Chapter 53: Who You Tell.

Her mother had made salt-grilled mackerel.

Mikoto could smell it as soon as she walked inside. Charred skin and rice vinegar and the sweet bite of grated daikon, and for one long second she stood in the entryway with her hand still on the frame and couldn't make herself take her sandals off.

"Mikoto? Is that you?" Mikan's voice came from the kitchen, bright and quick. "You're early! I thought you'd be back tomorrow. Oh, I only made enough for two, sit down, sit down, I'll grill another one…"

"It's fine, Mama. I'm not that hungry."

"You're hungry if I say you are. Now sit."

She sat.

Mikan put a plate in front of her, then a bowl of rice, then a second bowl of rice beside the first, as though she could feed back every meal her daughter had missed in the war. She sat down across the low table with her chin in her hand and her eyes shining.

"Well? How was the mission in Hanawa? Were the villagers nice? Did your little demons behave themselves?"

So Mikoto told her about Hanawa.

She told her about the hillside and the beam and Tsume digging with her bare hands. About Momo and the snail she'd given Yoshino as a present, and how Yoshino had carried it around utterly disgusted for an entire afternoon rather than hurt the girl's feelings. About Daigo and his stick sword, running half a kilometer down the road beside Nawaki, begging to learn swordsmanship. Mikan laughed warmly with a smile. She pressed a hand to her chest when Mikoto got to Sae, and the buried mother finally breathing in the sunlight, and the boy who had asked every adult in the village for two days if they'd found her yet.

Mikoto didn't tell her about the road home.

She ate the fish. It was delicious. She ate both bowls of rice so her mother wouldn't worry, and she kept her back to the wall and her face to the door the entire meal, and she didn't notice she was doing it until she reached for the teapot and found her left hand already resting on the tool pouch at her hip.

Her father came home an hour after dark.

Kaen Uchiha came in quietly, the Military Police crest on his sleeve and the long day in his shoulders. He set his sandals side by side in the entryway. He kissed Mikan on her forehead. He looked at his daughter, sitting at the table with her empty bowls, and said, "You're back."

"I'm back, Papa." She had a weak smile on her face.

He nodded once, and sat, and ate the dinner Mikan put in front of him without saying another word. 

But his eyes stayed on her smile for a moment.

“Is something wrong?” He asked in the midst of eating.

“I’m good.” Mikoto’s smile faded.

“I see.” Kaen gave a glance to his wife who clearly wanted to push after realizing something wasn’t good.

Mikan went to bed at the usual hour. She hugged Mikoto from behind on her way past, arms around her neck, cheek pressed to the top of her head.

"I'm glad you're home," She said. "Sleep in tomorrow. That's an order from your mother, and your mother outranks a jonin."

"Yes, ma'am." Mikoto didn’t think it worked like that but for now, she let it work like that.

The bedroom door slid shut.

Mikoto sat with her hands around a cup of tea that had gone cold. In the next room, her mother's breathing slowed and deepened. Outside, a cricket started up under the porch. The lanterns of the compound burned on down the street, one after another, the way they had every night of her life.

Her father finished his tea. He stood, and took the pot, and refilled both of their cups, and then he went out onto the porch and sat down on the edge of the boards with his cup in his hands and waited.

He didn't call her but she went out and sat beside him.

For a while neither of them said anything. Kaen drank his tea. Mikoto held hers. The night was warm and the air smelled of the cedar hedge across the way and of somebody's late dinner, ginger and soy, drifting from three houses down.

"Something happened after the mission." Her father said.

"Yes…" Mikoto said.

"Talk to me."

So she told him.

Her father set his cup down on the boards beside him after the long story. He set it down carefully.

"This is above us." He told her.

"I didn’t know who to share this with."

"This goes to the clan head." He stood. "Tonight."

Relief eased Mikoto’s shoulders as she heard her father’s words.

"Someone sent twelve shinobi to kill my daughter." Kaen said, "No matter who it is, they have to pay." He held out his hand to help her up. "Let’s get to the bottom of this."

…

The clan head's house sat at the heart of the compound, behind a low wall and a gate with the Uchiha fan carved into both posts. A single lantern burned over the door.

Tajimu's wife answered their knock in a dark robe with her hair down, took one look at Kaen's stern face, and went to get her husband without asking a single question.

