The old training grounds east of the wall were exactly as overgrown as their reputation suggested, moonlight filtering thin and gray through branches nobody had bothered clearing in years.
Shisui arrived precisely on time, because he always did, and found Danzo already waiting, alone, leaning on his cane with the specific patience of a man who had never once in his life needed to be anywhere before he chose to be.
“You came,” Danzo said, as if there had been any real doubt.
“You said you needed someone you could trust.” Shisui kept his tone light, though the low, persistent unease in his gut had sharpened to something closer to alertness the moment he’d stepped past the treeline.
“Here I am. What’s the assignment?”
“Patience.” Danzo studied him for a long moment, the bandaged eye somehow more unsettling in the dark than in daylight.
“First, I need to know something about you. Your reputation says you’re the fastest shinobi this village has produced in a generation. Faster, some say, than even the Fourth Hokage in his prime.”
“People exaggerate.”
“Do they.” Danzo’s mouth did the thing that wasn’t quite a smile.
“I don’t think they do, Shisui. I think you are exactly as remarkable as they say, and I think that remarkable quality of yours belongs to something larger than a single clan, however troubled that clan currently finds itself.”
Something in the words landed wrong, too smooth, too rehearsed, and Shisui felt the last of his hope that this might genuinely be nothing evaporate all at once.
“What are you asking me for, Danzo?”
“Your eyes,” Danzo said, and the pretense dropped from his voice entirely, cold and flat and finally, fully honest.
“Kotoamatsukami. I know what the Uchiha carry, and I know you carry the rarest version of it. I intend to have it.”
Shisui’s hand went to a kunai before he’d finished processing the sentence, old instinct moving faster than conscious thought, and Danzo was already closing the distance, cane discarded, moving with a speed that belied every year etched into his face.
“You won’t need to fight me,” Danzo said, almost gentle, almost reasonable, as if he were offering Shisui a mercy rather than a theft.
“It will be quick. You won’t remember enough of it to resent me.”
“I’ll remember plenty,” Shisui said, and moved.
He was fast — faster than Danzo, faster than nearly anyone alive — but Danzo had planned for fast, and the old man’s first strike came from an angle that shouldn’t have been possible, wind gathering visibly around his palm in a shape Shisui recognized half a second too late to fully avoid.
It clipped his shoulder instead of his throat, and the impact alone was enough to spin him hard into the dirt.
“Impressive,” Danzo said, almost admiring, closing in again.
“But not impressive enough.”
The first sign anything else was happening came as a blur of motion at the treeline — four shapes, then more, closing fast and silent, and Danzo’s head snapped up half a second before the first kunai found the space where he’d been standing.
“Danzo.” Hiruzen’s voice, carrying clear and hard across the clearing, no warmth left in it at all.
“It’s over.”
For one long moment, Danzo simply stood there, processing the shape of what had happened to him — not a meeting gone wrong, a meeting that had never been what he thought it was, engineered from somewhere he apparently hadn’t accounted for.
Then his expression settled into something colder than surprise.
“Root,” he said, quiet, and the word rippled outward through the trees like something physical.
They came from every direction at once — a dozen masked shapes, faces blank in the specific way Naruto had spent years learning to recognize from a distance, moving with total, fanatical commitment toward a man who had built every one of them into exactly this.
They didn’t hesitate.
They didn’t retreat when the Elite Anbu met them blade for blade.
They simply fought, and kept fighting, and one by one they died doing it, buying their master seconds that cost them everything.
Danzo used those seconds to move.
His remaining hand blurred through a rapid sequence — Ram, Snake, Tiger — and the air around his palm compressed into something visible, a lens of pressure that tore through the space between himself and the nearest Anbu.
“Vacuum Blast,” he said, almost conversational, and the vacuum blade took a chunk of bark the size of a man’s torso off the tree behind where the Anbu had been standing a half-second earlier.
“He’s stronger than the reports suggested,” she called, breathing hard, circling wide instead of closing straight in a second time.
“He’s had decades to make sure the reports were wrong,” Hiruzen said, and moved.
The old Hokage’s hands snapped through their own sequence — Dog, Boar, Ram — and struck the earth flat-palmed.
