Chapter 54: The First of Hopefully Many.
The road was empty, the scout reported, kneeling on the floor of the room under the room under the Foundation's archive, with the dust of the eastern highway still on his sandals. He'd gone out at dusk with two others. They'd walked the stretch between the Hanawa turnoff and the second mile marker three times, the last time on their hands and knees with lanterns.
No bodies. No blood. No scorch marks, no crater, no broken branches that a storm couldn't explain. A patch of fresh soil near the middle of the road that might have been anything. A few young trees with their leaves stripped on one side. That was all.
"Twelve…" Danzō said.
"No sign of any of them, Lord Danzō."
Danzō Shimura sat at his desk in the dark and didn't light the lamp.
Twelve of his best. Four who'd trained a year to fight with their eyes on a target's feet. Four who'd had the rare talent of barrier ninjutsu. Four who'd taken hostages in numerous nations and walked them out through two checkpoints with nobody the wiser. He'd chosen every one of them himself.
And Mikoto Uchiha had walked back through the gate in the late afternoon without a scratch on her.
He'd known it was over by nightfall. He'd sat in this chair waiting for the next thing to happen, and nothing had happened, and that was worse. No report to the tower. No knock on his door. The girl had gone home and eaten dinner. The tower had stayed dark.
Somebody had told her to stay quiet.
Then, at midmorning, the Hokage's guard had come.
Danzō rose. He straightened his robes. He considered, for the length of one breath, sending a shadow clone in his place.
He didn't. Hiruzen would know. Hiruzen always knew. And if he sent a clone into that office today, it would be the last thing he ever sent into it.
Hiruzen didn't look up when he came in.
He was sitting behind his desk with his pipe unlit in one hand and a scroll open in front of him. Four more scrolls sat in a row on the corner of the desk, sealed, their red wax facing down. The shutters were drawn. The guard who'd brought Danzō up the stairs closed the door behind him and did not stay.
"Sit down, Danzō."
Danzō sat.
For a long time, Hiruzen kept reading. Danzō knew the trick. Let the man sit. Let him wonder what's in the scroll. Let him start filling the silence with his own fear.
He kept his hands folded and his face empty and waited.
Hiruzen rolled the scroll closed. He set it aside. He reached for the first of the four on the corner of the desk, turned it over so the wax faced up, and broke the seal with his thumb.
The body came out onto the floor between them in a puff of smoke.
Dark clothes. No markings. A kunai wound at the base of the skull. A long diagonal cut across the face, from brow to jaw, through the bridge of the nose and both lips. Danzō knew the face. He'd recruited this one at nine years old from a family whose parents had both died on the Kusa border, and he'd watched him grow up in the dark, and he'd sealed his tongue at thirteen.
Hiruzen bent down, pressed the dead man's jaw open with two fingers, and turned the head toward the light from the window.
Three solid lines. Two broken.
"Tell me what that is, if you don’t mind." Hiruzen said.
Danzō looked at the seal for a long moment.
"You know what it is."
"I want to hear you say it."
"It is the seal of the Foundation," Danzō said. "As you well know. As you have known since the day you allowed it."
"Yes." Hiruzen let the jaw close. He sat back. "Since the day I allowed it."
The air in the room changed.
It came on slowly at first. A weight in the chest. A pressure at the back of the neck. The paper on the desk began to curl at its edges. The ink in the open well shivered, then went still, then shivered again, and the four sealed scrolls on the corner of the desk rolled half a turn on their own and stopped.
Danzō had felt killing intent before.
However, he had never felt it from Hiruzen. Not once in their long relationship.
It was like a hand on the back of his skull, pressing his face toward the floor.
"You sent twelve men," Hiruzen said quietly, "down a road in the Land of Fire. Our road. Hours from our gate. To kill a jonin of this village who has saved more of its shinobi than any medic who has ever lived."
"I sent them to remove a threat to this village."
"A threat to this village?" Hiruzen almost laughed.
