Chapter 44: What She Gives Back.

It started with one old woman and a jar of pickled plums.

She caught Mikoto outside the bathhouse, pressed the jar into her hands with both of hers, and said her son had come home from the war because a red-eyed angel had pulled poison out of his blood. She wouldn't hear a refusal. She bowed so many times Mikoto worried she'd hurt her back.

Then it was a fruit seller with a basket. Then a young father with a hand-carved toy he insisted Mikoto take for "when she had little ones of her own," which made Kushina cackle for a full minute. Then a tailor, a fishmonger, a retired kunoichi, a pair of children who'd made her a drawing of a stick figure with red eyes standing over a pile of defeated stick figures.

By midday, Mikoto and Kushina were both carrying stacks of gifts taller than they were.

"I can't see." Kushina announced from behind a tower of wrapped parcels, bottles, and one entire smoked ham. "Mikoto. Mikoto, I have lost the use of my eyes. This is how I die. Buried in your stupid gifts."

"I tried to tell them no…" Mikoto peered around her own stack. A bolt of cloth slid off the top and she caught it with her chin. "They don't accept no. I've tried. The plum lady nearly cried."

"Because you're the Red-Eyed Angel." Kushina spat. "Savior of the Leaf. Mender of the broken. They throw food at you in the street." She shifted her tower. "Nobody throws ham at me."

Mikoto glanced at her with a teasing look. "Kushina."

"I'm not jealous."

"You sound a little jealous."

"I'm not!" The tower wobbled. "I'm just saying! You wait! You just wait, Mikoto Uchiha. When I get out there, when they finally let me off the leash and onto a real battlefield, I'm going to rank up so fast it'll make your head spin. I'll save twice as many people. They'll scream my name in the streets louder than they scream yours, and the gifts I get will be ten times bigger and ten times better than this." She lifted her chin over the parcels. "Believe it."

Mikoto smiled. "No way."

"Excuse me?"

"You heard me. No way." Mikoto shifted her stack to one arm, dug into her hip pouch, and pulled out a worn little book. She flipped it open one-handed to a page she clearly knew by heart and held it up. "I'm famous across the whole world, Kushina. Not just the village."

It was a bingo book. And there, on the page she'd opened to, was her own entry. A rough sketch of her face. A list of her names. Mikoto of the Shredding Sword. The Cleaving Uchiha. The Red Death. Konoha’s Crimson Angel. And beneath it, a bounty large enough to retire on.

Kushina's eye twitched.

"You have a bounty…" She gasped looking at that number.

"A big one."

"You have a bingo book entry and three scary nicknames."

"The Red Death is my favorite." Mikoto lied. 

Kushina made a sound like a kettle coming to a boil. She dumped her entire tower of gifts directly onto the street, ham and all, jabbed a finger at Mikoto's nose, and declared at the top of her lungs, "I'll have a BIGGER bounty! A scarier book! More nicknames than you can count, you know?! The whole world's gonna know the name Kushina Uzumaki and they're gonna be TERRIFIED! You just watch! I'm gonna be better and more infamous than you before you even know it!"

She spun on her heel and sprinted off toward the training grounds, leaving her gifts in a heap in the middle of the road.

"You forgot your ham!" Mikoto called after her.

"FORGET THE STUPID HAM!"

Mikoto laughed, alone now, buried in presents, and created some clones to help her gather Kushina's abandoned haul into her own.

She sorted through it all that evening on the floor of her room.

Most of it was food, which she'd take to the orphanages. Some of it was handmade, the toy, the drawing, a knitted scarf, and those she set carefully aside, because someone had made them with their hands and that meant something. And tucked among the gifts were letters that she hadn’t gotten to yet.

Shikaku, Inoichi, and Chōza had written together, one letter split into three terrible handwritings. She could tell where Shikaku's portion started because the characters got lazier, half of them barely finished, like the brush had gotten bored partway through each stroke.

Mikoto,

We're alive. Enmaru-sensei’s food is bad compared to yours. Inoichi won't stop talking about your cooking and I hate it everytime he brings it up. We got promoted to chunin last month, all three of us at once, which Inoichi couldn’t stop bragging about and Chōza decided we needed to celebrate with a party. I won't bore you with war details, but I will say this, I believe we’re winning. If you can call any of this winning… Troublesome.

