Years trickled by in uneasy calm.
To Konoha, Ren was simply another Uchiha child. Quiet in class. Clever enough to earn a nod, never praise. His kunai flew true; his hand seals were crisp; his chakra control was better than most his age. Academy teachers whispered he had promise. Clan elders shrugged and called him average.
That was exactly what Ren wanted.
Keep your head down. Don't shine. Don't stumble. When the storm comes, survive.
When the sun dipped and lamps burned low, the mask slipped. Scrolls lay open on tatami—genealogies, patrol routes, old battle records written in iron-brown ink. Ren traced the maps of the compound over and over until he could walk them in his sleep. He learned where the walls were thin, where the roofs ran low enough to cross, where a child's body could slide and an adult's could not.
Knowledge is armor. I won't die because I forgot what was behind a door.
Sometimes the room's corners bent, the air quietly refusing to be normal. Those nights, he knew Gojo was near. The man rarely appeared—weeks could pass with nothing but a ripple in the dark—yet Ren never doubted. Gojo watched. Gojo waited. The presence was like a smile he couldn't see: amused, lazy, and utterly confident.
The Uchiha's tempers frayed. The police force walked Konoha like a storm cloud. Elders met behind closed doors, voices low and bitter.
"They will never trust us."
"They fear our eyes."
"If we do not act, the clan will be caged forever."
Ren listened from thresholds and shadows, a child whose footsteps made no sound. He knew the words. He knew where this road ended. They're right, he thought, and it won't matter. The script is already written. And it ends in blood.
He learned to be the sort of boy adults stopped seeing.
When he sparred, he won by accidents. When he lost, he smiled and asked for correction. When a teacher praised his chakra control—walking three steps up a tree before sliding down with a yelp—he laughed with the other kids and shook his stinging feet. Later, alone, he walked the same tree to the top and back down backwards.
He practiced breathing until his chakra thinned to a whisper, until even his reflection looked less present in the world. The System rewarded the habit with quiet notifications—tiny nudges to control, to patience, to stillness—never showy, never obvious. He accepted every one.
He smiled at Sasuke once in the courtyard. The younger boy, smaller and brilliant-eyed, scowled back with injured pride. Ren returned to his book as if nothing had happened. You'll have your tragedy, he thought. I won't take it from you. I have my own.
And above the compound, the moon waxed and waned like a blade being whetted.
The night of the massacre came beneath a heavy moon.
It began with a single scream—a sound too raw to be mistaken for training. Steel clashed. The compound's long avenues filled with the scatter of sandals and the shouts of men who were still trying to believe in order. Fire leapt from roof to roof, racing along the carp-chiseled beams like veins of light set aflame.
Ren woke before the scream ended. He didn't need to ask what it was.
It's here. Itachi's purge.
He rolled out of his futon and into the dark as if pulled by a thread, feet bare and silent. The corridor smelled of smoke already. He ducked under a lintel and slid through a narrow service door into a lane only servants used. The lane was full of blood. A man sprinted across it with a child in his arms, stumbled, and fell. Another shape dragged him into shadow. Ren didn't look back.
Move. Survive. Don't look back.
Chakra sank inside him like a shutter coming down. The System's training slid into place with the ease of repetition: stillness, thinness, a candle flame snuffed without smoke. He reached the old storehouse he had chosen weeks ago and went inside, closing the door to a crack.
Outside, the village broke itself on its own sons.
Footsteps approached: measured, not hurried. Ren flattened himself behind a stack of crates and watched the door with eyes that had learned to see in darkness.
The door slid open.
Red tomoe spun in the dark.
Itachi.
Ren's breath stopped. His heartbeat seemed too loud to belong to a living thing. He sees me, he thought, not as panic but as a simple, clinical truth. He knows. This is where I die.
The silence that followed wasn't empty. It was heavy—an acknowledgment between two beings who understood more than they should. Itachi's gaze passed across the cramped room. It didn't scan like a murderer's; it weighed. Ren felt it mark him, not as one boy among hundreds, but as a fact the night had overlooked and must now decide whether to include.
His child's body trembled. The adult inside it did not. If you kill me, the world doesn't change. If you let me live… I will change it.
Itachi's head tilted a fraction.
He did nothing.
Then he turned and left, the door sliding shut with a neat, ordinary sound that did not belong in a night like this.
Ren's knees let go. He caught himself on the crate edge and hovered there, shaking, while sweat ran down his back cold as rain.
Why? The thought floated up, thin and bright. Why spare me? Was it mercy? Calculation? Did you… choose me?
Itachi moved through his clan like a surgeon through diseased tissue: precise, relentless, grieving in a way that left no sound. His Sharingan made the world so clear that it hurt. Every face was a map of choices that had led to this night. Every cut was a sentence in a story he had agreed to write to stop a worse one.
