Grandma had started falling asleep in her chair before dinner was finished.
It hadn’t happened all at once.
Shizuku had noticed the change gradually: a slower pace to her steps around the kitchen, meals that used to come together in twenty minutes now stretching closer to forty, her voice that used to fill up the room decreasing significantly.
Although later, Obito noticed too.
“Grandma?” He nudged her shoulder gently when her head tipped forward over her half-finished tea.
“You fell asleep.” She startled awake, blinking at both of them like she was surfacing from somewhere far away.
“Did I?
Sorry, dear.
I suppose I’m more tired these days than I used to be.” “You’re always tired now,” Obito said, and though he tried to say it lightly, there was real worry underneath it.
“You used to chase me around the whole house.” “I still could, if I wanted to.” “You haven’t done it in months.” Grandma laughed at that, but it came out thinner than her old laugh used to, and it faded faster too.
“I’m getting older, Obito.
That happens to people.” Shizuku watched her carefully across the table.
It wasn’t just tiredness.
Her hands shook faintly when she poured tea now, something Shizuku hadn’t noticed until recently, though she suspected it had been happening longer than that — she simply hadn’t been looking closely enough.
“You’ve been sad,” Shizuku said.
Grandma’s expression softened, the tired lines around her eyes deepening.
“I lost my son and daughter-in-law, sweetheart.
That kind of sadness doesn’t leave.” Neither child had a response to that.
“Don’t look so worried, both of you.” She reached across the table, patting Obito’s hand and then Shizuku’s, her grip lighter than it used to be.
“I’m still here.
I plan on being here for a good while yet, watching the two of you become something extraordinary.” Obito managed a small smile at that.
Shizuku only nodded.
— A year passed.
Grandma’s decline continued, slow and steady, though she never once complained about it and never let either child see more than she could hide.
She still fussed over them.
She still hugged too tightly, still called Shizuku her precious granddaughter every single time.
But she sat more than she stood now, and napped through afternoons she used to be lively during.
The Academy, meanwhile, had stopped being able to teach either sibling much they didn’t already understand.
It was Fugaku who first raised the idea, during one of their now-monthly training sessions at the compound.
“There is a process for early graduation,” he said, watching Obito land a technique that would have taken most genin another year to manage cleanly.
“For students whose academy scores and combat evaluations exceed the standard threshold.
It exists.” Shizuku had already known this, but knowing it existed and deciding to use it were different matters.
She thought about it for three days before deciding it was worth pursuing.
Obito didn’t need three days.
“If it means becoming a real shinobi faster, I’m doing it.” Yachi, when they told her, surprised them both by saying she wanted to apply too.
“I’ve been keeping up with your training since we started sparring together,” she said, arms crossed with a stubborn expression.
“My grandfather thinks I’m ready.
I think I’m ready.” The three applications went in within the same week — Daichi signing off on all three without much hesitation.
— The way people talked about the Uchiha had been progressively getting worse, or it was just they were getting more brazen She heard it in fragments, things not meant for her to hear, two merchants near the market, lowering their voices just slightly too late as she passed.
“…my cousin says half the Uchiha men haven’t left the village in years.
Sitting comfortably in that police building while everyone else’s husbands are out there dying.” “They call it protecting the village.
Convenient job, if you ask me.” “Convenient is one word for it.” She heard it again from an older Academy instructor, not directed at her, discussing troop deployments with a colleague in the hallway.
“The Uchiha contribution to the front lines has been…
modest, compared to their numbers.” She listened for it wherever it surfaced.
The pattern was the same: resentment aimed at a clan whose most visible role in the war effort was, from the outside, staying behind to police the very village everyone else was dying to protect.
Nobody said it directly to a clan member’s face.
Nobody was that bold, but it moved through civilian conversations.
Shizuku understood, in the abstract, exactly where this eventually led.
She’d known it long before she ever set foot in this world.
What she hadn’t decided yet was what, if anything, she intended to do about it.
She turned the question over one evening, alone in the backyard, long after Obito and Grandma had both gone to bed.
There were real benefits to keeping the clan intact, she reasoned.
A place to belong, permanently, rather than being on the run constantly.
A strong backing, numbers, training, and political weight.
Fugaku’s continued interest alone had already proven its worth more than once.
But the clan, as a body, carried problems that weren’t hers to fix so much as inherit if she stayed too close to its center for too long.
She thought, unwillingly, of Hikari Uchiha.
A woman sealed away years ago by a joint effort between the Senju and Uzumaki clans.
Powerful enough that two of the strongest bloodlines in the world had sealed her, not killed her.
And, by every account Shizuku had managed to remember from her past life, someone who hated the Uchiha clan.
Someone like that could be extraordinarily useful, if she could be brought to their side.
Someone like that would also have absolutely no reason to help preserve the very clan Shizuku was currently weighing whether to save.
She set the thought aside, unresolved.
There were other names, closer at hand, that mattered more immediately.
Two children had been born into the clan over the past few years — Itachi, into Fugaku’s own household, and Shisui.
Both, if history held any of its shape at all, would grow into precisely the kind of prodigies the clan would one day either love or hate, depending on which direction things went.
She was already close to the center of the clan’s attention.
Close enough that influencing two children, over years, wasn’t an unreasonable thing to imagine.
She could shape how they saw the world, given enough time and enough patience.
Whether that would work was still unknown, but it was worth a shot.
To save the clan or not.
She didn’t know yet.
It wasn’t a decision that needed to be made tonight, or even this year.
There was still time.
She would decide when she had enough to decide with.
For now, she would just grow stronger.