Chapter 55: The First Open Uchiha Festival!

The gate of the Uchiha compound had been open every day of Tajimu's life.

It stood at the head of the main street with the clan fan carved into both posts, red and white, taller than two men. Carts went in and out of it. Children ran through it. The Police went to work through it every morning and came home through it every night. Nobody had ever closed it.

But very few had ever been invited through it, either.

Tajimu stood just inside it at dusk in his formal robes and watched the lanterns being lit. Hundreds of them. Paper lanterns strung on lines from roof to roof down the length of the main street, every one of them painted with the fan, and as the young ones went down the rows with their tapers, the red-and-white crests came alive one after another until the whole street glowed with them.

Beside the gate, five children stood behind a long table piled with uchiwa fans. Plain paper fans on bamboo handles, the clan crest printed on both faces. Two thousand of them. The paper-makers on the east side of the compound had been working for six days.

"Remember," Tajimu said, without looking down. "One to every guest. Bow when you hand it over. Say welcome."

"Yes, Tajimu-sama," said Tekka, who was thirteen and the oldest and had taken it upon himself to make sure the other four did it right.

"What if they don't want one?" asked Yuudai.

"Then they're a guest. They get one anyway."

Saya, the smallest, was holding a fan in both hands and staring down the street at the first shapes coming toward the gate in the blue evening light. Big shapes. Very big. A whole family of them.

"Tajimu-sama," she whispered. "The Akimichi are coming."

"Then go and welcome them."

She went. She bowed so low her ponytail flipped over her head. The Akimichi head, a man nearly as wide as the gate post, bent all the way down to take the fan from her small hands, and thanked her very seriously, and then fanned himself with it all the way up the street with an expression of great contentment.

Tajimu watched them pass under the lanterns and didn’t hide his smirk.

Behind them came the Yamanaka, blonde and curious, looking up at the lanterns. Then a pack of Inuzuka with their dogs, loud, already laughing. Then the Aburame, quiet, in their high collars, each one accepting a fan and inspecting it.

Every one of them stopped, just for a moment, when they stepped through the gate. Every single one. As though they expected the ground on this side to be different.

Tajimu's father had told him once that the Uchiha were a clan who lived inside the village, but apart from it. He'd been nine. He hadn't understood. He'd spent the rest of his life understanding it.

He looked at the street filling up with crests that weren’t his, and he let himself feel it, just for a moment.

Some time ago he’d walked past the girl and the Uzumaki jinchūriki sitting on the wall outside her house, the redhead complaining at the top of her lungs that she’d never once been inside the compound in three years of friendship. Nobody ever asked, the girl had said, puzzled, as if it had never occurred to her either. And I guess we never invite anyone.

He’d walked on. He hadn’t stopped thinking about it since.

Yashiro can complain all he likes, Tajimu thought, watching an Akimichi fan himself with the clan crest. She wasn’t wrong.

Then he went to greet the Nara.

[Ding!]

[Weekly Sign-in available!]

[Signing in…]

[Obtained: Wind Affinity!]

Name: Mikoto Uchiha 

Age: 14 

Rank: Jonin 

Affinity: Lightning Affinity, Fire Affinity, Yin Affinity, Water Affinity, Earth Affinity, Wind Affinity 

Unique: Immense Chakra Reserves, Sharingan (Three Tomoe), Advanced Growth Rate 

Skills: Fire Style Mastery, Water Style Mastery, Lightning Style Mastery, Yin Style Mastery, Earth Style Mastery, Wind Style Mastery, Shurikenjutsu, Elite Taijutsu (Ninja Art: Bare-Handed Blade Block), Superb Genjutsu, Ninjutsu (Body Flicker, Advanced Body Flicker, Clone Jutsu, Substitution Jutsu, Transformation Jutsu, Ninja Art: Shuriken Shadow Clone Jutsu, Amplified Summoning Jutsu, Shadow Clone Jutsu), Perfect Chakra Control (Chakra Enhanced Strength), Kenjutsu (Uchiha Style: Kenjutsu, Drunken Blade), Stealth, Survival Knowledge, Cooking, Medical Ninjutsu (Mystical Palm, Chakra Scalpel, Poison Extraction Jutsu, Body Pathway Derangement Jutsu, Regenerative Healing Jutsu, Mystical Healing Field Jutsu), Fūinjutsu Mastery (Sealing Jutsu: Release), Pedagogy Mastery, Space-Time Ninjutsu Mastery, Seven Heavens Breathing Method, Musical Talent, Craftsmanship Aptitude, Needle Mastery 

Equipment: Kunai, Shuriken, Senbon, Smoke Bomb, Explosive Tags, Poison Gas Bomb, Flash Bomb, Gas/Sleep Bomb, Food Pills x84, Wire Strings, Shark Skin, Gunbai, Bingo Book, Fūma Shuriken x74, Hero Water x4, Superior Frying Pan

Mikoto’s mother had both hands on her obi.

