Chapter Text
Hatsuhime is eighteen when she resigns from Anbu.
She considers herself lucky. The four years she spent as Anbu Gazelle were a harrowing experience. She was still a green novice when the Third Shinobi World War began. She’s seen a lot in her four years of service—seen too much, if she’s being honest.
Her two-point (futatsudomoe) Sharingan evolved to its three-point stage within the first month of active duty, and she doesn’t doubt for a second that the increased strength of her dōjutsu was the only thing that stood between her and certain death. Sometimes, when she closes her eyes, she can’t stop herself from seeing it all over again.
But she can’t win against exhaustion. It always defeats her in the end and, when she finally shuts her burning eyes, she dreams of it. Relives it. Feels the blood on her hands and in her hair, the cloying stench of viscera choking her—so thick she can almost taste it on her lips.
She looked down once and, in her nightmare, met the horrifying reflection of herself in a pool of blackened blood.
The fourfold tomoe, the yottsudomoe Sharingan, staring back wasn’t hers.
Such a thing doesn’t exist—shouldn’t exist. It would be a very inauspicious sign if it did, like a herald from Yomi itself, beckoning to reclaim the lives she stole back from the clutches of death with only her mediocre medical ninjutsu and swift first-aid.
Hatsuhime’s nightmares are recurring, and she never looks down again. And, as her exhaustion grows, and reality and unreality blur, she begins avoiding mirrors and other reflective surfaces.
On her last day as Anbu Gazelle, she runs into Uchiha Fugaku (her longtime crush) on her way to the underground Anbu base known only as the Ant’s Nest.
Fugaku, ever the blunt pragmatist, comments on the dark circles beneath her eyes and offers her a job at the Keimu Butai in the same sentence. She’s so flustered she says yes. He waves and is gone again as quickly as he came.
Hatsuhime arrives at the Ant’s Nest to collect her kit in a daze and finally picks up the nerve to check herself in a mirror—something she’s been loathing for months now.
She lets out a breath. Fugaku needs to get his eyes checked. She does have slight bags under her eyes from going without sleep for too long, but the so-called dark marks are the indigo crests she’s had all her life.
Gloomily, she thinks she must be so plain that Fugaku hadn’t even noticed her most defining feature.
However, they are larger and darker than she remembers. She leans in close to the mirror, touching the bruise like markings with a sort of timid curiosity. To think she’d almost forgotten what her own face looks.
Then she glances into her dark eyes and the eyes of the dead stare back at her.
She shatters the mirror with a swift punch before she can stop herself.
(Anbu Otter doesn't ask her to pay for the damages; he hands her bandages instead.)
Hatsuhime opens her home to her nephew, Uchiha Obito, the next day.
She hasn’t seen or spoken to him since he was four or five years old. Since before she became Anbu Gazelle, she realizes.
He’s the reason she isn’t Anbu Gazelle anymore.
Her older sister and his father died eight years ago, orphaning him when he was still just a baby. Hatsuhime was too young to take him in, having been barely older than he is now, so Obito went to his paternal grandmother instead.
But Obito’s grandmother had a stroke and fell last year.
They thought she would recover enough to move back into her own home, eventually, but after an entire year she’s still living in the hospice. The doctor in charge of her rehabilitation is now uncertain of her chances of ever recovering enough to live in her own home again, meaning Obito is officially Hatsuhime’s responsibility.
Part of her is livid. She was so close to becoming Anbu Commander!
Part of her is relieved. She was so close to becoming Anbu Commander…!
(Let Anbu Otter have the promotion. He actually deserves it.)
Obito doesn’t show up until the sun is high in the sky (long after the hour they agreed upon in their letters), stinking of pond water and sweat. She resists the urge to make him go around the back to hose off first. That wouldn’t be very hospitable of her.
“Um, sorry… Hatsuhime… oba-san?”
“Onē-san. Call me Hatsuhime-onē-san, please.”
“Ah, y-yeah, sorry, I had training this morning and Minato-sensei’s been really into punishment games this month! I was late and he made me do a D-rank in the Steam District, and then there was this Bā-chan from the Tenjin-ya and she was weeding her koi pond, but it’s kind of cold, you know? So I offered to do it for her, and she gave me a bunch of hot spring eggs for helping her!”
He holds out his backpack to show her his spoils, and Hatsuhime feels her eyebrow twitch. He looks at his backpack.
“Ah, no!” he swears. “Some of them broke! What do I do?!”
The runny yolks are dripping all over the bunched-up clothes he hastily stuffed in his backpack. Hatsuhime wasn’t planning on doing any laundry today.
She sighs and gestures for him to come in. “Take your shoes off at the step. Bathroom’s on the left side of the kitchen. Put everything in the empty laundry basket—not the full one. Towels are in the cupboard under the sink. I’ll… clean up your bag.”
“O-oh, I’m so sorry, Hatsuhime-ba—onē-san! I can clean it myself, I really can!”
“I’ll put some rice on for dinner.”
‘Please take a bath,’ goes unsaid.
The first few weeks living with her nephew are… different.
He’s everything she never was. He must take after his father, she thinks.
Loud, cheerful, naïve. Prideful at times, bashful at other times. Eager for her approval and praise.
Her praise.