Shisui's absence walked at his shoulder like a second shadow.
There were moments—a boy gasping on a threshold, an old woman bracing her hands on a caned stick—when Itachi felt the shape of his own heartbeat and wished it would stop. He did not slow. Sasuke's face floated ahead of him like a lantern over a black river. He followed it without looking up. He followed it because the alternative was to be lost.
He opened a storehouse door and saw a child hiding behind a stack of crates, and the child's chakra did what chakra did not do: it did not rise, did not flare, did not exist in the way it should. It was quiet, thinned, not like an elite suppressing his presence but like a candle that had decided not to be flame at all. The boy's eyes were wrong too—too steady, too focused, not with training, but with age.
Itachi met that gaze and, for a small, cruel second, wanted to ask, Who taught you to do that? Then the second passed, and he stood at a crossroads with only one step permitted.
He could swing. The story would close around the swing like the mouth of a bag. Nothing would change.
He could walk away. The story would open a seam—small, invisible to anyone who didn't know what to look for. Something might grow there. It might be weed or crop or poison. It might be nothing. But it would be a choice he made that wasn't in the script.
Itachi turned and left.
He did not tell himself he spared anyone. He did not let himself say the boy lived because of mercy. He simply added a variable to a world that was too full of certainties and kept walking toward the one certainty he had accepted: that his brother would hate him and live.
Ren stayed until his legs remembered how to move. The storehouse smelled of old straw and iron and the faint sweetness of mice. When the next scream outside faded into crackling and the crackling collapsed into a groan of timber, he slipped through the door and back into the lane.
The compound burned.
He took the path he had traced on his maps: behind the coppersmith's, under the drying racks, across the low roof of the dye-worker's house, down into a narrow cut between walls where adult hips stuck. A husband dragged a wife by the elbows and didn't see him. A child crawled out from under a bench, saw him, and froze; Ren pressed one finger to his lips and the child nodded solemnly and crawled back.
There will be time to save people when I have power to save them, he told the piece of himself that wanted to turn aside and collect the crying, the bleeding, the lost. Tonight, I survive. Tomorrow, I build.
He slid into the alley that ran behind a shuttered tea shop and stopped dead.
A figure blocked the exit—a tall shape in a blank mask. The man's posture was flat, soldier-straight. His hand held a kunai with the bored competence of someone who had used one too often.
"Straggler," he said, and the word had no shape, no feeling, like a stamp hitting paper.
Ren's lungs forgot the next thing they were supposed to do. The distance between them was small, and the angle of the alley was bad. There was no turn that a child's legs could make fast enough to matter. Chakra suppression meant nothing to a man already looking at him. Too close. Too fast. No chance to—
"Now, now."
The voice drifted in from the side like a breeze that had found a gap in a closed room: lazy, amused, carrying nothing of the night except its disrespect for the night.
"That's not very polite. You planning to stab my boss?"
The Root operative turned, body snapping around the way a tool obeys a hand.
Gojo strolled into the alley with his hands in his pockets, blindfold tilting a fraction. He whistled, a low appreciative note, as if he were standing in a gallery and had found the composition of the scene interesting. "Man… Root's really scraping the bottom of the barrel tonight. What happened, huh? You guys lose your A-team at karaoke?"
The operative didn't answer. Tools don't answer. He lunged, blade a clean line.
The kunai stopped an inch from Gojo's throat.
There was no impact, no ringing of steel against steel. The blade simply ceased to be allowed to arrive. Infinity hummed between them, a note too pure to be played on anything human.
The Root agent's arm shook. His shoulder quivered. The muscles in his neck jumped as if an invisible hand were squeezing the tendon. The kunai did not move forward. It did not move back. It occupied the exact amount of space Gojo permitted it to.
Gojo leaned forward until the mask's empty eyeholes reflected the blindfold. He grinned like a boy at a fair watching a trick he knew the secret to. "Oooh, scary. So close. But this is VIP seating. No touch zone."
The operative tried to step back. His foot scraped, found no purchase. Gojo sighed theatrically, turned his head a fraction, and flicked his finger.
The man's knee bent sideways. The body folded in on itself gently, as if listening to gravity's suggestion with sudden obedience. He didn't scream. The sound he made was like a box collapsing.
Gojo dusted ash from his sleeve with two brisk swipes. "Messy night," he said. "Definitely not a party I'd RSVP to."
Ren realized he hadn't breathed since the man had appeared. He inhaled once, carefully, and his chest burned.
Gojo crouched to put his face level with Ren's, head tilted, smirk back and easy. "Well, Boss, looks like the family reunion's gone a little sideways." The grin widened. "What's the plan? Stay here and roast marshmallows, or head out before things get awkward?"