Mikoto couldn't move. She couldn't make a seal, couldn't step outside, couldn't do anything but stand in the middle of her parents' room with her arms held out from her sides while the nature element settled throughout her body and mind.

All five elements at my age, Mikoto thought that was neat.

"Hold still." Mikan said.

"I am holding still."

"You're fidgeting." Mikan pulled the obi tighter around Mikoto's waist, tugged it, checked it, frowned at it, and pulled it tighter again. "There. Breathe in."

"I can't breathe in, mama. You’re killing me. You've tied it too tight to breathe. I’m going to die." Mikoto puffed her cheeks.

"Then you'll look lovely while you suffocate." Mikan smiled before squishing her cheeks.

Mikoto looked at herself in the mirror in her parents' room. The yukata was dark blue, almost black, with white cranes flying across the hem and the fan crest small on the back between her shoulders. It had been her mother's, once. Mikan had taken it in at the waist and let it out at the hem, sitting up three nights in a row, and hadn't let Mikoto see it until this afternoon.

Her hair was up. Her mother had done that too, with two long pins and a comb with a little red lacquer flower on it. Her back felt strange. Light. Nothing on it but cloth.

Shark Skin was in a scroll at the bottom of her closet, under two blankets. It was strange but it was like she could feel it from here. Sulking. A sulking that pressed against the edge of her mind.

It's a party, she'd told it, sealing it away. You can't come to the party. Maybe next time, but not this time. Hyūga can see you.

It had not accepted this. It hated Hyūga now.

"Mama," Mikoto said, still looking at the mirror. "Why is this about me?"

Mikan's hands paused on the obi.

"Tajimu-sama got a seat on the Hokage's council," Mikoto went on. "That's wonderful. It's the best thing that's happened to the clan in… ever, probably. But everyone keeps saying my name with it." She turned around. "I didn't do anything. I just went to Tajimu-sama about those bounty hunters on the road.” She said, because her mother was listening. “And he handled it. Didn’t he?” 

"He did." Her father said from the doorway.

Kaen stood there in his own formal robes, the dark grey ones he wore twice a year, with his hair combed flat and his face as unreadable as ever.

"He handled it." Kaen said again. "And the clan got a seat. And the village knows what you've done since you went to the front, every patient, every arm, every life. That's why they're saying your name." He paused. "That's all you need to know tonight."

"But…"

"Mikoto." He came into the room and put his hand on her head, carefully, so he wouldn't disturb the pins. "Go to the party. Eat. Let people thank you. You've earned it a hundred times over." His mouth moved very slightly at one corner. "Tonight, you don't get the choice to be humble and hide."

Mikan was smiling at him over Mikoto's head with wet eyes.

"Your father is correct," she said. "Now go, before I start crying and ruin my face. Go, go."

…

The main street of the compound had become something Mikoto didn't recognize.

Food stalls lined both sides of it, one after another, smoke rising from every grill. Skewers of chicken glazed with sweet soy. Squid on sticks, curling over the coals. Rice balls in rows. Dango in pink and white and green. A long trough of cold noodles floating in ice water, with an old Uchiha woman fishing them out by the bamboo ladle and pressing bowls on anybody who slowed down near her. Sake in wooden cups. Barley tea in tin kettles. Sweet bean buns piled in pyramids, and Mikoto watched a small Inuzuka boy with a puppy on his head steal three of them off the top and run, and the old man behind the stall tossed a bean bun at the back of his head. He fell with tears pooling in his eyes before the old Uchiha helped him up and chatted with him behind the stall.

The taiko drums had started somewhere further up the street, near the clan training field.

And the people.

She'd never seen so many people inside the compound in her life. Inuzuka with dogs at their heels and dogs on their shoulders. Aburame standing in a little quiet knot near the barley tea. Fūma in their dark wraps, who were their distant cousins, just unable to awaken the Sharingan. Kurama women in fine kimono. Izuno with their cat-designed robes. Shinobi from minor clans, chunin and jonin in their best clothes with their families beside them. Everywhere she looked, someone was fanning themselves with a red-and-white uchiwa.

And everywhere she looked, Uchiha. Behind the stalls, at the drums, carrying trays. Laughing. She'd never heard so many of her clan laughing at once.

She'd taken four steps past her front gate when someone said, "There she is!" and the crowd turned.

It was a long time before she got any further.

A big man with a soft face and a belly like a temple bell got to her first and bowed so deeply his topknot nearly touched the ground. The Akimichi head. Chōza's father. He took both of her hands in his enormous ones and held them.

"My son writes to me every week," he said. "Every letter, half of it is about food and the other half is about you. Mikoto-sensei says this. Mikoto-sensei taught us that." His eyes were wet. "He'd be dead three times over without you. His mother wanted to come and thank you herself, but she's too shy, so she sent me with this." He pressed a lacquered box into her hands, heavy and warm. "Pork buns. She made them this morning."

