Chapter Text
Third Time's the Charm (Consequences Part 2, Massacre
Take 3)
"Kakashi!"
Thrown forward, Kakashi can do nothing but watch on in terror as Obito, his teammate, the one who broke him out of his own hatred, is crushed by the rocks meant to kill him.
"OBITO!"
Everything went so wrong, because of this...
He's too slow.
He's too weak.
He let him die.
The victim’s biggest regret always comes first.
In this, Mikoto is vindicated: Obito had acted nobly, and Hatake felt appropriately stricken that he allowed her nephew to perish. It's strange, though – she watches as her well-meaning nephew convinces the two teammates to take his eye, to keep him with them even as they fail to move the boulder from his chest. For some reason, it is hard to summon up that familiar curl of rage that always flashes through her at the mere thought of Obito's teammate, even as she watches the act she so begrudges him for.
The body is still kneeling, smile on his face frozen like the sword buried in his gut. He was cold when Kakashi found him, the blood long since darkened by the air. At his father's side, Kakashi kneels as well.
For weeks, Kakashi had ignored him. Too young to fight against the overwhelming rhetoric that the man had been wrong, that he had doomed them all, Kakashi refused to hear Sakumo's side of the story.
Just when had "dad" become "Sakumo"?
When had he prioritized training alone over spending time learning together with his father?
When did he start responding to Sakumo's tired quires about his health and day with short, clipped responses consisting of nothing but quoted shinobi rules?
The family compound was protected by wards - it should have been a safe haven for Hatake Sakumo. The village could not reach him here. The village could not reach him, but it could reach his son. In turn, his son had done the damage it could not.
He had killed his father.
With disdain and ignorance, Kakashi had driven him past the point of no return.
It is days before someone comes to check on him.
Mikoto is uncomfortable, she decides, seeing a child lose his parent at such a young age. She does not like Hatake Kakashi, but seeing how small he was when he was left alone... it's no wonder the boy has no manners. He had no one to teach him.
The cold of the battlefield around him sinks into his heart as Rin jumps in front of him.
Rain falls against his face. His hand sinks into her chest, piercing her heart and emerging out the other side. His head feels like it's being split apart by the sound of screaming birds.
Blood drips from her lips as she smiles at him one last time, struggling to say his name.
This is wrong. This never should have happened. He was supposed to protect her, but instead -
He killed her, just like he killed Obito.
When will Minato-sensei die?
How long will it be until he kills everyone else?
If Kakashi dies first, will that save them from him?
Everything smears to black as anguished screams fill the clearing, ringing in his ears now that the lightning has gone dark.
Frowning, Mikoto tries to make sense of this regret. Kagome's eyes only show the absolute truth, but the civilian born girl is still alive. Is it possible that this is from the future Obito's crush had mentioned?
Helpless, Kakashi watches on in horror as the Kyuubi rampages through Konoha. He is so very small in his ANBU uniform, standing out amongst the sea of chuunin classmates Minato-sensei had transported him to before raising a barrier and disappearing.
He can't help.
He doesn't know where sensei is. He doesn't know if Kushina-nee-chan is alive, if her child is alive. Powerless, he can do nothing but watch as the nine tailed bijuu demolishes entire swathes of buildings with an enraged swipe of his paw. Stuck behind the barrier, he can't even try to help evacuate the civilians.
He's useless.
Everything is useless.
Gasping, Mikoto takes in the utter destruction playing out in front of her. When is this supposed to happen?! What was the hokage doing, letting such a thing happen to Kushina?!
Deathly quiet, Kakashi leads his team of ANBU through the Uchiha district. Blood splatters cover nearly every surface around him. Every house he passes smells like death.
Now that his original goal is rendered null, he is here instead to track down the one who did this. He is here to catch the scent of the unhinged killer who eliminated an entire clan within one night.
They are clearly insane - the deaths vary wildly. Elderly, children, adults. Stabbing, strangling, disembowelment, the list continues. Each death is needlessly violent, with only a handful of exceptions. Whoever did this was beyond hateful.
Why, then, can he only smell Itachi's scent, buried under the suffocating smell of sap that blankets the night air?
