Chapter 31 

— Fugaku Uchiha —

Fugaku stayed where he was a moment longer, one hand braced against a tree the dragon had somehow left standing, his legs not quite his own and his skull throbbing with every beat of his pulse. They would need to make camp, since none of them could begin the march home in this state, and pushing on through border territory while wounded and drained was how shinobi got themselves killed.

Across the wreckage, the boy's voice carried, worn but clear.

"There are Restoration Pills in my pouch," Yuuki said, flat on his back and unable to lift his head. "Get one into each of us, yeah?"

Restoration Pills. He had heard of them from those recently on the frontlines, the new creations Lady Tsunade had developed and handed out to the squads going into the worst of the fighting, and from what he had been told they gave the same recovery as a normal Soldier Pill without any of the consequences. He had not been to the front since they came into use, so he had never tried one himself, and he had assumed the talk was exaggerated, since shinobi always inflated whatever kept them breathing.

Dai dragged himself upright with a groan, dug a clay container from Yuuki's pouch, and pressed a pill into the boy's hand before swallowing one himself. Yuuki got his down, and Fugaku watched the change take him, the tension leaving his shoulders as his breathing evened, until the boy who could not raise his head a moment before was sitting up, climbing to his feet, and stretching out his back. He was still tired, plainly, but the deep ruin of a body run past its limit had lifted clean away.

Dai recovered as well, though not as cleanly, since his shoulder was still torn where the threads had punched through it. He held himself with the stiffness of a man whose body had paid for whatever forbidden technique he had leaned on all fight. Even so, Fugaku could not deny the skill and the power the Genin, and he snorted even at the word, had shown, because the man had fought like a seasoned Jonin and thrown himself in front of a killing blow without a flicker of hesitation, which earned respect on its own. And then there was the other one.

Fugaku let his gaze drift over the clearing, over the wide crater torn into the earth and the cracks still running out through the dirt, over the trees that had been ripped from the ground or snapped clean at the trunk, and over the long ridge of dead wood lying across all of it, and it struck him that te boy had done every bit of it while being no more than ten or eleven years old. The technique had needed time to gather, and only the genjutsu freezing the enemy had bought that time, so it was not something the boy could simply throw out at will, and yet Fugaku had read enough to feel the weight of what he had watched. He found himself wondering whether this was a glimpse of what the First Hokage had been on a battlefield, the First God of Shinobi who had raised the village walls and grown whole forests with a thought, since he had never quite believed those stories either.

Dai came over with a pill resting on his open palm, and Fugaku took it without comment. His chakra had been scraped down to almost nothing, and he could already feel the first edges of chakra exhaustion creeping into his thoughts, so even an ordinary Soldier Pill with all its strain he would have swallowed now. The village was still a fair way off, which meant they would either barely reach it by nightfall or be forced to camp, and he wanted to be home and rid of this border as soon as he could, so he swallowed it without hesitation.

The effect came within moments, his stamina returning as the weight lifted from his limbs and his chakra filled back by a good margin, more than he had expected, and he braced for the rest of it, for the racing heart and the lurch in the chest and the body eating itself to pay for the boost. It never came, since the pill simply did its work and stopped, and beside him Dai rolled his shoulder and said something about how amazing the things were, his voice already brightening.

But it was the other effect that held him, because the strain behind his eyes that always lingered after he used the Mangekyo, and he had called on it twice today, for Amaterasu against the creature and the genjutsu against Kakuzu, had begun to ease as his blurred vision cleared. It was only a little, almost nothing at all, and yet he could tell the difference, since a man who had watched his own sight pay for his power did not mistake a thing like that. It could matter to him a great deal.

Fugaku knew he was a blunt man, so he simply asked, "These pills, where do they come from, and what is the supply like?"

"Through my Wood Release, I can mutate plants into something far more potent than normal," Yuuki said, brushing the dirt off his arms, "and the pills are made from them. As far as everyone else is told, they're Lady Tsunade's invention, the work of the greatest medic the elemental nations have ever had, which keeps the attention off me. The higher-ups in the other villages might suspect there's a tie to my bloodline somewhere in it, but most are happy enough to credit her name and leave it at that."

That explained much of it, the sudden appearance of these on the front and the secrecy around their making and the way the boy carried a whole pouch of them as though they were nothing. Yuuki was watching him more closely than the easy answer let on, and Fugaku noted once again that the boy was sharp.

"It helped, didn't it?" Yuuki asked, his tone quieter. "With the strain of the Mangekyo?"