"Akimichi-sama, I can't…"

"You can," he said firmly, "and you will, and you'll eat every one, because she'll ask me if you did."

The Yamanaka head was behind him. Pale-haired, sharp-faced, a quiet smile. He didn't say much. He bowed, and said, "Lucky for us, our boys got you as a squad leader before the rest of the village knew what you were. Thank you for looking after them." And then he bowed again, and stepped aside.

The Nara head didn't bow at all. He was a tall, lean man with a goatee and a long scar down one side of his face, and he looked at her with half-lidded eyes, the way she imagined Shikaku would look in twenty years.

"Mikoto-chan." he said finally.

"Nara-sama."

"My son is the laziest boy ever born in my clan. I've been trying to make him train for twelve years." He tilted his head. "I'd like to know how you turned that headache into what he is now."

"He always had it in him. You just had to know how to motivate him." Mikoto said honestly.

“And how is that?”

“Regular boy stuff. Competition, positive reinforcement, the horrors of war. You know, the usual.” Mikoto smiled.

“The horrors of war… I’d imagine that would be quite the incentive to get off your lazy tail.” He chuckled before he walked off into the crowd. 

Mikoto stared after him.

Then someone tugged on her sleeve.

She looked down. A little girl of about four was standing there with a fan in one hand and a stick of dango in the other and her whole face very serious.

"Hello there." Mikoto smiled down at her.

"You fixed my Tou-chan's eye." The girl informed her.

And behind her, coming through the crowd with his wife on one arm and a six-year-old boy riding on his shoulders, was Botan.

He had two arms.

The left was still thinner than the right, and the skin on it still had that new, pale shine. He held it a little stiffly, a little carefully. But it was there. And it was holding his wife's hand.

"Uchiha-san." He grinned at her.

"Botan-san." Mikoto had a feeling she was going to be smiling a lot today. "How's the grip?"

He let go of his wife's hand and held the left one up. Slowly, with effort, he closed it into a fist. All the way. The knuckles went white.

"Last week," he said, "I held a sword for a full minute."

His son, up on his shoulders, said, "I timed it!"

His wife didn't say anything. She just stepped forward and wrapped both arms around Mikoto and held on, and Mikoto stood there in the middle of the street with a box of pork buns in one arm and a stranger's wife crying into her shoulder and didn't know what to do with her hands.

They weren't the only ones either. Other people who managed to have recovered limbs also joyously greeted her.

I need to get through that list faster. She thought. 

And then, from somewhere behind her, at a volume that cut through the drums and the crowd and the whole street.

"MIKOTOOOOOO!"

Kushina hit her from the side at full speed.

Mikoto saw her coming with half a second's warning and still barely managed to get the pork buns out of the way. They went down together in a tangle of blue yukata and orange yukata and red hair, and a dog barked, and somebody's tea went over, and Kushina was laughing so hard she couldn't breathe.

"YOU'RE WEARING A YUKATA!" Kushina screamed, sitting on Mikoto's stomach. "WITH CRANES! AND YOUR HAIR'S UP! YOU LOOK LIKE A PRINCESS!"

"Kushina, get off! My mother tied this obi for an hour… She’s going to kill me if I dirty it!"

"Haha never!"

"Kushina."

Two figures were standing over them. One was a quiet girl in a high-collared coat and dark glasses who looked like she’d been dragged there against her will. The other was a boy with green-tinged cat ears poking up through his hood, grinning with sharp teeth.

"Greetings, Mikoto-sensei," said Kaede Aburame.

"Mikoto-san!" Rei Izuno saluted. "We came to eat all of your clan's food!"

"You’re gonna have some competition," Mikoto said from the ground. "There are Akimichi here."

"I never back down from a challenge!"

“That’s not an admirable trait.” Kaede muttered.

Kushina hauled her up. She was already looking around with enormous eyes, at the lanterns, the stalls, the drums, the dancing lights. A pair of ANBU in plain clothes trailed her at a polite distance through the crowd. One of them had been given a fan at the gate and was using it.

"This is your house?!" Kushina said. "This is where you live?! You've had this the whole time and you never let me come in?!"

“You never asked to come over.” Mikoto brought up.

It wasn’t like people outside the clan were barred from getting in.

"Well, I'm here now, you know?" Kushina said, "And I'm hungry, and you owe me for every single time I could have been eating here and wasn't. Come on! I smell something sweet."

She grabbed Mikoto's wrist and dragged her into the crowd.

…

The senbei shop had a line around the block.

It sat on the corner where it had always sat, an old wooden storefront with a faded fan over the door, and old Uchiha Teruo had been grilling rice crackers in its window since before Mikoto's father was born. People from all over the village bought his senbei. They came to the edge of the compound to buy them, and then they went home.

