Chapter 45: Blood Teaches Blood.

Tajimu Uchiha was the clan head and he didn't waste words. He called for her one day and she met him on the porch of the main house with tea already poured, two cups, like he'd known she would come the moment the message reached her. She had. She didn’t think any Uchiha could just ignore the head of their clan.

"Sit." he requested.

She sat.

"They tell me you are an amazing sensei." Tajimu said. "The medical-nin you taught. The fifteenth generation of Ino-Shika-Cho were taught by you and they regularly sing your praises. Dan Kato’s sister and a civilian girl became chunin soon after being taught under you. And now, you’ve taken Tsunade’s brother, an Inuzuka, and a civilian girl under your command. Based on everything I’ve managed to piece together about your teaching record so far, I assume they aren’t far from becoming chunin themselves." He drank his tea. "What do you have to say about this?"

"They achieved what they had because they already had it in them." Mikoto blushed as she rubbed the back of her head. "I just helped them a little bit. You know, to bring it out of them…"

"A little bit, she says." He chuckled. “No one who knows what I know about your teaching capabilities would simply say you helped them a little bit.”

"Uhm… I didn’t do much…" Mikoto’s face was completely red. She just taught them what she thought any genin or medical-nin should know!

Tajimu looked at her over the cup. He was a big man just like his son. Fugaku definitely took more after his father than his mother, even if she hadn’t even seen his mom yet. They were almost a splitting image of each other, just Fugaku being way younger.

"We have young ones in the clan," he said. "Talented. They're Uchiha, so of course they're talented. But talent is useless if nobody does anything with it." He set the cup down. "I want you to teach them rather than relying on their parents or the Academy."

"Me?" Mikoto pointed at herself.

"I don’t want them to be taught normally. I want what you do for your students." He didn't smile. "If anyone's going to pour that gift into Uchiha blood, it should be Uchiha blood that gets it. Why give it to the village and not your own?"

Mikoto didn’t mind helping her fellow clansmen. But she didn’t particularly like the separation of the village from the Uchiha by the head.

“That’s wrong, Tajimu-sama.” Mikoto shook her head. “All of us are the village. Uchiha and Konoha are connected. So it isn’t why give to the village and not my own, but why not teach the younger generation of Uchiha as well?” She corrected him.

“...” He looked at her. A child’s naivety. However, it doesn't matter as long as the outcome is the same. “Very well. What do you say? I’ll pay you appropriately for your time. Consider it on the same level as an A-rank mission.”

"There’s no need for that Tajimu-sama. I got a little bit of free time and I don’t mind helping my family." Mikoto smiled. “When should I start?”

"Tomorrow. Training ground behind the shrine. Five of them. The ones worth the trouble." He picked the cup back up. "Don't go easy on them because they're family."

"I’ll do my best." Mikoto loved teaching.

…

There were five of them and they were waiting when she got there, which told her something. Uchiha kids didn't wait nicely for anyone. Somebody had put the fear in them. Probably Tajimu.

She waved at them with a smile.

The big one stood in front like he owned the spot. Twelve, thick through the shoulders for his age, already having the Uchiha glare locked down. The oldest one hung back with his arms crossed, thirteen, watching her like she didn't match the rumors.

A small one in the middle kept her eyes down. Ten, maybe. Hands fidgeting.

Next to her a girl stood quietly. Eleven, and she looked eager to learn.

The fifth one was slouched against a post like he'd wandered over by accident. Twelve. Unfriendly eyes like the rest.

"Hey, everyone. I'm Mikoto Uchiha, which I think you already know." She giggled. "What are your names?"

"Yuudai." The big one.

"Tekka." The oldest.

"...Saya." The small one. Barely heard it.

"Miya." The quiet girl.

The slouching one took his time. "Hibiki."

"All right," Mikoto said. "Here's how this works. I'm not going to lecture you. I'm not going to tell you what you're doing wrong. You're going to come at me with the intent to kill, all five at once, and you're going to find out what you're doing wrong the hard way. Then your body's going to fix it, because your body doesn't like the hard way." She didn’t bother reaching for her weapon. "Whenever you're ready."

Tekka uncrossed his arms. "All five of us at once?"

"All five." She nodded, still smiling.

"You're not even going to use your Sharingan?"

"I won’t need to." She grinned.

“You’re crazy!”

“I know you’re a jonin, but there’s no way you can take on all of us without your Sharingan!”

“We have good grades in school…”

“Hmph.”

“Your funeral.”

"Whenever you're ready." She said again, and put her hands behind her back.

They opened with fire.

The Fireball Jutsu was their birthright and their pride, the thing that made them adults in the clan's eyes. They spread without a word and made the signs together. Snake, ram, monkey, boar, horse, tiger. Five chests swelled. Five mouths opened.

Five fireballs came at her from five directions at once.