"An Uchiha," Danzō’s voice didn’t rise. "A fourteen-year-old Uchiha with a fully matured Sharingan, who stood in front of Hanzō of the Salamander and walked away. Who has half the shinobi of this village owing her their lives. Who will soon have the other half owing her their arms and legs and eyes. In ten years, every shinobi in Konoha will owe her something, and every one of them will remember whose clan she belongs to." He held Hiruzen's eyes. "You've heard Homura say it. You've thought it yourself. Gratitude becomes loyalty. Loyalty becomes a faction. And a faction with an Uchiha at its heart is the one thing Tobirama-sensei spent his whole life making sure this village would never have."
"Don't."
"He would have done the same."
"Don't!" Hiruzen said, and the killing intent doubled, and the window shutters rattled in their frames.
Danzō's fingers had gone white where they were folded together. He didn't move them.
"Tobirama-sensei," Hiruzen said, very low, "trusted an Uchiha with his own life. Do you remember? You were there. Kagami stood in sensei’s escort beside you. Sensei trusted him with all of our lives that night. Sensei didn't love the Uchiha, Danzō, I know that better than anyone. But he did not murder their children on the road."
"He made the Military Police so he wouldn't have to."
Hiruzen didn't answer that. For a moment, something passed over his face that might have been agreement, and it was gone.
"Do you know who else was on that road?" he said instead.
Danzō said nothing.
"Senju Nawaki." Hiruzen leaned forward. "Tsunade's brother. Hashirama-sama's grandson. Tobirama-sensei's grand-nephew. Twelve years old. Your men went for him and two little girls to use them as knives against their sensei, and he tore his own body apart from the inside to stop them. He killed three of them. He is lying in his sister's house right now and he cannot lift a cup of water." His voice cracked on the last words. "Sensei's grand-nephew, Danzō. You sent them at sensei's grand-nephew."
"The boy was never a target."
"The boy was on the road."
"Acceptable…"
Danzō stopped.
He'd heard the word coming out of his mouth and stopped it halfway, and it was too late, and they both knew it.
Hiruzen sat back very slowly.
The killing intent vanished.
That was worse.
"Tsunade was in this office this morning," Hiruzen said. His voice was tired now. Only tired. "She thought ANBU had done it. Then Mikoto Uchiha sat in that chair where you're sitting and told me everything. The road. The barrier. The masks. The seal. She tried to take your man's memories and your seal burned them in front of her, and she told me that too." He nodded at the body on the floor. "And when I asked her why she hadn't come to me yesterday, she said she'd gone to her clan head first."
Danzō went still.
"Tajimu Uchiha saw the seal before I did," Hiruzen said. "He saw it last night by lantern light in his own garden. He knows what it is. He knows whose it is. He was in the room the day we told the clan heads the Foundation existed, and he has never said one word about it since. He'll say a great many words now."
"Then he has a dead man's tongue and a story. That's nothing."
"She brought me four bodies." Hiruzen gestured at the scrolls. "Four. Out of twelve. The other eight, she says, were not recoverable."
Danzō didn't say anything.
He'd done this work for thirty years. He knew exactly what eight missing bodies meant, in the hands of a clan head who'd had them overnight. Eight tongues. Eight faces. Eight sets of clothing and weapons and training scars that could be laid out in front of the Hyūga, or the Nara, or the Fire Daimyō's court, any morning Tajimu Uchiha chose.
"You'll have to resign, my friend." Hiruzen said.
"Hiruzen."
"Tomorrow morning. In front of Homura and Koharu. You'll give up your seat on this council. You'll give up the Foundation. Every name, every safehouse, every operation in the field and every operation planned. And you'll lift every seal on every tongue, or you'll show me how, and I will find someone who can."
"The seals don't simply lift…"
"Then you'll make them." Hiruzen put the pipe in his mouth, unlit. "Or I'll take this to the clan heads myself, Danzō, before Tajimu does. All of it. And I'll let them decide what to do with you. You know them. You know what they'll decide."
They looked at each other across the desk. Forty years. The Academy. The war. The night the Kinkaku Force closed around them, and sensei asked which of them would stay behind as the decoy. Danzō had known the answer. He’d tried to say it. He couldn’t. And when Hiruzen said it instead, part of him had been relieved.
