Chapter 3: Meetings and Other Unforgivable Acts

It was a time to Gain the Advantage. It was a time for Action. It was a time to Wage War. But the Third Hokage knew better. Danzou was a shadow, an illusion. Nothing more. Most people in Konoha would not even know his name. Hiruzen knew what people call those who wage war on shadows.

They call them fools.

So it was not a time for War. It was not a time for Action. It was a time for something far, far worse.

It was a time for Meetings.

And so the once-retired Third Hokage of the village of Konoha gathered his weapons and prepared to wage peace upon his foes. The Hokage donned his armor for this battle: his robe and hat of office. It would be made clear to all that he spoke as leader of the village. He gathered his most trusted allies and enacted a plan made years before, one that he had often hoped to never have the opportunity to use.

Perhaps, if everything had gone smoothly for Root... Perhaps, if Danzou had succeeded in forcing poor Itachi to betray his clan... Perhaps then, this might not have worked.

But that was not the world they lived in.

Danzou had stepped out of line in acting alone, but Hiruzen knew that the elders would forgive a success, only pretending at disapproval. Doing what needed to be done, even if he was hated for it, was ever Danzou's idiom, after all. But he hadn't succeeded, had he? At least, not cleanly.

Hiruzen sighed to himself. If he had learned one thing during all his time as leader of Konoha it was this: When it came to effecting social change, not even the most dreaded of Uchiha mind-altering illusions could ever hope to compare with the raw might of several powerful people coming together to complain in the middle of the night.

Hiruzen stood up from his desk and stretched his old bones. On the writing desk before him lay several scrolls.

Now it was time to give them all the same thing to complain about.

Hawks flew through the night. Midnight messengers knocked at gates. By this point anyone important had heard something and was already dressed and prepared for the worst. The prospect of civil war tends to make people rest uneasily.

The village elders, minus Danzou, were interrupted in the act of calling an emergency council meeting by an urgent messenger who informed them all that the Third Hokage had just summoned them to an emergency council meeting.

Throughout the village, numerous clan heads received long-expected messengers carrying unexpected messages. Group after group left clan compounds with scowls on their faces. If they were going to be up in the middle of the night, the least they could do was yell at someone about it.

So it was that the emergency council-meeting was interrupted as the doors to the council chamber crashed open. The village elders sat, exchanging nervous glances with one another as the Hyuuga Clan Head entered. The Hokage sat, stone-faced.

"This is an outrage!" roared Hyuuga Hiashi, blood pounding through his veins. "Is this how Konoha wishes to treat its bloodline clans? Are the Hyuuga next in line?!"

One elder managed to get her thoughts together swiftly enough to respond. "Unfortunately, we had information to suggest that the Uchiha were planning an uprising or rebellion against-"

"And so you slaughtered them?!" The head of the Hyuuga clan had now clearly activated his Byakugan, the treasured White Eyes that gave them a supreme edge in combat and reconnaissance. "I may not have always agreed with the Uchiha, and in fact I might have occasionally despised them, but we both have the honor of being founding members of Konoha! Uprising? Rebellion against the village?! Ridiculous! Our families are the village!"

Several Hyuuga clan-members stood behind him, stoic and motionless. Though they did not seem to be staring at any council-member in particular, the Byakugan meant you never could quite tell.

"And now, by all my information they are essentially gone. Never to recover their strength! How many remain? Ten? Twenty? Please inform me what I must do for my family to avoid a visit from ANBU in the middle of the night, because I would regret the inconvenience of having to pile the corpses of your trained assassins outside my gate in the morning. Or does this too count as talk of rebellion?"

The elders watched, wide-eyed. The Hokage was next to speak. "I apologize to you as well as to the entire village. A specific ANBU leader took action against my explicit orders. This was my failure, and my first priority will be erasing this problem, even if I must dig it out by its... roots."

"Oh, I expect that you will. I know all about this. Danzou's gone too far this time. He should make sure he doesn't give me cause to deal with him myself. I expect this matter to be resolved by the end of the day tomorrow." Shooting a final glance to certain elders, Hiashi escorted himself out of the building. The doors slammed shut behind him.

Taking a deep breath, the elders exchanged a weary glance. The Hokage did not move a single inch. After a time, the one of the elders spoke up.

"Well, that was certainly-"

He was frozen in mid-sentence by blood-curdling canine howls coming from outside, just before the doors slammed open once again. Again they were interrupted by a clan leader with demands.

And again. And again. And again.

Behind his steepled fingers, the Third Hokage allowed the smallest of smiles to flicker across his deeply wrinkled face.