Tonight they'd come all the way in.

The line went out the door, down the side street, around the corner, and back up the main road almost to the noodle stall. Akimichi and Yamanaka and Inuzuka and Kurama, waiting their turn. Teruo had three grandsons working the grills beside him, and they were going so fast the smoke poured out the window in a thick sweet-smelling cloud.

"We're not waiting in that," Kushina said, appalled.

"We have to. Everyone else is."

"But you're the princess!"

"I'm not a princess. I’m just a regular Uchiha."

Kushina rolled her eyes. “Who would believe that? I don’t even think your own clan members would say that about you.”

“It’s true!” Mikoto argued.

“Hey, miss! Would you say this girl is a regular Uchiha?” Kushina gestured at Mikoto.

Mikoto blushed as she hid her face.

“No. No, I would not.” The vest-wearing Uchiha lady said with a small smile.

“See.” Kushina proudly smiled.

“Shut up and stop embarrassing me in my own compound.” Mikoto pushed Kushina’s face as she cried out in indignation.

The old man in the window saw them. He squinted through the smoke. Then he shouted something over his shoulder, and one of his grandsons came running out the side door with a paper bag in each hand and pressed them into Mikoto's arms before she could say a word.

"Grandfather says no line for you," the boy said breathlessly. "Not tonight."

"I can't…"

"Grandfather says to tell you he's sold more senbei tonight than he did all last year." The boy added, already running back. "He says thank you. He says you'll get senbei free until he dies!"

Kushina had already stolen one of the bags and opened it.

"I love this place," she said, with her mouth full. "I'm moving in. We need to have a sleepover as soon as possible!"

"I don’t think my bed is big enough for the three of us."

"Three?! Who the hell will be in your bed other than us two?!"

“My sword.” Mikoto sounded confused. Who else would she cuddle with?

“That’s not normal, Mikoto!!! Normal people don’t go to sleep with their sword in their arms like stuffed toys!”

“I do…” Mikoto blushed a little. It was a habit since she first got Shark Skin during the war. It was comforting.

…

Nawaki arrived as a mummy.

There was no other word for it. Tsunade had bandaged him from his ankles to his neck, every centimeter, so thickly that his arms didn't quite hang straight. He was swinging himself along on a pair of wooden crutches with his teeth gritted and sweat on his forehead, and he looked absolutely miserable, and the hilt of Kusanagi was sticking up over his shoulder because there was apparently no force on earth that could make him leave it at home.

"Don't say anything, sensei. I feel way better than I actually look." He said, when he saw Mikoto's face.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were going to."

"I wasn't going to say anything," Mikoto said, "except that it's good to see you on your feet."

"I'm not on my feet. I'm on sticks." He glared over his shoulder. "Somebody wouldn't let me come unless I was wrapped like a gift."

"You tore every muscle in your body," Tsunade said behind him. "You're lucky I let you come at all. If you fall over, you'll go straight back to bed and stay there until the war ends."

She was wearing a pale green yukata and carrying a cup of sake in each hand. She'd clearly picked both of them up at the first stall inside the gate and didn't plan on putting either down. She looked at Mikoto over Nawaki's head, and nodded once, and Mikoto nodded back.

Neither of them said anything else.

"Sensei!"

Tsume came pelting up the street with Kuromaru at her heels and a woman and a man behind her who could only be her parents. The mother had the same wild spiky hair and the same fang marks on her cheeks. The father was a big, mild-faced man with a grey dog the size of a pony walking beside him.

"Sensei, sensei, sensei! There's SO MUCH MEAT!" Tsume skidded to a stop and looked up at her and stopped. Blinked. "Whoa. Sensei. You look…"

"Totally different right?!" Kushina supplied.

"Yeah! Totally different!"

"Tsume," said her mother, putting a hand on the back of her daughter's neck. "Manners." She looked at Mikoto, and her face did something complicated. "Keep up the good work, Uchiha. My Tsume is growing up strong and balanced because of you."

Tsume's father didn't say anything. He just bowed. The pony-sized dog beside him bowed too, lowering its huge grey head.

Then Tsume saw Nawaki.

"NAWAKI?!"

"Hi," said Nawaki, from inside his bandages.

"You look horrible!"

"Thanks, I really needed to hear that today." He responded.

"Why’d you even come out if you’re so injured!" Tsume was circling him with her hands over her mouth, and her face was very red, and she couldn't stop grinning. "Are you okay? Does it hurt? Can you walk? Can you…"

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine, you look like a critical patient!"

"I'm a fine critical patient." Nawaki said with great dignity, and swung himself forward on his crutches, and nearly fell over, and Tsume caught him under the arm without even thinking about it.

And then she didn't let go.