Itachi hates violence. He never took pleasure in the kills he made as part of Team Rho. Kakashi has worked with loose cannons in the past, but Crow was never one of them.
How could he have been so wrong?
No. No, no, no, that wasn't possible. The Uchiha clan couldn't have been killed, not like that. Itachi? Her baby? What had gone wrong, to force such a cruel, bizarre future to exist?
He's been ordered to eliminate the small village supplying Iwa with weaponry. There can be no survivors.
Kakashi stares down at the three-year-old curled up in a worn blanket, sleeping peacefully with her mother.
There's something coating his hands -
Abruame Akane is impaled by Kiri hunter nin, and he can do nothing but sit in the shadows, waiting for them to leave. He cannot be discovered. She has a younger cousin waiting for his only remaining aunt to come home.
He could have prevented her death, if only he was allowed to act. If he had just...
It won't come off -
Konoha is nothing but rubble. Good shinobi lay scattered around him, dead and dying.
Kakashi is buried under rubble and fading fast, the way he should have been when he was twelve. His head is fuzzy as he wonders who else died because he was too weak to hold off Pein.
The blood, it won't come off.
It's on his hands, covering him, and it won't come off.
He needs to get it off, he needs to be clean.
It needs to come off,
off,
off.
The world shatters.
Water pours into the meeting hall, drenching everyone and everything as Hatake Kakashi performs a B-rank suiton jutsu with unsteady hands. Knocked off balance, Mikoto sticks herself to the floor with her chakra.
The boy falls to his knees, face a mask of terror. Unseeing, he dips his hands into the currents flowing around the room, reaching calf height by the time the geyser he created stops spewing.
He's shaking, scrubbing viciously at his hands, trying to rid himself of the blood coating them no one else can see.
"Hatake-san!" Itachi struggles, breaking free of his mother's grip to land in the water. Splashing forward, he reaches out for Kakashi.
"Itachi, no!" Mikoto kneels, scrambling to keep her son from grabbing the shoulder of a twitchy shinobi in the middle of an episode. She grabs him just as his small hands make contact with Kakashi's right arm.
Kakashi freezes, turning towards Itachi in a trance. With trembling hands, he reaches out and cups Itachi's face.
"I'm so sorry. I failed. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
Mother and son stare into a desolate gaze, half slate gray, half Sharingan red. Looking into the stretched pinwheel of the Hatake's Mangekyo, Mikoto wonders how she let things get this far. Hesitantly, she reaches out to place a hand on Kakashi's hitching shoulders, refusing to flinch when her fingers brush against clammy skin.
She had done this.
Gripping his shoulder as he holds her son's face in his hands, crying out apologies, Mikoto can only wonder at the consequences of her actions.
Trapped between spongey moss and a victorious Rin, Obito huffs.
Kakashi had done it, the crazy bastard. He had gone and given Obito a Sharingan, without getting rid of anyone too important in the process. He had also gotten over his little mental break and killed Danzo, like Obito had suggested he do forever ago, but that's less important than the fact that his teammate had thought of him and given him a Sharingan.
It may not be Shisui's, but aside from the lack of Mangekyo, it kicks ass. He knew that not all Sharingan were the same quality from his first life - he'd certainly had enough of them in his head to declare himself thoroughly versed in the subject. Kagami's eye has almost none of the weaknesses the other eyes he'd used possessed. It's responsive, ridiculously clear sighted, and can track chakra movements almost entirely on its own.
Obito likes his new eye. Now, if only he could convince Rin to let him use it.
"Rinnnn," whining, Obito tries to throw her off of his back. "Move!"
"Ah, ah, ah, Obito!" Rin jeers. "Are you trying to roughhouse? On the moss?"
"I'm not trying to roughhouse, I'm trying to breathe, dammit! You're squishing me!" Obito gasps out dramatically.
Laughing, Rin gets off of him, sprawling out on her stomach in front of him. "You're such a big baby, Obito! Why, if Kakashi knew that all anyone has to do to defeat you is to sit on you, he would - Obito?"
Pain lances through Obito's left eye, but he knows it has nothing to do with the recent transplant. A deluge of despair and horror crashes through him, the feelings not his own.
His Mangekyo swirls to life unprompted.
"Obito, what's going on?"