Shikaku

The handwriting shifted to something rounder, neater, and a little cramped.

Hi Mikoto-sensei!

I hope you're doing well and eating enough and sleeping sometimes. We heard about what happened with Hanzō. Everyone pretty much heard about it. People were talking about it for days. That’s my sensei!!! I’m proud to call myself your student!

Sometimes I miss home. I miss the village and my parents and the flower shop and the way the street smells in the morning. Small things. It's always the small things. I hope the war will be finished soon. Even if my new vest looks really sick and awesome. I hate the rain.

Tell me about your new students! How are they?! They aren’t cooler than us, right? That’s impossible! Respond back to me as soon as possible! It’s boring out here when we’re not fighting!

Your student,

Inoichi

The last section was written in big, generous strokes that took up twice the space of either of the others.

MIKOTO!!

Everything is going great! I’m becoming a master of the staff and I absolutely love it! We eat a lot of field rations which taste awful compared to anything you cooked for us. The rice is always either undercooked or burned. There is no middle. I have dreams about your cooking and I wake up angry.

When this war is over we are ALL going to dinner. No arguments. I've been keeping a list:

- Yakiniku Q (the big table in the back, you have to reserve it a week early)

- That ramen place near the academy with the pork broth

- The dumpling cart by the east gate (the old man's, not the new one, the new one uses too much ginger)

- Akimichi clan barbecue at my house (my mother will cook, it'll be the best meal of your life, I promise this every time and I'm right every time)

That's a minimum. I will add to this list. The war can't last forever and when it ends I want to eat with my loved ones until we can't move.

Stay safe. Eat more. You're too skinny Sensei.

Chōza

P.S. Thank you for the staff. Really. I know I already thanked you but it deserves more thanking. It’s already saved my life more times than I can count.

She read it a couple times and wished she could see all three of them again.

Emi had written. The letter was folded with sharp, perfect creases, the paper unmarked. The handwriting was precise and slightly too small.

Mikoto-sensei,

Status report. I've been promoted to chunin. Obviously you already know this. I'm currently assigned to the western corridor and have been given command of a three-man cell. They're genin. Two of them are older than me. One of them called me "little girl" on the first day and I put him on the ground with one swing of my fan before he finished the sentence. He doesn't call me that anymore.

They're not as awful as Nawaki was. Fumio has decent instincts but his brain is so bad I have to repeat things multiple times over for him. Aika is a sensor with but she panics when things don’t go to plan. Fukkatsu is the one I put on the ground. He's actually the best of the three once you beat him over the head enough.

I drill them every morning the way you drilled us. Four hours before dawn. They hate it. I told them they could hate it and be alive or enjoy sleeping in and be dead, and that I had a personal investment in keeping them breathing because I refuse to be the kind of squad leader who loses people. They stopped complaining after the second week. Mostly.

The war fan is holding up well. I managed to use it on an assassination mission and Suna shinobi mistook me for one of theirs and that led to a successful assassination of a key target.

My brother is always nagging me. Can you please write to him to stop worrying about me and that I am doing exceptional as a chunin?

My squad members called me a freak last week. I took it as a compliment. That’s what people said about you sensei.

Respectfully,Katō Emi, Chunin

Nonō had written too. The paper was thin and folded gently. A small pressed flower, something pale and blue, was tucked inside the fold. It smelled quite pleasant.

Dear Mikoto-sensei,

I hope this letter finds you well. I hope you're finally resting now that you’re back home. You never did when we were together, but I hope you are. Are you eating properly? You always made sure to cook for us and then forgot about yourself. Please don't forget about yourself.

I'm stationed at a medical outpost. It's quieter than where we were. I treat a lot of wounded. Poisons, mostly, from Suna's puppet masters, and illnesses from infections that happen when people can't keep their wounds clean in the field. I do what I can. Some days it's enough. Some days it isn't and I train every day to have more days where it is enough than isn’t.