She just stayed there, holding him up, with her face slowly going redder and redder, and Nawaki said, "Totally didn’t need your help by the way." and didn't notice anything at all, and Tsume's mother exchanged a glance with Tsume’s father over their heads.

Yoshino arrived a moment later. She was wearing a plain grey yukata and her hair was in its usual ponytail. She took in the scene, Nawaki in his bandages, Tsume holding him up with her face on fire, Kushina eating senbei by the fistful, and Mikoto in the middle of it in her mother's cranes.

"Sensei," she said. "You look different."

"I’ll take that as a compliment, Yoshino."

“It was.” Yoshino confirmed.

“Thank you.” Mikoto smiled.

“I’m going to go enjoy the rest of the festival with my parents. I’ll see you later if I get bored.” She walked off.

Tsume, still holding Nawaki up, watched her go and said, "She's so weird sometimes."

"You're one to talk." Nawaki told her.

Orochimaru had been at the party for an hour, and he was not having a terrible time.

That surprised him a little.

He'd come for the same reason he did most things, which was curiosity. The Uchiha had not opened their gates often. They'd never thrown a party for anybody but themselves. And now, all at once, three days after confirming a council seat that nobody had seen coming, here they were with two thousand paper fans and lanterns on every roof, smiling at Inuzuka and feeding Akimichi. Something had happened. Something large. And a large thing happening without his knowing about it was an itch Orochimaru found very difficult not to scratch.

So far he'd learned nothing useful. He'd learned that the Uchiha made excellent grilled squid. He'd learned that Uchiha children, when given a fan and told to bow, did so happily. And he'd learned that the Uchiha clan shrine was at the end of a narrow lane behind the main house, because he'd wandered down that lane with his fan in his hand and his face polite and pleasant, and an old man with a voice like a hinge that wanted oil had appeared in front of him from nowhere and said, "The shrine is closed tonight, Orochimaru-dono. The food is that way."

Very polite. Very firm. Two-tomoe Sharingan in the old man's eyes for just a moment, there and gone.

Orochimaru had gone back to the food.

He found Tsunade by the sake stall, already four cups deep and arguing with an Inuzuka about whether dogs could smell a winning hand. He greeted her and chatted for a while. Then he found himself looking past her, at her little brother, propped on crutches beside a bench with an Inuzuka girl hovering at his elbow.

At the sword on his back.

Orochimaru knew that sword. He knew it the way he knew his own hands. Not that sword, but its shape. The plain, long hilt. The particular sheen of the steel where it showed at the collar of the sheath. The way it seemed to sit just a little too lightly on the boy's back, as though it were lighter than steel had any right to be.

He'd carried one exactly like it for years.

He'd thought it was the only one.

"Nawaki-kun," Orochimaru said, coming up beside the bench. The Inuzuka girl's head snapped around and her nose wrinkled, and she shifted half a step closer to the boy without seeming to know she'd done it. Orochimaru smiled at her. She didn't smile back. "How are you feeling?"

"Like the birthday boy of a pity party." Nawaki said.

"I'm sure." Orochimaru looked at the sword. "That's a beautiful blade."

"Thanks!"

"May I ask where you got it?"

"Mikoto-sensei gave it to me."

Orochimaru's smile didn't change.

"Did she ever tell you where she obtained it?" He asked.

Nawaki shrugged as much as his bandages would let him. "Didn't ask. She said she found it. It's a really cool sword. I love it." He looked at Orochimaru, suddenly more alert. "Why?"

"No reason. I collect interesting swords." Orochimaru straightened. "Take care of it, Nawaki-kun. Swords like that don't turn up very often."

He walked away. Behind him he heard the Inuzuka girl say, very quietly, "He smells like snakes." and the boy say, "Don’t be rude. Orochimaru-sama is one of the legendary Sannin! He’s a man you should respect and admire!" and he smiled a little to himself. 

Now how did Mikoto-chan receive one of the legendary weapons from the snakes? He thought. Orochimaru knew that she didn’t have a contract with the snakes. Her name wasn’t on the scroll.

He looked down the street, at the cluster of people around the Uchiha girl in the dark blue yukata. She was holding a box of something and a bag of something else and talking to a white-eyed girl in Hyūga robes, and laughing, and she looked exactly like what everyone said she was. A fourteen-year-old girl. A healer. Sweet. Shy. Embarrassed by all the attention.

A fourteen-year-old girl who rebuilt arms from a lock of hair. Who'd come back from Hanzō alive. Who'd found a second Kusanagi and given it to a genin without a thought in the world.

Orochimaru fanned himself slowly with his red-and-white uchiwa.

She isn’t a simple Uchiha at all, he thought.

"No sword tonight?" said Hisana.

She'd come up out of the crowd from the direction of the Hyūga, who'd arrived as a group, twenty of them in pale formal robes, and had taken up a position near the drums where they could see everything and touch nothing. Most of them stood like they were uncomfortable. They'd accepted their fans at the gate unsure of what to do with them exactly.