Jolting upright, Obito hastily throws on his Ukki henge. "It's Kakashi. Rin, I'll be right back. I don't know what the hell happened, but I'm going to find out. We may need Tsunade for this, if he's too fucked up."
He doesn't stick around to hear her answer.
Following the pull of Kakashi's eye, Obito swirls into existence in front of his teammate, every fiber of his being screaming for murder.
Unnatural water sloshes under his feet, and he sticks to the surface with less than a thought. He's in an underground meeting hall that looks a lot less blood splattered than the one in his memories, surrounded by a handful of the Uchiha's most influential elders. Said elders seem to be recovering from being slammed against the wall by whichever jutsu summoned the miniature lake currently flooding everything. Kakashi is on his knees, cupping Itachi's face as Mikoto tries to forcefully calm him down.
Obito has seen Kakashi in the middle of an episode often enough to know what they look like. Right now, he's pretty sure that whoever his teammate is seeing, it's not a six-year-old Itachi. He probably doesn't even know where he is.
He snatches Mikoto by the wrist, forcefully peeling her hand off of Kakashi. The second she catches sight of his face, he puts her into a genjutsu. Absently, he lets his other hand brush over where hers had landed, trying to soothe as he spares a brief thought to the shape of the hell he’s going to drop her into for doing this to his teammate.
"What happened?"
"Obito?!" Mikoto startles, fingers twitching at his unexpected interference. "We, we needed to be sure he wasn't a threat. He just -"
Obito drags her arm upwards, forcing her to stretch uncomfortably to accommodate. "You did this?"
Fear sparks in Mikoto's eyes. It looks like she's finally realized that he's no longer the useless, harmless little Obito she once knew. Hesitantly, she shakes her head in denial. "The elders needed proof. They wouldn't have let him go, otherwise - they wanted to kill him. It was the only way, the only choice we had..."
Laughing coldly, Obito drops her. "Oh, there are always other choices. The Uchiha always seem to make the same ones, in the end. Who am I to deny you your fate?"
Mentally pulling back, he weaves together the memories of every single hour Kakashi spent mourning in front of the memorial stone, drowning in despair and self-hatred, and mentally drags her into the ensuing chasm. As Rin always tells him, hatred stems from ignorance; if Mikoto learns nothing else, he will at least teach her that Kakashi is off limits. Oh, she won't remember this by the end, but her subconsciousness will never forget his warning.
Mikoto's limp form collapses into the water face first. Squirming in Kakashi's dazed grip, Itachi frantically reaches out and grabs her shoulder, trying to turn her over as he desperately calls out to her.
Ignoring him, Obito looks out to the rest of the room. These are the people hell bent on killing off his teammate, on raging against the chains placed upon them. They haven't even noticed him, too caught up in their own struggles. He scoffs. How idiotic.
"Ah, enough. You've all gotten too annoying."
Obito raises the hand not grabbing Kakashi, bringing it to his lips. Letting his intangibility spread to Kakashi and his cling-ons, he inhales. It's been decades since he's needed to use hand signs for this particular jutsu.
At age six, Uchiha Obito could barely use a henge, but could light a bonfire with his great fireball jutsu.
At age sixteen, he could burn down an entire wall of trees.
At twenty-six, he'd taken out more than his fair share of village settlements with the jutsu.
By thirty-two, well. He'd had better techniques, but seeing as it scaled based on the amount of chakra you shoved into it? Obito's fireball was a thing of nightmares.
He may not have the Juubi rattling around in his skull, he may not have the deep wells of chakra he'd worked so hard for when he aimed to decimate the entire shinobi world, but he certainly has enough to turn this waterlogged meeting room into a fucking kiln.
Obito breathes out, setting the world ablaze.
Awash in white and orange light, he wills the flames to grow, to raze. The elders don't even have time to scream, but that's fine. They've made more than enough noise already. He keeps feeding his chakra into the stream, refusing to stop until nothing but ash remains of the ones who wanted his teammate dead.
The roar of fire is replaced by Itachi's screams, and Obito rolls his eyes. How overdramatic: he didn't even kill the brat's mother, and he's still yelling?
Glaring down, Obito barks out, "Shut up."
