if you have them.”
“Your problem.” She tells him, in the middle of sorting through the fruit and seeing what’s salvageable and what has to go, “Is that you have too much food.”
They’re on the fourth bin bag already, having filled the other three with the contents of the fridge and carried them out to a monstrous skip at the back of the compound.
“You have loads of people giving you more than you can feasibly eat, let alone prepare.” She continues, grimacing at a particularly fluffy punnet of cherries. “So it goes to waste. You need to begin doing your own shopping. Or telling some of them thanks but no thanks. Or, hell, even donating the extra stuff to people who can use it.”
“Like who?” Uchiha asks dismissively, as he reorganizes his pantry so things aren’t just thrown in there willy-nilly, carefully sweeping up spilled grains of rice or flour or sugar or pasta into a dustpan as he goes.
“The Orphanage.” Naruto throws out as he scrubs pots and pans until they gleam under almost-boiling water. “They’d always tell me they never had enough food to go around when I lived there.”
Sasuke’s face is wrought with some complex emotion when he next empties the dustpan into the bag, his mouth twisting when she mutters, “Wouldn’t get it, huh?” striding back into the pantry like he hadn’t heard her.
She tilts an avocado, marveling at how much it feels like a rock, and says in a louder voice, “You could always see if there are any charities or soup kitchens that would appreciate the donations. Even I could always take some of what’s left over and make you something with it.”
“...” There’s a lot of judgement she doesn’t appreciate in that silence.
“I don’t just make curries.” She replies snidely, stuffing some rotten bananas into the bag with more force than is perhaps strictly necessary. “I do lots of other foods. Right Naruto?”
“Yeah!” He says, depositing a metal spoon onto the veritable field of tea towels they’ve laid out over the counter. “She just makes the curry super spicy because she has no idea what it’s supposed to taste like. She does other foods normal though!”
Her eyebrow twitches and she has to fight to stop herself from lobbing a mushy apple at Naruto’s treacherous head.
By the time they’re done, the countertops are gleaming, the fridge has been scrubbed clear of contaminating juices, and the sink’s drain no longer sounds like it’s giving out a death rattle every time water goes down it.
The pantry is arranged so Uchiha actually knows where stuff is, and the fresher meat and bread he doesn’t know if he’ll eat in the next week or so has been frozen and put into the freezer.
They have used a grand total of seventeen bin bags to throw away all the wasted food.
In one of the now-gleaming pots, there’s enough minestrone soup for one person gently bubbling away. All Uchiha has to do is let it simmer until the pasta is cooked through and then he can eat it. And wash everything up. She’s very adamant about him washing up properly.
She now has a bag stuffed full of food that Uchiha turned his nose up at on her shoulder.
The sun is beginning it’s slow descent out of the sky. They need to get going if they want to even have a quick dinner together.
“Wait. You two live together?” Uchiha asks, incredulous.
“No. I have to live in my apartment in the village.” Naruto says, looking crestfallen. “An’ I can only eat with Mayu-chan and Mayu-chan’s Okaa-san and Otou-san if I make it there and back before the sun sets.”
She smiles sadly at him, reaching out to squeeze his hand—
“If I leave, the Uchiha clan lands are forfeit.”
They turn back to Uchiha Sasuke, who’s begun looking like he really, really wishes he hadn’t said anything.
He huffs. “If I leave this place, the council will take it as a declaration of the Uchiha clan forfeiting their right to this land, since there wouldn’t be any living here anymore. The land will be reclaimed by the village, and—and—”
Clans are required to do things certain ways or risk dissolution. She sighs. “There is so much wrong with...that, but okay. We can start working on that next. Thank you for explaining.”
He nods stiffly, and walks them to the gate of the compound.
“I don’t get it,” Naruto says as they walk down her street, sun hot on their necks. “Even if the village does claim the lands, wouldn’t it be better to not live with...that?”
She shrugs the bag higher on her shoulder. “If he does, the village might tear down the old compound buildings to make new ones. And even if it is the site of an awful tragedy, he may still think of that place as ‘home’. If you’d lost everything else, would you wanna lose that too?”
Naruto shakes his head and bites his lip.
She gently bumps his shoulder with her own and they arrive home in pensive silence.
She makes sure to bring her (now dogeared and slightly stained) easy recipes cookbook with her to the Academy, alongside extra servings of eggplant tempura, to loan to Uchiha Sasuke.
He doesn’t quite throw a tantrum.