Hisana wasn't standing like that.

She was taller than Mikoto remembered. Her hair was longer, down past her shoulders, and there was a thin white scar at her temple that hadn't been there before the river. Her eyes were the pale grey-white of the main house, and they were smiling.

"Not tonight." Mikoto said.

"Good." Hisana's eyes flicked, very briefly, to the empty space between Mikoto's shoulders. Then back to her face. "You shouldn’t bring something like that around my clan anyway."

"Lesson learned..." Mikoto murmured.

Hisana laughed. She reached out and took Mikoto's hand. Her fingers were warm tonight. "I never thanked you properly for saving my life back then. I was half dead."

"You did. You told me you didn't see anything."

"I still didn't." Hisana squeezed her hand once and let go. "I never will."

Then one of the Hyūga elders called her name in a stern voice, and she rolled her eyes where only Mikoto could see it, and went.

…

The Hokage's gift arrived at the hour of the dog.

It came in a cart pulled by two chunin in Sarutobi crests, under a cloth embroidered with the Sarutobi monkey, and the crowd parted for it all the way up the main street to the steps of the clan head's house, where Tajimu stood waiting.

Under the cloth were four casks of sake from the Daimyō's own brewery, and a long lacquered box. Inside the box was a scroll.

Tajimu unrolled it on the steps, where everyone could see.

It was calligraphy. A single line, brushed in heavy black ink by a hand that every adult in the village recognized.

The fire that warms the village burns in every hearth.

The street was quiet for a moment. Then someone clapped, and then everyone was clapping, and the sake casks were being rolled off the cart and broached on the spot.

Tajimu rolled the scroll back up, slowly, and handed it to his wife.

There was nobody from the tower here. Nobody from the Sarutobi but the two chunin with the cart. Nobody from the Hokage's council at all. Mikoto looked at the empty steps beside Tajimu, where they should have been standing.

I wonder what could be keeping the Hokage, Mikoto thought, and didn't know what to make of it, and then Kushina stuck a skewer of chicken in her mouth and she forgot about it.

…

There was a toast after. Tajimu stood on the steps of the clan head's house with a cup raised in one broad hand and waited for the street to go quiet. It took a while. When it did, the only sound was the lanterns creaking on their lines and a dog barking somewhere near the noodle stall.

"I'm not a man for long drawn-out speeches." Tajimu started.

His voice wasn't loud. It carried anyway. Mikoto had heard it carry down the training field when she was six and couldn't do a proper Great Fireball, and it hadn't changed since.

"My clan has been in this village since the day it was born. We built it. Our blood is in the foundations. We've guarded its streets every day for two generations." He looked out over the crowd. "And for two generations, our gate has been open, and very few have come through it. We never kept anyone out. Few thought to ask, and we never thought to invite."

Somebody in the crowd made a small sound.

"Tonight we invited. And you came." Tajimu raised the cup a little higher. "The Uchiha clan thanks you for that. More than I can say."

The crowd murmured. A few cups went up.

"And there's one more person I need to thank."

No, Mikoto thought. No, no, no…

"A girl of this clan went to the front at thirteen years old. She came home at fourteen. In between, she healed more of this village's shinobi than any medic who's ever lived. Some of them are standing in this street tonight. Some of them are standing on legs they didn't have a month ago." He let that sit, for just a moment. "She's never asked this clan for anything. She's never asked this village for anything. And if I look at her right now, she's going to try to hide behind the Uzumaki girl."

Mikoto was already trying to hide behind Kushina. Kushina was not letting her.

"Mikoto," said Tajimu.

Two thousand faces turned toward her.

"Everything the clan celebrates tonight, we owe to you." Tajimu raised the cup to her. "To Mikoto."

"TO MIKOTO!"

“THE RED-EYED ANGEL!”

“KONOHA’S CRIMSON ANGEL!”

It came back at him from every throat in the street. Uchiha and Akimichi and Inuzuka and Nara. Botan's son on his father's shoulders, shrieking it. The man with no legs, lifting his cup from his bench. Kushina, right in Mikoto's ear, loud enough to make her flinch. Tsume, from across the street, still holding Nawaki up, both of them yelling it. Even Yoshino, by the training field, with her parents beside her.

Mikoto's face was so hot she thought it might catch fire.

She bowed. It was all she could think to do. She bowed very low and stayed there, with her face hidden, until the roar of the crowd turned into laughter and the drums started up again.

When she straightened, her mother was crying openly next to the steps, and her father was standing beside her mother with his arms crossed and his lips slightly turned up, and his eyes very bright.

And Tajimu, coming down the steps, put a hand on Kaen's shoulder as he passed, and leaned in, and said something Mikoto couldn't hear.

Her father froze. Then he nodded once.