Ren's hands curled into small fists. The smoke painted his skin a muddy gold. Fire cracked behind the tea shop's wall. The night smelled like tannins and blood and pine pitch.
The Uchiha are gone. But from their ashes, something new will rise.
"Out," he said, and his voice did not shake. "We leave."
Gojo straightened, stretching his shoulders like a cat. "Well, Boss? You lead, I'll follow. Not that you need to stress. You've got me—the strongest."
He winked under the blindfold, the boyish flash of teeth absurd and perfect in a street used as a killing floor.
Ren turned from the ruins. The fire threw his shadow long, and the boy in it did not look like a child. Civilians would wake to rumors, to careful ANBU language sanded smooth and unthreatening. None of them would know a child had walked free with a king's decision burning in his chest.
Gojo fell into step beside him, humming something cheerful and off-key, as if they were leaving a theatre after a comedy and not a graveyard.
They passed under a gate charred black and out into the lanes where the rest of Konoha still slept with its windows closed and its dreams unbroken. Far away, the Hokage's office glowed, a single square of soft light in a sea of dark roofs. Closer, a cat slunk along a wall with its back up, fur sparking with ash.
Ren did not look back.
Elsewhere in Konoha, Hiruzen Sarutobi stood at the window and watched the red smear of the compound burn. His pipe lay cold in its dish; his hands had forgotten it. Behind him, a table held scrolls he had been reading when the first report arrived—petitions about road maintenance in the south district, a complaint from a merchant about police overreach. Ordinary things. He could not remember what they said now.
"Report," he said without turning.
A masked ANBU knelt. "Confirmed: Uchiha Itachi executed the purge personally. Root teams… have been sighted performing, ah, 'containment.' Survivors are unconfirmed."
Hiruzen closed his eyes. He felt very old. Again, he thought, and the word contained a weight of wars, policies, compromises, letters written to mothers. Again, we tell ourselves it was necessary.
"Pull Root out," he said. His voice sounded hoarse to him, thin. "All of them. The cleanup is ANBU's responsibility. No more… 'containment.'"
The masked head dipped. "Understood."
Hiruzen opened his eyes and looked at the fire again. You were a child when I first saw you, he thought toward the red smear. So was he. We ask so much of children here. And when they give us what we ask, we call them monsters.
He imagined, foolishly, that somewhere inside that red, a small boy had found a door he could fit through and had taken it. He let the thought exist for a moment and then blew it away like smoke.
The streets beyond the compound were quiet in the way things are quiet after a scream. Ren and Gojo moved through that quiet like an answer to a question no one had asked yet. The moon was high. It made ladders of light on the water of the small canal that ran toward the river. A lone drunk slept with his back against a warehouse door and snored like a cat purring.
Ren said nothing for a long time. Gojo did not fill the silence. He walked with his hands in his coat pockets and whistled softly now and then, tuneless and cheerful. He looked like a man walking home from a long day at a job he liked for all the wrong reasons.
Finally, Ren said, "Thank you."
Gojo's head tilted. "For what? The sarcasm? The VIP seating? I offer excellent amenities."
"For being here," Ren said. He didn't try to dress it up. He didn't have to.
Gojo's grin flashed. "Well, yeah. Contract's a contract. Besides, this is way more interesting than grading papers."
They walked a little more.
Ren thought of the storehouse, of red tomoe in the dark, of the way Itachi had looked at him and chosen to leave. You saw me, he thought at a memory. You left me as a variable. The adult inside him understood the cruelty and the generosity of it. The child inside him wanted to sleep and wake up somewhere else.
"When we leave," Ren said, "we don't run."
Gojo made an approving sound. "Good instinct. Running makes people chase. Walking makes them wonder if they should be chasing."
"We walk," Ren said. "We leave the village like ghosts. And then…" He looked toward the forest where the roads became tracks and the tracks became choices. "We build."
Gojo's grin spread, all teeth. "Now that's my favorite word."
They reached the shadow line of the trees just as the first real wind of the night found the streets and began to push the smoke sideways. The village behind them shifted in its sleep. Somewhere an ANBU on a roof turned his masked face and thought he had seen something move at the edge of the district, then shook his head and went back to watching the glow.
Ren stepped under the first branches and let the dark take his outline. His body was small. His steps were light. Inside, something vast took a breath.
The Uchiha are ash. But I am not. From this night forward, the world will change.
Gojo tapped two fingers against his shoulder twice, a light, companionable sound. "Lead on, Boss," he said, with the easy certainty of a man who had never considered losing. "I'll keep the sky from falling."
Ren did not look back.