Itachi flinches violently, finally breaking himself from Kakashi's slack hands. How cute, he activated his Mangekyo. "Ukki-senpai? Why?"
"Why? Because they deserved to die. Now, I thought I told you to keep your eyes turned off, Itachi, unless you wanted to lose them." Crouching down, he grabs Itachi's face. This young, the boy doesn't have enough chakra to keep his Mangekyo active. They swirl back to Uchiha black as he sways with exhaustion. "Go to sleep, kid. This doesn't concern you yet." Obito catches him in another genjutsu, clouding his memories of the last five minutes. No need for the kid to start telling everyone that one Uchiha Ukki murdered a bunch of Elders, especially since he isn't finished. He drops Itachi, leaving him curled against his mother on the ashen floor.
Forming his hand into a different seal, Obito creates three wood clones.
"Take out anyone with designs against Kakashi or Rin. Make it hurt, but don't make it traceable."
With that order, he hauls Kakashi into Kamui.
...
Blood paints the streets of the Uchiha district, once again. Not as much as the first time in a reality no longer relevant, not by a long shot, but enough to send a message.
They can be hunted. Nowhere is safe.
Obito's clones are resourceful enough to find a couple of ROOT agents and stage them in the homes of two or three of their victims, making it look as though the unlucky Uchiha had fought back just hard enough to ensure they didn't go out alone.
No one who wasn't a civilian would buy it, but it's enough to muddy the waters against Danzo, so that doesn't matter.
In Kamui, Obito doesn't feel a thing. This is nothing, if it means keeping his teammates alive and by his side. If they'd let him, he would do so much worse, but that's not what they want. It's not what Kakashi wants.
Kakashi likes Konoha. He's attached to some of the Uchiha brats, even. So, they get to live.
In the back of his head, Obito can hear dear old Madara reprimanding him for not finishing the job, for being sloppy, but fuck that bastard. It's not sloppy, he's already killed off everyone he wanted to. If anyone else acts up in the future he'll snuff them out in a heartbeat, but as of now he's taken care of the current threat. Plus, Madara was a delusional asshole who didn't even have the common decency to let Obito kill him, so he deserves to be ignored.
"Obito!"
Snapping out of his fight with the imaginary Madara in his head, Obito shoves Kakashi into Rin's waiting arms. Between the time that Obito first saw him and now, Kakashi's skin has gained a concerning grey pallor and his tremors have increased in frequency. His eyes are both open, staring at absolutely nothing.
"Fix him."
"Fuck!" Rin curses, immediately reaching out and closing his eyes, twisting his ROOT mask to the side and dragging the band down to obscure them as an additional precaution. "Hand, now. He's dangerously low on chakra. Shit, we let him leave without checking. Why didn't he say anything? Why did we let him leave without checking?!"
Wordlessly, Obito holds out his hand, letting Rin slam it into Kakashi's and kickstart a chakra transfer.
She spreads Kakashi out in front of them, the Isobu-piloted-clone hurrying over to grab the medical instruments she calls for as her hands fly over the shaking boy. The whole time, she's muttering to herself. "Light laceration to the throat, three broken ribs, concussion, fractured ankle. Antiseptic, four rolls of bandages, cooling seals..."
Rin cradles his head first, hands glowing green. She doesn't spend too long probing through his hair, so Obito's pretty sure she didn't find anything truly worrisome like pooling blood or swelling.
The thin cut on his throat is closed quickly, the skin visibly knitting back together under Rin's fingers, nothing but an angry red mark left in their wake.
Using the scissors Isobu hands her, she cuts open the chest of his uniform. She has to reinforce the blades with chakra to get his ROOT armor plate off.
Obito isn't surprised by the mottled purple and red canvas painted across Kakashi's skin, but it does cement his opinion that he was entirely justified in his reaction to finding Kakashi as he had. He knows the elders weren’t responsible for kicking the shit out of his teammate, but that’s unimportant in the grand scheme of things. They still fucked with him while he was weak. They deserved to die.
Rin's still muttering as she heals, head bent low, Isobu observing by her side.
Kakashi's fingers twitch in Obito's hand. Obito tightens his grip without thinking. "Kakashi?"