Something happened last week that I wanted to tell you about. A man was brought in, a chunin from the 14th Division, with a wound I couldn't close with the Mystical Palm alone. Too deep, too much damage to the internal tissue. The other medics were saying we should stabilize him and send him to a rear hospital, but the nearest one was two days by stretcher and he didn't have two days. So I used the medical techniques the way you taught me. I was shaking the whole time. I thought about you the whole time. What you would do, how you would keep your hands still, how you always made it look like you were never afraid even when you had to have been.

He lived. He's walking now. He called me an angel and I told him that wasn't me, that was my sensei, and he couldn’t believe it. He said the Red-Eyed Angel was your teacher? No wonder you’re so talented.

I'm sorry this letter is so long. I always mean to write shorter ones and then I think of more things I want to say and it just keeps going.

Please take care of yourself, Mikoto-sensei. You take care of everyone else. Let us take care of you too, sometimes.

With love and gratitude,Nonō

P.S. I enclosed a flower from outside the outpost. I don't know what it's called, but it grows in the rocky soil here where nothing else does. It reminded me of you.

Mikoto wrote back to every one of them. She sat at her low desk and wrote back to everyone who wrote to her. Her students, the medical-nin who she taught, the shinobi whose lives she saved, and more. She sealed each letter and stacked them to send in the morning.

Then she sat with the empty desk and the pile of gifts and thought.

All of this. Given to her. Pressed into her hands by people who loved her for what she'd done for them.

She wanted to give something back. Something that said thank you in the other direction, from an Uchiha to the village, instead of always the village to her.

She just didn't know how to make anything but she did have the talent for it…

…

Two days later, she and Kushina were walking the market road, Kushina mid-rant about how much better she’s gotten thanks to her training, when a man stepped off the curb directly into their path, looked Mikoto dead in the eye, and spat on the ground at her feet.

"Uchiha scum." he said, and walked on.

Kushina rushed forward before the words finished landing.

She was fast for a genin and she'd crossed half the distance to the man's back with her fist already cocked before Mikoto caught her by the waist and lifted her to a stop.

"Let me GO!" Kushina snarled, straining against her grip. "I'll knock every tooth out of his stupid head, you know?! Nobody does that to my best friend!"

"Kushina. Stop…" Mikoto had a small smile on her face, knowing why Kushina was acting like this.

"Why are you DEFENDING him?!"

"I'm not defending him." Mikoto kept her grip firm and her voice level. "I'm defending you. Look at me. Look." She waited until Kushina's furious eyes met hers. "I'm an Uchiha. You know what my clan does. We run the Military Police. And a shinobi assaulting a civilian, no matter what he said, is exactly the kind of thing the Police arrest people for. You'd be in a cell by tonight, and I'd have to watch it happen. Over words."

Kushina's struggling slowed.

"It's not okay, what he said or did," Mikoto said. "It wasn't. But it was words, Kushina. Just words. And words aren't worth you spending time in a cell over a jerk."

"He doesn't get to talk to you like that…"

"People are allowed to have their opinions." Mikoto let go of her collar, slowly, making sure she wouldn't bolt. "Not everyone's going to like me. Some of them lost someone I couldn't save and they need somewhere to put that. Some of them just hate my clan and always will, no matter what I do or how many people I patch up." She shrugged. "I don't need everyone to like me. I don't even want it. But I'm not going to let you get in trouble over nothing."

Kushina stood there, fists slowly unclenching, breathing hard.

"But it's not nothing to me…" She said.

“It is to me. I’m telling you I don’t care about what just happened. I’m not happy about it, but I’m not about to throw a fit over words. Sticks and stones, Kushina.”

Kushina sighed “I wish you were less you. We could’ve totally had a fun time kicking that loser’s butt."

"Instead of being thrown in a cell together, how about we continue our walk together? One sounds a lot nicer than the other, I promise you." Mikoto bumped her shoulder against Kushina's. "Come on. Walk with me."

Kushina shot one last glare down the road where the man had gone, then fell into step beside her, grumbling the whole way about how she could've at least gotten one hit in. While Mikoto disagreed, not even one hit was allowed.

…

The sign-in came due that week, and it actually wasn’t junk.

[Ding!]

