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SILENT CROWS MOODBOARD 🖤

itachi uchiha x oc

One of them survived a massacre. The other caused one. They meet in the wreckage of both and, against every reasonable instinct, they keep showing up for each other.

Sora Chishio has spent her whole life surviving what happened to her clan. Itachi Uchiha has spent his living with what he did to his. Neither of them should be each other’s soft place to land. They become it anyway.

CHAPTER MASTERLIST | AO3 LINK

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

an Itachi Uchiha x oc fic

One of them survived a massacre. The other caused one. They meet in the wreckage of both and, against every reasonable instinct, they keep showing up for each other.

Sora Chishio has spent her whole life surviving what happened to her clan. Itachi Uchiha has spent his living with what he did to his. Neither of them should be each other’s soft place to land. They become it anyway.

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chapter seven - rain

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warnings: violence · grief · emotional angst · mature themes

tags: slow burn · angst · oc x canon · friends to lovers

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CHAPTER MASTERLIST

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The rain never stopped in Amegakure.

Sora barely noticed the rain anymore. The endless gray, the water dripping from every ledge, the thick, damp air — it was just the background hum of Amegakure. She’d always thought better in weather like this; the rain quieted everything else.

She found the entrance to the building without needing to look for it. One year of monthly visits had written the route into her feet. The structure was directly carved into the slick rocks of Amegakure’s Cistern sector. She descended below the surface using a set of narrow stone stairs until she reached the seventh subterranean floor, and headed for the door on the far left corner. She knocked twice.

The door opened almost immediately.

Ryo was tall and broad-shouldered. His short, dark hair, slightly damp from the rain, framed his forehead just above his thin eyebrows, which beautifully emphasized his sharp eyes. His naked torso appeared from the other side of the door, and she took her time taking in his appearance, eyes slowly making their way up. He was, by any objective measure, an attractive man, and he looked at her with the exact expression he always had when she showed up after months of absence — relief and exasperation in equal measure.

She didn’t wait for him to say anything. She placed her hand on his chest and pressed lightly. Ryo didn’t protest; he moved back and let her in.

Her pack hit the floor, and with it, her boots followed along with her raincoat. When she finally turned her attention to him, she caught him eyeing her with a particular hunger she hadn’t seen in him in a long time. A slow smirk spread across her lips as she draped her jacket. She stepped closer, enjoying the game, watching his restraint fray at the edges as she began working the buttons of his trousers, her lips inching closer to his. Ryo didn’t move; he never did without her permission. Only when his breath began quickening, hot and shallow against her lips, did she finally close the gap.

The kiss was wet and messy from the start. She felt the moment his control finally broke — the small sound low in his throat, the way his hand came up to grip her jaw like he needed something to hold onto. She walked him backward toward the bedroom without breaking the kiss, one hand fisted in the waistband of his trousers, steering him the way she’d continue to steer the whole night. His hands found her in the dark the way they always did — unhurried, certain, with an assertiveness that suggested he had learned her well enough to know what she needed before she said it. That was the thing about Ryo that worked, the reason she kept returning to him. He didn’t ask questions she didn’t want to answer, didn’t reach for things she wasn’t offering. He just showed up for whatever it was.

For once, her mind was quiet. Just his hands, his mouth, the heat of him—nothing else creeping in.

Afterward, the sound of water draining into the village’s lower level filled the silence between them. Ryo chose to live deep in the district’s underbelly, despite being a chunin in good standing with a stable income. He had explained once that there was something comforting about the darkness of the subterranean level — the anonymity, the melting pot of people from all walks of life. It wasn’t a nice place to live by any means. Sora found the irony almost amusing: Ryo, who could live anywhere, choosing a place where mold and rust crept into your bones, while countless others dreamed of escape.

She lay on her back, looking at the ceiling, and felt the temporary peace from the absence of the noise her mind made when she was tracking seventeen things at once. She appreciated it briefly, without attachment, already aware it was fleeting.

Ryo was sitting up beside her, forearms on his knees, looking at the void of metal pipes and industrial lights through the foggy window.

“Three months,” he said.

“I know.”

“Your visits are getting less frequent,” he said in a tone that was almost frustrated. “Not that I was counting.”

She said nothing. He knew what he had agreed to when this started, as did she, and neither of them needed to remind the other.

“Did you find anything?” she asked.

He reached past her to the low table beside the bed and picked up a folded paper she hadn’t noticed until now. He held it out.

“Took me two months to trace it back far enough,” he said, while she opened it. “People started talking different, months before the massacre. Whispers about your clan, about curses and forbidden jutsu, all that crap. It wasn’t normal gossip. Someone wanted those stories out there.”

“Someone was spreading it,” she said as she skimmed the paper.

“Exactly,” he said. "The pattern is too consistent. Same narrative, same specific details. Someone seeded it.” He paused. “Someone with reach. Resources.”

She folded the paper slowly. Thought about a pacifist clan that healed sick children and elderly farmers and women in labor. Thought about someone deciding, with calculation and patience, to make the surrounding region afraid of them.

“How far back does the paper trail go?” she said.

“The earliest instance I found was approximately eight months before the massacre.” He looked at her. “Whoever did this planned it well in advance.”

“None of this corresponds with official Konoha assessments that I reviewed myself.” Sora pointed out. “They needed to tarnish my clan’s name before they moved.”

“And a justification if any of it came back to them,” Ryo added with a nod of agreement.

She sat with that. Eight months of deliberate narrative reconstruction. Eight months of making sure that when the night came, nobody would ask too many questions about who was responsible. And if they did, they could easily villainize the victims.

“Good work,” she said, and she meant it.

He nodded. Then: "There’s more.”

She looked at him.

“The rumors didn’t just spread through civilian channels. I found traces of them in shinobi networks too.” He met her eyes. “They were making sure the shinobi world wasn’t going to look too hard either.”

She was quiet for a long moment. 

She put the paper in her pack. The map of the crime had begun to take shape with each piece she collected during her investigation. She was getting closer.

“Come,” she said, standing. “Show me to Haru.”

Ryo’s younger brother was sixteen and looked younger, the illness having taken something from him that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. He was sitting up in bed when they came in, which was better than the last visit, and he looked at Sora with the expression she had learned to recognize in patients who had been through this type of treatment before. Ryo assumed his usual position at the corner of the room, silent and still.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. 

“Better than last month,” he said. “Worse than I’d like.”

"That’s expected,” she said, and sat down on the edge of his bed. “Same as always. Tell me when it becomes too much.”

She placed both hands on his arm, her palms curving into the arch of his forearm, and closed her eyes.

His body tensed under her hands, muscles twitching like he was bracing for a blow. Her chakra met resistance, then pushed through — painful, but familiar. She followed the well-worn routes through his bloodstream, searching out the clusters of corrupted cells.

The process of separation was precise and unrelenting. Her chakra was moving through his circulatory system like a current, identifying the corrupted cells, and applying pressure until they broke down. It was, she had explained to Ryo once, not unlike removing splinters from a wound, except the splinters were everywhere, were part of the blood itself, and the removal process felt to the body like being unmade from the inside.

Haru bore it in silence. His free hand gripped the bed sheets, his jaw clenched, and his eyes were fixed on something above the window. Occasionally a sound escaped him that he immediately suppressed. She felt his pulse spike and steady and spike again with each pass of her chakra, his body registering each wave of treatment as an assault.

Thirty minutes in, she felt the rhythm of his pulse that told her they were approaching the body’s limit. She withdrew her chakra carefully, the way you withdraw a blade from a wound — slowly, with attention, making sure nothing was left behind that shouldn’t be.

“Done for today,” she said.