"...Obito?"
Oh thank the sage, he's already coming back to himself. "Yeah, Bakashi. What -"
"Are you here to kill me?"
Obito freezes. "What?"
"I killed Rin, Obito." Kakashi's voice is breathless, likely due to the broken ribs Rin's trying to fix. "I failed you. I killed sensei and Kushina-nee-chan, too. I couldn't even take Danzo out correctly."
"Kakashi, no -"
Kakashi tilts his head towards Obito, no doubt following the sound of his voice. He smiles, lips barely moving the fabric of his mask. "I'm sorry you had to waste your life on such a failure."
Obito reaches out and cups Kakashi's face. No matter how much he wants to smack the other boy over the head for talking like this, he knows it won't help. Kakashi isn't in the present, he won't know Obito means it as a threat to get better, so help me Bakashi, I will smack you again if you don't. "If I saved you, Bakashi, then why the hell would I kill you? That seems like a waste, to me."
Kakashi's breathing hitches quietly. "But..."
"You're the one being a butt, Bakashi. You're alive, and you're going to stay that way. It's not a punishment. Go to sleep, and we can talk about it when you wake up."
"That's..."
"Go to sleep, Kakashi," Rin speaks up, having gone silent after Kakashi asked Obito to kill him.
"..." Kakashi's hand squeezes Obito's hard enough that he can actually feel it. "Are you sure I'm not already dead? I'm pretty sure I just heard Rin."
Obito snorts. "You're not, but you should still listen to her. You know better than to ignore a medic, genius."
Kakashi hums doubtfully at that, a complete brat even while stuck in his own head. "Since my ghosts seem to have gained the ability to talk to each other, can you let dad know that I finally got that bastard? I haven't seen him since the campfire..."
Obito has no idea what Kakashi's talking about, his words starting to slur with exhaustion. "Sure, Kakashi. If I see him, I'll let him know."
"Try not to get distracted... by any cats... or old people... Obito..." Kakashi's sentence is a mumbled mess, barely making it through the barrier of his mask with how quiet his voice drops. By the end of it, the silver haired boy is unconscious.
"..."
"Did you kill them?" Rin asks sharply.
"Not slowly enough," Obito hisses out. "He hasn't been this bad in forever: it was that fucking genjutsu's fault."
"Explain," Rin grits out, still working on Kakashi's ribs.
"Mikoto had the elders put him under some kind of genjutsu with the bullshit excuse of seeing whether or not he's trustworthy. I'm not sure what it did, since I didn't ask about every old bastard's eyes the last time I cleaned house."
"Will he recover?" Isobu worries.
"Yes," Rin snarls, then cools her tone. "Yes, Isobu. We'll make sure he recovers from this. As soon as we're done here, we are going directly to the summoning realm and smothering him with his dogs."
Isobu tilts their head. "I've been to the canine realm before. I can take us."
"Good. Obito, keep up the transfer until I tell you to stop. He must have been running on empty when he kamui'd himself out of here, and then somehow got worse."
Obito nods, determined. If anything ends up actually killing Kakashi, there's nothing that will be able to stand between him and the absolute destruction of the shinobi world as a whole. He will absolutely pull his teammate's dumb ass out of the Pure Lands with Edo Tensai just to tear him a new one for dying, but only after he gets his revenge.
Rin snaps her fingers in front of his face. She must have finished putting Kakashi's ribs back together while Obito was busy plotting the end of the world again. "Obito! I want you focused on keeping Kakashi stable, if he wakes up. Blood and guts can wait."
Taking a second to adjust his train of thought, Obito grimaces in acceptance.
"Good. Isobu, I just need another minute to fix his ankle. After that, we're going to go straight to Pakkun."
Fugaku can only imagine the headache his wife is dealing with currently. He had been pulled away from the clan meeting by an 'urgent summons' to discuss a 'breakthrough' on Shisui's suicide.
Obviously, this was complete garbage concocted by Shimura Danzo. He does not know why the warhawk wants to remove him from the Uchiha compound on this evening in particular, but it does not bode well. The clan elders have been getting more and more forceful in their dissent, only barely contained by Fugaku's continued hope in the upcoming Hokage, if not their current leader.
