Chapter Text
It's difficult to say that Sasuke was born into ill fortune. But he's heard the current Konoha crop of whispers-- Itachi had been well respected, if never liked, his betrayal never revealed to the village-- and Kaeru had been well feared, even Naruto's stumbling efforts to defend her never truly managing to scrape away her proud mantle of bloody horrors. And Sasuke-- well, he was simply unlucky, don't you think. Being born into a family of monsters. It's only natural that the Uchiha blood would claim one last victim. He's related to Madara, right?
A little insanity is to be expected.
There's grave dirt on his hands. Sasuke takes the cup that Maruten offers him instinctively, staring between the unearthed soil he'd been in the middle of digging up and the Akimichi with the vague hope that anything might make sense. Nothing has really made sense since he buried his siblings, and they unburied themselves just to rip and tear at him with their love, or what passed for it.
"Hey there, Sasuke," Maruten says. "I haven't seen you since you were this tall!" He makes a gesture at around his chest height, then elbows the stick thin Aburame standing next to him. "You remember that, Tats. He was tiny!"
His name is Tatsuma. You should be nice to him!
"He grew six inches in two and a half years, and then a little more after that," Tatsuma says, voice flat. "That is a normal amount for someone his age."
The question that had been stuck in his mind due to shock finally makes it past the barrier of his numb mind.
"Why are you here?" Sasuke demands, voice hostile. "This is-- this is Uchiha Kaeru's grave!"
"Yeah," Maruten says, smile still resting cheerily on his face. "We come by here pretty often."
"We visit once a year," Tatsuma says. "Varying the schedule to make sure there are no ambushable patterns, as per Konoha policy on graveside visits."
Sasuke's first memory of Maruten that he can really remember is the day directly after the Massacre. He'd been struggling to gain enough control over the sharingan to be able to turn it off, and terrified if he managed to make it go away it would never come back. So, he remembers all of that day in vivid detail. But he's also vaguely certain he saw the man before that... maybe..?
"I thought you were Itachi's teammate," Sasuke says. The cup has gone cold in his hand... or maybe it's his hands that are cold. He needs to... pull everything back together. He's got work to do.
Maruten laughs.
"Did you? That's cute. No, I think both of his teammates are dead..? Tats, do you remember?"
"Tenma Izumo. Assassinated on Lord Danzo's orders 12 years ago. Shinko Inari. Left the ninja corps."
"Oh, the girl at the teahouse? I've met her. I didn't know she was Itachi's teammate, I could have used that to talk to her! We've got so much in common. We could've talked about what Kaeru and Itachi were like as kids!"
"You were both Kaeru's teammates," Sasuke says, voice flat.
He tries to imagine the smallest portion of what it must have been like for Itachi to kill-- to kill the entire clan, have his sister leave, pick Sasuke himself back up from the hospital, and then-- and then his sister's teammates offer to help.
"Did she tell you she was-- that she didn't do it."
She must have.
"What?" Maruten says. "Oh, that. No, she never talked about any of that with me, even though we kept in contact. T&I is Yamanaka central, you know? And I like my job."
"I killed several ANBU to cover her tracks on the way out," Tatsuma says. "Did I know she hadn't killed her clan? No. But Maruten said she didn't do it, so she didn't."
He's talking to the ROOT agent that killed Danzo and a Torture and Investigation special jounin who'd successfully stayed in contact with a S ranked missing nin.
"You believed in...nothing." Sasuke says. "You..."
His sister's teammates kind of make Naruto look normal.
"Uchiha Kaeru is not prone to personality shifts," Tatsuma says.
"I think being in the Akatsuki really softened her a bit, though? Like, can you imagine 10 year old Kaeru giving us presents? No way."
Presents.
That's right. That's why he's here.
"I buried a short sword with her," Sasuke says, eyes glued back onto the grave he'd been digging up. "I can't find it."
"The one she never used?" Maruten says. "Wow, she dragged that thing all the way to the Akatsuki?"
"It was Itachi's," Sasuke grinds out between clenched teeth.
And she had used it. On herself.