Haru exhaled. His whole body settled, the held tension releasing at once, and he lay back against his pillow looking worn out and translucent.

“Same as last time?” she asked.

“Worse,” he said. Then: “Better. I don’t know. Both.”

"The corrupted cells are fewer than last time,” she told him. “The healthy blood is holding more territory. It’s working.”

He closed his eyes. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

She stood and looked at him for a moment, then at Ryo, whose grip on his folded arms had tightened enough for his knuckles to turn white. She picked up her pack and followed him out.

He walked her to the apartment’s outer door, which connected to a metal walkway, a fire escape if you will, leading out into the public areas of the Cistern Sector. The sound of rain draining into the underground roared and filled the space in Ryo’s apartment as he opened the door to see her out. She turned to face him, preparing to say her goodbyes when she noticed his face. 

His expression was reflective of the despair he often felt after Haru’s treatments. He looked down at the ground with sorrow-filled eyes, head hanging low with the weight of watching his brother go through something so incredibly hard. Sora recognized the weight. She had seen it on him every month for the past year as the treatments weakened yet improved his brother’s health.

“He’s getting better,” she said. “Slowly. But he’s getting there.”

Ryo nodded. He looked at her with that sorrowful expression for a moment longer, and then he stepped forward and put his arms around her and held on. She could feel the embrace did not come from a place of desire — just a person holding on to something because the alternative was standing alone with a heaviness in their heart they could not bear. She understood that. She put one hand briefly against his back, returning the embrace.

He pulled back after a moment to look at her. And then, without even properly processing the action, he pulled her in for a kiss. It was desperate and brief, and when he pulled back, there was a hint of embarrassment on his face, immediately regretting his actions.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t—”

"No, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it,” she said, and she meant it. She understood where it had come from, and she was not going to make it into something bigger than it needed to be. “I’ll see you next month. I won’t make you wait this time, I promise. Make sure he eats.”

Then, she stepped out and disappeared among the metal pipes.

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He had been in Amegakure for two days on Akatsuki business that shouldn’t have brought him anywhere near the Cistern Sector. Yet here he was, walking the narrow metal walkways threaded among the drainage pipes, when a familiar presence tugged at his attention from deep within the lower level.

He’d known she came here. He would never admit — even to himself — that he’d started keeping tabs on her since their last meeting on her roof nearly four years ago. Sometimes he sent a crow, just to check she was safe. Occasionally, he tapped Akatsuki’s information channels, noticing her name in Amegakure more often than he preferred. But he’d never known, exactly, why she came here, or who she came to see.

He knew now.

Itachi saw them from above, through the apartment’s back door before it opened. The window beside it offered a partial view of the apartment, enough to see the man who opened the door and walked her out to the fire escape. The expression on the man’s face made Itachi halt his stride. There was something familiar about it, something that indicated he was not a casual acquaintance of hers.

He saw them embrace — brief, but close. His jaw tightened. When he kissed her, Itachi kept his face blank, but couldn’t shake the prickling irritation under his skin. It was stupid to care, but he did.

Beside him, Kisame had also stopped and was looking over at what had caught his partner’s attention.

“Hm,” Kisame said after a moment. Thoughtfully, like he just discovered something about his partner that was worth taking a mental note of.

Itachi watched her walk away between the drainage pipes. She pulled her hood up, seemingly unfazed by everything that had just transpired. He watched the man she had left standing in the doorway for a moment before he went back inside. The way his eyes lingered on her for a moment too long.

“Old friend?” Kisame asked.

“An informant,” Itachi replied.

“Right,” Kisame said. “An informant.”

The silence that followed was one that Itachi was very familiar with. It was tense and uncomfortable, much like being caught in a lie, which he was and wasn’t at the same time.

“We should go,” Itachi said.

“We should,” Kisame agreed, without moving.

She had crossed half the length of the metal walkway below them, her pace even and unhurried, the industrial lights barely illuminating her figure as she got further away.

Itachi watched her go and felt the thing in his chest that frustrated him beyond reason. He was very much aware that he had just spent several minutes standing in the dark, watching a woman he had not spoken to in years walk away from another man, and this was not something that he was willing to accept today. Maybe one day. But not today.

They resumed their walk.

They were thirty feet down the metal walkway when Kisame said, without looking at him: “For what it’s worth, she didn’t kiss him back.”

Itachi kept his gaze ahead, ignoring the bait. He let the conversation fade, focusing instead on the steady rhythm of his footsteps. That’s when something in the periphery of his senses caught an unfamiliar chakra, sudden and close. He slowed, then stopped, already scanning the shadows for the threat.

Kisame felt them too. Itachi could tell by the way his partner’s nose flared, his right hand subtly flinching toward Samehada.

“Company,” Kisame said, pleasantly.

Itachi was already calculating. The chakras were not ones he was familiar with. He counted three of them in a formation ideal for an ambush. But not for them — rather, someone behind them, a woman traveling alone, about a mile away.

Itachi acted before he had a chance to think.

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The sound of their pulses from miles away became the sole focus of her attention, the moment Ryo’s apartment faded in the distance. It was almost laughable, really — trying to sneak up on someone with her abilities. She maintained her unhurried stride, carefully tracking her opponents' positions with quiet attentiveness. She counted three pulses, beating at an almost synchronized pattern which led her to believe the enemy was not entirely oblivious to her abilities. They were trying to conceal their numbers, and doing a decent job at it, yet it didn’t matter. 

She activated her chakra, beginning at her fingertips and extending upward toward her forearms, bracing for battle. The dark byzantium veins spread underneath her long sleeves, a beautiful yet terrifying display of her power, even though she was not at full capacity after Haru’s treatment. 

The team of three flashed around her a few moments later, two positioned ahead of her, and one behind. Sora took in their sights and confirmed without a doubt that her suspicions were in fact correct. These were not regular ninjas from Amegakure, nor were they petty criminals looking for a quick robbery. They were well-trained, specialized ops, wearing village branding Sora did not recognize at first. 

“Who are you?” She asked coldly, shifting her body ever so slightly so the ninja behind her appeared in her peripheral vision.

“We are here on special orders from our village to capture you,” the one to the right answered. 

“And which village would that be?” Sora questioned them again, her blood sharpening within her veins and protruding out from her palms, ready to attack.

“Otogakure, obviously.” She heard the one behind her respond, pointing at the headband symbol on his forehead. The crystallized dagger was already halfway extracted in her hand, and Sora took a deep breath before she spoke again. She’d handled worse odds, but not when she was this drained. Still, she steadied herself, ready to fight. 

“Hm, never heard of it.” The dagger shot out of her palm, and she threw it to the man standing behind her, hitting him right between his eyebrows. Her blood dripped out of her open palm and turned into a katana with an urgency fit for the situation she was in, and she flipped around to face her other two opponents. They were already rushing toward her when she turned to face them, and Sora braced for impact when something hit the second operative from the side with a force that removed him from the equation entirely. 

Kisame stood on the metal railing, Samehada held out, bloody and thrashing with hunger as the limp body of the Sound Ninja hung on his sword. “Three to three,” He said cheerfully. “Much more reasonable.”

Across from him, Itachi appeared beside the third operative, so fast he was barely detected by the opponent. He grabbed the man by the neck and twisted it swiftly, the body falling limply on the floor.

The sound of the drainage pipes filled the silence afterward.

She looked at the three unconscious figures on the ground. Then at Itachi. Kisame set down the operative he’d been holding and put Samehada back on his back, his expression showing the inner satisfaction he felt. She allowed her katana to dissolve but continued to analyze their body language. Nothing about them gave her the indication that they were a threat, but she still questioned their intent. 