Then sensei chose Hiruzen for the hat.
He’d never forgiven him for either.
"You were always going to choose the easy road." Danzō spat.
"Get out." Hiruzen said. "Tomorrow morning."
Danzō rose. He looked down once at the body on the floor, the orphan from the Kusa border with his face cut open, and then he walked out and down the stairs and didn't look back as several ANBU followed him from various points when he made it outside.
Hiruzen sat alone with the dead man for a long time.
Then he sealed him back up, and turned the scroll over, and put his face in his hands.
Homura took it worse than Koharu.
He stood at the window of the council room the next morning with his back to the table while Hiruzen talked, and when Hiruzen got to the part about Nawaki, he put one hand flat on the window frame and left it there.
"I said it should be thought about," he said, without turning around. "In this room. I said the Uchiha should be thought about. I didn't say this." His voice was thick. "I didn't say this, Danzō."
"You said what I needed said," Danzō answered, from his chair. "You always did."
Homura turned around.
Koharu put a hand on his arm before he could cross the room. She was a small, sharp-faced woman with her grey hair pinned up tight and a stack of papers in her lap, and she hadn't stopped writing numbers since Hiruzen started talking.
"Twelve," she said. "Jonin level. All of them. In the middle of a war where we need every man available." She looked up from the paper at Danzō with no expression at all. "Do you know how many shinobi we've lost in the Land of Rain this month, Danzō? I do. I count them. Every one. Twelve jonin are invaluable at a time like this."
"We will win the war, twelve jonin or not. An Uchiha with the whole village in her debt is a problem for the next fifty years."
"And now she's a problem with the whole village in her debt and a reason." Koharu set her brush down. "Congratulations."
Danzō said nothing.
"What will Tajimu want?" Koharu asked Hiruzen.
"His head." Homura said, looking at Danzō.
"No." Danzō said.
They all looked at him.
"Tajimu Uchiha is not a fool. A head is a satisfying thing for an evening. Then it rots." Danzō's voice was flat and dry, as though he were discussing someone else's mistake. "He'll ask for my chair."
The room went very quiet.
"He won't get it." Homura said.
"He'll get something." Koharu said. "He has to. He's holding eight bodies we'll never see and a story we can't let leave this village. The question is what we give him that costs us least." She tapped her brush against the edge of the paper. "Something that looks large. Something he can carry home to his clan and wave over his head. And something that keeps him away from this table."
"The Foundation." Homura said slowly.
Danzō's eyes moved to him. It was the first time anything had shown in them all morning.
"Think about it…" Homura went on. He wasn't looking at Danzō now. He was looking at Hiruzen. "The Foundation needs a new head. It can't be Danzō. Give it to the Uchiha. It's power, it's real power, and it's the kind nobody ever sees. No seat. No vote. No voice in this room. They work in the dark for the village, the same as they've worked in the street for the village since Tobirama-sensei gave them the police. It keeps them busy. It keeps them grateful. It keeps them out there." He nodded at the window, at the village. "And not in here."
Hiruzen was quiet for a while.
"You'd hand the Uchiha a secret army?" He questioned.
"We’d hand the Uchiha a leash," Homura said, "and let them think it was a gift."
“They’d have to lift the seals,” Koharu said. “Every man in the Foundation answers to Danzō’s tongue seal. Tajimu would want that gone.”
Danzō laughed a short dry laugh.
“You’ve been sitting beside me for forty years,” Danzō said, “and you still think the Uchiha are stupid.” He stood up. He took a folded paper from inside his robe and set it on the table in front of Hiruzen. "My resignation. From this council and from the Foundation. Effective this morning. I've written it so it says I'm stepping down for my health." He looked at Hiruzen. "My health is excellent, as you know. But the clan heads will need to be told something."
Hiruzen took the paper and unfolded it and read it.
"The names?" He asked.
"You'll have them by tonight."
"All of them." Hiruzen met Danzō’s eyes.
Danzō inclined his head a fraction of an inch. It might have been a yes.
