(I put my ao3 message in posterity because I have follow up questions)
[1. I Absolute love the the chapter title. 2. How dare you introduce Shin before root takes him away my heart, you've broken it.
I love Houhua being the right amount of paranoid in this chapter, especially about root. Well, about potentially being disappeared.
I love his grandmother. But also all I can think is *oh no another parental figure that gets to die*.
P.s. I love how Houhua is like, I hope the [fourth hokage] isn't dead because that leaves dangerous power vacuums.
Wait so Houhua dosen't know Minato is Narutos father. What will he think of natuto later? Like he's going to technically be Sauskes gaurdian so he's going to hear all about Naruto.
Is he going to figure out he has the ninetails? Is he going to be like, please be nicer to the nuke shaped boy. Or more like, please dont involve me in the politics of having an opinion about the nuke-shaped boy.
Also, also. If/when Houhua reveals he has the sharigan after the massacre the only person who can "teach" him about it is *Kakashi* won't that just be even more hilariously awkward?
Again loved the chapter! Can't wait to see more of the grandmother.
I'll include my original answer to ur comment also for posterity then !!
[ I'm honestly such a fan of the idea that ROOT took crazy advantage of the biiju disaster to disappear several promising children. It'd be so crazy easy for them— just check to see if anyone saw them after the disaster and can confirm they survived it, decide if they're worth taking, and boom. Snatch them up. Who tf is gonna tell?? Everyone's losing their mind about 10 different things, no one will notice a handful of missing children in all the corpses!
Houhua was unknowingly right in the jaws of a real bad end,, I like to think that if he hadn't name dropped Mikoto, they really would have taken him.
We might hear more about Shin later,, even if we don't see him. Unfortunately, Houhua has already forgotten his name and can not be relied on to connect the dots from the kid he met to one of the many kids who "died" that night 😔😔
Granny Uchiha my beloved <3 she should not be given a child to raise tbh, but she'll try her best !! Unfortunately her best isn't very uhh. Maternal. ]
!! SQH stopped reading Naruto after wave arc, and then got the rest of his Naruto knowledge from shitty memes. And that was like. Almost 100 fucking years ago. So it's safe to say that he doesn't know a LOT; including who tf Minato is or that Naruto is his son.
I think that he's capable of piecing it, along w a lot of Naruto's other general mysteries, together on his own— especially when half the fucking village openly refers to him as a demon and he does have vague memories of something ab a demon fox. He just needs his old memories to be rebooted, and for the clues to pop up in front of him before he really does any thinking about it is all!
I honestly don't know what direction he'll take with Naruto just yet. Sasuke will be his focus for a lot of reasons (mostly the easy access, at first) but it'd be straight up stupid for him to not try to interact w Naruto. So it's really only a matter of time till he does! But still, not for a little bit, as he doesn't really have much of a reason to run into Naruto out in the wild before he's at least a few years old and actually capable of wandering around to be found.
We'll just have to see how things develop!!
Kakashi is soooo fun for me— before the massacre he's chill w Houhua, pretty neutral overall, he knows him as that kid he used to babysit/Itachi's friend. After the massacre however,,, what a fucking loaded bomb of a history. Suddenly everything between them has taken on a new meaning and Kakashi can't stand to be in the same room as him. Can you say awkward guilt complex because Kakashi sure can!!!
I think it's different w Sasuke, who Kakashi knew of but never interacted with before the massacre. But like with Houhua, they both know and recognize each other as "Itachi's friend/teacher" so it's just a lot on both sides. I think they're probably gonna mutually avoiding each other for a while
This is for sure another thing that I'm gonna have to wait and see how it shapes up exactly. Bc depending on how much they interact from here on out and exactly how those interactions go, the post-massacre dynamic has a lot of potential range
Thank you for ur ask !!! I'm so happy to know u like the fic!! I'm having a lot of fun with it