Come to my study tomorrow, Tajimu had said. After the morning shift. There are things we need to talk about.

Kaen didn't know what things. He didn't ask.

He'd find out soon enough.

Tajimu's wife found Mikoto afterward, when the crowd had finally stopped tossing her in the air. Mikoto cursed her best friend for starting it and tossing her into the crowd.

Uchiha Fumiko was a small, round-faced woman with grey streaks in her hair and the kind of calm that made people lower their voices around her without knowing why. She took Mikoto by the elbow and steered her out of the crush toward a bench under the eaves of the clan head's house, where it was quieter, and sat her down, and put a cup of barley tea in her hands.

"Drink," she said. "You look like you're about to faint."

"I might be."

"He shouldn't have done that to you." Fumiko sat down beside her. "I told him not to. He never listens to me about anything."

Mikoto drank the tea. It helped.

"Fumiko-sama," she said, after a while. "Thank you for everything tonight. The fans. The lanterns. All of it. I know it was a lot of work."

"The fans were my idea." Fumiko looked pleased. "Two thousand. My husband said nobody would take one. I told him everybody would take one." She looked out at the street, at the sea of red-and-white paper fans moving in the lantern light. "I was right."

They sat for a while and watched the party.

"My son would have liked this," Fumiko said, after a while. "Fugaku. He's at the front. He hates parties, but he'd have liked this one." She glanced sideways at Mikoto. "You've met him, haven't you?"

"A few times. At the front. He was always very kind to me." Mikoto thought about it. "Very serious. But kind."

"He speaks well of you," Fumiko said. "He said he’d never had a better squad mate if you exclude that best friend of his."

Mikoto didn't quite know what to say to that, so she drank her tea.

Fumiko smiled to herself and didn't press further.

…

The fire show started when the moon was up.

The clan training field had been cleared and roped off, and the whole party had squeezed in around the edges of it, standing on benches, sitting on roofs, children up on their parents' shoulders. Yoshino had gotten her good spot. She was right at the rope, at the front.

Five familiar children walked out into the middle of the empty field in the dark. Five children she still taught here and there, when she had the time.

Mikoto's heart jumped.

Tekka. Yuudai. Hibiki. Miya. And Saya, the smallest, at the end of the line, with her hands already shaking. They spread out across the field in a wide arc, ten meters apart. In the silence, Mikoto could hear the lanterns.

Tekka raised his hand. Then dropped it.

Rat. Tiger. Dog. Ox. Rabbit. Tiger.

Five chests swelled at once.

"Fire Style: Phoenix Flower Jutsu!"

Dozens of small fireballs, burning bright orange, spitting up into the black sky in long curving arcs like sparks thrown off a grinding wheel. Fifty of them. A hundred. They went up and up over the field in five great sprays, and at the top of their climb, they crossed. Every one of them. Tekka's met Miya's met Yuudai's met Hibiki's, and where they met, they burst, and the night sky over the Uchiha compound broke into flowers.

The crowd gasped. Then it roared.

But Mikoto was watching the end of the line.

Saya hadn't fired.

She was standing there with her chest still full of air and her hands still locked in the Tiger seal, and she wasn't moving. Her face was white. Her eyes were wide. Mikoto knew that look. She'd seen it on the training ground, when the girl had missed her first fireball and frozen solid, unable to move, waiting to be scolded.

The other four's fire was already coming down. In a moment it would be gone, and the field would be dark, and everybody would have seen.

Mikoto didn't think. She stepped forward to the rope.

"Saya." She said.

The girl's head turned, just a little, at her voice. Mikoto nodded at her.

Saya let out her breath.

The fire came out of her all at once, in a long, rising, roaring column, a hundred little fireballs spiraling up on top of each other into the sky, higher than the other four had gone, higher than the lanterns, higher than the roofs. At the very top of it they burst together, all at once, a great golden flower that lit up every face on the field.

Saya stood under it with her mouth open, looking up.

The crowd went absolutely wild.

Then the adults took the field.

Twenty of them. Then thirty. Uchiha jonin and chunin, Police officers out of uniform, in a long line across the field. Mikoto saw officers from her father's shift, and old Yashiro at the far end with his hands already moving. They fired together, one after another, down the line, Great Fireball after Great Fireball rolling up into the sky and bursting into red and orange and gold. Fire Dragons, coiling up and over each other. A ring of fire spun up from the center of the field into the shape of the clan crest, red and white, and held there, hanging in the dark, for one long breath before it came apart into sparks.

When it was over, the smoke drifted out over the rooftops of the compound and the whole village could see it. Everybody would know, in the morning, that the Uchiha had been celebrating.

Tajimu was looking at her from across the field.

He tilted his head. Just slightly. Toward the empty field.

Oh, no, Mikoto thought.

"Go on," said her mother, behind her, pushing her by the shoulders. "Go. Everyone's waiting."