But it’s pretty close.
“I. Don’t. Want. It.” He grits out, glaring at her.
She bites into an onigiri she’s traded from Shino. There’s half a hard boiled egg inside as filling, and it’s supplying her with absent-minded ideas for recipes based off of food from her past life.
“Look, we’ve got your food down to manageable levels, but that means nothing if you can’t do anything with it.” She taps the book’s cover. “This is the first cookbook I ever owned. It’s what I used to use to make stuff for Naruto when we met.”
Naruto perks up a little at the other end of the table, craning to see it’s cover, so she holds it up for him. “It’s pretty easy to follow, and there are some more complex recipes in the back if you want a challenge—”
“I’m not wasting my time with cooking.” Uchiha hisses, nose wrinkling in distaste. “I need to focus on getting stronger. Only civilians care about useless things like that.”
She’s about to give him a good kick in the shins and see how he feels about civilians then, when Chouji abruptly stands up next to her.
“Wanna say that again, Uchiha-san?” He says, his tone low and surprisingly steely.
Shikamaru lifts his head off the table and sits up straight for once to give him a death glare, while Ino scoots her chair away from “Sasuke-kun” and crosses her arms, frowning at him imperiously.
Uchiha’s eyes dart between each one of the three, and he looks away, taking a bite out of one of the tempura she’s snuck into his lunchbox. “Hn.”
She blinks, trying to digest this new information about there being stellar cooks who also are apparently ninja while Chouji just sighs, settling back down in his seat and returning to his sandwich.
Of course, once he feels slighted, Uchiha can never leave well enough alone.
“It can’t even be that good.” He grumbles, pretending he doesn’t hear Kiba’s snickering. “If it was where soup you made came from. That was disgusting.”
She hears Hinata breathe a soft little “oh dear,” over the rush of blood in her ears.
“I see. What was wrong with it?” She asks.
The Uchiha puffs up a bit, oblivious to Shino shaking his head behind him. “Everything. I couldn’t even eat it, so I threw it out.”
There’s a soft slap as Shikamaru covers his eyes, muttering “Troublesome.”
“Alright. Well, since this is the first time, I’ll be sure to take your complaints into account.” She says, smiling.
She grabs his shirt collar and drags him up over the table to meet her gaze. “Because the next time you waste food, Sasuke-kun, I’m going to rip out your baby teeth, boil them down into a bone broth, and feed that to you instead. Are we clear?”
The Uchiha goes pale.
“Easy Mayu-chan, I think the jerk’s just lying to make you mad.” Naruto says, leaning over and gently attempting to pry her fingers off of the shirt collar. “C’mon, jerk, Mayu-chan doesn’t mean it—”
“Yes I do.” She adds.
“—No you don’t, stop making this worse!!” He yells, finally separating her from Uchiha. “I get you’re upset, and he shouldn’ta hurt your feelin’s, but you can’t just make bits of him into ingredients over stuff like this! Even Sanji wouldn’t do that, would he?”
“...Sorry, Naruto.” She replies hesitantly, feeling a bit abashed.
He gives her a disapproving look that is a stunning replica of her mother’s. “I’m not who you should be apologizin’ to, am I?”
She shoots a poisonous look at the offending party. “...Sorry Uchiha.” She says grudgingly.
He just huffs, storming off to the other side of the classroom where his fangirls coo over him and glare nastily at her.
But her cookbook has vanished along with him.
The next day he comes back and throws her recipe book at her face.
She has just enough time to catch it before it clocks her in the nose before he begins boasting in that quiet, insinuating way of his about how he’ll surely surpass her as he waves around a newer, updated copy of the same book.
She asks if that’s supposed to be a challenge, mind turning over the possibilities of recipes Uchiha will willingly cook and eat, mentally marking down the pages.
He haughtily snorts, but doesn’t deny it.
Sakura then shoots up, one hand in the air, saying she’ll be the judge. When Sasuke snorts and says she’ll be biased because she’s civilian, her lips purse and she grabs Chouji’s arm, proclaiming him to be her “co-judge”.
Chouji just shrugs and says he doesn’t mind getting more food.
So then of course, Ino invites herself and Shikamaru along as “moral support”, though why the judges need it is a little beyond her.
Naruto and Lee come with her, obviously, so Kiba and Hinata also show up that weekend with a reluctant Shino in tow.