Uchiha Tajimu received them in his study. He'd been reading by lamplight. He set the scroll aside when they came in and looked at Kaen, and then at Mikoto, and then he gestured to the cushions across from his desk.

"Sit. Both of you." His voice was deep and rough. "Kaen. You don't come to my door after dark. What's happened?"

"Tell him." Kaen said to his daughter. "You can trust the Clan Head."

She nodded and told him.

Tajimu listened without interrupting. He didn't move. He didn't look away from her face the entire time she was speaking, and when she reached the part about the barrier squad and the hostage squad and the four killers sent in after her, she saw the muscles in his forearms go hard where his hands rested on the desk.

When she reached the seal on the tongue, Tajimu's eyes went red.

Two tomoe, spinning, there and gone in the time it took her to finish the sentence. He blinked, and they were black again.

"Show me." He asked.

They went out into his garden, because Mikoto didn’t want to unseal a corpse onto a clan head's tatami. Kaen took the lantern from over the door and held it up. Mikoto knelt on the flagstones by the koi pond, unrolled one of the scrolls, and released it.

The shinobi she'd questioned lay on his back on the stones in a puff of white smoke. Dark clothes. No markings. Kusanagi's diagonal cut ran across his face from brow to jaw, through the bridge of his nose and both lips, and the lantern light made it look black.

Mikoto pressed his jaw open with two fingers and turned his head toward the light.

The seal sat on his tongue in thin dark ink, root to tip. Three solid lines. Two broken.

Tajimu looked at it.

He looked at it for a long time.

Root.

The Foundation.

Years ago, in a room with the Third and the two advisors and the other clan heads, he’d been told that the Foundation existed for the protection of the village and that its business was its own. He had been told whose business it was.

There was only one man in Konoha that seal answered to.

Danzō Shimura.

Tajimu straightened up from the body very slowly. His face didn't change. His hands, at his sides, closed into fists so hard his knuckles cracked.

You sent your dogs after her.

After her.

He'd sat in his study a few weeks ago and smiled to himself in the dark over a rumor. A girl who could build an eye from a lock of hair. A girl with three tomoe at fourteen. A girl the village called an angel, who had stood alone against Hanzō of the Salamander and walked away, who had half the jonin in Konoha owing her their lives and the other half lining up outside the hospital to owe her their arms. Tajimu had been clan head for a long time. He had seen a great many gifted Uchiha come and go. His own son was one of them, and Tajimu was proud of him.

But Fugaku was not Mikoto.

He saw embers of Madara Uchiha in Mikoto.

The clan had waited since Madara left for someone like her. And now, finally, there was a girl who could make the whole village look at the Uchiha fan and see something to respect and admire.

And Danzō had tried killing his golden goose.

He'd told his wife he wouldn't push the match. He'd meant it. He meant it still. But the girl would remember who had stood beside her when the time came, and who had stood in front of her the morning after, and if she looked back someday and saw the clan head there, saw Fugaku's father there, well. That would be her choice to make. He'd simply be making sure she had all the information.

That wasn't why he was furious, though.

He'd have been furious if it were the least of them. Danzō Shimura had sent twelve killers after a daughter of this clan, inside the Land of Fire, on a Konoha road, and that was unforgivable whoever she'd been.

That it was her…

Tajimu breathed out through his nose.

"Seal it back up." he said.

Mikoto sealed the body away. Kaen lowered the lantern.

"You know who it is?" Mikoto asked. She was looking at the clan head's face. She'd watched his eyes go red.

"I have merely a guess at this time." Tajimu's voice gave nothing as he lied.

"Can I know the guess?" Mikoto asked.

He shook his head. "When you know a name, it's visible in your eyes. People who know how to look will see it there. Better for you that you don't know it yet." He looked down at her. "How many of them did you bring back?"

"Four." She'd decided that on the walk home, too. "The three Nawaki killed, and this one. The other eight weren't recoverable." She kept her face still. "It was a bad fight. Ninjutsu. Poison. Explosive tags. There's very little left of them."

Tajimu nodded.

"Who else knows the truth?"

"My father. Now you."

"And you didn't go to the Hokage."

"No."

"Good." He said it simply. "Don't."