“Thank you,” Sora broke the silence first, her eyes finding Itachi’s red ones. It had been a few years since she last saw him. He looked taller, older, and — depleted. She didn’t mean to, but she unconsciously started listening. At his pulse, his breathing. There was something off that she couldn’t quite put her finger on, but she took note of it the way she always took note of important details. Maybe one day she would return to it. 

“You’re welcome,” Itachi responded. “They’re Sound ninja.”

“So I heard. I’m not familiar with their village.”

“They’re new. Founded by Orochimaru.” Itachi explained, looking down at the corpse that lay before him. 

“He’ll never give up, will he?” Sora said with a sigh, her hands coming up to fold under her chest as she, too, looked at the three corpses. “I thought he finally forgot about me.” Orochimaru’s involvement completed the greater picture that Sora couldn’t fill in on her own. It wasn’t uncommon for her to be targeted in her travels — she was a woman traveling alone after all, and many viewed her as an easy target. But an organized attack to capture her and deliver her somewhere was not something she had encountered before.

“He’s persistent,” Itachi remarked.

Sora met Itachi’s eyes. For a heartbeat, neither looked away. Whatever was between them — grief, history, everything that was left unsaid — it was all there, just beneath the surface.

She broke the eye contact and looked at Kisame, who was surveying the scene with his hands on his hips and the expression of a man who was very comfortable with where he was at. He grinned widely when his eyes locked with Sora’s.

“New partner?” Sora asked, turning toward Itachi, who was now looking off into the distance, visibly not content with all three of them being acquainted. 

“I don’t think we’ve been introduced,” Kisame interjected, turning to Sora after finally finding an opening in the conversation. “Kisame Hoshigaki.”

“Sora,” she responded dryly.

“Just Sora?”

“For now.” 

Kisame grinned. He looked at the blood dripping from her palm, the katana that she discarded slowly losing its shape as it turned back to a pool of blood. “That ability sure is something. Blood Release?”

“Mm,” she murmured, nodding.

“Hm.” He tilted his head, a sign that he was deeply intrigued by her jutsu and was already thinking of follow-up questions. “Offensive and medical applications?”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating.” He said it like he meant that too. “How does the crystallization—”

“Kisame,” Itachi interjected, shooting daggers at his partner with his bright red eyes.

Kisame stopped. He looked at Itachi and then over at Sora, visibly disappointed that he clearly wasn’t being allowed to continue his conversation. “Fine. We should go.” He did not immediately move. “It was good to meet you, Sora-who-is-just-Sora-for-now.”

She looked at him for a moment. There was something about Kisame Hoshigaki that she found, against her better judgment, likable. Sora smiled slightly and tilted her head before she responded.

“Likewise,” she said.

Her gaze shifted over to Itachi. The Sharingan was still fully activated even though there was no immediate threat to assess. Sora found that odd yet justified. She gave him an understanding look and nodded before she turned to leave.

She had taken four steps when Kisame called after her, loud enough that the whole surrounding area could have heard if there had been anyone else around: “If you’re ever in the market for a change of scenery, Akatsuki’s recruiting.”

“Kisame,” Itachi scolded, behind her.

“I’m just saying. We have a vacancy.”

Silent Crows | Chapter 6 - The Hour Before Dawn

Silent Crows | Sora Chishio (Naruto OC)

Thank you @dyscalculiccrocheter for the tag 🖤🖤

last song: Salam by Mestiza (gotta love a baddie DJ duo)

currently watching: half-way through my second Naruto rewatch and also started watching the latest season of house of the dragon

currently reading: ACOMAF (I promised my bestie I'd read the series with her before the new book came out... I'm struggling to pick it up I'm ngl 😭)

current obsession: hmm writing my fanfic, Itachi, sourdough anddd been hyper fixated on tinned fish lmaoo

currently working on: my itachi x oc fanfic (super angsty but with a happy-ish ending lol)

last google search: Panna Cotta recipe cause I had a bunch of people over for lunch hahaha

favourite flowers: ORCHIDSSS I LOVE ORCHIDS

I will tag the following 10 people if they'd like to participate 🖤

an Itachi Uchiha x oc fic

One of them survived a massacre. The other caused one. They meet in the wreckage of both and, against every reasonable instinct, they keep showing up for each other.

Sora Chishio has spent her whole life surviving what happened to her clan. Itachi Uchiha has spent his living with what he did to his. Neither of them should be each other’s soft place to land. They become it anyway.

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chapter six - the hour before dawn

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warnings: violence · grief · emotional angst · mature themes

tags: slow burn · angst · oc x canon · friends to lovers

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Two years is a long time to spend becoming someone else.

She did not remember most of it as a sequence of events. She remembered it through sensations: the ache in her body, the feel of her wounds, the look of her scars. She remembered the evaluations, and how two other candidates did not make it past the first six months. She tried to remember their names. She couldn’t. Then, one morning, she was handed a mask and assigned to a team.

Team Ro. Kakashi Hatake, who commanded without visible effort, without redundancy or authoritarianism. Tenzo, whose ability grew trees out of dead soil, and who, with the same effortlessness, found reasons to make her laugh on the days she seemed least inclined to. And Itachi, whom she had first known as the boy who knelt before her in the courtyard, and who she now knew as a comrade who quietly orchestrated tactics during their missions with the wisdom of a man thrice his age.

She was only twelve and had been Team Ro for the better part of a year. She had learned to hold her ability the way she'd learned to hold a blade. Carefully. With the understanding that anything left undisciplined eventually turned on the person holding it.

She had also learned, without meaning to, that she trusted these three people in a way she had not let herself trust anyone in a long time. It was not a decision she had made consciously. It was simply, by the time she noticed it, already true.

Something was wrong.

She had known it for weeks, tracking it in the shift of his features and the tension in his shoulders. Everything around Itachi felt off. Since Shisui's death, it had not resolved the way grief usually resolved. It had only gotten heavier.

She didn't ask. She showed up for missions, sat next to him in the usual places, and let him know, without saying it, that she was there. She hoped her presence was enough, that the knowledge of having someone notice offered some kind of comfort. She wasn’t sure what to say or do; all she knew was that her friend was hurting and she did not intend to leave him to dwell on it alone.

About two weeks before everything changed, she was assigned a solo intelligence mission. She accepted it and noted the way Itachi's eyes lingered on her a moment too long when the assignment was read, like he wanted to say something and didn't. She left two days later, knowing she would be gone long enough to matter.

She came back eleven days after that, much later than expected. She returned at night, reported in, and went straight to her apartment. She was already thinking about sleep when someone knocked on her door.

She knew who it was before she opened it.

He was standing in the hallway in civilian clothes. She didn't have the word for the way he looked at the time, and she would spend years trying to find one. Eventually, she would settle on fractured, because that was what it looked like. Not broken. Not fallen apart. Something held together with more effort than it should have required.

"You're back," he said.

"Just now," she answered.

He looked at her. She looked at him. The hallway was very quiet.

"Come in," she said, stepping aside to make room for him. He sat on her dining table as she made tea, because it was something to do with her hands. She set it down when it was ready, and sat across from him, thinking about how to phrase her question.

“Do you want to tell me what's happening?” she eventually settled on.

A pause. "No."

"Alright," she said and wrapped her hands around her cup. "You don't have to."

He looked at her. Something moved through his face that he didn't quite manage to contain. "I needed to be somewhere that wasn't—" He stopped. "I needed to be here."

She absorbed that. "Okay," she said.

They sat in the particular silence that had always been theirs, except this time it was heavier, weighted by what he wasn't saying. She watched his face across the table and read, with two years of accumulated attention, that something was wrong. This was not a social call, a bad night, or something a few hours of tea would resolve.