It was definitely a good start in Mikoto’s opinion. The fireballs converged on the spot where she stood and met in the middle in a roar of overlapping fire that cratered the ground and threw a wall of heat across the whole field. The watching instructors raised their arms against it. The fireballs folded into each other and burned, and inside the burning, for just a moment, there was the shape of a girl, and she was screaming.

The kids let the jutsu die. The smoke hung thick.

"Did we…" Saya's voice was very small. "Did we kill her?"

"I didn’t think she’d actually freaking die..." Yuudai muttered. "Aw man, are we about to get in trouble…?”

"She's a jonin." Tekka said, but he'd stopped moving. "She's fine. She has to be fine..."

"I don't see her." Miya said.

They drifted together without realizing it, five kids peering into the smoke, no longer in their stances, the fight forgotten in the sudden cold thought that they might have just killed the most beloved Uchiha in the village.

Behind them, Hibiki felt the air move.

He spun, mouth already opening, "She's behind-" and got no further, because Mikoto's foot caught him in the chest like a falling boulder and sent him off his feet and across ten meters of dirt into Yuudai, and the two of them went down in a tangle.

She'd never been in the fire. The log she'd swapped with was still burning in the crater.

"First lesson." Mikoto said, standing where Hibiki had been. "You stopped. You threw everything you had, you thought you won, and you stopped to talk about it. On a battlefield that's where you die. The enemy doesn't wait for you to feel bad about killing them. You stay prepared in case your attack doesn't work and to confirm the death of the enemy."

Tekka recovered first. He flashed signs and tossed a kunai.

Except Mikoto had seen the signs. She knew those specific signs. So when Tekka came in from behind, where the kunai previously was, with a kick, and her hand closed on his ankle out of the air, and she slammed him down into the dirt hard enough to drive the breath out of him.

"You let me see your hands." she pointed out. "Substitution's only worth anything if I don't know you’re doing it."

The other four rushed in again.

Miya was the first to attack. She'd watched Tekka and she copied his angle, the same blind-side approach, a strike at the back of Mikoto's knee.

Mikoto turned into it, took the strike on a braced leg that didn't buckle, and drove an elbow down that put the girl face-first into the ground.

"You copied him." Mikoto said. "You did it better than he did. But you copied the move and didn’t think about why it didn’t work with Tekka. And it wasn’t because he was lacking in any way." She crouched by the girl's head. "Look underneath the underneath. The surface is the attack. Underneath is why the attack should work. Underneath that is the thing you're actually missing, which is that I'd already seen it once."

Miya spat dirt and said nothing, but her eyes changed.

Yuudai roared in with fire and fist together, a fireball to make her move and a haymaker to catch her where she moved to.

He overcommitted the punch. Threw his whole body into it, and when she wasn't there his ribs were wide open, and Mikoto buried her fist in them. Yuudai folded around her hand and dropped, wheezing, no air left to make a sound with.

“Think several moves ahead, don’t just think in the present.”

Clones bloomed across the field, Hibiki up off the ground and into the academy's first refuge, a dozen of him, then two dozen, the field suddenly full of slouching boys. Tekka added his own. The boys, multiplied until a swarm of them surrounded Mikoto.

Mikoto walked through them and she reached a Hibiki whose feet had pressed down into the soft dirt and gut-punched him, and the boy lurched and went down retching. She spun to one whose body was actively making sound and caught him with a round kick that sent him flying sideways. She found the third real one because he'd kicked up a thread of dust, and she took him off his feet and slammed him flat.

The clones winked out, all of them, their casters down.

"Clones were a good idea." Mikoto said, standing in the suddenly empty field. "But the regular Clone Jutsu makes afterimages. No substance. They can't touch me, and a careful eye can't be fooled by them either." She pointed as she said it. "They don't crush the grass. They don't kick up dust. They don't make noise. Their feet don't press into soft ground, see where yours sank and theirs didn't. On dirt it gives you away. On stone you'd have had a better chance, stone hides the footing. Use clones to make me look the wrong way while something real is coming. Don't use them to hide in a crowd that isn't real."

That left Saya.

The small girl stood frozen at the edge of it all, kunai in a white-knuckled grip, having watched the four older, better kids get put down one after another in the space of a minute. She hadn't moved. She didn't move now.

Mikoto walked at her, unhurried, and Saya's body locked up entirely, the fear winning, the kunai useless in her hand.

Mikoto kicked her off her feet and into the low wall at the field's edge.

"An enemy will not wait for you to decide whether you want to fight or not." Mikoto said, standing over her. "I walked at you slowly. I gave you three full seconds. A real enemy wouldn't give you half of one, and you'd be dead with a kunai still in your hand because you never used it. Freezing is the most expensive thing a shinobi can do. It costs everything, all at once."