Mikoto blinked. Kaen, holding the lantern, didn't.

"Whoever sent those men is waiting for news," Tajimu said. "A body, or a report. Either one tells him what he needs to know. Give him neither. Let him sit in the dark tonight wondering what you saw, and who you told, and why the tower is quiet." He turned toward the house. "You've told your genin it was bounty hunters?"

"Yes."

"Then the Senju boy will tell his sister. And Tsunade Senju will not believe for one second that twelve bounty hunters in matching masks ambushed her brother on a road two hours from the gate. That headstrong headache will be in the Hokage's office by morning. And the Hokage will send for you."

"And then?"

"And then you go." Tajimu stopped at the edge of the veranda and looked back at her. "You walk into that office and you tell him the truth. Everything you told me. You give him the bodies. And when he asks you why you didn't come to him first…" His voice dropped, rough and low. "You tell him you came to me."

"Just like that?"

"Exactly like that." He looked at Kaen over her head. "He'll understand what it means."

Kaen nodded once.

"Sleep in your own bed tonight." Tajimu told her. "I'll put officers on your street."

"I'll watch my own house." Kaen said.

The clan head looked at the Military Police officer standing in his garden with a lantern in one hand and his other hand resting on the back of his daughter's neck, and whatever he'd been about to say, he didn't.

“I’d expect nothing less from my newest yoriki.” Tajimu said. He’d signed Kaen’s promotion himself, not two months ago.

…

Mikoto didn't sleep.

She lay on her futon and looked at the ceiling and listened to her father not sleeping in the next room. Once, very late, she heard the porch boards creak under his weight. Then nothing. Then the boards again. He walked the porch until the sky went grey.

At first light she slipped out the back, over the wall, and ran north into the forests behind the training grounds where nobody went at that hour.

She found a hollow she'd used before, a dry streambed cut deep into the hillside, screened on both sides by thick brush. She unsealed the scrolls she wasn't going to hand over, one at a time. They were the six Shark Skin had killed, the one she’d kicked over the treetops, and a scroll of red water that had once been a man.

Snake. Ram. Monkey. Boar. Horse. Tiger.

“Fire Style: Fireball Jutsu.” A stream of flames flew from her mouth.

When the fire went out, she raked through the ashes with a stick, found the pieces that hadn't burned all the way, and burned those too. Then she used water to cool the stones and earth to fill the hollow, and she stood over the place where eight people had stopped existing, and she didn't feel much of anything except tired.

She was dusting soil off her hands when a hawk found her.

It came down through the trees in a long smooth glide and landed on a branch at eye level, and it held out its leg to her, and the message tube on its leg carried the Hokage's red wax seal. She opened it.

Report to the Hokage's office immediately.

Tajimu had been right.

Hiruzen Sarutobi had been at his desk since an hour before dawn, which was not unusual. Sleep came harder every year of the war, and paperwork never seemed to sleep at all.

The door hit the wall so hard the frame cracked.

"WHY WERE ANBU TRYING TO KILL MY BROTHER?!"

Tsunade Senju stood in the doorway. Behind her, a masked guard was halfway into a lunge to stop her and very sensibly changing his mind. Her hair had come half out of its ties. There was dried blood on her sleeve that wasn't hers, and dark rings under her eyes, and her chakra was coming off her in a wave that set every scroll on the shelves rattling.

"Tsunade." Hiruzen set his brush down. "Close the door. You'll wake the whole village."

"I DON'T CARE IF I…"

"Close the door," Hiruzen said again, not louder, "and sit down, and tell me what's happened. Then you can shout at me as much as you like."

She stood there breathing hard for a moment. Then she slammed the door shut behind her, which cracked the frame a little more, and didn't sit down.

"Nawaki came home last night," she said. "He walked in the door and fell down."

Hiruzen listened patiently.

"Every muscle in his body was torn. Hundreds of tiny bleeds under the skin, everywhere. Someone had already set his bones.” She’d noticed that much. “Whoever it was left the muscles alone. He’d done something to himself. That weird jutsu of hers. He went past where he was supposed to." She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. "I sat with him all night. He can't stand. He'll be in bed for days at least, maybe a week or more before he can walk without help, and the whole time I'm working on him, he's talking. About masks. And barriers. And twelve people coming out of the trees on the road home from Hanawa."