Shikamaru’s beginning to teach him how to play shogi, and she’s experimenting with different concentrations of sugar water and fruit juice to see what his insects enjoy best, so she hopes he’s not too put out by spending time with them.
Akamaru is still a very good boy, and is perfectly happy with bits of meat and a rawhide bone.
They work out pretty quickly that Naruto can’t really be around for the cooking contests.
This is because Uchiha will, without fail, work out something to argue about with him, and then they’ll have to take it out on each other in the training ground, and by the time they’re finished it’s always too late to actually begin cooking.
So the weekends when Naruto is required to visit the Hokage become cooking contest weekends, while the ones where he comes become sparring weekends.
They don’t all always show up—Ino’s parents have a flower shop they want her to help out at, and her and Chouji and Shikamaru’s parents are all best friends so sometimes they have to go to parties. Shino, Hinata and Kiba often will have clan duties that mean they can’t come.
Sometimes she and Naruto or Sakura can’t come just because they’re spending some time with their parents.
But there’s always someone there on any given weekend, as the leaves on the trees change colors and fall off. And it works. Uchiha’s house is beginning to feel less like a mausoleum and more like somewhere lived in again.
She enjoys the chance to stretch her culinary muscles without bankrupting her parents and test her skills against a rival who she will grudgingly admit might be catching up to her.
She’s still more irritated by him than not, but Sanji and the other chefs at the Baratie drove each other up the wall too, so she’s fine with this working relationship.
Comrades don’t need to get along or even share the same goals to be able to work together after all.
Naruto’s birthday is always a strange affair.
They aren’t allowed to see him for the entire week, for one thing. He’s always collected by masks on the Sunday before and doesn’t return to his apartment until the next Monday.
The first time it happened, she freaked out badly enough that her father accompanied her to the Tower and they sat in a little waiting room outside the Hokage’s office for four hours, not meeting the glares that all the busy, ant-like people sent them.
Hokage-sama had taken their visit in good humor, even as he told them he couldn’t tell them where Naruto was, for the boy’s safety. He’d patted her head and told her not to worry, that Naruto would be back soon.
Of course, she’d worried enough that she ended up sitting outside of Naruto’s apartment for most of the week, watching the village’s festival below and knocking on the door intermittently, occasionally munching on bits and pieces from food stalls that her parents brought for her.
When she’d finally knocked on the door and Naruto had answered, she’d tackled him to the floor in a hug.
There may have been tears. She really couldn’t say.
Neither could Naruto, no matter what he likes to insinuate about “photographic evidence”.
So they’ve developed a tradition of celebrating Naruto’s birthday the weekend after the week it actually happens.
His birthday dinner is held at Ichiraku’s, like there’s any other option.
He gets his first five bowls of ramen free, and the rest heavily discounted. Teuchi-sama and Ayame-sama ladle extra toppings into each bowl, with a grinning “Happy Birthday, Naruto!”
Unlike last year, he’s got two birthday cakes this time, because Uchiha turns even gift-giving into a competition. He’s made an extremely bitter coffee cake with dark chocolate fondant and decorated with sour cherries forming an Uzumaki spiral. Naruto manfully eats two entire slices before passing it off to the adults, who derive much more enjoyment from it.
He likes the lighter vanilla sponge with orange buttercream and a white chocolate narutomaki which Chouji made much more. Chouji subtly lords this over Sasuke for the rest of the night.
Hinata stutters out a “Ha-ha-happy B-bi-bi—” before dropping an intricate box filled with shuriken and a whetstone on the counter and fleeing.
She lasted ten minutes longer this year.
Kiba gives Naruto kunai, as does Ino, which leads to an argument about the quality of their preferred suppliers. Sakura gives him a book on the language of flowers, while Shikamaru gives him a book on the plants of Uzushio and a calligraphy set.
Gai and Lee give him a piggy-bank in the shape of a smiling frog on a lilypad.
It’s really cute, and Naruto instantly declares it to be Gama-chan’s “big sister”, Kaeru-chan.
Her parents have bought him a selection of orange hoodies, some sleeveless and some not, all with the Uzumaki spiral hand-embroidered on the back by Okaa-sama. She also added little ninja frogs with teeny shuriken and kunai and katana in all of the hoods.
She’s a bit worried about her present by now, because it seems silly by comparison. Never mind that she had to search high and low all throughout Konoha and eventually ended up giving all her money to a merchant from Takigakure for this.