"Then why do you want it?" Maruten asks, invasively curious. "You've already got the necklace. She was so smug about that thing after you gave it to her. Wore it everywhere."
"I--"
Why does he want it? Because it just feels-- he hadn't known it was important, when he left it behind. It feels like he never understands the things his siblings had cherished, what differentiated precious objects from trash along the side of the road. Had Itachi carried around a gift from Kaeru?
Sasuke can't imagine that, but that just means he's sure that his brother really had had one. And-- now he'll never know. There's no one he can ask.
"I...never mind. You guys should just go away-- I want to be alone."
They ignore him completely.
"Actually, this is great timing," Maruten says. "I was going to go looking for you in a couple of months! I had a question."
This is the man that had taken him grocery shopping when Itachi was busy. Itachi had been... paranoid, when it came to leaving him alone with people. Everyone had simply assumed it to be trauma from the massacre, but now Sasuke had a lot of other evidence that spoke to much less imaginary threats. But Itachi had never hesitated-- never shown Sasuke his hesitation, which is probably not the same thing-- never hesitated to let Maruten escort him.
Would Itachi have let Tatsuma escort him? Someone Itachi had definitely known was ROOT?
He feels sick.
"What's...your question," Sasuke says, voice flat.
"So glad you asked. You know how Kaeru really got into chakra thread embroidery as her hobby?"
He's got her embroidery on his back. She'd done that? Regularly? The more he knows of her, the more human she is-- her and Itachi both. He swallows again, throat closing. It's one thing to be loved by monsters. It's one last hateful act against him, that she's far more human dead than she'd ever felt when she lived.
Is that where the blade has gone? He can't find it in the ground because she's still using it in the Pure Lands to send the cuts down into his soul?
"I know," he says.
"Great, glad we're on the same page. So, she left me and Tats both quilts to remember her by. And Tats--" Maruten knocks a meaty elbow into his teammate's side. "He says to me, the pattern that his bugs are sensing and the pattern that he can see with the naked eye aren't really the same. So we go and get-- ah, Itachi was already dead by the time we realized this-- we get Kakashi to go and look at it. Good guy, Kakashi. I think he knew a ton of Uchiha when he was in ANBU-- oops, we're not supposed to discuss ANBU identities. T&I business."
Quilts to remember her by!?
"They are all dead now," Tatsuma points out. "He and Lord Danzo were the only two remaining sharingan users within the village."
"Why do you keep calling him 'Lord'?" Sasuke demands, desperately grasping at his own rage to avoid the echoes of Maruten's casual words. "You killed him."
Now both of them are staring directly at him. It's not better than when he was being ignored.
"Why?" Tatsuma repeats.
There's a long, frozen pause, minutes stretched to eternity as Tatsuma's bugs crawl around his skin.
"He is my lord."
"You killed him!"
"You killed your sister, and yet you continue to use her name. Why?"
Ah, that's right. The vengeance he could have taken against Danzo, rendered hollow by his family's own apathy. If Itachi had wanted him dead, wouldn't he be dead? If Kaeru had cared for vengeance, would she have brought her cruelty right back to his door?
"Don't be mean to him, Tats," Maruten says, voice still full of that chilling warmth. This would be so much easier if Sasuke had never met him. Maruten's been in and out of his house for-- "We've still got a favor to ask."
"Of course you do." Sasuke only now remembers the cup he's holding, and narrowly resists throwing it at Maruten. He sets it down instead, crossing his arms as he stares at them from across the disturbed grave with a hollow eyed gaze.
Maruten pulls out a storage scroll and unseals it, letting two rolled up pieces of fabric fall into his hands.
Tatsuma reaches over and grabs one of them, and side by side they both unfurl. Sasuke's mind balks at the amount of work Kaeru must have put into them, the sheer time and effort it must have taken her. The insincerity that had blanketed her every word except for her dying whispers is nonexistent, leaving only--
White doves circle inwards towards a blazing sun set against a red sky. Tiny golden swirls, miniature replicas of the Akimichi cheek tattoos border the entire quilt, each stitch tiny and deliberate. Green frogs devour insects beneath a silver moon, and the insects are themselves multilayered, protruding or sinking into the surface of the quilt as his eye picks more and more of them out.