"Twelve people?" Hiruzen questioned.

"Twelve! In white masks! No markings, no headbands, all carrying the same short blades! They put a barrier over Mikoto to cut her off and then four of them came for Nawaki!" Tsunade's hands were shaking. "They had a knife at his throat, Sensei."

"Nawaki's?"

"Someone's!" She waved a hand. "One of them. One of the other two. It doesn't matter! My brother nearly died kilometers away from Konoha!"

Hiruzen rose from behind the desk, came around it, and put a hand on her shoulder. She let him. That told him more about how she was than anything she'd said.

"There were no ANBU on that road," he said quietly. "None were sent. I'd know."

"Then who were they?"

"What did Nawaki say?"

"He said Mikoto told them they were bounty hunters. Her name's in the bingo books, there's money on her head, shinobi come for her sometimes." Tsunade made a disgusted sound. "Bounty hunters. In matching masks. Twelve of them, working together like they'd done it a hundred times, two hours from our own gate. Bounty hunters don't move in twelves, Sensei. Bounty hunters don't look like ANBU."

No, Hiruzen thought. They don't.

White masks. No markings.

"And Mikoto?" he asked. "Was she hurt?"

"Nawaki says no. He says she came out of that barrier and killed the last one and then healed all three of them and the dog on the side of the road." Tsunade's mouth twisted. "He said she sealed up the bodies. All of them. Every single one. He said she even had to go find one in the forest that had gone flying."

Hiruzen looked at her.

"She collected their bodies." He nodded. Standard procedure when the option was available.

"That's what he said."

"Then where are they?"

The silence stretched.

Hiruzen went back around the desk. He shuffled through the stack of reports waiting for him from yesterday. He shuffled through it multiple times.

There was nothing from Mikoto Uchiha besides the standard mission report of the C-rank mission they went on. It ended at Hanawa. It said nothing about the road. 

"She came back yesterday afternoon, didn’t she?”

"The gate guards would know. Nawaki said they walked straight in." Tsunade frowned. Some of the anger was draining out of her now, and confusion was filling up the space it left. "She didn't come here to report it?"

"No."

"That doesn't make any sense." Tsunade finally sat, heavily, in the chair across the desk. "Twelve shinobi try to kill her on our own road and she just… goes home?"

"It doesn't make sense," Hiruzen agreed. "Unless it does."

Tsunade looked up at him sharply. He didn't explain.

He wrote three lines on a slip of paper, rolled it, sealed it with red wax, and went to the window. A hawk was already waiting on the sill. It always was.

"Wait with me," he said to Tsunade, as the hawk went out over the rooftops. "I want you here when she arrives."

"Why?"

"Because you're her equal in the medical corps," Hiruzen said, "and because I want a witness I trust."

He didn't say a witness she'll trust. He thought it, though.

He made tea while they waited. Tsunade refused a cup and then took it when he set it in front of her anyway. She held it without drinking, looking down into it, and after a while she said, without looking up:

"I'm not here to blame her. Before you ask."

Hiruzen glanced at her.

"I did that once already. I put her through a wall over Nawaki and it wasn't her fault and she still saved his life." Tsunade turned the cup in her hands. "Whatever happened on that road, he came home. He came home because she taught him how to fight like that. He told me so. He was proud of it." Her voice went rough. "I wanted to be furious at her again. But I couldn’t. She can’t control who comes after her. That’s just the life of a shinobi. Especially an infamous one…"

"That's growth." Hiruzen chuckled.

"Shut up, old man."

He smiled a little behind his pipe.

Mikoto arrived a little under half an hour later.

She'd washed. She'd changed into fresh clothes and a new flak vest, her forehead protector tied neat. Her eyes were black. She'd let the Sharingan go before she knocked; walking into the Hokage's office with it spinning was something even she couldn’t do. The ANBU had warned her about it once before.

She bowed in the doorway. Then she saw Tsunade, and she bowed again, smaller.

"Hokage-sama. Tsunade-san."

"Mikoto. Sit, please." Hiruzen gestured to the second chair. "I think you know why you're here."

"Nawaki," she said. She sat. She looked at Tsunade. "How is he?"

"Flat on his back," Tsunade said. "Proud about his injuries. Again." She said a bit more bitterly.