She hands him a (rather ratty) plush of a grey pelican with an offensively yellow bill. Her embroidery skill is nowhere near her mother’s level, so the red Uzumaki spiral she attempted to stitch onto its breast in place of the customary tomoe is crooked.
Naruto stares at it for a really long time.
The adults are very, very quiet.
“Well,” She hazards. “Hokage-sama did say everything we give him needs his symbol on it?”
Then Naruto begins laughing and hugging her tightly, proclaiming that it’s name is now Peri-chan, and the adults begin talking again, acting like nothing interesting has happened.
So she hugs Naruto back as hard as she can, Peri-chan squished between them.
It’d be nice if this could last.
She should know by now that a running theme in her new life is that it doesn’t
The weather’s finally warmed up again. The cherry blossoms suffered because of the continued cold snap this year, and Ino’s family flower shop is struggling to keep a lot of their stock alive.
She knows this because Ino will notstop complaining about it.
They’re in the first class of the day and the teacher is lecturing about chakra, teaching them the difference between genjutsu and ninjutsu. She’s thinking that both sound horrifying in their own ways— subverting the laws of nature to attack an opponent, or invading their brain to do so.
A sound pierces the air.
It’s not a siren wailing—not quite. It’s high and fluted, too close to birdsong for that.
But it has a similar urgency. The teacher’s head snaps up the moment he hears it, and his face goes pale.
“Everybody follow me.” He snaps. “Single-file line, hold hands now. Anyone trying to mess around or run off will be automatically expelled from the Academy, do you understand?!”
There’s a bit of confused muttering, and a couple of lamentations from Kiba when it transpires he has to hold Shino’s hand again, but them teacher shoots them a wild-eyed, barely restrained look.
That shuts them all up.
They walk out into the hall, where several other lines of children, older and younger than them, are assembled into similar formations and following other teachers out of the building.
She catches a brief glimpse of Lee, holding hands with a girl with her hair in buns, before the crowd of children moves and swallows him up once more.
“What’s going on?” Naruto mutters behind her.
She shrugs helplessly, shaking her head at him.
In front of her, Chouji shifts nervously, clutching her hand tighter.
They’re lead out of the Academy and up to the not-Mount Rushmore.
They’ve been learning that these are the past and current leaders of the village. Their huge faces seem to frown down on them as they approach.
They take little trails up the side of the cliff face, so thin and crumbling that their single-file procession is the only way to avoid plummeting to a painful end.
“Look!!” Someone—she doesn’t recognize who—yelps from several children in front of them in line, a pale arm appearing seemingly out of the throng to point.
They stutter to a halt, as people’s heads crane round to follow the pointing finger and they stop moving to see what all the fuss is about.
They’re a lot higher than the village, at this point on the trail. So it’s easy to see numerous shapes—dressed in dark clothes and white masks, or in green jackets like Gai-sensei’s—moving with a single minded focus through streets and over roofs towards one building.
The Hokage Tower.
There’s a low, percussive BOOM.
Fierce wind pushes the children flat against the mountainside as dust and debris rolls through the streets below.
The side of the Tower closest to them now has a gaping hole.
“MOVE, all of you!!” The teacher from their first year screams.
Someone’s crying as they all begin shuffling forward again at a faster pace, an intense wail that almost drowns out the harried whispers of “What was that—” and “This can’t be happening—” and—
Naruto’s foot slips.
He shrieks as gravity pulls him down. She hears a scream as she tightens her grip on his hand and yanks as hard as she can, inadvertently using Chouji as an anchor.
To his credit, he plants his feet and holds onto her as tight as he can to stop her from going off the edge after him.
Shino, holding Naruto’s other hand, also strains to keep him from plummeting, a mass of insects swarming out of his sleeves and pushing at the boy’s chest until he’s leaning against the cliff face, sweaty and panting.
They shuffle along a lot more carefully after that, until they arrive at the entrance to a series of tunnels.
Naruto suddenly makes an urgent little noise behind her. She turns back to look.
There’s a person.
They’re perched on a roof not too far away, face turned up towards the little mountainside procession.
They could be a boy or a girl, long blond hair whipping in the wind. They seem...small. Maybe about Ino or Shikamaru’s size?
Their clothes seem strangely bulky for the mild weather and help to hide their sex. There’s a dark mask over the bottom of their face, concealing it from view.
Their eyes, however, are clearly fixed on Naruto.