Fugaku held his gaze, since there was no point in denying what the boy had clearly already read on his face. "It did," he admitted. "Somewhat."

"I'll speak with the Hokage and see about a dedicated supply sent your way, so you can use those eyes more often without burning them out," Yuuki said, drawing a small sealing scroll from a pouch and tossing it over for Fugaku to catch. "That one has fifteen in it, from my personal stock. Take them."

Fugaku looked down at the scroll and did not understand it at first, because fifteen of them handed over with no negotiation and no condition attached made little sense between an Uchiha and a Senju. Their clans had circled one another with measured suspicion for as long as both had lived inside these walls, and men did not simply hand a rival an advantage and ask nothing in return, so being a blunt man by nature, he saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

"Why?" he asked, looking up. "What do you gain from this?"

"You're a shinobi of the Leaf," Yuuki said, a tired chuckle in his voice. "That's all the reason I need. You being able to use those techniques won't just keep you alive, it'll keep the people standing next to you alive too." He gave a bright grin at the end.

Fugaku did not know what to feel, so he simply nodded and closed his hand around the scroll.

— Yuuki Senju —

Finally, as the sun was setting, we reached the outskirts of the village, and the sight of those massive walls rising against the orange sky had me stretching the ache out of my back while Dai threw both arms up and whooped at being home at last. The trek back had been slow and quiet, since none of us had much left beyond putting one foot in front of the other, and even the Restoration Pills could only do so much against two days of hard travel on the heels of a fight like that, so for the last stretch Dai had carried the conversation for all three of us, most of it about his son Guy and what the boy would say when his father came through the door.

The Chunin on gate duty waved us through after a glance at our papers, and Dai clapped me on the shoulder with his good arm and told me to sleep for a week before heading off toward home, while Fugaku gave me a short nod, which from him was practically a speech, and peeled away toward the Uchiha district. I would have liked nothing better than to follow either of them and fall face first into my own bed, but I had led this mission, which meant the report was mine to give before I could rest, so I turned toward the Hokage Tower as the last of the light bled out of the sky.

Hiruzen was still in his office when I arrived, bent over a desk buried in maps and troop rosters. I gave him the whole of it while he smoked, from reaching the border and finding where the patrols had died, to the confrontation with Kakuzu and everything he had spilled about himself, to the fight, the rogues, Fugaku's use of the Mangekyo, and the way it had all ended, and he listened without interrupting once, saving his questions for the end. When I finished he asked a handful of them, then gave a slow nod and told me to have the written report on his desk by the following day.

Then he studied me through the smoke a moment longer. "You seem tense, Yuuki-kun," he said, his tone quieter. "Is something bothering you?"

I let out a breath I had been holding longer than I realised. Eleven shinobi had died to bring me out to that border, nine Chunin and two Jonin, killed for no reason beyond drawing me into Kakuzu's reach, and I had been turning it over the whole way home without being able to make it sit right. Underneath it sat the question I could not say aloud in this office or anywhere else, whether those eleven would still be breathing if I had never come into this world at all.

"Those eleven," I said. "Kakuzu killed them to lure me out, not for anything they did or any mission they were running, but just to put me in front of him. They died because of me, because I'm here, because I'm worth dragging out into the open." The next part came harder, since saying it made it real in a way that thinking it had not. "How many more times does that happen? If I'm the bait, how many people end up dead for nothing more than standing too close to the reason someone wants me?" 

He said nothing, so I pushed on to the question that had been sitting heaviest. "Did any of them have bounties of their own? Anything that would have marked them as targets without me in the picture?"

He was quiet for a moment, then set his pipe down and folded his hands. "No," he said. "They did not. They were ordinary shinobi running ordinary patrols."

"I won't tell you there's a clean answer here, because there isn't one," he went on, and he did not soften it in the slightest. "There is no version of this war where no one dies, and no choice you can make that keeps everyone breathing. If you had never been born into any of this, Kakuzu would still have hunted his bounties somewhere else, and Iwa would still be grinding at our western border, and those same eleven might well have died on a different front in a different month, with no one left to even wonder why." He let that sit before he finished. "The weight you're feeling is real, and it will not leave you. But carrying it is part of being what you are, and the day you convince yourself you can save every last one of them is the day this work breaks you for good."

I nodded, because the words came from a man who had carried more of this than I could begin to imagine, and because there was nothing in them I could honestly argue against, even if none of it made the weight any lighter.

"Tell me about them," I said. "Their names. Who they were."