Some tension went out of the girl's shoulders that Hiruzen hadn't realized was there.

"Tell me what happened on the road," he said. "From the beginning. Leave nothing out."

Mikoto told him.

She told it the way she wrote her reports: plainly, in order, without pausing to make herself look better or worse. The silence of the birds. Tsume's nose. Twelve. The barrier dropping, and four of them closing on her inside it while four more went for the children. The four inside dying one after another. The barrier breaking. The four who'd held it, dying. Running back. Nawaki on his hands and knees. Yoshino with a blade at her throat. The genjutsu.

Hiruzen listened, and smoked, and watched her face.

She had the most even voice he'd ever heard from someone her age. He'd heard that voice in reports from the front, telling him how many she'd saved and how many she hadn't, and it hadn't shaken then either.

“I know you use seals in your surgeries. I didn’t know you had experience in other areas.” He mentioned it lightly.

"My father started teaching me barrier work when I was in the academy." Mikoto folded her hands in her lap.

Tsunade nodded. Mikoto did have experience in fūinjutsu. She’d seen the seals Mikoto had drawn on patients.

"And the hostage?" Hiruzen asked.

"I caught him in genjutsu. He looked me in the eye. He'd been trained not to, the inside four never once did, but his mask was gone and his face was cut open and he'd just watched eleven of his comrades die." Mikoto's voice didn't change. "I went into his mind."

"And?"

"And there was a seal."

Hiruzen's pipe stopped halfway to his mouth.

"It was wrapped around the memories that mattered," Mikoto said. "The order. The face. The voice. The room. Every time I reached for one, it destroyed it. I could feel it burning away while I held it." She looked at him. "But it couldn't burn everything. He was from Konoha and whoever sent him knew about my mission."

Nobody said anything.

Out the window, a flock of sparrows went up off the roof of the Academy all at once and wheeled away over the village.

"Mikoto," Hiruzen said at last. "You came back through the gate yesterday afternoon."

"Yes, Hokage-sama."

"With all of this. With twelve dead shinobi collected and a seal you couldn't break and the knowledge that someone inside this village had ordered your death." He set his pipe down on the desk. "And you didn't come to me."

"No, Hokage-sama."

"Why not?"

Mikoto met his eyes.

"I went to my clan head first." She said.

Tsunade's head turned toward the girl. Then, slowly, toward Hiruzen.

Hiruzen nodded as if he understood. It was reasonable.

Tajimu.

She took it to Tajimu.

"I understand." Hiruzen said.

"The men who attacked us came from inside the village," Mikoto said. She said it gently. She said it like she was sorry to be saying it at all. "Whoever sent them saw a mission that went across this desk. I didn't know who else that desk goes across, Hokage-sama. I didn't know who I'd be telling." She bowed her head a little. "So I told the person I was sure of. And he told me that if you sent for me, I should come, and tell you everything. And so I have."

"And the bodies?"

"I brought four." She reached for her pouch. "The other eight weren't recoverable. It wasn’t an easy battle, Hokage-sama. One of them blew himself up trying to take me with him. There wasn't enough left of most of them to seal."

Tsunade glanced at her. Hiruzen did not.

"Show me." He requested.

She knelt on the floor in front of the desk and unrolled the scrolls, one after another.

Four bodies, in four puffs of smoke, lying side by side on the floorboards of the Hokage's office.

Dark clothing. No markings. No headbands. Featureless white masks on two of them; a white mask split down the middle and tucked into the belt of the third; the fourth with no mask at all, a long diagonal cut through his nose and lips, a kunai wound at the base of his skull.

Tsunade got up out of her chair and knelt beside them. She looked at the first one, at the long cut that had gone through an arm and the neck behind it in one stroke. She looked at the second, a single deep thrust through the chest, hilt-deep, and the bruising around the entry where the guard had struck bone. She looked at the third, run through from behind.

"Nawaki’s sword…" Tsunade said quietly.

Mikoto nodded.

Tsunade said nothing else. She reached out and laid two fingers against the edge of the chest wound on the second body, and kept them there for a moment. Then she took her hand back and put it on her own knee and left it there.

Mikoto leaned over the fourth body and pressed his jaw open.

"This is what I couldn't break." She said.