"No one said I was participating in this part of the festival..." Mikoto muttered as she went anyway.

She walked out into the middle of the empty field, with two thousand people watching, and she didn't look at any of them. She looked up. At the sky. At the smoke drifting in the moonlight.

She made the seals for a jutsu perfect for the occasion. Several seals, her hands moving faster than most of the crowd could follow.

And then three more, small and quick, tucked into the end of the sequence where nobody who didn't know the jutsu would notice they didn't belong.

Then she breathed in.

And when she breathed out, she breathed out a dragon.

It came out of her mouth in a roaring, rolling torrent of fire, and it took shape as it rose. A long body, coiling. A head with a mane of flame. It went up into the sky in a great spiral, forty meters, fifty, sixty, its body twisting and its tail lashing, and at the top of its climb it turned and looked down at the crowd. It opened its mouth.

Then it came apart slowly, from the tail up, its body breaking into a thousand little fireballs that hung for just a moment in the shape of a dragon, and then drifted down over the field and the crowd and the roofs like falling stars. Burning, glowing, going gold, then orange, then red, then nothing, a long slow rain of light over the whole Uchiha compound.

Two thousand people stood with their faces turned up and watched the fire come down, and the only noise in the whole compound was the drums, beating once, very softly, in the dark.

Mikoto stood in the middle of the field with the last sparks falling around her.

Then the drums started up, all of them at once, very loud. And the crowd erupted.

…

The dancing went on until midnight. The drums beat it out from a scaffold in the middle of the training field, and a ring of dancers moved around it under the lanterns, step and clap and turn, step and clap and turn, and every few rounds a few more people joined it from the crowd until the ring was three rings deep.

Uchiha danced next to Akimichi. Inuzuka danced next to Aburame, who did it with complete seriousness and no visible enjoyment but never once missed a step. Botan danced with his wife, holding her hand in his new one, his son and daughter clinging to their legs. Kushina danced with Mikoto like she’d never been allowed to dance before. Kaede danced beside Rei, perfectly, with her collar pulled up to her nose.

At the edge of the field, Nawaki was sitting on a bench with his crutches beside him and his bandaged legs stuck out in front of him, watching the dance with a sour face.

Tsume was standing next to him, not dancing either.

"You can go," he said. "You don't have to stay with me."

"I know."

"Then go dance."

"I don't want to."

"You've been bouncing for an hour, you obviously want to go dance."

"I'm not bouncing." She was bouncing. She stopped. She looked at the rings going round. She looked at him. Her face went red again, all the way to her ears. "Can you stand up?"

"Barely."

"Then stand up barely." She held out her hands.

Nawaki looked at her hands.  Then at her face. “I said you could go dance. I never said I wanted to dance.” 

“Shut up and just enjoy the festival!” She grabbed both his hands and hauled him up off the bench. He swayed, and nearly fell over, and Tsume caught him, and they stood there at the very edge of the circle, not quite in it, Tsume holding him up with both arms and Nawaki holding on to her shoulders.

They didn't dance, exactly. They just swayed a little, in time with the drums, while the rings went round in front of them.

Kuromaru danced around them with his tail wagging back and forth.

It was past midnight when the last guests went out through the gate.

The lanterns were burning low. The stalls were empty. Paper fans lay everywhere, on benches and in the street and on the roofs, where the children had thrown them. The old woman from the noodle stall was asleep on her own bench with a ladle in her hand.

Mikoto walked home between her parents.

Her feet hurt. Her face hurt from smiling. The pins in her hair had come loose an hour ago and Kushina had taken them out entirely and stuck them in her own hair, and then fallen asleep on Mikoto's shoulder by the drums and had to be carried home by her ANBU guards, who did it without a word and with resigned looks.

The box of pork buns was empty. She'd shared them with Team Eleven, which counted as eating every one.

Her mother took her hand on the other side and held it, swinging it a little, the way she had when Mikoto was small.

They walked on through the compound under the dying lanterns.

It's over, Mikoto thought.

The men on the road. She'd gone to Tajimu-sama, and Tajimu-sama had handled it. She didn't know how. She didn't really need to know how. Something had happened in the tower that she didn't understand, and the clan had gotten a seat on the council because of it, and everybody was happy.

At home, she went straight to her room and knelt in front of her closet and pulled the two blankets off the scroll at the bottom.

She could feel Shark Skin before she'd even opened it. Still sulking. Five full hours of it, upset and hurt.

"I'm sorry," She whispered. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know. It was a whole party and you weren't invited. That was mean of me."

She released the seal. The great sharky sword came out onto her floor in a puff of smoke. She put her hand on it.

Under her palm, very slowly, the scales shifted. A long, aggrieved ripple ran down the length of the blade, from the hilt to the tip.

Mikoto carried it into the bed with her and fell asleep before she'd even taken the obi off.