He walked to the door. He stopped with his hand on it.
"Offer him the Foundation if you like," he said, without turning. "He'll refuse it. And when he does, you'll give him my chair, because you won't have anything else left to give." He opened the door. "I'd have liked to see Tobirama-sensei's face."
The door closed behind him.
Nobody said anything for a while.
"If Tajimu refuses the Foundation," Koharu said at last, "where does it go?"
"To me." Hiruzen said. He was looking at the resignation. "Folded into ANBU. Under the Hokage's direct command, where it should have been from the beginning. Every seal lifted. Every name on a list I can read."
He'd find out that night how short the list was.
Tajimu came two days later.
He came in the afternoon, alone, in formal robes of dark grey with the Uchiha fan stitched across the back in red and white silk, and he bowed in the doorway of the council room exactly as deeply as protocol required and not one hair deeper.
"Lord Hokage. Homura-dono. Koharu-dono."
"Tajimu." Hiruzen gestured to the chair across the table. "Thank you for coming."
"You sent for me." Tajimu sat. He set his hands on his knees. He looked at the fourth chair at the table, the empty one at Hiruzen's right hand, and then he looked away from it as though it didn't interest him at all. "I assume it's about my clan's daughter."
"It is."
Hiruzen told him.
A rogue element in the Foundation. Orders given without the Hokage's knowledge. The man responsible removed from every position he held, as of two mornings ago. The Foundation itself to be reformed under new leadership. The Hokage's personal regret that a member of his village had been endangered on a road in her own country, and his gratitude that she and her students had survived.
Tajimu listened without moving. When Hiruzen finished, he nodded once.
"Danzō Shimura?" He questioned.
"He resigned for his health," Koharu said. "That's what the clan heads will be told."
"His health." Tajimu's mouth rose at one corner. "I'm sure it's very poor at the moment."
"The Foundation needs a new head," Homura said. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. He'd clearly been practicing this. "It's important work, Tajimu. Vital work. Work that keeps this village standing while the rest of us sleep. It needs someone strong. Someone with discipline. Someone whose clan understands what it means to serve the village without needing to be thanked for it." He paused. "The Hokage would like to offer it to the Uchiha."
Tajimu held back his laugh.
"No, thank you." He immediately responded.
"You haven't even heard the terms…"
"I don't need to hear the terms." Tajimu turned his head and looked at Hiruzen instead. "When Tobirama Senju was Hokage, he looked at my clan and saw a weapon that needed somewhere to point. He gave us the police. Very generous. An honor, they told my father. The Uchiha, guardians of the village's peace." His voice didn't rise. "Do you know what the police is, Lord Hokage? It's the job nobody thanks you for. It's arresting a drunk Inuzuka on festival night and having the whole clan hate you for a month. It's standing on the street corner in the clan crest so every merchant and every child and every farmer coming in the gate learns to look at the fan and feel watched." He spread his hands. "All these years we've done it. We've done it well. And every year the village likes us a little less for it."
"Tajimu…"
"And now you'd give us this." Tajimu nodded at Homura. "Men in masks with no faces. Men who kill in the dark and never come home and never have names on any stone. The Foundation. The work so dirty you won't even let it be ANBU." He looked from one of them to the next. "Why is it always us? Why do the Uchiha always get the jobs meant for the bad men?"
Nobody answered.
"And I'll tell you what else." Tajimu's voice dropped. "Every man in that Foundation has a seal on his tongue. Whose seal?"
Silence.
"His. You'd hand me a hundred men whose tongues belong to the man who tried to kill my clan's daughter. And you'd smile while you did it." He sat back. "No. I don't want the Foundation. Fold it into ANBU. Burn it. Bury it. I don't care. Keep it far away from my clan."
Koharu glanced at Hiruzen. Hiruzen didn't look back at her.
"Then what does the Uchiha clan want?" Koharu asked. "Compensation? The clan's losses in the war have been heavy. A stipend for the families…"
"No."
"Expanded authority for the police, then. Jurisdiction over the outer districts. A voice in the gate assignments…"
"No."