Three solid lines. Two broken.

And Hiruzen Sarutobi looked confused at the sight. As if he’d never seen it before. Tsunade didn't know the seal. She'd never seen it in her life. She looked to her sensei to see if he recognized it.

Mikoto realized something. He didn’t know about the attack. When she’d told him about the road… the shock had been real. But the confusion on his face now wasn’t. If Tajimu knew that seal, there was no way the Hokage didn’t.

He knows exactly who uses it.

Hiruzen breathed out.

Danzō.

You fool. You absolute fool.

Twelve. Twelve of his. The best of them, it must have been, to send them after her. Twelve men that the war could have used at a front where Konoha wasn’t winning cleanly anymore. And he'd sent them after a child with three genin on a C-rank road in their own country, and not one of them had come home. And the seal that was supposed to keep the Foundation's secrets had kept every one of them, every last one, except for the one secret that mattered. That the seal itself existed. That it was there on the tongue for anybody to see who knew where to look.

And he'd let the bodies fall into her hands.

And she'd taken them to Tajimu.

Of everyone in this village you could have handed this to, Danzō. Of everyone.

The Uchiha clan head had sat across a council table from him for years. Tajimu Uchiha knew what that seal was. Tajimu knew whose it was. He'd sat in the room the day the Foundation was spoken of, and nodded, and said nothing, and Hiruzen had been grateful for that silence ever since.

Tajimu would not be silent now.

He would not come to this office to ask. He would come to collect.

"Hokage-sama?" Mikoto said.

Hiruzen put the pipe down.

"Seal them back up, please," he said. "Leave the scrolls with me."

She did. Four scrolls, set in a neat row on the corner of his desk.

"Mikoto." He folded his hands. His voice was warm again, the grandfather's voice, the one the whole village knew. "Thank you for telling me. All of it. I know it wasn't easy, and I know you had good reason to wonder who you could tell." He held her eyes. "I will investigate this personally. I'll get to the bottom of it as quickly as I can. Whoever is responsible for this will answer for it. You have my word."

"Thank you, Hokage-sama."

"In the meantime," he said, "I'd ask you to let the village go on believing it was bounty hunters. Your genin. Your friends. Anyone who asks. For now." He paused. "I realize that's a great deal to ask."

"I already told them that," Mikoto said. "And Tajimu-sama already knows the truth."

"Yes," Hiruzen said, after a moment. "I'd gathered that."

She bowed. She stood. Tsunade stood with her.

"Tsunade," Hiruzen said. "A moment."

Tsunade stopped. Mikoto went out alone, and the guard closed the cracked door behind her.

Hiruzen looked at his student for a while.

"You know that seal," Tsunade said. Her voice was flat. "Don’t you, sensei."

"I know a great many things," Hiruzen said. "Go home to your brother, Tsunade-chan. Tell him he did well and I’m proud of him."

She looked at him the way she'd looked at him when she was six, and he'd told her that her grandfather was very busy and couldn't come to the Academy's spring festival, and she hadn't believed a word of it.

“Like hell I’m telling him that. That fool might just repeat something like this again. There is no benefit in being a damn hero.” She soon left.

Hiruzen sat alone in his office with four scrolls on the corner of his desk and his pipe gone cold in his hand.

Twelve.

He'd allowed it. That was the part that sat heaviest. He'd allowed the Foundation because Konoha needed shinobi who could handle the dark work that standard shinobi shouldn’t be exposed to. Danzō had sworn every one of them belonged to the village and nobody else. He had looked away from the Foundation for years because it did good work. Because Danzō was his oldest friend, and his oldest rival, and one of the few remaining men left alive who remembered Tobirama-sensei's lessons the same way Hiruzen did.

And Danzō sent his men to cut a girl's throat.

A girl who had saved more of this village's shinobi than any medic in its history.

And the Uchiha knew. The clan head knew. And he knew Hiruzen knew.

Hiruzen thought about what Tajimu would ask for. He thought about it for a while. He didn't like any of the answers.

He tapped the desk twice. A masked guard appeared at his shoulder.

"Find Danzō," Hiruzen said. "Bring him here. Now."

The guard vanished.

Hiruzen looked at the four scrolls. Then he reached out and turned the nearest one over, and he didn't have to look at it anymore.