Saya's eyes were wet. But she got her feet under her, and she got the kunai back up, which was more than she'd managed a second ago.

The training session continued on.

They were skilled, all five, more skilled than any academy students had a right to be, because they were Uchiha and the clan started them young and hard. But every one of them was completely, hopelessly alone.

That was the thing. That was the whole thing.

Nine times out of ten, when one of them set up a real opening, another one stepped into it and ruined it. Yuudai's fire drove Mikoto toward Tekka and Tekka wasn't ready because Tekka was busy planning his own moment of glory. Miya lined up a perfect blow and Hibiki's wild kunai forced her to flinch off it. They crossed each other's paths. They tripped over each other when attacking together. Twice Mikoto simply stepped aside and let two of them collide where she'd been, and they went down in a heap and shouted at each other instead of her.

None of them wanted to win. Each of them wanted to be the one who won. Wanted to be the kid who put the famous Mikoto Uchiha on her back, alone, in front of the elders, because surely a kid who could do that would be promoted on the spot, straight past chunin, straight to jonin, a legend before they were grown. She could read it on every one of them. The pride. The fantasy. The Uchiha certainty that greatness was a thing you seized by yourself with your own two hands.

They never landed a solid hit. Not one. For all their talent, not one of them touched her, because she was a jonin who'd spent two years in a war among people who actually meant to kill her, and they were five children who meant to kill each other's chances at glory more than they meant to kill her.

It was only at the very end, when all five were bruised and gasping and out of tricks, that something flickered.

Tekka caught Yuudai's eye. Jerked his head. And the two of them came at her together, actually together, fire jutsu and shuriken from two angles timed to leave her nowhere clean to go, and Miya read it and slid in to close the third angle, and for one breath the three of them moved like an actual squad.

Mikoto broke it apart in two seconds, because two seconds of teamwork at the end of an hour of selfishness was not enough to trouble her. But she did see it.

Then she put all three of them down and the fight was over.

Five Uchiha lay scattered across the cratered, scorched field, bruised, winded, and injured. They were seriously hurt. Not anything life threatening but would definitely require some healing.

"If I were your jonin-sensei," Mikoto said, "I would fail you. All five. Today, without hesitating."

That got their heads up off the dirt.

"Not because of your talent. Any one of you would be the best in whatever academy class you'll graduate from. You're talented, every one of you, and it doesn't matter even a little, because I would still fail you."

She let that sit as she thought back to her skills. Back at the beginning when she first made it to the war. There were the unique skills: Strong Chakra and Advanced Growth Rate. And Mikoto felt that the only thing unique about her was the fact that she was an Uchiha. So, she presumed that most if not all Uchiha had the same two skills.

"Strength is one thing a shinobi needs. One. It is not the only thing and it is not the most important thing, and any of you who thinks beating me by yourself would've made you a jonin doesn't understand what a jonin is. I watched all five of you fight for an hour, and for fifty-nine of those minutes every single one of you was fighting alone. You got in each other's way. You ruined each other's openings. You wanted the win more than you wanted your team to win, and so you have no team, and a shinobi with no team is a dead shinobi and a danger to everyone standing near him."

Tekka, flat on his back, said it through his teeth. "We're Uchiha. We don't need-"

"You're Uchiha." Mikoto crouched in the middle of them. "So am I. And I'm telling you that if you want to be a real Uchiha? Five of you as a unit has far greater potential than one of you. Five of you by yourselves, I beat without my Sharingan and without breaking a sweat." She looked from face to face. "You felt it at the end. Those last two seconds, when three of you finally moved together. You felt how different it was. That. That's the whole lesson. That's the only lesson that matters today."

She stood and held out her hands, and green light bloomed over both.

"Now hold still."

She healed them where they lay, one after another, the Mystical Palm running warm over cracked ribs and bruised bone and the small cuts. Yuudai first, then Tekka, then Miya and Hibiki, then Saya, knitting them back to whole, and not one of them pulled away from her hands.

"There." she said, when the last of it was done and five children sat whole and quiet in the ruined field. "I hope the next time the clan asks me to teach you all, you give me a better showing than this. Because I have to be honest with you." She dusted off her knees and looked down at them, and let the needle slide in clean. "Watching five gifted Uchiha waste their talents, because not one of them could manage something as simple as fighting together, I found myself wondering. Are you even really Uchiha at all?"

Five faces flushed dark with the oldest thing in the clan. Pride. Stung pride.

"See ya around, failures." She said, and walked off the field.

At the edge of the ground, the instructors and the few elders who'd come to watch said nothing for a while.

They'd come expecting the famous kind Uchiha to play nice. To go gentle on the clan's young, to dazzle a little and coddle a little and send everyone home feeling special. That was not what they'd watched. They'd watched her flatten five gifted children without mercy and without her Sharingan, name every flaw each one carried, and then tell them the truth about why they'd lost.