He looked at me for a long moment, and I half expected him to reach for a file, since eleven dead across three weeks was a drop in the ledger of a war this size, but he did not reach for anything at all. "Tetsuo Komiya, Yui Hosaka, Shin Iwabuchi," he said, his tone even. "The first squad we lost. Komiya's wife gave birth to their first a month ago. Daichi Sakuma, Miyako Onda, Sota Kiriyama, the second. Kiriyama turned sixteen this spring, promoted barely a year. Ren Matsuo, Chiharu Nomura, Ippei Takase, the third. And Kenji Sagara and Sayo Yukimura, the two Jonin who went to find out what was taking them. Yukimura asked for the assignment herself. The first squad was her Genin team once, before they made Chunin."

I repeated each one silently as it came, fixing them somewhere I would not lose them, and he watched me do it through the pipe smoke without hurrying me along.

"Get some sleep," he said as I turned for the door. "That is an order, not a suggestion."

"Yes, sir," I said, and I even meant it at the time.

By the time I stepped back out of the tower the village had gone dark and still, the streets down to lamplight, and every part of me was begging for my bed. My feet took me the other way instead, out past the quiet residential rows and toward the training grounds at the edge of the village, to the place where the memorial stone stood, because a list of names spoken in a warm office was one thing, while seeing them cut into stone was another, and I found I needed the second before I could sleep.

It sat in a clearing near the third training ground, a tall slab of polished stone catching the moonlight, its face cut with row upon row of names, every shinobi who had given their life for the village set into it, hundreds of them reaching back across two wars and into this one. I had passed it before without ever stopping, since the dead it held had never been mine to mourn, but tonight I had come looking.

There was someone already at the stone when I arrived, a small figure sitting against the base near the far end with their knees drawn up, and I left them to their own mourning, at this hour, the same way I hoped they would leave me to mine.

The fresh names were not hard to find, the cuts still sharp and pale against the weathered grey around them, set in near the bottom of the most recent column, and I read them slowly, matching each one against the names Hiruzen had given me. Tetsuo Komiya, whose son was a month old and would never remember him. Sota Kiriyama, sixteen, with a spring promotion and one summer to enjoy it. Sayo Yukimura, cut a few lines below the three she had once raised from Genin, which meant whoever ordered the carving had at least known enough to set her near them. For the rest I had nothing beyond what Hiruzen had spoken, ordinary shinobi on ordinary patrols, and somehow that was its own kind of weight, since a person ought to amount to more than a carved name and the manner of their death.

I stayed there in the cold and read them through again, and then a third time, until I was certain I had them all.

— Kakashi Hatake —

Kakashi was at the Memorial Stone again.

He came at night because the stone stood empty at night, and he did not know why he came at all. Or rather he knew exactly why and had no intention of admitting it to himself, so he sat at the base of the stone with his knees pulled up to his chest and read his father's name where it was cut into the rock. The memory came the way it always did, without being asked, the blood dark on the floorboards and the look on his father's face when Kakashi found him. Years had passed, and it would not go away no matter what he buried it under, and he did not understand why it refused to.

Footsteps had come up the path a short while ago, a single set, and stopped at the newer end of the stone. Kakashi had not looked over, since people came here at every hour now that the war kept adding names, and none of them ever had business with him. Family of the new dead, most likely, come to read the fresh cuts, so he left them to it.

He pulled in a breath and let it out heavier than he meant to, loud in all that quiet. If he wanted to visit his father there was a grave for that, but something in him turned away from the thought every time it came, which was how he kept ending up here instead.

The visitor's attention shifted at the sound and settled on him, so he glanced back.

Yuuki Kagurazaka stood at the far end of the stone, watching him. Senju, he supposed it was now, since the whole village had heard about the First Hokage's bloodline resurfacing by this point. The part Kakashi had found harder to believe was that it belonged to the same person who had humbled Obito at their training ground that day, then sat down to ramen with the rest of them, handing out pointers Obito still used. Kakashi had called the match educational at the time, and in his opinion anyone capable of shutting Obito up for an afternoon could not be all that bad. It had also explained why Minato-sensei was praising him back then, though if anything sensei had undersold it.

Senju-san's gaze left him and travelled along the stone toward the name Kakashi sat beneath, so Kakashi spoke before it could arrive. "What brings you out here at this hour, Senju-san?" He kept his voice polite, since the Senju had earned that much, and a question aimed at someone else was the surest way to keep one from landing on him.