The realization is so sudden that she almost drops the bowl of silken tofu she’s been chilling in the fridge since morning. The weather’s been getting hotter and Obito is always running around outside right at the height of it. He had a mild case of heat exhaustion last week.
She stares at the square mold she borrowed from her neighbor to make the chilled treat. She hasn’t made anything this complicated since before she joined Anbu.
Obito crashes through the front door, kicking his sandals off and almost tripping over the step in the genkan.
“Nē-san, do you have any juice? Rin forgot her canteen, so I gave her mine and now I’m dying of thirst!”
“There’s water in the fridge,” she says. Obito groans.
“Nē-san, I know we’ve only been living together for like a month, and I’m just a freeloader, but I think you should buy some juice. And maybe some snacks. We can’t keep living on takeout and instant ramen!”
The instant ramen is a new staple of Hatsuhime’s diet, honestly. Before Obito came, she lived off meal replacements, soldier pills, and white rice. Every. Single. Day. Obito wasn’t impressed. Neither was his grandmother, who wrote Hatsuhime a very stern letter about what to feed a growing boy.
Obito stomps into the kitchen, and Hatsuhime has to remind herself that he’s not actually stomping. He’s just a very loud walker—a habit she’s been trying to break him from, politely. Noisy shinobi get dead, after all.
She doesn’t want to see Obito lying in a pool of his own blood.
“Is that silken tofu?” he asks.
“I made some in case you got overheated again,” she says. “Would you like some now? There are no toppings, but it should still taste refreshing.”
Obito grins and bounces over, taking off his crooked goggles. He probably needs a new pair, soon.
“Thanks, Nē-san! It looks great!”
She cuts out a few cubes for them both and sits at the table across from him as he devours the plain silken tofu with gusto.
“Are you in a hurry?” she asks.
Obito nods.
“Yeah! We’re doing an overnight C-rank. I haven’t been late to practice all week, so Minato-sensei said we could all do a mission together! It’s just an escort mission to a nearby town, but I’ve only ever done D-ranks before now. I’m super excited!”
The only reason he hasn’t been late in the past week is because Hatsuhime has been waking him up early and making sure he’s out the door with plenty of time to spare.
Obito… he’s a good kid. If she doesn’t plan for him getting distracted on the way (by helping someone), he would never make it to practice on time.
“That’s great,” she says. “Have you packed your bag yet? Is your bedroll clean?”
“Not yet,” he says. “I got loads of time, though! I just need to meet everyone at the western gate at sixteen hundred. That’s like… six o’clock, right?”
Hatsuhime picks up her bowl and dumps the silken tofu into her mouth. Her internal clock is telling her it’s currently somewhere around fifteen hundred. She has an hour to get Obito ready and out the door.
“Four o’clock,” she coughs. The silken tofu went down in lumps, somehow. “Sixteen hundred is four o’clock, Obito.”
Obito pales and knocks back his tofu too, pounding his chest when he also chokes.
They stand up in unison and run for opposite sides of the house, throwing together Obito’s travel kit in record time. She only has to stop him from packing his secret picture of Rin once. Progress.
She pushes him out the door, poking his toothbrush into his bag before he can leave without it.
“Straight to the western gate,” Hatsuhime tells him. “Do not stop for anything, okay?”
“But what if an old lady needs help to carry her groceries?”
“Obito.”
“Or a little kid gets lost in the market?”
“Obito, no. You’re going straight to the western gate. The market isn’t anywhere near there.”
“Oh, right.” He scratches his head and freezes. “Goggles!”
Hatsuhime shunshins to the kitchen and back to the front door before he can take one step inside. She presses them into his hands and turns him around, pushing him out to the garden and pointing him west.
“No shortcuts, no detours, and no cats. Or old ladies and lost kids.”
Obito grumbles but takes off at a reasonable sprint. Hatsuhime glances at the clock in her entryway.
It’s fifteen and nine—he’s never going to make it on time. It would take a miracle, and Uchiha are never that lucky.
Damn that Yellow Flash! He should be working with Obito on these things—not coddling the White Fang’s son! He needs to work with all of his students, equally.
Well, he actually needs to work with some of his students (Obito) more than others, because not everyone learns at the same speed. She’s fairly certain the other two, Kakashi and Rin, are way ahead of Obito.
Hatsuhime sighs.
She’ll just have to get him up to speed herself.
She heads back inside and grabs a pen and notebook, writing out both her schedule and Obito’s.
Obito’s schedule is more erratic and prone to sudden changes than hers is (thanks to that airhead, Namikaze Minato) even with Fugaku being around to cajole her into working overtime most days.
She’ll have to learn to say no. She’s going to need every spare minute she can scrounge up to tutor Obito in ninjutsu, taijutsu, and genjutsu. She’s pretty sure whoever passed her nephew didn’t actually care if he could do the Academy Three or any of the other core skills. They just pushed him forward with everyone else in his age group.
Hatsuhime already has a lot on her plate, and she keeps piling on more. She might just have more responsibilities since taking in Obito and joining the Keimu Butai than she ever had while working as an Anbu agent.
She may be in less peril every day—and she’s definitely sleeping better—but she’s becoming more stressed with each passing day.
No one ever warned her how difficult raising a child was.