Haruto’s house was smaller than most of the homes near the Uchiha district.
No clan crest hung over the door.
No training yard out back, just a small patch of dirt where his mother grew vegetables.
“You’re home late,” she said, not looking up from the stove.
“Academy stuff.” Haruto dropped his bag by the door and flopped onto a cushion at the table.
“We learned how to fake a trail today.
Well, some of us learned how to spot one.” His father glanced over from where he was mending a torn strap on an old pack.
“Let me guess.
The Uchiha girl again.” “She figured it out before everyone else even started walking.” “Mm.” His father tied off the strap.
“You keep talking about her like she’s some kind of monster.” “She kind of is.” Haruto propped his chin on his hand.
“Most people in class either want to fight her, be near her, or a bit of both.” “And you?” Haruto considered it seriously.
“I just want her to owe me a favor eventually.
Being liked by the scary genius seems safer than being disliked.” His mother laughed at that, setting a bowl down in front of him.
“Sounds like someone has a crush.” Haruto coughed, looking slightly embarrassed.
“No way, she’s terrifying.” — Shizuku noticed Rin two days later, entirely by accident.
The academy sometimes combined classes for shared drills when the training grounds weren’t fully booked, and Class 1-C had been folded in with 1-A for an afternoon of basic taijutsu training.
She’d simply glanced across the field during a water break and recognized the girl immediately.
Rin didn’t look toward their side of the field once.
She was busy correcting her own stance, focused entirely on her own group, her own friends.
Shizuku watched for a moment, then let it go.
It wasn’t hard to work out what had happened.
Different class assignment, different instructor, the kind of split that happened to hundreds of children every year without meaning anything at all.
Just two kids sorted into different rooms by whatever margin separated their entrance scores.
She thought about what that actually meant, walking back to her own side of the field.
Obito had spent every day for weeks sitting beside Yachi.
Training with her.
Walking home with her most afternoons, the two of them slowly growing closer.
Rin was a stranger to him.
Every day that passed added more weight to one side of the scale and none to the other.
The odds of the two of them ever growing close now were basically zero.
— Three days after a Root operative he’d assigned to a surveillance task stopped reporting in, Danzo noticed.
No distress signal.
Simply a missing report, and then another silence where a second report should have followed it.
He didn’t send anyone to investigate immediately.
He reviewed the assignment himself instead.
Low-priority observation.
A single Uchiha child, unremarkable in method, meant to test whether the subject’s reported perceptiveness matched the academy evaluation on paper.
Nothing that should have resulted in the operative’s disappearance.
Nothing that should have drawn that type of response.
Danzo churned over the possibilities in his head.
The Hokage was the obvious candidate, and the least likely one.
Hiruzen had refused him plainly, without hesitation, in the same conversation where this entire matter had begun — a man who refused outright rarely bothered with quiet retaliation afterward.
It wasn’t in his nature.
Hiruzen preferred his refusals clean, his hands visibly unstained.
If he’d wanted the operative removed, he would have gone directly to Danzo or removed the operative, then questioned him.
Which left the clan.
Fugaku Uchiha was young for his position, and younger men in positions of new authority tended to overreach before they learned the value of restraint.
If word of the surveillance had reached him, perhaps a young, ambitious clan head might well have decided a personal answer served him better than a formal complaint that would only expose his own limitations in return.
Danzo couldn’t prove it.
Whatever had happened to his operative had been handled cleanly enough to leave no trace worth going after, and pursuing the matter openly would require admitting exactly what the operative had been doing there in the first place — an admission that would cost him considerably more than one low-level asset was worth.
He set the file aside.
He would simply need to watch more carefully next time, and from considerably farther away.
For now, there were other names on his list, and a war that would need every one of them eventually, one way or another.
—————————————————————————————– prob will drop another chapter since this one is very short, just got somewhere to go and thought i could end the chapter here and use what i was gonna do for the other half for the next one —————————————————————————————–