Instead of answering from where he stood, he crossed over and sat down against the stone beside Kakashi, near enough that Kakashi almost shifted away, since people did not sit next to him, here or much of anywhere. Up close he looked worn through, his sandals still carrying road dust, as though he had come straight from the gates without stopping at home.

"You'll have seen the fresh names up that end," he said. "Eleven of them, three Chunin squads and the two Jonin sent after. A rogue shinobi killed them squad by squad, for nothing they did, just to draw me out of the village to somewhere he could reach me, and I came to learn their names before I sleep."

Kakashi turned that over. Eleven shinobi, spent as bait for one, and the one in question was sitting in the dark learning their names instead of sleeping off whatever he had done to the man responsible. He searched for somewhere to put a thing like that and found only the answer the village had built for it, and the words were out before could give it much thought. "They died honorably," he said.

Senju-san let out a dry chuckle. "Did they truly, Kakashi-kun?"

The suffix pricked at him, coming from someone barely a year or two older when he had worn a Chunin vest for two years, but objecting out loud would only make him sound like the child it made him, so he let it go.

Yuuki-san tipped his head back toward the sky, where the moon had come up over the trees. "Komiya, who led the first squad, his wife gave birth to their first a month ago, a boy who will never remember his face," he said, his tone soft. "Kiriyama, on the second squad, turned sixteen this spring, so somewhere in the village tonight there are parents who outlived their child. There are wives who woke up widows this week, and children who woke up orphans. There is no honourable way to die, Kakashi-kun. However a person dies, and whatever gets said about it afterward, someone is left behind to suffer the aftermath. Is that not right?"

Kakashi reached for the counter he was sure existed, the one about sacrifice and the good of the village, and while he was still assembling it, Senju-san's eyes came down from the sky and moved along the stone until they settled on his father's name. Kakashi went tense, and hated that it showed.

"He was an honorable man," Yuuki-san said, his tone respectful.

"He died with shame." The words came out hard and fast, before Kakashi had decided on them.

"He saved those people from certain death."

"He put the village in a worse position!" His voice rose without him meaning it to. "The mission failed because of him, the war got worse because of him, and even the ones he carried home turned their backs on him, every single one!" He heard it ring back off the trees and only then realised he had been shouting.

"Then they were fools." Yuuki-san said it evenly, as though it could ever be that simple, and Kakashi had spent years building the case for the other side, the one he recited to himself on nights the memory would not leave, and not one piece of it came when he called. Yuuki-san lifted a hand toward the name. "They realised it in the end, didn't they?"

"Only after he died." The bitterness came up his throat before he could stop it, and for once he did not try. "The news went around, and three days later they carved his name into this stone. Three days, Senju-san. People who used to cross the street rather than walk past our door spent months calling him a disgrace to the village, and then he was gone, and inside a week those same mouths were calling him a hero of the Leaf who gave everything for his comrades." His hands closed around his knees hard enough to ache. "They didn't change, he just stopped being there to inconvenience them." He did not know why he was still talking, except that no one had ever sat down next to him at this stone before, and the words had apparently been waiting for someone who would.

"Fools are slow to see their mistakes," Yuuki-san said, his tone quiet. "There is no honor in death, only in an honorable life, and your father lived one."

Neither of them said anything for a while after that.

"You never know when the Shinigami comes collecting, Kakashi-kun," he said at last, his tone mild. "There's a saying I heard once. Live each day as though it might be your last, and hold on to the people you still have while they're still here."

It was a morbid saying, and the thoughts it stirred up were ones Kakashi had no intention of sitting with. His father came first, and then the rest arrived on their own, Minato-sensei, Rin and Obito, even Kushina-san, the handful of people he still had and how little holding he did of any of them. He was on his feet before the thought could finish. "Thank you for the chat, Yuuki-san," he said, his tone blank, and he was gone in a Body Flicker before the reply could reach him.

— Yuuki Senju —

I let out a sigh into the empty clearing.

I didn't know how far away the Kannabi Bridge mission was from now, and I was certain my presence in this war had already knocked events well off the course I remembered, but even if I saw that one disaster coming and stopped it, there was truly no guarantee that one of them, or any of them, morbid as the thought was, would make it through this war at all. What I had was standing. Tsunade had already told me that with my rank and the weight the Senju name with my bloodline carried, I would likely be pulled into the talks for every major operation going forward, which meant that when that mission finally crossed the Hokage's desk, I would hear about it before any team was ever assigned.