[Weekly Sign-in available!]

[Signing in…]

[Obtained: Advanced Body Flicker Technique!]

Name: Mikoto Uchiha

Age: 14

Rank: Jonin

Affinity: Lightning Affinity, Fire Affinity, Yin Affinity, Water Affinity, Earth Affinity

Unique: Immense Chakra Reserves, Sharingan (Three Tomoe), Advanced Growth Rate

Skills: Fire Style Mastery, Water Style Mastery, Lightning Style Mastery, Yin Style Mastery, Earth Style Mastery, Shurikenjutsu, Elite Taijutsu (Ninja Art: Bare-Handed Blade Block), Superb Genjutsu, Ninjutsu (Body Flicker, Advanced Body Flicker, Clone Jutsu, Substitution Jutsu, Transformation Jutsu, Ninja Art: Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu, Amplified Summoning Jutsu, Shadow Clone Jutsu), Perfect Chakra Control (Chakra Enhanced Strength), Uchiha Style: Kenjutsu, Stealth, Survival Knowledge, Cooking, Medical Ninjutsu (Mystical Palm, Chakra Scalpel, Poison Extraction Jutsu, Body Pathway Derangement Jutsu, Regenerative Healing Jutsu, Mystical Healing Field Jutsu), Fūinjutsu Mastery (Sealing Jutsu: Release), Pedagogy Mastery, Space-Time Ninjutsu Mastery, Seven Heavens Breathing Method, Musical Talent, Craftsmanship Aptitude, Needle Mastery

Equipment: Kunai, Shuriken, Senbon, Smoke Bomb, Explosive Tags, Poison Gas Bomb, Flash Bomb, Gas/Sleep Bomb, Food Pills x84, Wire Strings, Shark Skin, Gunbai, Bingo Book, Fūma Shuriken x74, Hero Water x4, Superior Frying Pan

She read what it was, and then she went to an empty training ground to find out how to use it.

The Body Flicker she already knew. Vitalize the body and move at extreme speeds. A burst. One and done usually with a pause to recover before the next.

This was not that.

The first difference was that it didn't stop. Where the old flicker spent itself in a single jump and left her to gather for another, this one super-vitalized her body and kept going, flicker after flicker with no hard floor between them, as long as her chakra held. She crossed the training ground and back and across again without the pause.

The second difference was that she could narrow it. She didn't have to throw the whole of herself into the technique. She could pour it into one part and leave the rest still, super-vitalize a single arm and let it move while she didn't. She tested it on a practice post, stood flat-footed and unhurried, and flickered only her forearm. Her fist hit the wood faster than her own eyes wanted to track and the post cracked down its length. She drew and threw a kunai the same way, the arm a blur the body never committed to, the blade buried to the ring in a target before the throw looked like it had started. In close quarters it would make her something other people did not want to be near.

The third difference lived in her legs.

She built chakra in her feet and her calves and held it, a charge with nowhere to go, and then she released the whole of it through a window of timing so narrow she had to feel for it rather than think it. The ground left her. She crossed forty meters in the space of a blink, no sound, no warning, her feet barely writing themselves into the dirt. An afterimage of her hung in the air where she'd been standing, slow to catch up to the truth that she was already gone. She tried it over the training ground's pond and crossed the whole width of it without troubling the surface, not a ripple, the water never learning she'd been there.

It asked a great deal of the body. It asked a body that could survive its own speed, and she understood at once that a normal shinobi who tried it would tear muscle from bone after a single jump, ruined by the sheer violence of moving that fast. But she was not a normal shinobi. Between all of her training, she had more than enough strength to withstand it.

She stood at the edge of the pond, breathing a little harder than she'd expected. Whoever met her next on a battlefield would find her faster than her bingo book suggested.

…

The glass-maker's shop sat at the end of a quiet lane she'd walked past a hundred times.

Bright shapes in the window. Bowls and bottles and little hanging ornaments that caught the morning light and threw it around in colors. She stopped in front of it the day after the spitting, looked at the bright things glowing behind the glass, and the idea that had been circling finally landed.

She went in.