"Itachi," she said quietly.

He looked at her.

"Whatever it is." She held his gaze. "You don't have to carry it alone.”

Something in him went very still. Not his controlled composure but the other kind, the kind that meant something had landed.

"I know," he said quietly, looking down at his cup.

She believed him. She also believed he was going to carry it by himself anyway, because that was who he was, and she understood that continuing to pry would get her nowhere.

"Okay," she said again. "Then I'll just be here."

He stayed for two hours.

He didn't tell her what was wrong, and she didn't push. They talked about everything around it. She told him about the mission, the tedious parts, the bureaucratic frustration of extended timelines. He told her about something small and unexpectedly funny about a training-ground argument between colleagues she barely knew, and she watched his mouth do the thing it always did when he tried to hold back a smile. This time there was a hint of sorrow behind it, not just his composure, but something deeper.

She was already starting to understand, as she sat there, that she was watching something end, though she still did not know what would be lost.

When he stood to leave, it was the hour before dawn. She walked him to the door.

He stopped in the doorway and turned to look at her, and what moved through his face then was the most unguarded she had ever seen him. He looked at her with the full weight of everything he was not going to say, and she felt it land without yet knowing what it meant.

"Thank you," he said. The way he said things that had no adequate words.

"Come back if you need to," she said.

He held her gaze for a moment that lasted slightly longer than it should have.

Then he left.

She went back inside. She didn't sleep.

And in the hallway, walking away from her door in the hour before dawn, Itachi returned toward the Uchiha compound and did not let himself think about the look on her face when she found out. He did not let himself think about what it would cost her, on top of everything she had already paid. He knew the truth would reach her soon, and he would not be there when it did.

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She had been awake since before dawn, sleep still elusive since his leaving the night before, sitting at her window with tea she wasn't drinking when the voices reached her. Two chunin in the corridor outside her apartment, low and urgent, trying to be quiet because the information they were carrying was too large for normal volume.

She opened her door.

The voices stopped. They looked at her with the expression of people caught holding something they weren't supposed to.

"What happened?" she asked.

That’s when she found out: the Uchiha clan. All of them. One night.

And Itachi.

Itachi. Who had come to her apartment last night, sat across from her at the table, looked at her with that fractured composure, and said thank you when he left.

Itachi, who had gone from her kitchen table to the Uchiha compound in under a day and—

She stopped.

She heard about Sasuke three hours later. Seven years old. Sole survivor. She knew something about that particular equation — what it cost to be the one left standing when everything else was gone. She did not go to him. She understood, with the same clarity she applied to everything, that she was not the right person to appear in his life right now. But she watched from a distance, because that was all she could offer and all she could safely do.

She was summoned to the Hokage's office four days later.

She had been expecting it, had spent the four days preparing for it, thinking through variables, likely approaches, what she would and wouldn't say. Rumors had begun circulating that Itachi had an accomplice. She was the prime suspect.

She arrived late, after another miscellaneous mission she ran through the motions of quickly. The sun had already set by the time she reached the office, still in her ANBU gear. An intentional move on her part.

The door to the Hokage's office was not fully closed.

She did not go in. She stood in the corridor, was very still, and she listened, because she had learned at nine years old under a floorboard that the most important information was rarely meant for you. This time, the information could change everything.

Two voices. Hiruzen. And Danzo.

She stood in that corridor for eight minutes and everything rearranged itself around what she heard, the way a room rearranges itself when you finally find the light switch. The information wasn’t exactly new. She had had most of the pieces already, had had them since she watched him say thank you in her doorway. What she was hearing now was the frame. The specific, damning, carefully worded frame of two men discussing the orchestration of a plan they were calling his choice.

Realization hit her almost instantly. This was her out, her opportunity. She stood there behind that door, slowly gaining the clarity that this village, this life, was never meant for her. No matter how much she tried to convince herself, through every bond she created, every meal she shared, every laugh that rippled through the air, she was here only temporarily.

When the voices stopped, she counted to thirty. Then she knocked.

Danzo was still in the room. He stood near the window, still and unreadable. He did not look surprised to see her. But that wasn't uncommon for him.

She sat down across from Hiruzen without being invited to. She folded her hands on her lap and met his eyes with the flat, direct attention she had developed over her years being an ANBU operative.

"I know the truth,” she said. "About the Uchiha clan. About Itachi.”

The silence that followed had a quality she recognized. It was the silence of a room in which something irrevocable has just been said, and the people in it were deciding what to do about it.

"Sora," the Third said, carefully.

"I'm not here to make a problem," she said. "I'm here to make an arrangement." She held his gaze. "I won't say anything. I won't tell anyone what was decided or why or who made the decision." She paused. "In exchange, I leave. Today. The village lets me go without pursuit. I disappear, and whatever I do with my life after this is my own business, and we are done with each other."

"Absolutely not." Danzo's voice, from the window, flat and immediate. "A child with that information does not simply walk out the gate, Hiruzen. She is a liability the moment she leaves this room, whatever she's promising you."

"I heard everything you said in that corridor," Sora said, without turning to look at him. "If I'm a liability inside this room, I'm a liability whether I leave it willingly or not. The only variable you control is whether I leave angry."

"There is a third option," Danzo said. His voice did not change register at all, which was somehow worse than if it had. "You do not leave this room at all."

The silence that followed was different from the one before it.

"You're welcome to try," she said. She did not raise her voice either. "I'd love to see it."

"Danzo," Hiruzen said. Just the name. A warning, mild and absolute.

The Third looked at her for a long moment.

"You're twelve years old," he said.

"I'm aware," she replied.

"Where would you go?"

"That's not part of the arrangement."

He was quiet for a long time, looking at her with the full weight of whatever he carried behind those eyes. The decades of decisions, the exhaustion of a man who had spent his life making choices that cost others. She looked back at him without flinching.

"The village will not pursue you," he said finally. "You will not be designated. You will leave today, and this conversation will not have happened." A pause. "And what you heard in that corridor will stay there."

"Yes," she said.

She stood, already thinking about what she was going to take and what she was going to leave, which was not much on either side.

"Sora."

She stopped. Turned.

The Third was looking at her with something that might have been close to regret. "You deserved better than what this village gave you."

She looked at him for a moment.

"Yes," she said. "I did."

She left.

She packed in under an hour. She had always known, on some level, that she was not going to stay here forever. She had built nothing here she couldn't leave. She was grateful for that now.

She took her weapons. Her research. The files she had been compiling since the beginning — everything she had gathered and cross-referenced and built toward the question that was still unanswered, that had been the shape of her life since she was nine and would continue to be until it wasn't. The answer to what had happened to her family was still out there. The people responsible were still out there. The children who had never been found were still out there.

She took the things from before. Small, specific, and precious the way only survivors understood, the objects that were worth carrying because they were proof of people who had existed.

Hi guys! I’m officially moving my Itachi x OC fanfic to AO3. I just uploaded Chapter 6 (or chapter 5, if we’re not counting the prologue as a chapter lol) Would love to hear your feedback on it!

Lmk if I should continue posting chapters on Tumblr too <3

Chapters: 6/? Fandom: Naruto (Anime & Manga) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Uchiha Itachi/Original Female Character(s) Characters: Uchiha Itachi, Original Female Character(s), Hatake Kakashi, Yamato | Tenzou, Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Shisui, Sarutobi Hiruzen, Shimura Danzou, Hoshigaki Kisame, Orochimaru (Naruto) Additional Tags: Slow Burn, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Uchiha Massacre (Naruto), Post-Uchiha Massacre (Naruto), Anbu (Naruto), Grief/Mourning, Original Character(s), Not Canon Compliant, POV Alternating, Uchiha Itachi Needs a Hug, Loyalty, Slow Build, Trauma, Eventual Romance Summary:

One of them survived a massacre. The other caused one. They meet in the wreckage of both and, against every reasonable instinct, they keep showing up for each other.