"Commands in ANBU," Homura said. "Two. Three. Uchiha jonin, heading their own squads, reporting directly to the Hokage."
"No."
He looked at the empty chair at Hiruzen's right hand. This time, he didn't look away.
"I want that." He pointed.
Nobody spoke.
Out in the corridor, a messenger went by at a run, sandals slapping, and was gone. Down in the street, somebody's child was crying. Homura's breath went in through his nose and didn't come back out.
"That's not possible." Homura said.
"Why?"
"Because it isn't how this council has ever…"
"Why?" Tajimu said again. He didn't raise his voice. He put both hands flat on the table. "I'm asking honestly. I want to understand. The Uchiha and the Senju built this village together. Hashirama-sama and Madara shook hands at the river, and everything in this room exists because of that handshake. The Senju have held the hat twice. A Sarutobi holds it now." He nodded at Hiruzen without any malice in it at all. "The Shimura sat in that chair at your right hand for twenty years. Every one of the families that came here from the warring years has had something. Except one."
"The Hokage's advisors have always been chosen for their service," Koharu said. "Not their blood."
"Danzō Shimura is the head of his clan."
"He was chosen because he was Tobirama-sensei's student. All three of us were. That's the precedent, Tajimu. The seats go to those who served under sensei himself."
“So did Kagami Uchiha.”
Koharu’s mouth closed.
“Kagami stood in the Second Hokage’s escort beside Danzō Shimura,” Tajimu said. “The same unit. The same night.” He looked at Hiruzen. “One of them was given a chair at your right hand. If Kagami had lived, Lord Hokage, would he have had this one? Or would you have found a reason?”
Hiruzen didn't answer.
"And there's the balance to think of," Homura said. His voice had gone hard. "You know it as well as I do. Seat the Uchiha, and next week the Hyūga are at this door. Then the Nara. Then the Aburame and the Akimichi and every family with a crest and a grievance. This council works because it's small. Three voices and the Hokage. It can't hold every clan in the village."
"Then don't seat every clan. Seat one more." Tajimu shrugged. "And when the Hyūga come, tell them the truth. That the Uchiha got their seat because a fourteen-year-old girl of our clan has kept a thousand of this village's shinobi alive, and was nearly murdered on her own road for it by a member of this council. If the Hyūga can put forward someone who's done the same, they're welcome to the next chair."
Homura's face had gone red. "Then what makes you fit for it?" He asked. "Beyond your name? A seat at this table is more than a crest on your back, Tajimu. It's decisions. It's lives. It's knowing which front to bleed so another one can hold. What do you know about any of that, beyond what your father taught you?"
Tajimu looked at him with something that was almost pity.
"I've been the head of the Uchiha clan for twenty-two years," he said. "I've been the chief of this village's police for sixteen. I've sent several of my own clan members to this war and buried just as many. I've signed arrest orders on Senju and Hyūga and Sarutobi alike and stood in front of their clan heads the next morning to explain why. I command four hundred officers, Homura-dono. I keep the peace of a village of tens of thousands of people with them." He tilted his head. "Tell me which of those disqualifies me."
Homura simply glared.
Tajimu turned back to Hiruzen.
"Give me one good reason," he said quietly. "One. Why the Uchiha shouldn't sit at the heart of the village we built. Give me one good reason, Lord Hokage, and I'll stand up from this table and walk out and never ask again."
Hiruzen looked at him.
He had a reason.
He’d had it his whole life. He’d learned it around a campfire during the First War, with sensei’s escort unit sharing the fire, Danzō and Torifu on one side and Kagami across from him, while Tobirama-sensei talked about the clans.
The Uchiha love more deeply than any of us, sensei had said. That is what makes them dangerous. When an Uchiha loses what he loves, the love doesn't die. It turns. It becomes hatred, and the eyes feed on it, and it grows. It is a curse in the blood. Never forget it. Treat them well. Treat them fairly. Give them honor and work and respect.
But never give them the village.