Namikaze Minato had also been called out in the dead of night, despite his wife being nine months pregnant.
Danzo had stood behind the Sandaime's shoulder throughout the whole discussion, gravelly voice grating to the ears as he spouted off lie and coincidence alike. Shisui had been spooked by something Danzo had said during their entirely coincidental meeting, apparently, fleeing after the genial elder's mention of rising tensions between the Uchiha and their Village.
Danzo accuses Fugaku's clan of treason before the Hokage and the future Hokage. His regretful expression, full of false concern and pity, makes Fugaku taste ash.
Luckily, Minato had backed him up. The younger man hadn't even hesitated, stating that no formal action against the Village had been taken and that it was up to Fugaku, a loyal shinobi of Konoha and head of one of Konoha’s founding clans, to decide how to deal with his own people. He reiterated that nothing concrete had been found, aside from natural tensions that grew from organic sources.
He implied that the tensions will go down once a change of power has occurred, and Fugaku admires how far he's come. From that star-struck jounin to someone politely telling his hokage that he's the reason one of Konoha’s most important clans is on the verge of rebelling... it's inspiring, somewhat. At the very least, Mikoto's friend certainly knew what she was doing when she chose him.
While Hiruzen folded with a weary sigh, Danzo hadn't seemed too upset by the lack of kill orders coming from his old friend's mouth.
As soon as they were released, Fugaku took to the streets, Minato following right behind him. Danzo is clearly up to something, and while he never seems to be able to tell what the man is planning, he can at least warn his police forces to be on the lookout for upcoming trouble.
Once he made contact with most of the squads on this side of Konoha, leaving them with orders to being on high alert for any suspicious behavior from their friends beneath the ground, he retreats to Minato’s house. The last thing Fugaku wants to do, after having to deal with Danzo's insidious machinations, is to go back and deal with the slightly less insidious plans of his own clan elders. No, he trusts that Mikoto can hold them at bay a little longer while he confers with Minato and Kushina to find a way to end Danzo's reign at last.
Eventually, after being plied with months’ worth of the strongest black tea money can buy, she'll forgive him for leaving her to deal with their honored clansmen.
The two men pause in front of the closed door, close enough for the protection and privacy seals to take effect.
"This will be useless if we don't manage to combat the iron grip he has on the minds of the public," Fugaku says, the spark of Uzumaki sealwork the only thing loosening his lips. Things have gotten to such a point that he no longer feels able to freely speak his thoughts aloud without some form of reprisal being levied his way.
Bringing a hand up to ruffle his blond hair, Minato sighs. "We'll have to come up with something, then. I'll shut down ROOT as soon as I can, but we're going to have to dig in deeper if we want to force him to actually get rid of it. Probably with ANBU, once I finish scrubbing their ranks for any plants."
Fugaku inclines his head. "And in the meantime? Every day that passes without action on our end, the tensions grow. How do we stop the village from turning on my clan in full?"
"Fake crime," Minato declares, chipper.
"..." How is this the person who is weeks away from assuming leadership of Konoha, from becoming a father. How is this a person Fugaku is actually friends with. How.
Holding his hands up as though it would help his case, Minato laughs for the first time all evening. "Now, just hear me out! It would be similar to a D-rank mission - in order to convince the public that the Uchiha still have their best interests in mind, we just have to show you all doing your job. With the way Danzo's smeared your public image, you're more likely to get yelled at than thanked if you help a normal civilian, so the next best thing is to help a shinobi whose whole mission is to play nice. You help a child find his mother, you stop a minor case of shoplifting, you break up a couple fights. The whole time, no one cusses out your officers, no one acts resentful - the civilians will copy what those around them do. If less and less people are vilifying you, if they routinely see you helping people who are grateful, then they'll start to shift their attitudes."
The blond menace shoots Fugaku a thumbs up, almost as exuberant as Dai. "We should only really need to fake the first couple of months. After that, everything should settle down pretty well!"
"Minato. That is illegal."
"Not if you're the hokage!" Minato winks. Fugaku hates him for it, slightly.
The front door slams open, distracting him from his next plea for the blond to see reason. A hand darts out from inside the house they had been standing in front of as they chatted away into the evening breeze, latching onto Minato's ridiculously high collar.