SILENT CROWS IS NOW ON AO3

GO SHOW IT SOME LOVE PLS 👉🏻👈🏻

I only have the prologue uploaded so far but I’ll post the rest of the chapters this week

an Itachi Uchiha x oc fic

One of them survived a massacre. The other caused one. They meet in the wreckage of both and, against every reasonable instinct, they keep showing up for each other.

Sora Chishio has spent her whole life surviving what happened to her clan. Itachi Uchiha has spent his living with what he did to his. Neither of them should be each other’s soft place to land. They become it anyway.

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chapter five - regrowth

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warnings: violence · grief · emotional angst · mature themes

tags: slow burn · angst · oc x canon · friends to lovers

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The apartment they gave her was small and completely bare of character, the kind of space that was designed to be functional rather than inhabited. A bed. A table. A window that looked out onto a narrow alley between two buildings. A small kitchen where food rations were neatly stacked for the rest of the week, each container clearly labeled breakfast lunch and dinner. At first glance, the whole scene seemed meticulously planned out, like someone had taken the time to make sure she had every thing she could possibly need. Sora paid no mind to any of it.

Itachi came the second day. And the third. And the fourth after that.

He told himself it was practical, that he was just following up to make sure the arrangement held, because he was the one who initiated it and that it was only natural for him to be responsible for some part of it. So he showed up at the apartment every day and told himself he needed no explanation for doing so, even though deep down he was aware that this explanation would not have satisfied anyone who looked at it closely, including himself. He came anyway.

She was always in the same place when he arrived. Sitting on the floor against the far wall with her knees drawn up, looking at something and nothing in particular in the middle distance. She acknowledged him when he came in the first time. Her attention shifted slightly without turning toward him. Then, she went back to staring at the empty space and did not say a word.

The food rations were untouched. Every day, exactly as they had been left. Itachi had moved them to the fridge, hoping she would eventually reach for something.

"You should eat something," he said, on the third day. He had brought something from the market, small and simple, thinking perhaps that the rations the village provided were not to her taste. He set the container down on the table near her.

She looked at it. Then she looked back at the empty space that she had been glued to for the past few days.

"I'm not hungry," she said. Her voice was low and raspy after days of not speaking.

"I understand ," he said, because arguing with her would have been pointless and slightly cruel. "You still need to eat."

She didn't respond. He sat down on the floor a few feet away, which was becoming a habit he wasn't examining, and they stayed like that for a while in silence, knowing they were not going to resolve anything today.

On the fifth day he tried a different approach.

"Come outside," he said. "Just for a few minutes. There’s a park nearby, we could go for a walk."

She shook her head. Small, quiet, the absolute minimum required to communicate no.

"The fresh air will help—"

"I’m fine," she said.

She was not fine. He did not need to observe much to know she was not fine. He could see it in the hollows under her eyes, in the untouched food, the unchanged position on the floor and the empty space that held her attention so completely. She was a child who had lost everything she had ever known in a single night and she was sitting in a bare room that was now supposed to be her home, eating nothing and calling it fine, and there was nothing he could do about any of it that he had not already tried.

He stayed anyway. He came back every day and he stayed for as long as he could, saying very little and leaving the food where she could reach, hoping that one of these days she would reach for it.

"Why do you keep coming,” she asked him on the seventh day, still staring off into space.

He thought about that honestly. "Because someone should," he said.

He noticed her eyes shift toward him when he responded. Then she looked back at the floor.

---

Hiruzen summoned Kakashi on the eighth day and the conversation was short and direct.

The arrangement, the Third said, was contingent on participation. The girl was not participating. She was not eating, not training, not engaging with anything the village had offered her. If that did not change within the week, the arrangement would be revisited and the original assessment would stand.

Kakashi did not argue. He understood bureaucratic language well enough to know that revisited meant reversed and original assessment meant the dungeons in the tunnels under the village. So he walked out of that office, having been handed a problem he wasn’t sure he knew how to solve.

He had not visited her yet. He had convinced himself that was the right thing to do, that she needed time and space, that showing up too soon with the weight of official concern would only make things worse, that Itachi's quiet presence was enough for the first week. All of that was true. He was also aware, if he was being honest with himself, that he didn't know what to say to her.

He went to see her that evening.

She was on the floor when he arrived, in the same position Itachi had described. She looked at him when he entered, her head coming up from her knees, as though she was expecting him. She looked thinner than when he had last seen her, the hollows of her cheeks making her appear frail.

He sat down across from her on a chair by the dining table, because he thought it mattered that they both understood the shape of this conversation, the particular weight and importance it held.

"I'm going to tell you something that I don't particularly want to tell you," he said, "because I think you deserve to know it and I think you're someone who can do something with the truth."

She looked at him and said nothing. Kakashi continued.

"The village was ready to lock you away," he said. It came out plainly, the way he consciously decided to deliver it. No softening, no beating around the bush, because she'd already had a week of people managing her and it had done nothing. "The report I wrote pointed directly at you. No evidence of external perpetrators, one survivor with an uncontrolled bloodline ability at the scene. The conclusion was right there and most people in this building ran with it."

She looked down at her hands. The bandages were off, the wounds healed, the skin marked with faint branching lines that would probably never fully disappear.

"It was Itachi who argued for the alternative," he said. "He stood in the Hokage's office and made the case for your candidacy. That is the only reason you are sitting in this apartment instead of a cell." He paused. "I want you to understand what that means. Not because you owe him anything. But because it means that there is at least one person in this village who looked at what happened to you and refused the easy answer."

She was very still. Her eyes now bore into him.

"There was a line at the end of my report," he continued. "About children missing. Children who should have been at that compound and weren't. No bodies, no survivors. Nobody is investigating it. Nobody is looking for who actually did this to your family, because the easier answer was already sitting in front of them." He held her gaze. "You were the easier answer."

Something moved across her face. Not grief and not quite anger either. Something rather deeper, an attentiveness so full that Kakashi felt confident in continuing.

"The people who did this to your family," he said, "are not being looked for. Not by this village, not by anyone with the resources to find them. If you want justice for what happened to your clan—" He stopped. Chose the rest of it carefully. "You will have to bring them in yourself."

He had not planned to say that last part. It had arrived at the end and he said it without really processing it. He sat with it in the silence that followed and wasn't sure whether he'd just done something useful or something irresponsible.

She didn't respond. She looked at her hands for a long time and said nothing, and he waited, and eventually the silence made it clear that she was done receiving information for the night.

He got up to leave and once he was at the door he stopped. "Training starts tomorrow," he said plainly. "I hope you'll be there."

She didn't answer.

He walked back to his own apartment feeling hopeless and demoralized, after having said the whole truth and having no idea whether it had landed anywhere useful.

---

Kakashi was the first to see her.

He was crossing the ANBU training ground at the early hours of dawn before it filled up when he registered movement at the entrance and looked up.

She was standing at the edge of the training ground in the grey early light, still too small and frail for the space around her, still wearing the clothes the village had given her that didn't quite fit. Her hands were at her sides. Her chin was level. Her eyes, when they found the center of the training ground, had a quality he had not seen in them before — not the terror from the courtyard, not the hollow blankness of the apartment. No, this time she looked different, like a major shift had occurred in her.

He stood very still for a moment, looking at her.

She looked back at him. Said nothing. Walked past him to the center of the training ground and stopped there, feet planted, and looked at him with an expression that said: tell me what to do and I will do it.