Kagami had been sitting right there. He'd heard every word of it. He'd gone on smiling and training and laughing with them all the same, and he'd died in the field ten years later without ever once giving any of them a reason to remember that lesson.
And Hiruzen had remembered it anyway. Every day for thirty years.
That was the reason.
He couldn't say it. Not to this man of all people. Especially after what just happened. If he said it out loud, here, today, he would be saying that Danzō had been right.
The silence stretched.
Koharu looked down at her papers. Homura looked at the window.
Tajimu waited.
"I thought not." He said gently.
He stood up. He smoothed the front of his robes.
"I've taken up enough of the council's time," he said. "I'll be meeting with the clan heads this week. The Nara. The Hyūga. The Inuzuka. I imagine they'll want to hear about it." He paused. "The Hyūga main house has a daughter who'd be dead in a Suna ditch if not for Mikoto. The Nara, Yamanaka and Akimichi heirs owe her their lives, every one of them. The Inuzuka will want to know what happened to the girl Tsume, who was on that road too, and who still thinks it was bounty hunters." He looked down at Hiruzen. "And they'll want to know what was found on it."
Hiruzen kept his face exactly as it was.
Eight bodies, he thought. He has eight damn bodies.
He couldn't ask. To ask would be to admit how badly he needed to know. And Tajimu hadn't said a single word about bodies. He'd only said what was found, in a calm voice, and let Hiruzen fill in the rest himself.
"Sit down, Tajimu." Hiruzen sighed.
Tajimu sat.
"There'd be a condition…" Hiruzen said.
Homura grumbled. Koharu put her hand on his arm again.
"Go on." Tajimu said.
"A member of this council advises the Hokage on every arm of the village. Including the police." Hiruzen set the pipe down on the table. "No one can sit at this table and command the police at the same time. It's too much in one pair of hands. If the Uchiha take the seat, you give up the police. Someone else wears the chief's badge. Someone who answers to this council like every other commander in the village."
"Done." said Tajimu.
He said it so fast that Hiruzen blinked.
And in that blink, Hiruzen understood that Tajimu had walked into this room already knowing what the price would be, and had already decided to pay it, and had probably already decided who'd be wearing that badge by the end of the week.
You came here for the chair, Hiruzen thought. From the first moment. Everything else was just to make me offer it.
Danzō had seen it. Danzō had told them. He'll ask for my chair.
"Then it's decided." Hiruzen looked about twenty years older.
"Hiruzen. Think about what…" Homura tried to speak.
"I have," Hiruzen said. "For two days. I've thought about nothing else." He didn't look at Homura. He was looking at the empty chair. "It's decided."
Tajimu rose. He bowed, exactly as deeply as protocol required, and not one hair deeper.
"The Uchiha clan thanks the Hokage for his infinite wisdom."
He walked out.
He didn't smile until he was all the way down the stairs, out of the tower, and halfway across the square, and even then he only let the corner of his mouth move.
Kaen Uchiha. Chief of the Konoha Military Police.
It would have been Fugaku's, someday. He'd always meant it to be. But Fugaku was a boy at the front with mud on his sandals, and he'd come home a man, and he'd come home to find his father seated at the Hokage's right hand. A chief's badge was a fine thing for a man to wear. A seat at that table was finer.
And Kaen would wear the badge well. He'd wear it quietly and proudly, and the whole clan would see the Uchiha's newest council seat and the Uchiha's newest police chief and know what both of them had been bought with. Kaen's girl.
Mikoto would see her father become the most respected officer in the village, and know which clan head had made him so. And when Fugaku came home, she’d meet the clan head’s son. Tajimu wouldn’t push her… He'd promised his wife that. He'd only make sure everything lined up in the best way for his plans.
And Fugaku…
Tajimu looked up at the cliff above the village. Three faces carved into the rock. Room for many more.
Someday, he thought.
He walked home.
The clan heads met five days later in the long hall at the base of the tower.
It was a plain room. A long, low table of dark wood. Cushions on both sides, one for each family that had come to the valley in the warring years and stayed. A crest painted on the wall above each place. The Hyūga's at one end, the Nara's at the other, the Akimichi and the Yamanaka side by side, the Aburame, the Inuzuka, the Kurama, the Fūma, the Izuno, the Sarutobi, a dozen smaller families whose crests had faded on the plaster.