Stone answered him, rising in a jagged wall between Danzo and the two Anbu he’d been driving back, buying them the half-second they needed to reset their footing.
“Earth Wall,” Itachi murmured, recognizing the technique even mid-motion himself, already weaving his own hands through Tiger, Snake, Dog — and the fireball that left his mouth a breath later was enormous, orange-white and roaring, forcing Danzo to abandon his approach entirely and throw himself sideways into a roll.
“Great Fireball Technique,” Itachi said, flat, already moving into his next stance before the flames had finished dissipating.
Danzo came up from the roll already summoning, palm slamming flat against the earth, and the seal that spread out from beneath his hand was old, dense, and clearly well-practiced.
The ground itself seemed to hesitate before it answered him.
What emerged was enormous — a beast the size of a small building, hide the mottled gray-brown of old stone, a long trunk-like snout swinging low and testing the air.
Baku.
The Dream Eater.
It let out a sound that wasn’t quite a roar, more a deep, resonant pressure that Naruto’s clones, had any been present, would have felt in their teeth from streets away.
“That’s new,” one of the Anbu said, several notes higher than her usual composure.
“That’s old,” Hiruzen corrected, grim, already backing to reassess the field.
“Older than most of you. Careful — it doesn’t need to hit you cleanly to hurt you.”
Baku surged forward, and the ground itself seemed to flinch under its weight, and for a handful of seconds the fight became less a battle of technique and more a matter of simply not being where several tons of summoned beast happened to be moving.
Hiruzen met it head-on.
His hands moved through a longer sequence this time — Snake, Ram, Monkey, Boar, Horse — and the technique that rose from the earth beneath Baku’s feet was less a wall than a cage, spears of stone punching upward in a tight ring, forcing the beast to rear back rather than trample straight through.
“Rising Stone Spears,” Hiruzen said, teeth gritted against the effort of it, sweat already standing out on his brow despite the cool night air.
“It won’t hold him long. Somebody use the opening.”
Itachi used it.
Another rapid sequence, and the Phoenix Flower technique that followed wasn’t one great blast but a dozen small ones, peppering Baku’s flank in quick succession, driving it half a step back and buying exactly enough space for two Anbu to drag their wounded companion clear of its next stride.
Danzo, meanwhile, hadn’t stopped moving.
He’d used the chaos of his own summon to close distance rather than create it, and by the time Baku finally shrugged free of Hiruzen’s stone cage with a sound like a landslide, Danzo was already three steps closer to the treeline than anyone had accounted for, wind gathering again around his palm. This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
Itachi found the gap he needed in the middle of it — Danzo’s attention split between Baku’s rampage, the Anbu regrouping, and his own escape route, Root’s dying commitment upstream of all of it buying exactly the kind of opening a patient man had spent a week planning for.
“Shisui!” he shouted, no time for anything more than the word itself.
“The arm! Now!”
There was no explanation in it, no time for one, just his friend’s voice cutting clean through the noise of the fight, and Shisui — still reeling from Danzo’s betrayal, still processing the fact that Itachi had somehow known this was coming, still furious and confused and entirely unprepared to sort through any of it in the middle of a battle with a summoned beast still thrashing nearby — moved anyway.
He didn’t ask why.
There wasn’t time to ask why, and some older, more fundamental part of him didn’t need to.
Itachi had asked.
That had always, in the whole history of their friendship, been enough.
He crossed the distance in less time than it took Danzo to track the movement, and the strike landed clean and total, exactly where Itachi’s shouted instruction had aimed it.
Danzo’s right arm came away at the shoulder in a spray of blood and severed wrapping, and the old man’s scream — the first genuine sound of pain he’d made all night — tore through the clearing loud enough to still Baku itself, the great beast’s trunk swinging toward the sound.
For one heartbeat, it looked finished.
It wasn’t.
Danzo turned on the pain rather than folding into it, one-handed seals now, faster and uglier than anything he’d thrown before losing the first arm — Ram, Snake, no third sign needed, muscle memory doing what two hands used to share between them — and the vacuum technique that came off his remaining palm was wide and indiscriminate, catching Shisui mid-recovery and sending him tumbling hard across the clearing, forcing the nearest Elite Anbu back a full three steps with a shallow line opened along one forearm.