Itachi arrived twenty minutes later and stopped at the entrance of the training ground when he saw her.

He had come looking for Kakashi, having something routine to discuss, a mission debrief if you will, and he stood at the edge when he noticed the small figure in the center of it and felt something shift in his chest that he didn't immediately have words for.

She was practicing a basic drill Kakashi had her doing, basic taijutsu, the kind that would have been elementary for most ANBU candidates and was clearly not elementary for her. The difficulty of it was visible in the rigidness of her shoulders and the precise, fierce concentration on her face. She fell on the fourth attempt. Got up without looking around to see if anyone had seen it. Ran it again.

Kakashi appeared at his shoulder. "She showed up this morning," he said, quietly. "Before anyone else."

Itachi watched her fall again. Watched her get up again.

"What changed," he said.

"I told her the truth," Kakashi said. "All of it."

Itachi absorbed that. He thought about the eight days of sitting in that apartment, of hours spent in silence with someone who was not yet ready to be reached. He thought about the untouched food that had eventually gone sour, the hollowed cheeks of a child refusing to eat, refusing to move or speak. Seeing her now, he couldn’t help but feel relief.

She fell again. The strike had been better this time, more controlled, closer to the target. She looked at her hands for a second, recalibrating, and then she set up to run it again.

"She's going to be remarkable," Kakashi said. He hadn't meant to say it out loud.

Itachi looked at him sideways. Said nothing.

me writing the next chapter of silent crows while on vacation because i physically can’t stop thinking about it.

an Itachi Uchiha x oc fic

One of them survived a massacre. The other caused one. They meet in the wreckage of both and, against every reasonable instinct, they keep showing up for each other.

Sora Chishio has spent her whole life surviving what happened to her clan. Itachi Uchiha has spent his living with what he did to his. Neither of them should be each other’s soft place to land. They become it anyway.

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chapter four - blood remembers

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warnings: violence · grief · emotional angst · mature themes

tags: slow burn · angst · oc x canon · friends to lovers

──────────────────────

The night settled into the compound just like any other night before it. The sun sank into the mountains as the moon arose, the sky reflecting different shades of orange, pink, yellow and blue. The weather was perfectly temperate, common for the spring season in the north east area of the Land of Fire.

The moon was full and bright and filled the sky with her light as soon as the last rays of sunshine disappeared. This was the perfect place to star gaze, deep in the rural part of the country, completely isolated from the loud and bright cities. On a clear night like this, the stars looked like bright fireflies, twinkling in the dark skies.

Sora sat cross-legged on the floor of her room with the door cracked open slightly, wide enough to hear the house, but narrow enough that no one would notice it wasn't shut. She was practicing what her father had shown her that afternoon. Feeling for heartbeats through the floorboards. She felt her mother in the kitchen finishing up the last of the dishes from that night’s dinner, humming a soft melodic lullaby as she worked. Her father two rooms over, in his study, his heart rate soft and calm and steady, the way Sora always remembered it. Her cousins across the courtyard, their pulses small and quick the way children's pulses always were.

She almost missed it.

The first sound was small. A thud from somewhere outside that her mind registered as ordinary, as something falling. But the heartbeats changed. Her mother's rhythm stuttered. Her humming came to a halt. Her father's spiked, sharp and sudden, as if he knew something terrible was approaching. Then she heard him moving fast, faster than he ever moved inside the house. She rushed to the door and met him just as he was bursting in.

"Sora." He lowered to her level and grabbed her by the shoulders with shaking hands. His hands never shook. "Listen to me. The floor board by the window, the loose one. Right now, we don't have time—"

"Papa, what's happening—"

“Now." The word came out urgently yet hushed, as if he worried someone would hear. He was already pulling up the board, the small hidden space beneath it rising out of the dark. From outside, she could hear voices that weren't her family's, sounds that she couldn’t fully understand. Thuds, slashes, the wet sounds of bodies dropping limply. The cries of women, the begging for mercy. "Get in. Get in and do not make a sound and do not come out no matter what. Do you hear me?"

"I don't want to—"

"Sora." He said her name like it was the only word he had left. He crouched down to her level again and his face was indescribable. It was the face of a man trying to be calm for his child. Trying to protect her, not knowing for certain if he actually could. “I love you. I need you to be brave right now. Can you do that for me?"

She couldn't speak. The words were stuck to her throat like a bundle of thorns. Her eyes burned and filled with tears that she refused to let loose. She nodded her small head as she stared at her father’s blurring face, trying to memorize every crease and crevice and detail. At the door frame, her mother appeared, looking panicked and terrified. Sora tried to get near her, but her father’s grip was too strong.

“Sora, please-“ her mother pleaded as tears streamed down her cheeks. She complied.

He put her in the dark and put the wooden board back over her.

She heard it all. She heard every piece of it. The sounds were coming through the wood like they were coming from inside her own chest. Her uncle's voice, and then another voice she didn't know, shouting, pleading, fighting. Then a sound she felt more than heard, a percussion in her teeth. The clash of weapons. Running feet that vibrated through the floorboards. Her mother's voice, high and sharp and then suddenly not.

She tracked the heartbeats. She couldn't help it. It was the only thing she could do as she lay there helplessly and she couldn't turn it off, couldn't stop feeling them the way she couldn't stop her own heart from beating. And one by one, like candles in the wind, they went out.

She still felt her father's. Faint. Moving. She held onto it the way she held the ground beneath her, clinging to the hope that he would come back and pull the floor board open and pull her into his arms. Into safety.

She counted. She didn't know to what. She just counted, in the dark, listening to her family disappear one heartbeat at a time, until the compound went silent.

She lay in that silence for a long time. Long enough that the dark stopped feeling like darkness and started feeling like the only real thing there was. The anxiety paralyzing her from even lifting a finger, like if she was still enough, everything would go back to the way it was and she would realize this was just a bad dream.

Her father's heartbeat was still there. Faint as a candle through a wall.

She moved quickly. She pushed the board up and the smell that hit her nose was wrong, everything was so wrong. She didn't allow herself to imagine the outcome of what had just occurred because if she did, she would stop moving and she couldn't stop moving.

She moved through the house on her hands and knees. Some primal part of her knew not to stand up yet, not until she understood what was out there, so she crawled through her home which didn’t feel like her home anymore and kept her eyes on the floor, following the only heartbeat she had left.

It led her to the courtyard.

She stood up when she came through the door and she was finally able to see everything she wasn't ready to see. The courtyard that had once been full of the people she loved, was now littered with their lifeless bodies arranged in shapes and positions that her young mind could not process. She felt like screaming, the images before her tearing through her insides like a jagged sword, but she maintained her composure. She had to find her father whose heartbeat kept getting fainter and fainter. She made her way through the compound, stepping over severed limbs and pools of blood, trying to keep her eyes off the ground, off the reality that was sprawled all around her, as if that would make it all go away. She found her father near the old tree. The one her grandfather had planted when he was a young man almost 50 years ago.

"Papa." Her voice came out tiny. She ran to him.

He was barely breathing. His chest moving in shallow increments, each one a question. She dropped to her knees beside him and her hands found him before her eyes had fully processed what she was looking at. She pressed her hands flat against his chest the way he'd taught her, reaching for his heartbeat through her palms the way they'd practiced just that afternoon.

It was there. Thread-thin and fading.

"No." Her voice cracked. "No, no, no." She repeated frantically as her mind raced through all the options she had left. She had to do something, she could fix it. She’d seen her parents do the same for so many people in their village. Sick elderly people, injured young men, women in the brink of death after childbirth. She knew it was possible. She just didn’t know how.