And the Shimura.
The Shimura cushion had sat empty for twenty years. Its head had always taken his place upstairs instead, at the Hokage's right hand, and sent a cousin down to the long hall to sit and listen and say nothing.
Today, Danzō Shimura sat on it himself.
Nobody spoke to him. Nobody looked directly at him. The Akimichi head, who was a big, kindly man and spoke to everyone, filled his cup and set the teapot down beside it and moved on without a word.
Hiruzen stood at the head of the table and told them.
Danzō Shimura had resigned from the Hokage's council for reasons of health. The Foundation, whose existence every head in this room had been told of years ago and none had spoken of since, was being dissolved and folded into ANBU under the Hokage's personal command. And the vacant seat on the Hokage's council would be filled, as of today, by Uchiha Tajimu, head of the Uchiha clan, who would be stepping down as chief of the Military Police to take it.
The room couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
Then the Inuzuka head burst out laughing and slapped the table.
“Well, I’ll be damned! Tajimu, what the hell did you do to earn something like that?! Is Hanzō dead? Did an Uchiha manage to kill that slimy bastard or something?”
Tajimu simply chuckled. “No, nothing like that. Perhaps this was always supposed to happen and the stars finally aligned.”
That broke it. Voices came up all around the table. The Akimichi head was smiling and nodding at Tajimu across the room. The Yamanaka head leaned over to murmur something in his ear. The Aburame head said, “Congratulations.”
The Hyūga head did not smile.
He was an old man, straight-backed, white-eyed, with his hands folded in his sleeves. He looked at Tajimu down the length of the table for a long time. Then he looked at Hiruzen. Then he looked, briefly, at the empty air beside the Hokage where a fourth chair would now be filled by an Uchiha, and Hiruzen saw Homura's prediction land behind those pale eyes and take root.
Next week, Hiruzen thought tiredly. Or the week after.
The Nara head said nothing at all.
He sat with his chin on his fist at the far end of the table and let his eyes move, slowly, from one face to the next. From Hiruzen, standing at the head of the table with the lines in his face deeper than they'd been a week ago. To Tajimu, sitting quietly with his tea, accepting congratulations with a small nod and a polite smile. To Danzō, alone on the Shimura cushion, looking at nothing.
From Danzō back to Tajimu. From Tajimu back to Danzō.
The Nara head's eyes narrowed very slightly.
Then he picked up his cup and drank his tea and didn't say a word about it. He believed he somewhat knew what happened. Not exactly, but the fact that Danzō was resigning from the Foundation and at the same time An Uchiha of all people was being placed on the council? An event had to have occurred without anyone being the wiser.
Danzō sat on the Shimura cushion until the meeting ended and everyone had gone.
The room emptied around him. The servants came in and gathered the cups. The light through the high windows went from gold to orange to grey.
He sat with his hands folded in his lap and looked at the wall across from him, at the Uchiha fan painted on the plaster above Tajimu's empty cushion, red and white and old, the paint flaking a little at one edge.
Forty years.
He'd given the village everything. His childhood. His teacher. His friends. Every night of his life since he was nineteen years old, sitting in the dark so that other men could sleep. He'd done every ugly thing the village needed done and couldn't bear to look at, and he'd never once asked to be thanked for it.
And it had taken one girl a week and a half to take it all away from him.
He'd been right about her. That was the part that irked him the worst. He had been right. Gratitude became loyalty, and loyalty became a faction, and the faction had walked into the Hokage's council room and sat down in his chair. Everything he'd said she would become, she had become, faster than even he'd feared. And he'd been the one to make it happen.
The handed-over list of names was in Hiruzen's desk now.
Danzō had written it himself, the night of his resignation, slowly. Every operative in the Foundation. Every safehouse. Every operation in the field.
Nearly every one.
He sat in the empty hall until it was dark. Then he rose, and straightened his robes, and walked home alone.