The glass-maker was a man named Sutemi, sixty-odd, with burn scars old and pale across both forearms and the squint of a man who'd spent forty years staring into a furnace. He'd been a glassblower in the capital once, he told her, with a workshop that supplied a noble’s household, until a fire took the workshop and his wife both in the same night and he'd come to Konoha to start smaller and quieter. He made bowls and bottles now. Wind chimes for festival season. He didn't have apprentices anymore. He said he didn't have the patience to watch young hands break good glass.

Mikoto put a stack of ryo on his counter and asked him to teach her.

It was a great deal of ryo. Enough to make Sutemi's eyebrows climb, then frown, then push the whole stack back across the counter.

"I can't take that." he said. "That's a year of my work for an afternoon of talking. Robbery runs the other way, girlie."

She pushed it back. He pushed it again. They settled, eventually, on a sum that was still more than generous and far less than absurd, and Sutemi grumbled the entire time that she was overpaying a broken old man for nothing.

Then he showed her.

He talked her through the furnace and the gather and the way the molten glass hung off the blowpipe like honey, the way you had to keep it turning, always turning, or gravity pulled it shapeless. He showed her how breath shaped the bubble, how heat and timing were everything, how the smallest tremor in your hands wrote itself into the finished piece. He shaped a simple bottle as he talked, slow, narrating each motion.

Mikoto watched with her Sharingan, and her eyes absorbed every motion down to the muscle and the breath and the exact moment the glass went from workable to set. The Sharingan copied. Her perfect recall, her fire affinity, and the craftsman's aptitude skill already in her hands did the rest.

She gathered her first bead of glass, brought it to the pipe, and made a bottle.

It was flawless.

The walls were perfect, the curve had no flaws, the lip was amazing, the kind of piece Sutemi turned out maybe one in twenty after forty years at the furnace. He stared at it. He picked it up. He turned it in the light and looked for the flaw that had to be there and didn't find it.

"That shouldn’t be possible for a little girl…" He said.

"My eyes are a little special and help me learn faster than most." Mikoto said, a little apologetically.

Sutemi set the bottle down very carefully. He looked at her, this fifteen-year-old who'd just matched four decades of his life in an afternoon, and instead of bitterness, something in his scarred old face eased into a slow, surprised smile.

"Well," he said. "At least it went to someone who'll use it for something." He waved a hand at his furnace. "Come back whenever you like. Use the heat. An old man could do with the company, even if his company makes him look like a fool at his life’s work."

Mikoto bowed to him with a smile on her face. “You’re overpraising me, Sutemi-san.”

…

She made things for weeks, in her free time when she wasn't at the hospital or with her team or when Kushina dragged her out of the house.

With Craftsmanship Aptitude guiding her hands and the Sharingan refining every motion, the pieces came out peerless, each one better than anything in Sutemi's window, and she leaned into what she was, an Uchiha, and let the work say so. She made fans of spun glass, delicate uchiwa with red and white worked into the panes, the clan's own symbol turned into something wanting to be admired instead of feared. She made ornaments shaped like curling fire. She made wind chimes whose tones she tuned by ear, her musical talent and her craft folding into one.

Then she gave them away.

She gave the first one to her mother, a glass fan in Uchiha red and white, and her mother held it to the window and hung it where the morning sun would hit it.

She gave one to her father, who turned it over in his hands for a long time and said only, "It's very fine work.". He took it with him to work at the police station to hang in his office.

She made pieces for the clan. For the young Uchiha who looked up to her, the ones barely older than her own genin and the ones older than her who'd still started speaking to her with quiet respect. Even for the ones who muttered that she spent too much time playing nice and not enough being a proper prideful Uchiha, she made something fine and handed it over with a bow, and watched the muttering falter a little in the face of a gift too beautiful to dismiss.

She set aside pieces to send to the front. A large glass fan for Emi, similar to her weapon. A religious glass statue for Nonō. Three pieces for Shikaku, Inoichi, and Chōza, matched as their clan symbols. A small beautiful symbol of Uzushiogakure for Kushina that she knew her friend would love.

And she made a small medical-nin glass figurine for Ren-sensei.

She didn't make anything for her own genin yet. Their gifts would come later. Maybe when they reached chunin…