She poured her chakra into him. Not the same way her parents had performed blood control to their patients, gently and carefully. She didn't know what she was doing. She knew only that his heartbeat was fading and she could feel it fading. So she pushed everything she had into her hands and into him and screamed at her own ability with everything she had: Fix it. Fix it. Fix it.

His chest shuddered.

"Yes—" She pushed harder. "Come on, please—“

The heartbeat stuttered. Surged. And then stuttered again. The blood circulation commenced and halted with each time she tried to pump it through his body manually.

Something tore open inside her. She kept pushing and pumping and becoming more desperate with every failed attempt, her chakra control completely unrefined and spotty. She was focused and frantic at the same time, the emotional turmoil that was a recipe for disaster when her ability was so volatile. Her father had taught her that during her training, to never attempt blood release unless he was there to monitor her.

She felt it come up through her like a tide.

Her arms went dark first. The lines spreading from her fingertips up past her wrists, past her elbows, fast and uneven, nothing like the gentle controlled bloom she had seen on her father. Her blood rose to meet the air without her permission, at the main veins of her wrists and elbows, forming sharp spikes underneath her skin, ripping through her veins and protruding out as if pulled by a magnet. She felt it pushing outward, answering the call she didn’t mean to make but was making with every desperate cell in her body.

"Papa." She cried, her voice raspy and gone from all the screaming and crying, which she hadn’t even realized she was doing all along. "Please, I'm trying, I need you, please-“

The blood around her wasn't hers anymore. It rose from the courtyard, from the ground, from everything the night had left behind, drawn by a pull she didn't know she was exerting. It moved in slow dark arcs through the air. It crystallised and broke apart and crystallised again in jagged shapes she wasn't making, wasn't choosing, wasn't controlling at all.

She didn't see the fragments flying. She didn’t feel the sharp sting of her wounds as blood poured out of her own veins. She only saw her father's face. She only felt his heartbeat getting quieter.

"Please—"

It stopped.

The silence it left was total. She felt the specific, impossible absence where the most familiar heartbeat in her entire world had been, and her mind simply broke. A scream rippled through the now quiet compound. She wailed as she kept pushing, refusing to accept that her father, her teacher, her protector, was gone.

She brought him back over the threshold and lost him. Brought him back and lost him again and again and each time the loss hurt the same and each time she refused to accept it, refused to accept she had no chakra left to use, no blood left to give, no tears left to cry. Her small hands stayed pressed flat against his chest while the courtyard filled with the cries of a child too young to understand the finality of death.

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Nothing about the Chishio compound mission briefing had prepared Kakashi for what was on the other side of the gate.

He'd known going in that it was bad. The tip they received came from the nearby village, and reported an attack in the north east mountains of the Land of Fire. The tip was low on detail and high on urgency, which was a classic indication that the situation was dire.

The courtyard stopped him.

Not because of the bodies, Kakashi was no stranger to corpses. He processed those the way he'd trained himself to, clinical and sequential, without absorbing, without getting emotions involved. It wasn’t the damage to the structures either, significant as it was, the cracked well, the broken windows, the deep score marks in the stone.

It was the blood.

It moved. Slowly, in arcs and drifts, thick dark currents suspended in the air, defying gravity, and it all circled the center of the courtyard where a child knelt over a body with her hands pressed against it.

Her arms were dark to her shoulders. The veins under her skin pulsed and branched in the sickening rhythm of chakra reserves being pushed past their limits. Half-formed crystalline shapes rose and collapsed around her in an unstable orbit, some of them close enough to the bodies of the other fallen clan members.

"What is that," Tenzo said, quietly. Not a question, exactly.

"Kekkei tōta." Kakashi responded. "Blood Release. Appears to be out of control."

"How long has she been—"

"Long enough." He responded. "She's almost empty. She'll drop soon."

Drop was one word for it. Kakashi ran the numbers fast and grim. Chakra depletion at that rate, that young, with no signs of slowing, could be fatal.

"We need to get close enough to stop her."

Neither of them moved immediately. That was telling, he thought. Their team of three standing at the courtyard entrance, all ANBU, all trained for things that most people couldn’t even begin to imagine, and all of them hesitated to walk into that radius. The floating blood. The jagged crystal shapes that appeared and vanished with an unpredictability that made threat assessment genuinely difficult. The little girl at the center of it.

"I'll go," Itachi, the youngest and newest team member, said.

"Itachi—" Tenzo started.

"She's almost out. We don't have time to figure out a better approach." He was already moving, slow and deliberate, no sudden movements, and Kakashi watched him pick his path through the debris with careful precision, very aware of exactly how wrong this could go.

Kakashi tracked every floating shard in the air. His hand stayed near his weapon. This was not a situation his training had given him clean protocols for, and he didn't like that.

She noticed them when Itachi was six feet away.

Her head came up fast, with the snapping animal attention of something cornered, and what Kakashi saw in her face wasn't the blank unfocused state he'd expected from someone at the edge of depletion. It was terror. Immediate, unequivocal terror, and underneath the terror something that was already reorganising itself into something more dangerous.

The blood in the air around her lurched.

"Stop.” Tenzo's hands moved, a single seal, and the ground between her and Itachi split and rose into a thick wooden barrier and the crystal shard that formed from the floating pools of blood around her shattered against it.

She scrambled backward. One hand finding the ground, the other still reaching toward the body, the two impulses fighting each other, and the blood in the air lurched again in the midst of the chaos. Sharp shards of crystalized blood shot out from every direction, hitting stone walls, tree trunks, anything that appeared before them.

"We're not here to hurt you." Itachi said, from around the edge of Tenzo's barrier. His voice genuinely calm, not the performed calm of someone managing a situation. "We’re here to help. Let’s talk.”

She was breathing in short, wrecked increments. Her hands were back on the man’s chest, whom Kakashi gathered was someone close and precious to her. Likely her father. She was still pushing chakra through, he could feel it, even from here, but he was not sure what exactly she was trying to do.

"He's gone." Itachi again, and there was something about his voice this time, not gentleness exactly, just honesty, plain and direct. "I'm sorry. He's already gone. You can stop now.”

A sound came out of her that Kakashi would never forget.

The blood dropped. All of it, all at once. Every suspended arc, every half-formed spear. She collapsed with it, falling sideways over the man’s body with the loose bonelessness of someone whose body had given out.

Itachi reached her in the same moment. He crouched down beside her looking at the body she was sobbing over, recording and analyzing every detail. He looked up and around at the rest of the corpses. Kakashi did the same. The massacre was undeniable. No forensic analysis was needed to realize that no other survivors were left. Kakashi’s heart tightened for a second and then he walked over.

She curled over her father's body and shook without making any sound at all, her body completely drained of everything that she couldn’t even cry out loud.

Tenzo appeared at Kakashi's shoulder. His voice was very low. "What do we do?"

"We take her back," he said. "And we figure out what happened here."

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Kakashi stayed up most of the night writing it.

Site assessment: Chishio clan compound, full structural and population loss. No evidence of external combatant presence. No weapon strikes, no tracks or entry points suggesting forced intrusion. Single survivor: female, approximate age 9, identified as Sora Chishio, found at the center of the affected area exhibiting active and uncontrolled Blood Release.

He stopped there for a long time.

He knew what that paragraph would read as to anyone reviewing it without having stood in that courtyard. The conclusion was right there, clean and simple and terrible: the survivor is the perpetrator. No visible external threat. A child manifesting a destructive ability at the scene.

He had stood in that courtyard. He had seen the damage, the distribution of it, the things about it that didn't cohere with a single child as the source. He had watched her face when they arrived, the terror of someone who did not know who they were, who thought they might be what had come for her family. That wasn't the face of a perpetrator.

He wrote the facts as observed anyway. Nothing excluded.