“He’s not done,” Hiruzen said, grim, already moving, hands already finding Tiger, Ox, Dog — a fresh wall of stone punching up between Danzo and the treeline, cutting off the escape route before it could be used.
Baku, riderless direction lost in the chaos, turned its bulk toward the nearest source of movement — Danzo himself, as it happened, its own summoner suddenly just another obstacle between it and the pain still echoing through the clearing — and the old man had to throw himself sideways to avoid his own summon trampling him underfoot, the distraction costing him a full second he could no longer afford to lose.
Itachi used it.
One more fireball, smaller this time, precise rather than overwhelming, driving Danzo back into the exact corner Hiruzen’s stone wall had built for him.
A one-armed man with decades of battlefield experience and nothing left to lose still fought differently than a man with everything intact — faster, wilder, every remaining technique compressed into whatever his one hand could manage, no longer conserving anything because there was nothing left to conserve for.
He drove back two Anbu at once with a final, desperate pressure wave that split bark off the nearest tree, and for a long, ugly stretch of the fight it was genuinely unclear whether Baku’s own confused rampage and four exhausted pursuers were going to be enough to bring him down before he found a gap to escape through.
“Surround him,” Itachi called, voice cutting through the chaos.
“Don’t let him find an opening to the treeline!”
They closed the circle tighter, taking the cost of it — another shallow cut, a bruised rib, one Anbu clipped hard enough by a wind blade to lose her footing entirely — and Danzo fought every inch of that closing distance like a man who understood exactly what waited for him if it succeeded and had decided, somewhere in the pain and the fury of the last several minutes, that going down fighting was preferable to whatever came after.
Baku finally lost interest in the fight entirely, wounded and disoriented, and shouldered its way back through the treeline and out of the clearing entirely, leaving a trail of splintered undergrowth and one less variable for anyone to account for.
It took Hiruzen himself, finally, to end it — closing the last of the distance in a single decisive motion, hands moving through one final sequence, and driving Danzo down with an earth-wrapped strike that carried the full, unhurried authority of a man who had been a shinobi for longer than most of the people in that clearing had been alive.
Danzo went down hard, and stayed down, and the clearing went abruptly, terribly quiet except for the ragged breathing of everyone left standing in it.
They sealed him where he lay — chakra bound, body restrained, the specific thorough containment reserved for shinobi whose reputation demanded it.
Nobody spoke for a long moment after, the adrenaline of the fight draining slowly into something heavier.
It was one of the Elite Anbu, the careful woman Itachi had served beside twice before, who finally knelt beside the severed arm and began, carefully, to unwind the ancient, blood-soaked bandages that had covered it for as long as anyone could remember.
She stopped halfway through.
Went very still.
“Hokage-sama,” she said, and her voice had lost every trace of its usual composure.
“You need to see this.”
Hiruzen crossed to her slowly, and Itachi watched his old, tired face change as he looked down at what the unwound bandages revealed — implanted along the length of the severed limb, dozens of them, embedded deep in flesh that had clearly held them for years.
Eyes.
Sharingan, unmistakably, arranged in careful rows like a collection curated with the same cold patience Danzo brought to everything else.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
There wasn’t anything adequate to say.
“How long,” Hiruzen said finally, to no one, to the arm, to the man lying sealed and unconscious a few feet away.
“How long has he been doing this.”
Nobody answered, because nobody knew, and the not-knowing was its own kind of horror.
“Torture and Interrogation,” Hiruzen said, once he’d found his voice again, and there was nothing soft left in it at all.
“Ibiki Morino. Inoichi Yamanaka. I want everything he knows extracted, and I want it extracted carefully, and I want him watched every single hour he draws breath from this moment forward.”
“He was my friend,” Hiruzen said, unprompted, and something in his face had gone somewhere Itachi had never seen it go before, decades of complicated loyalty finally, visibly breaking under weight it could no longer bear.
“Whatever he is now, wearing whatever’s left of that man’s face — that ended tonight. Take him.”
They did, and the clearing emptied slowly around the aftermath, Root’s dead left where they’d fallen for now, the whole grim business of a war fought entirely in shadows finally, briefly, dragged into the light.