After sitting a while longer, I pushed off the stone and made for home. The Senju compound was quiet when I reached it, every window dark, everyone long since inside their homes, and the only thing that greeted me was the tree near the entrance, the first thing I had ever grown here, put down the day I arrived, the same one the old Elder had pressed his forehead to and wept against. I dragged my fingers along its bark on the way past and let myself into my house. I should grow some forests.

As I finally moved to lie down on my bed, a burst of confetti exploded across my vision, and about time too, since I had spent half the road home wondering why it hadn't yet. Maybe it had simply waited until I was somewhere I could afford to stare at floating boxes.

[Achievement Unlocked: Kill Future Akatsuki Member - Kakuzu] [Rank: HIGH]

So the threads hadn't found a way after all. He had stayed dead. Something in my chest unclenched at the confirmation, the system only popped up when I was alone, resting or ready for it. It was something that I actually appreciated. 

I mentally prompted the roll. The screen flickered and settled.

[Bloodline Progenitor] [Naruto - Ōtsutsuki Clan] (Source)

Most of the many different kekkei genkai on Earth, anomalies found in the DNA that allows their wielders to use unique techniques and usually passed down to the wielder's descendants, have some kind of connection with the Ōtsutsuki clan. While some of them are completely unrelated to our clan that probably appeared from rare mutations that occurred on humans thanks to the exposure of chakra, like advanced nature transformations, others are directly related to us and they're used by clans constituted of Kaguya's descendants, like the Sharingan inherited by the Uchiha clan, the powerful life force and chakra inherited by the Senju clan and the Byakugan inherited by the Hyūga clan for example, but even these are just diluted versions of their original versions. You're capable of manipulating this biological feature: you can encode any of your abilities into your genetic material, regardless if these abilities are biological in nature or not, letting you share them with your descendants or biological beings that have at least a part of your DNA. You can also remove these abilities from your genetic material if you want. You can control who inherits your power, letting you set specific conditions, and how exactly strong these abilities will be, like if they will or won't become diluted with time, as well as someone using abandoned DNA samples.

This... I swallowed. This perk was huge.

If I wanted, every child of mine would inherit not only Nature Release, but [Attribute Distribution] and [Martial Arts Prodigy], alongside every other perk I owned, at full strength, undiluted for as many generations as I chose. I had never given children a single thought, since I'd had no need to, but with this, that changed. I sat up straight, because this was not a small thing.

A clan of Nature Release users and Taijutsu monsters. The laugh burst out of me in a bark I couldn't hold back. Wood Release was already considered an unnatural, highly rare mutation, one the world believed had died with the First, and would likely die with me again, but if the other villages ever learned it could now breed true, they would do anything to kill me, well, more than they were already doing. The conditions mattered just as much, since I could decide exactly who inherited what and under what terms, which meant nobody would ever grow themselves a weapon out of a stolen scrap of my blood.

And it bought security besides, because if I never managed to force this world toward peace the way the story I remembered eventually had, my children would at least be strong enough to stand through whatever came instead.

I let the screen fade, filed the rest away for the morning, and let sleep take me. The deeper implications of this could wait till tomorrow.

AN: For the past week or so, I've been in and out of the hospital. I apologise for the lack of updates/communication. 

I wrote this chapter while being sick, so it is a bit rough around the edges, my bad but I didn't want to delay the update anymore. 

From Fugaku's POV, we see Yuuki unknowingly becoming more like Hashirama (the GOAT, sure he's a bit of an idiot, but I still do like this character). The same goes for Kakashi. 

Speaking of Kakashi, I think Konoha is just hypocritical enough to add Sakumo’s name after he offed himself from the pressure. I see him retreating more as a “this-is-wasteful-suicide” rather than “can't-let-my-freinds-die” like Naruto might.

The thing is, canonically, Konoha was in a much worse position during this war. They only gained an advantage after the Kannabi Bridge was destroyed, but here, they've got two key advantages that they wouldn't have otherwise, those being the enemy Shinobi are worried over the second coming of the First Hokage’s bloodline and the Restoration Pills. The pills in particular are causing a massive shitshow whose effects I plan to show in later chapters. 

His achievements with Alchemy were tiered. He'll get rolls from it as it spreads and helps. This was mentioned.

[Bloodline Progenitor] is actual fucking bullshit, by the way. 

I think that's about it, if you enjoyed this, please, please leave a like and a comment, it helps more than you think! Other than that, thank you for continued support despite the lack of updates. I'll try to be more active.