He added one more line at the end.

No remains of additional children were located at the site. Clan records show at minimum three children under the age of twelve and 5 infants and toddlers. This discrepancy is unresolved and warrants further investigation.

He looked at that line for a long time before he let himself sleep.

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She came back to consciousness slowly, in pieces, and the world assembled itself around her one sensation at a time. Ceiling first. White. Blurry. Then the smell, clean and medicinal the way hospitals always smelled. The soft linens of the bed she lay on engulfed her in a comforting warmth. The bright light coming from the big windows hit her eyes making her squint and groan in annoyance.

Then she remembered.

She sat up so fast the room started spinning.

“Easy.” A voice said, from her right. It was not a voice she recognized. She scrambled backward until her spine hit the headboard, her hands finding the sheets, looking for something, anything, that she could use to defend herself but finding nothing.

“You’re in Konoha.” The voice said again. Her vision finally cleared from the blurriness and head rush from sitting up too fast. A boy, sitting a few feet from her bed, not much older than her. He looked like he had been settled on the chair by her hospital bed for a while, waiting for her to wake up and was now being very careful not to startle her further. “The hospital. You’ve been here since yesterday.”

She stared at him. She knew those eyes. She had seen them in the courtyard, across the radius of her own unraveling, before everything went dark.

“Where is my father,” she said, her reflexes making her turn her head to the side, as if looking for another hospital bed in the giant room she had been placed. She saw nothing.

He didn’t look away from her. Didn’t reach for a kinder version of the answer. “He didn’t survive,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

She had known. The knowing had been sitting in her chest since she woke up, heavy and permanent as stone. Hearing it out loud was different anyway. Her heart stung from the tightening of hearing those words out loud. It knocked the breath out of her, made her forget how to maintain the most basic functions. She held her breath for a few seconds, the news hitting her with an intensity that she had not expected, even though deep down she knew it was coming.

She didn’t cry. She had nothing left to cry with.

She looked down at her hands. Both of them bandaged to the elbows, white linen wrapped tight over the places where her own blood had torn its way out. She stared at them for a long time.

“My name is Itachi,” the boy said, after a while. “I was there. In the courtyard.”

“I know,” she said. Her voice came out quieter than she intended. “You were the one who told me to stop.”

“Yes.”

She turned the bandaged hands over in her lap. “Is everyone else—”

“Yes,” he said, before she could finish. Sparing her from having to say it.

She absorbed that. The full weight of it settling into her slowly, too large to arrive all at once. She stared at the window and said nothing for a while, and he let her.

“There are people,” he said carefully, after a moment, “who have questions about what happened. About what we found when we arrived.”

She looked at him then. She noticed the careful way he’d chosen those words, the implication underneath them that he was making sure she understood without saying it plainly.

“They think I did it,” she said.

He didn’t confirm it. He didn’t deny it either. “I think it would be good,” he said quietly, “if you were careful about what you say. And to whom.”

She held his gaze for a moment. Looked at the young boy in front of her whose dark gentle eyes were trying to hold back the empathy and compassion he was feeling inside. He had come. Had waited for her to wake up, just to warn her.

“Okay,” she said.

He nodded once. Settled back in his chair.

The grey morning light turned slowly to something warmer, and neither of them said anything else, and it was, in its strange and insufficient way, enough.

──────────────────────

The Hokage’s office felt smaller than it was when all three of them were standing in it.

Itachi had been in this room before reporting to the Third with the rigidness that his role required. He knew how these debriefs went. Factual. Sequential. The kind of conversation that reduced what had happened to a series of observations that the people in this room could do something with.

He gave his account the same way Kakashi gave his, and Tenzo after that. The courtyard. The blood. The girl at the center of it. He chose his words carefully and said what he had seen without involving his emotions, because that was what this room required of him and because he understood that his personal feelings would do very little to shift the weight of Lord Third’s decision.

The Third listened without interrupting. His eyes, behind the deceptive gentleness they always carried, were taking everything in and revealing nothing about where it was going to land.

“The clan records confirm it,” the Third said, when they had finished. “The Chishio were a closed community. No alliances, no active shinobi on record, no enemies we have documented intelligence on. They were a pacifist clan that refused to integrate into the shinobi nations, they detested war and death.” A pause. “The damage to the compound is consistent with a Blood Release event of significant scale.” His eyes moved across the three of them. “The girl is the only variable we cannot account for. Furthermore, the girl has offered no account of the events.”

Itachi kept his face still. Sora had chosen the path of complete silence after he had warned her to be careful with recounting the events of that night. Whether that aided or hurt her case was not certain yet.

“Our assessment,” the Third continued, “is that she presents too significant a risk for standard placement. The ability is volatile. We have no experience for containing it in a civilian or even a standard shinobi context.” He set his pipe down. “She will be held in the lower tunnels until a longer term plan can be established.”

The room was quiet for a moment.

“With respect,” Itachi said.

Kakashi glanced at him. Tenzo went very still.

The Third looked at him. The full weight of his superior’s gaze landed on him. “Uchiha.” The Third said, granting him permission to keep speaking.

“Detainment won’t contain the ability,” Itachi said. “It will give it nowhere to go. A kekkei tōta that volatile, in a child that age, under prolonged confinement with no outlet and no training,” He stopped. Chose the next words precisely. “The risk increases, not decreases.”

“And your alternative suggestion.”

“ANBU candidacy. Structured training, supervised development of the ability, a framework that gives her discipline instead of isolation.” He held the Third’s gaze. “A weapon that is trained is significantly less dangerous than one that is not.”

The silence that followed was tense and thick. Itachi held his breath as The Third eyed him, thinking of a response to the young boy’s suggestion.

“She is nine years old,” the Third said.

“Yes.”

“She has no formal shinobi training.”

“Correct.”

Something moved across the Third’s face that Itachi couldn’t fully read. “You are suggesting we invest considerable village resources into training a child who may have destroyed her entire clan.”

“I am suggesting,” Itachi said carefully, “that the alternative is holding a child with an uncontrolled kekkei tōta in a tunnel and waiting to see what happens when she runs out of reasons to cooperate.”

Another silence. Longer.

“She would need a supervisor,” the Third said finally. “Someone responsible for her progress and any incident that occurs during the training period.” His eyes moved to Kakashi. “You wrote the report.”

Kakashi straightened slightly. “I did.”

“Then you understand the variables better than most.” It was not quite a question. “You would take responsibility for her candidacy.”

Itachi watched Kakashi absorb the weight of what was being handed to him, which was not a request nor a suggestion.

“I’ll back the recommendation,” Kakashi said. “What he’s describing is sound. Containment without structure doesn’t solve the problem. It just moves it somewhere darker.”

The Third was quiet for a long moment. He looked at Itachi. Then at Kakashi.

“She will be monitored at all times during the initial period,” he said finally. “Any incident, any loss of control, any indication that the training is not producing the intended result and the arrangement ends immediately.” His eyes settled on Kakashi. “You will personally oversee her integration. That is not a suggestion.”

“Understood,” Kakashi said.

The Third picked up his pipe again, which Itachi had learned meant the conversation was over. “Dismissed.”

They walked out. The door closed behind them and the corridor outside was very quiet. Kakashi looked at Itachi. Itachi looked ahead.

“That was either very smart,” Kakashi said, “or very reckless.”

“It was both,” Itachi said.

Kakashi was quiet for a moment. Then: “She’d better be worth it.”

Itachi didn’t answer. He thought about the hospital room that morning. The way she had looked at her bandaged hands. The way she absorbed the news of her entire clan being wiped out. The exhausted look on her face. He couldn’t let her suffer through more by being punished for a crime she didn’t commit.