They stood apart from the others afterward, Shisui cradling his injured shoulder, Itachi watching him with an expression more unguarded than Shisui had seen from him in longer than he could remember.
“You knew,” Shisui said.
Not an accusation.
Just a fact, settling into place.
“I knew.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough.” Itachi’s jaw tightened.
“I couldn’t tell you. If you’d known, if you’d changed anything about how you carried yourself around him even slightly, he might have felt it. I needed you exactly as unaware as you actually were.”
Shisui was quiet for a moment, turning it over, and then, slowly, something in his face shifted — not away from the hurt of it, exactly, but around it, making room for something else alongside.
“You used me as bait,” he said.
“Yes.”
“For weeks. Maybe months.”
“And you’re going to stand there and just say yes both times, like that settles it.”
“It’s the truth both times,” Itachi said.
“I don’t have a better answer than that.”
Shisui studied him a long moment, and then, unexpectedly, he laughed — short, disbelieving, real.
“You absolute disaster of a best friend.” He winced, favoring the shoulder, and the laugh cracked into something more tired but no less genuine.
“You know I’m going to hold this over you for the rest of both our lives.”
“I assumed.”
“I mean it. Every time you’re insufferably smug about something, I’m bringing this up. ‘Remember that time you used me as Root bait and didn’t tell me.’ Forever. That’s the deal now.”
“That seems fair.”
“It’s not fair. It’s extortion.” Shisui grinned, wincing again as the expression pulled at something in his shoulder.
“You owe me a punch to the face for this, by the way. A real one. I’m cashing that in eventually, when I’m not busy bleeding.”
“I’ll allow it.”
“You’ll allow it,” Shisui repeated, delighted despite himself.
“Very generous of you.” He looked at his friend for a long moment, something warmer settling underneath the exhaustion and the ache in his shoulder.
“For what it’s worth — I get it. Why you did it this way. Doesn’t mean I liked finding out mid-fight that my best friend orchestrated the worst night of my year.”
“No. I imagine it doesn’t.”
“But I trust you.” Shisui said it simply, without ceremony, the same easy conviction he’d carried into every version of their friendship so far.
“Crappy plan. Right call. Both things can be true.”
Itachi’s mouth moved, finally, into something that was unmistakably, fully a smile.
“Punch’s still coming, though,” Shisui added.
“Don’t think I’m letting that go.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The rumor beat him to breakfast.
He caught the tail end of it at Ichiraku’s — two chunin at the far end of the counter, voices dropped low but not low enough, trading fragments they’d clearly each only half-verified.
Elder Danzo.
An arrest.
Something about the arm.
Teuchi refilled his bowl without comment, either not listening or too practiced at not seeming to.
Naruto ate slowly and said nothing, the way he’d trained himself to say nothing about exactly this kind of thing for exactly this long.
They don’t know what they’re talking about, Kurama said.
Wouldn’t matter if they did.
I already know what’s under those bandages.
Naruto turned his chopsticks over, considering the broth.
What I don’t have is the rest of it.
Whose face went white first.
What Hiruzen actually said, standing over it.
I know the fact.
I don’t know the weight of it — not the way the people who were actually standing there do.
You’ve built yourself a strange kind of blindness, Kurama said.
Knowing the ending and missing the middle.
It’s the only kind I get to have, Naruto thought.
I’ll take it.
One of the chunin at the counter said something that made the other one go pale, and Naruto didn’t turn to look, and didn’t need to.
Whatever it was, it would keep.
Everything eventually did, in a village this size.
He finished the bowl.
Left exact change.
Walked out into a morning that looked, to everyone else in it, exactly like every other morning it had ever produced.
Shisui and Itachi, he thought, once he was clear of the crowd.
That’s the part I actually needed confirmed.
Both accounted for.
Both walking.
Then it worked.
He let that sit for a moment, turning it over the way he turned over most things lately — not with triumph, not quite, but with something close enough to satisfy him.
Everything else is just the cost of it.
Kurama didn’t answer that one, which was its own kind of agreement, and Naruto kept walking, unremarkable, unhurried, carrying a piece of the previous night that would never once show on his face.