Kushina drags her husband inside, her hair ebbing and flowing on the waves of acrid chakra radiating from her skin. She shoots Fugaku a venomous glare. "Stop dicking around and get in here."
Raising an eyebrow, the Uchiha complies with her demand, following a whining Minato as he's dragged through his own home.
"We were planning on how to subvert the negative civilian attention on the Uchiha, Kushina, not messing around!"
"Great. You can get back to that as soon as the latest shitshow finishes. Kakashi's moved out."
Minato gapes at his wife, comically. "But we only just got him to live here instead of his tiny apartment!"
Kushina throws her husband through the door of the study, uncaring of how his rough entry makes him stumble. "Now is not the time for dumb jokes, y'know. Kakashi is either going to do something risky as hell, or he's already done it. We need to be ready to back him up, not trying to lighten the atmosphere."
Suddenly serious, Minato picks himself up off of the floor. "What happened?"
Kushina sighs, straightening from her aggressive lean and calming the chakra emanating around her form. She gestures to a desk covered in numerous scrolls. "He dropped off his cypher. Everything we've been getting ready for, is happening tonight."
Fugaku steps closer to the table, Minato coming up behind him to peer over his shoulder. Thirty scrolls, two notebooks - one complete, the other in a different hand, half-full of trains of thought, notes decoding random bits of cyphers and piecing together the resulting information.
"I presume this is about Danzo, or at least ROOT?"
Kushina nods at Fugaku's inquiry. "Both. He's been putting together evidence ever since he and Rin came back from their fucked-up mission. I've been trying to interpret some of his scrolls to see what our gameplan is going to be, but this has never been my strong suit. Give me seals and I can crack that shit in minutes, but this? This crap may as well be a fucking pop quiz on medical ninjutsu. I’ll figure it out eventually, but it's been a pain in the ass so far."
Fugaku picks up the first notebook, flipping through the pages and memorizing the information as he goes. At the last page, he pauses.
As things have gone off schedule, it is very likely that I will either be labelled as a missing-nin or killed. In this event, please designate someone to clean my father's grave on the seventeenth of December. If amenable, please leave behind poppy flowers before departing.
Danzo will no longer be a threat to Konoha. I cannot promise that ROOT will not continue to cause problems in their master's absence.
Sensei, Kushina, ensure that these scrolls are presented to the Hokage and the Village Council. Do not let them sweep this under the rug.
Looking up, he catches Kushina's eyes. "What exactly is Kakashi planning on doing, Kushina?"
The woman grins, though her worry makes it seem more like a grimace. "He's going to kill Danzo, Fugaku."
The world shifts under his feet at that, the idea that someone would be bold enough to resort to simple assassination when faced with an elder who controlled an unknown amount of their village's leadership. At his back, Minato sucks in a sharp breath.
"And you let him go?"
"Let him go? Hah!" Kushina barks out a laugh, some of the spark she's so famous for breaking through her angry anticipation. "I would have handed him a kunai if he didn’t already have twenty. That old piece of shit's days were numbered ever since he decided he wanted to put his greasy mitts on our kids. The crap he's pulling with the Uchiha only made me hate him more. For the kid, it's personal – like fuck was I going to tell him no."
... If Fugaku squints, he can almost see the apparition of his wife behind the redhead, mirroring her actions. It's no wonder they became friends after all – they both have the same reaction to people interfering with those they love. Fugaku puts aside his gut reaction to the blatant admission of treasonous intentions, a move that he's sadly becoming more and more familiar with as the months wear on. Instead, he focuses on the positive. "So, Elder Shimura will be dead by the end of the night. What part do we play in this?"
Kushina stalks forward, dumping a scroll onto the open pages of the cypher Fugaku still has open. "We need to sort through all of the shit he's left us and figure out a way to shove it down the council's throat that they can't refute. If absolutely necessary, I'll hide Kakashi myself; no one can get through my wards if I don't want them to."
Here she pauses, before screwing up her face in dissatisfaction. "Almost no one. Argh, never mind. We need to crack these before we know where to push."
Taking the scroll, Fugaku passes the cypher off to Minato. It looks like they have their work cut out for them.