It is craft on a level that would take a lifetime to master-- or the use of the sharingan.
She'd burned away her own eyesight to make them.
Get a hobby.
"She went blind because of these stupid quilts," Sasuke snaps. "She wasted her eyes!"
There's a tightness around Maruten's eyes, but nothing else about him changes.
"She made something for you, didn't she?" He says, voice soft. "You're wearing it right now."
It burns into his back like a brand.
"She made that...after she died," Sasuke says. It's different. It had already been too late, by then. It's-- It's an ugly feeling. It makes his gift feel cheaper, by comparison.
"You are unhappy," Tatsuma states. "Why? She never made anything for anyone else."
It doesn't make him any happier to think she never made anything for Itachi. Even while they were talking, it was hard to tell if they got along at all...
A chasm of ideals so wide that death couldn't bring them together.
"Anyway," Maruten says casually. "Kakashi told me that the quilts have a specific trigger that happens when you look at them with a mangekyou sharingan. And then he refused to speak a single word about what he saw. So you're our only hope, Sasuke-kun."
"You should take some time to brace yourself," Tatsuma says. "Why? Because Kaeru is--"
"A bit scatterbrained," Maruten says.
"Unused to empathy," Tatsuma continues, mouth twisting under the high collar of his uniform. "I fear whatever emotion moved her to devote so much of her time to something seemingly without cruelty."
Maruten laughs as if Tatsuma has just told a joke.
"She's never been interested in hurting us," he says. "We're not her family."
That's what forces Sasuke's eyes to Sharingan red-- and under his vision, the blazing sun and shimmering moon both turn that same color, whirling to form Kaeru's own red tomoe. A wide, bright smile splits the fabric before vanishing, and Sasuke gasps as the entire pattern of both the quilts writhes and changes to show a wide landscape of Konoha's shopping district. And, with the talent of the Mangekyou, the details burn themselves into his brain.
There he and Itachi are, him holding Itachi's hand as Itachi brings him to buy some dango. Maruten Akimishi waves from his seat at one of his family's many restaurants. It takes him the longest to spot Tatsuma, eye finally catching on a young man carefully checking an old scroll out of the library.
But that's not all. There he and Itachi are, again, slightly older, Itachi picking out some kunai for him to try. There's Maruten and Tatsuma, bent over a mission scroll.
There's him attending the Academy, and Itachi staring directly at the viewer.
That's when the nauseous realization of where the viewpoint rests: This is the view from the rooftops of the Uchiha district. He's seeing what Kaeru saw. Exactly what she'd seen. Everything she'd seen..
More and more visages pop up the longer he stares.
Kisame sits at a boba tea shop, half empty glass full of pearls left in front of him. His twelve year old self, bolting out of the village, while Itachi slowly walks behind him..
He looks and looks for newer images, older images of him, but--
That's the last one.
He's not going to cry in front of Kaeru's stupid friends.
"She never..." he mutters. "She always has to have the last-- She's already had the last laugh every time! She's so greedy!"
He doesn't care that he's not making sense.
"What does it look like?" Maruten's voice cuts through his spiraling thoughts. "Kaeru's final joke."
Every good thing she saw in her life, carefully stitched into a place where no one would ever see it. A monument to a world she didn't believe in.
"It's a landscape of Konoha," Sasuke finally mutters. "There's.. Me. Itachi. You and Tatsuma. Kisame. Over and over and over--"
"Aw, that's so sappy," Maruten says. He doesn't look happy. Good, Sasuke wants him just as upset as he is. "Isn't that sweet, Tats? She liked us!"
"She didn't include herself," Tatsuma says, voice still neutral. "Not once? Nowhere?"
Sasuke shakes his head, eyes still fixed on it.
"No. It's from her point of view. She wouldn't be in it."
His eyes catch on Kisame's small picture again.
Actually... he'd heard that report. She should've been...beside Kisame for that moment. Right? But the sharkman is sitting alone.
A monument to a world she doesn't live in.
Now that's--
That's more like the Kaeru he's come to know.