Root had faced a much harder fight than expected. In isolating the entire population of the Uchiha clan for the attack, they had neglected something crucial. Blood, loss, and death were, in a way, the crucible in which Uchiha power was forged. It was the fan to their flame. That night, every link of love was a trap. Every person inside that compound an upset waiting to happen. The truth was, though many of the Uchiha managed to earn their Sharingan during their careers as ninja, the heart-rending personal loss and desperation that led to its further evolution was usually a blessedly rare occurrence.

That night, no fewer than ten pairs of Mangekyou Sharingan activated from those who failed to protect those closest to them. Each one brought new powers to the fray, untested, random, and furious.

All-in-all, it had been a terrible night for everyone involved.

It was less than three hours after the council meeting had ended before a drastically weakened Root was dug out of its hole. Despite everything, Danzou had escaped. As night turned into morning, Danzou was caught in an underground laboratory, spattered with blood, scavenging from the corpses of several Uchiha. He disappeared before he could be pinned down, and no one knew what would come of it all.

The next step came swiftly afterward. Hiruzen knew that everything Danzou did was what he believed to be good for the village. Danzou and his Root had seemed like necessary evils, but his actions were no longer even predictable. Root must be dissolved, its members and functions carefully incorporated into ANBU. A kill order for Danzou was signed shortly thereafter.

It would be quite a few years before Konoha got any intel at all on Danzou's whereabouts.

The Uchiha had been crushed. Fewer than twenty individuals had survived the chaos of that night. Every single capable combatant had been killed protecting- or avenging- their families.

Though the other clans were quite willing to help punish those who had been responsible for this slaughter, their sense of responsibility did not extend to fighting for the Uchiha's well-being. The rebellious clan was quietly separated and watched carefully for further signs of collaboration.

Young Sasuke was not given to any distant relation, fostered, or abandoned to an orphanage. A week after the massacre, he found himself desperately alone, curled up on a mat inside a sparsely furnished apartment in a run-down building he'd never seen before in his life. The tears still came from time to time, but he had been surprised to find that you really could only cry for so long before it all started to run out. It was all just the same after a while. One thing was new though. He'd discovered it was possible to both feel immense loneliness and not want to see any other person at all at the same time. His emotions were both wild and dull, as well as being wholly unpredictable.

This time it was rage that boiled up inside of him when he heard the raucous knocking at his door. It demanded attention. Sasuke ignored it nonetheless. The people who had been watching him would just open the door if they wanted to come in.

The wild knocking continued, seemingly without pattern or rhythm, as the seconds lengthened into minutes.

Seriously, what the hell was up with this person? Sasuke had not yet even taken a single music lesson, but he felt certain you could only pound on a door for so long before developing a pattern or something. He was pretty sure his brother had told him that high-level shinobi have to train for years just to prevent themselves from falling into even the slightest of patterns.

Well, maybe the Intelligence and Interrogation people would like to come down and try to decode this, because he sure as hell couldn't.

The knocking continued. Now there was whistling to go along with it. The knocker was clearly settling in for the long haul. Eyes wide, brow furrowed, still curled up on the floor, Sasuke ground his teeth together.

Maybe this was torture? Or some Genjutsu? He doubted his brother had ever had to train to resist people knocking off-beat (he had), or whistling off-key (basic Genjutsu training), or making stupid noises really loudly (saved his life twice already).

Finally, Sasuke got up and answered the door.

"WHAT! Do you WANT?!"

The grin that stared back at him was not actually more irritating than anything he had experienced in the last week, but he could, perhaps, be forgiven for not making a distinction at that moment. The new child adjusted a pair of goggles that were stuck awkwardly in a pile of messy blond hair, and he seemed extremely satisfied with himself. He began shouting immediately.

"Heya new neighbor! I'm Uzumaki Naruto, and I'm gonna become the Hokage someday! Nice to meetcha!"

If this scene had occurred five years later, Naruto would have watched, dumbfounded, as he witnessed the birth of Sasuke's Sharingan. Unfortunately, today Sasuke really only had one option.

In Naruto's mind, it seemed just a bit of an overreaction when Sasuke screamed right in his face and bull-rushed him back into the hallway. Crashing straight through the open window opposite his door seemed unwarranted too, but, hey, whatever. Being punched repeatedly on the way down to the street was just the icing on top of an already complete surprise-attack.

From his perch on a nearby building, Sarutobi Asuma winced as he watched the two screaming children come hurtling through the second story window to land in a pile of packing material down below.

Asuma really hoped his father knew what he was doing with this one.

Years later, neither Sasuke nor Naruto would remember this day very accurately, due to a haze of bloodlust and head-trauma, respectively. They would, however, agree that they couldn't really imagine where things would have gone without it. Both were, in a certain way, outcasts.

Now, they were outcasts together.