Petunia Dursley looked down at the basket on her front step.
There was a baby in it.
She looked around—was someone in her wonderfully normal neighborhood playing some sort of prank?
No, no one was watching her.
She would have known; as an expert peeper herself, she knew how to spot someone spying.
So maybe someone thought that her normal house was in fact some sort of church?
She knew it happened all the time with churches, but her house looked about as far from a church as it was possible for a good Anglican home to be.
Well then.
She knelt and opened the letter in the basket.
After a few minutes, she glared at the baby sleeping contentedly.
“Fuck Wizards.” She didn’t swear, but this was a special occasion.
She put the letter in the basket and stared at it some more.
“You know,” she said to the sleeping child.
“I can’t raise you.
I hate Wizards.
They took my sister and then they killed her.
I’d be a terrible person to raise a Wizard.
And Vernon .
.
.
he really hates anything not normal.
I just wish there was some safe place for you to go—” The basket was gone from her step.
She blinked at the open space for a few moments.
Then she picked up the milk and went inside, resolved to mention this to all of no one.
Ever.
Kisame yawned.
It was too godsdamn early in the morning to have to be awake, but the life of the nukenin was filled with unexpected hardships.
You think that once you quit your village, you’re free to do as you like and then you discover that you need to pay the bills and so you have to take jobs you don’t want anyway.
Next thing you know, you’re waking up just as early as before, only now you don’t have a warm bed to sleep in first.
Still, people got much less bent out of shape when he killed civilians, so it was better.
Madara had given him an interesting partner, too.
It was a real trip for him.
His partner was thirteen.
Seriously.
What the hell?
And to top it off, the kid was ex-ANBU and had murdered his whole family in one night before escaping his village with no one the wiser.
Even that freak Momochi hadn’t been that messed up.
Kisame was confident in his power, but he wasn’t afraid to admit that Itachi scared the shit out of him sometimes.
There was a rustle in the bushes.
That would be his partner coming back from a morning ablutions.
Kisame looked up.
Then he blinked a few times, just to check his eyes were working.
He tried pinching himself.
As a last resort, he dumped a tenth of his chakra into a dispelling.
At last, he decided to admit that this seemed to be real.
“Itachi,” he said to the stoic youth.
“Is that a baby?”
Itachi looked down at the bundle in his arms and then up at Kisame.
“Yes.
The three of them entered the main tower in Ame.
There was the usual silence from Itachi, but Kisame was not engaging in banter of any sort.
They rode the lift up to the central chamber and stepped inside to face the man who called himself Pein.
“Leader-sama,” said Kisame.
He paused.
How the hell did he put this to the man pretending to lead a terrorist organization?
Then he decided to just get this over with.
“Itachi brought a baby back with us.”
The orange haired man with piercings adorning his face blinked.
Eyes filled with rings looked around as though searching for the prank.
“What?”
“Yeah.
That was pretty much my reaction, too.” Kisame admitted.
“I’m going to raise him,” interjected Itachi.
“Nostalgia.” When he received blank stares, he went on, “my little brother would be about this age now.”
“And?” prompted Pein when no further statement seemed to be forthcoming.
“And?” replied Itachi.
Pein threw his hands up in the air.
“Just don’t let it interfere with your work.” He turned to look at a blue haired woman beside him.
“Why do I feel like my life has just become more complicated?”
Hidan stormed into the room and proceeded to, in a friendly way, attempt to disembowel Itachi.
The fourteen-year-old dodged without looking up from his book.
After two more swings, he noticed that someone was attacking him and looked up.
“Yes?”
“Your brat .
.
.” Hidan pointed at his head.
A dirty nappy was dangling off of it, covering the side of his face.
“He hit me in the head with this.”
Itachi looked at Hidan neutrally.
“Alright, so I was saying to him that I was waiting for him to get old enough to be scared and then I’d sacrifice him, but still.”
Stare.
“And then his stupid cloth comes flying off his ass and smacks me in the face.”
Stare.
Hidan growled.
“That’s the whole story.”
“You’re saying,” Itachi asked slowly, “that he managed to somehow just move his napkin from his body to your face?”
“It flew off him, yes.”
“Flew?
Not like he tossed it?”
“No.”
“So why do you think it was him?”
“There wasn’t any other fucker in the room, was there?
It had to be that little shit-maker.”
“I see.
Just for your own safety, a question: did you hurt Hari?”
“Fuck no.
I know what’d happen if I did that.
You don’t care if I take a few swings at you, but if I cough at the little bastard, you’d cut my dick off and shove it somewhere.
I figured a few threats were okay though, y’know?”
“I see.” Itachi walked slowly from the room.
As he did, his foot accidentally slipped and smashed into Hidan’s groin.
“Don’t threaten my son, Hidan.”
“Leader-sama?”
Pein looked up from his map of the world to see Itachi at the door.
“Yes?”
“Apparently Hari is doing something odd.
I don’t know how, but he managed to fling his soiled napkin into Hidan’s face without removing it.
Or something like that.
Hidan is indisposed at the moment, so I can’t ask further questions.”