Sasuke doesn't want to know what face he makes as he jerks away, refusing to look any more at the quilts. Whatever it looks like, however, he sees the first hint of seriousness cross Maruten's face.The fact that both of Kaeru's teammates wear leaf headbands with all sincerity and pride makes Sasuke sicker and sicker the more that he thinks about it.
"Sasuke," he says. "There's something else you should know."
"More secrets!?" Sasuke snaps, ignoring the growing lump in his throat. "It looks like you could have been an Uchiha yourself."
"Hey, thanks. So, Kaeru didn't ask me to help you or Itachi. Not once, not ever. In fact, the one time Tats asked her, she explicitly said not to keep an eye out for you after she died-- you'd be fine."
"I didn't ask her," Tatsuma corrects. "I simply stated I had lost a bet about it."
They'd been betting on it. On him.
"Same thing. So, like all the times before, I'm just doing this because I want to. Sasuke-kun-- we will help you, you know. Need access to private Konoha records? I've got that."
"If you require knowledge on ROOT or ANBU bases or activities? I can provide it."
Maruten grins at him.
"Need a roof over your head that's not in the Uchiha district? You're still welcome to come over, kiddo. That old picture of me and Tats and Kaeru with our old sensei is still exactly where it's always been."
That might be the only picture of Kaeru that exists anywhere in this world.
"As one of the oldest survivors within ROOT, I am currently in charge of repatriating younger ROOT agents back to their clans," Tatsuma says. "So unfortunately, I am busy. Should you never need an assassin, though--"
A friendly bug crawls across Sasuke's shoe.
"My skills remain available."
"I--"
He stares down at the gravedirt.
"I don't think she wanted me to be a ninja."
He doesn't even know if Itachi had wanted him to be a ninja, or if it had all been tied into Itachi's idea of self defense. If it would have been perfectly fine for him to never do anything for Konoha, as long as he was strong enough to defend himself from the Uchiha's many enemies.
Silence.
"Yeah," Maruten says, finally. "You know, that's what I admired about Kaeru the most. If I hated living as a ninja even... A quarter, or a tenth as much as she did, I don't think I would have had any fun at all-- but she had lots. All the time!"
"She had fun being cruel," Tatsuma says. "And when that failed, she had fun being mildly petty."
What a touching eulogy from her closest friends.
He's crying, again.
How stupid.
"She didn't have to die," Sasuke repeats, bitterness choking him all at once. "She didn't!"
He has no goals, anymore.
"She did all that, and then she tells me to have a good life...she's the reason my life was so awful! I can't even spite her by living well."
Maruten laughs.
"But were you going to live well just to spite her?"
No. No, he wouldn't have.
"Do you think Konoha could ever look like that quilt?" Sasuke asks. "Someplace...warm, and comforting."
"No," Maruten says. "But..." he shrugs. "When you've got friends, anyplace in the world can look like that, sometimes. When the light hits just right. And hey, with your eyes, you could see it forever."
"Found it," Tatsuma says. "Looks like it shifted a little when Kabuto went graverobbing."
His bugs flood out of the grave, carrying the short sword on their tiny carapaces over to Sasuke.
Sasuke picks up the sword, feeling the weight settle into his hands.
It's still got flakes of his own blood stuck to it.
"You two..." he says.
It feels fake, and quiet in his mouth.
"I'm...glad. That you were friends with her. That she wasn't--"
Like him. Like Itachi.
He feels Maruten's hand settle on his shoulder.
"You've got friends too, kiddo," he says.
Does he?
Sasuke slowly straightens up, weight of his siblings' endless painful gifts forever propelling him forward.
Kaeru won't mind if he just copies her hobby instead of getting his own, right?
Because copying is what the Uchiha eye does best.
...
It's strange. In the distance, he can almost hear her laughter.
A/N: The blackbird saw the bird-catcher laying food in his net, and so called out-- "Friend, what are you doing there?"
The bird-catcher said-- "I am praying to my gods. I am offering bread to my guests."
Believing him, the blackbird flew into the net, and was caught.
"Friend," the blackbird called as the bird-catcher's net tightened around it. "If this is what you offer your guests, then no gods will ever answer."
"But birds will," the bird-catcher said.