She clenches his hand tighter, tries to pull him behind her so the stranger won’t have a clear shot at him. Shino’s insects buzz in warning. Kiba bares his teeth as he and Akamaru let out twin growls. Chouji begins yelling for a teacher.
The masked person tilts their head, considering.
Then they vanish in a swirl of white she thinks might be snow.
Several masks materialize around the place where the person was, before disappearing themselves in flurries of leaves.
The teacher from their first year grabs Naruto and Chouji’s shoulders and shoves them behind her.
She does the same thing to her and Shino, pushing them all deeper into the tunnels as she strides back to the entrance, a kunai clenched in her teeth.
She thinks she might’ve respected Taki-sensei more while she taught them if the teacher was nicer to Naruto, if she didn’t have such an obsession with Usagi-hime (the tyrant), and if she had known that the woman could do a stellar impression of Zoro-on-the-Warpath.
They’re swept along in the throng of crying, shouting, scared children.
Chouji’s muttering what happened to Shikamaru, who’s growing paler by the second. Kiba’s growling epithets and empty threats behind them, punctuated by Akamaru’s high-pitched barks, while Shino remains worryingly silent.
Sakura, Ino, Hinata and Uchiha are too far ahead for her to be able to see them, to know if they’re alright.
She can’t see Lee anywhere in the crowd around them either, and an irrational cold sweat breaks out on her brow.
Naruto’s hand trembles slightly in her grip. She squeezes it, gently.
They walk for what feels like miles, before the tunnels finally widen out into a cave.
From there they’re told by the teacher (their current one) and the nice man with the scar to sit quietly with their class as the teachers call role to see if anyone’s missing.
Much like the fire drills of her past life, it devolves into chaos pretty quickly.
Lee manages to sneak away to join their lunch time group in a corner.
He greets the others with his usual exuberance and takes her sudden, frantic hug with aplomb. Then he promptly sets about telling Sakura how lovely she looks today.
They all relax a little bit at that, even Sakura who’s desperately trying to hide how unused she is to the praise by changing the topic to anything else.
The knowing looks Ino keeps giving her and Lee only serve to exacerbate the pink-haired girl’s efforts.
She startles suddenly. “Oh shit.”
“Huh? Mayu-chan, what’s wrong?” Sakura asks, nervous.
“This is bad, this is bad, this is so, so bad—” She repeats, running her hands through her hair, nearly knocking her silver hairclips loose. Luffy save her, this is a nightmare on top of everything else. They couldn’t go on like this. How could she be so stupid?
“What is it?!” Shikamaru demands, eyes tight and focused.
“I forgot our lunches back in the classroom.” She rasps.
For some reason, instead of reacting with the appropriate horror, everyone else just groans.
“Mayu, it is ten in the morning.” Ino says. “Lunch isn’t for another two hours.”
“We might be here for longer! You don’t know!” She argues, cheeks flushing hot. “I don’t want you guys getting hungry!”
“Why are women so troublesome?” Shikamaru grumbles, flopping back to stare at the ceiling.
She pouts, Hinata’s hand on her knee the only thing stopping her from booting Shikamaru in the side, and leans into Naruto’s side to grouse about ungrateful friends, not appreciating all the worry she goes through on their behalf.
He pats her head consolingly.
She’s drawn out of her sulk by Sakura’s worried. “...Sasuke-kun?”
When she looks up at the boy in question, he’s white as a sheet, hands digging red lines where they grasp his knees, eyes bulging and staring at nothing, breath coming in shorter and shorter gasps.
Shit.
“I believe Uchiha is having a panic attack.” Shino says. “Why? Because he is unresponsive to the stimuli provided by my kikaichū and his pulse is elevated to fight-or-flight levels.”
“What’s a panic attack?” Naruto asks, eyes fixed on Uchiha’s shaking form.
“Something reminded him of something scary,” She says, hoping she’s not mangling the description as horribly as Ino’s face is suggesting she is. “Now he’s having trouble staying in the here and now.”
Uchiha begins muttering something, too low to hear.
Kiba tilts his head. “Why’s he saying ‘it’s him, he’s back’ over and over?”
Shikamaru’s eyes widen. “The massacre. Shit.”
Lee’s about to whip around, like he expects to find the murderer of the Uchiha behind him, when Ino grabs his arm.
“Don’t.” She orders. “No sudden movements or raised voices. Daddy says that freaks them out more. Just be calm and quiet. Can you do that?”
Lee nods silently, and Ino gradually releases her grip on his arm.