"She didn't go easy on them," Kaba Uchiha chuckled with pride. "Not at all."

"No," Yashiro Uchiha croaked. He'd come to disapprove. He'd said as much on the walk over, the girl was soft, the girl wasted clan blood playing healer. He watched the five children pick themselves up off the scorched dirt, whole, chastened, already arguing about team exercises. "No, she didn't."

The go-between came three days later.

It was Yashiro. What he'd seen before had changed his mind about a few things, which was likely why Tajimu had chosen him for this. A man recently won over made the most convincing messenger.

He came in the early evening, in good clothes, carrying a wrapped parcel in both hands, and the moment Mikan opened the door and saw the formality of him she understood this was not a regular social call.

He presented the gift before he sat. A cask of fine sake and a bolt of dark silk, wrapped and corded the proper way. Mikan received it with both hands because there was no graceful way not to.

"The war’s been kind to your house, I hope," he said. "Word came through that the eastern push has held. Fewer letters going the wrong direction this month."

"Fewer," Kaen agreed. "Not none."

"Never none." Yashiro sipped. "I buried a grand-nephew in the spring. Good boy. Couldn't have told you the first thing about him past that he was quick with his hands, we were never close, but you feel it anyway. The name coming off the list." He set the cup down on his knee. "How is your daughter finding the village again? Two years away changes the taste of a place."

"She keeps busy." Mikan said. She was watching his hands. "The hospital. Her genin squad. She made me a fan out of glass, can you believe it. Hung it in the window. She's never still anymore. That girl used to enjoy playing with her little girl friends more than anything ninja related. I almost don’t recognize her…"

"So I've seen." Yashiro's mouth moved toward something like a smile. "The clan's been talking of little else since she came home. The young ones especially. Half of them want to be her now." He turned the cup a slow quarter turn on his knee. "Which is part of why I've come."

He let it land gently. Then he set the cup on the table between them, and the small talk was over.

"I come on behalf of Tajimu, head of the clan," he said. "He sends his respect to your house, and this gift as a token of it. And he asks me to raise a matter with you, as is proper, so that nothing need be said face to face that any of us might wish unsaid later."

Mikan's hand had gone still on the pot. "A matter."

"A match." Yashiro inclined his head. "In time. The clan head has a son. Fugaku. A jonin, at the front, and by every account a credit to the clan. Your daughter and he have served together. He speaks well of her, which I am told the boy rarely does of anyone." He turned the teacup a slow quarter turn. "Tajimu would see the two of them joined, when the years are right for it."

Kaen's face had gone carefully empty. The Uchiha face. "She's fourteen."

"She is. And no one is speaking of tomorrow." Yashiro met his eyes without flinching. "There's no haste in it. A girl her age is of an age to be promised, you know that as well as I do, it's been the way of the clans since before any of us drew breath. But the clan head is in no rush to call it done. He'd see her grown first. A few years yet. Let her come fully into herself, let her body be ready for what a marriage asks of a woman in time, let the two of them know each other when the boy is home from the war." He spread one hand. "These things are best made slowly. He only wishes the door left open."

The room was quiet a while.

"Think of what those two would make," Yashiro went on, gentler. "His blood and hers. The clan has not seen a pairing like it in a generation. The children of such a match," he let the thought finish itself, the way an old man could, "would be something."

"She's my daughter," Kaen reminded him. "More than just her strong Uchiha blood."

"She is a person, and a daughter, and yours." Yashiro didn't argue it. "Which is why Tajimu sends me, and a gift, and a question, instead of coming himself to press you across your own table. There is no shame in this for anyone. If the answer is no, it is no, and it was never spoken aloud, and we all keep our faces. That is the whole point of doing it the right way." He let that sit. "He asks only that you consider it. Speak with each other. Speak with your daughter when you judge the time is right, or not at all, as you see fit. There is no clock on it."

Mikan looked at her hands. Kaen looked at the wall.

"We'll consider it," Kaen said at last. "That's all I'll promise tonight. We'll consider it. And when the time comes, whatever we think, we will give you an answer."

Yashiro rose, and bowed, and there was approval in the old man's eyes.

"Spoken as a father should speak," he said. "I'll carry it back as you've given it. Thank you for the tea, and for hearing an old man out." At the door he paused. "For what it's worth, and it's worth little coming from me, I watched your daughter with the young ones this week. I came to disapprove of her. I left thinking the clan is grateful to have her. Whatever you decide, you raised a good strong Uchiha."

He let himself out.

Mikan and Kaen sat with the cooling tea and the gift between them and didn't speak for a while.

"Fugaku Uchiha," Mikan said at last, trying the name out, turning it over. "She's mentioned him. Once or twice. In her letters." A pause. "She said he was kind."

Kaen grunted.