“Uchiha-san.” Hinata asks. “Can you hear me?”
No response.
Then—a quick jerk of the head.
“I was wondering if you could tell me how you made that cake. For U-Uzumaki-kun’s birthday last year? The one all the adults liked?”
There’s a silence.
“...Whisked sugar and butter.” He croaks. “Didn’t use as much sugar as Akimichi wanted. Still was fluffy. Added eggs and a bit of flour slowly. Can’t use all the flour until after. Fold it in with baking powder. And coffee bits. Lots of coffee bits. Half the tin.”
“That’s dumb.” She says in her most soothing voice. “You’re only supposed to do one tablespoon.”
He actually lifts his head and glares at her. “No it’s not.” He argues. “It’s too sweet otherwise.”
She’s about to argue that it’s cake, that’s the entire point when Sakura cuts in. “Yeah.” She says. “Your cake just had a more...mature taste than what Mayu-chan’s used to.”
She narrows her eyes at Sakura, contemplating elbowing her. Her tastebuds are fine, she just doesn’t destroy them with bitterness and acidity.
But Uchiha’s snorting in amusement and his trembling’s slowed down a lot, his breathing gradually returning to normal.
They keep talking quietly like that about cakes and the various ways Uchiha was planning on butchering perfectly good recipes, and the potential of making safe doggy-cakes for Akamaru, until the teachers tell them the coast is clear.
The sun is long past the noon mark by the time they make it back to the classroom.
She was right about them going hungry, because everyone falls upon their lunchboxes with the ferocity of wild beasts or a hungry Luffy before the teacher sends them all home for the day.
Sasuke somehow leaves before anyone can notice and offer to walk back with him.
Okaa-sama is waiting outside the gate to greet her, Naruto and Lee.
Her teahouse uniform is covered in brownish dust, which her mother appears heedless of as she hugs each of them individually, and then gives them all one big hug.
Nobody knows what happened, or why a bit of Hokage Tower exploded yet. Apparently there was a huge genjutsu cast that made everyone in the surrounding area, even the masks, fall asleep after that, so the culprits got away for now.
Okaa-sama reassures them that the Hokage will surely have his best hunter-nin on the case, and they’ll be caught and brought to justice soon.
She goes a bit green when Naruto describes almost falling, and then seeing the mysterious person who was likely one of the perpetrators staring at him, squeezing his hand tightly as they walk.
There are lots of people walking home now. Even shopkeepers are closing up early and returning home to their families.
She wonders when Otou-sama’s coming home while she washes up the lunchboxes with Lee and Naruto. Surely his job would’ve let him go home by now?
Nobody says anything, but his absence becomes palpable as dinner draws closer. Okaa-sama makes them wait half an hour past when the food should be served, watching out the window anxiously.
Eventually they have to eat or Naruto won’t get home by curfew. They leave aside a plate warming in the oven.
Okaa-sama has begun gnawing at her bottom lip when a knock at the door finally comes.
Everyone exchanges glances, before her mother rises and goes to answer it.
It’s not Otou-sama.
It’s a mask.
“I am here to collect Uzumaki.” The mask says. At least it’s not the one that hurt her.
“I understand,” Her mother replies. “Naruto-kun!”
Naruto stands from where they’ve been peeking around the doorframe. Lee follows him.
“If it is alright, ANBU-san, I would like to walk home with Naruto-kun!” He says. “I wish to ensure he returns home safely before going back to the Orphanage.”
The mask tilts his head. “This is permissible. Come.”
“Wait.” Naruto says, stopping before the threshold. “Where’s Mayu-chan’s Otou-san? He’s never this late. He even missed dinner.”
“That is not relevant.” The mask says, trying to grab Naruto’s arm. “Come.”
“No!” Naruto ducks back into the house, hiding behind Okaa-sama’s legs. “I wanna know where Mayu’s Otou-san is! I’m not going until I know!”
Okaa-sama shrugs helplessly but makes no move to pull Naruto out from behind her. “Please sir, we’re all just worried about my husband. If we could have some word of his whereabouts—even if he’s in hospital—?”
The mask goes very still.
“Ketsugi Jirou is currently being held in custody of Konoha’s Interrogation department. He will be released once he cooperates with questioning regarding today’s incident.”
Then he rips Naruto away from Okaa-sama, grabs Lee, and vanishes in a whirl of leaves.
And all she can do is watch as her mother slowly sinks to the floor.
She begins crying in the still-open doorway.