Fugue State, Chapter 2: Funeral Pyre

The Uchiha funeral grounds are nestled close to the Naka shrine and surrounded by a quiet forest. Soot-stained stone fills an entire clearing, with beds of dark rock raised for the placement of bodies. It’s a solemn place meant only for Uchiha in mourning.

Masuyo steps silently onto the stone, feet clad in sandals borrowed from the hospital. She’s always been a quiet walker, but now barely a tap follows each step.

“I don’t think I’m meant to bring outsiders to this place,” Masuyo tells Kakashi with little feeling. “I guess that doesn’t matter anymore. I’d rather not be alone.”  

He has a sharingan. He’s the only person in Konoha with one besides her and Sasuke. He’s practically an honorary Uchiha. Certainly more of an Uchiha than Masuyo, who is only piloting the body of one and co-opting her memories.

There had been a sealing scroll full of urns left in the Naka shrine for funerals, but there wasn’t enough for all of the bodies. Each one will have to be interred separately to follow tradition. And each one has to be cremated with a great fireball technique. 

Tradition may not matter in the face of four hundred and sixty two corpses. She’ll see. 

“You don’t have the chakra for this,” Hound says as they walk towards the first stone bed. He has bags of scrolls in his hands and the hands of two clones. Masuyo holds the clan registries and her storage scroll of urns. They make a grim pair. 

“Then it will take days. I have time,” Masuyo says practically. As long as the scrolls stay close to her and she’s able to check each body for signs of eye loss, she wins. And with the registries she’ll know if anyone is missing. 

Beat that, Danzo.

“Do you think Sasuke-kun would want to miss this?” Hound asks again. He’s being more talkative than she’d expect. She settles the registries on the ground, far from where the great fireball should be able to catch them. 

“Sasuke-kun will probably wake up before I’m done. Then he can be here too, if he wants.” Masuyo gestures for him to drop the bags of scrolls beside the registries. 

“Do you have to start this now?” 

So fucking nosy for an ANBU. He’s probably here to spy on her on top of keeping ROOT from slitting her throat again. 

The scar tissue along her neck pangs at the reminder. It’s not too thick, and the med-nin said she could come back to have it broken down in a month. She doesn’t know if she cares enough to do it. This body isn’t hers anyways. A scar is secondary to all of the work she needs to do.

(She’s only looked in the mirror once since waking up here. Her face was wrong. Her eyes dark, her features delicate. More like a doll than a teenage girl. Maybe the scar will make this body feel less like it’s on lend.)

“The longer I wait, the more time someone has to take their eyes,” Masuyo says plainly, grabbing a scroll from the pile. “Which people will, once they realize only a genin and an academy student can come after them for the slight. I won’t let that happen. Not while I’m still alive. My clansmen’s eyes will burn with them, and if someone wants a sharingan, they can try and take it out of my head.”

Or Sasuke’s. But Masuyo has on good authority that Itachi will hunt down anyone who tries to take Sasuke’s eyes with much better effectiveness than she could ever threaten. 

Kakashi doesn’t offer anymore opinions, and Masuyo carries the body scroll in her hand to a stone bed, unrolling it upside down so that she’ll be able to remove the scroll from on top of the body instead of under. These body scrolls don’t belong to her, and she’s not risking Konoha asking for the amount of ryo one would cost if she burns it. 

She peeks at the description for the scroll, grimacing. 

‘Old man, sixty-five to seventy-five. Grey hair. Stab to heart.’

Masuyo channels chakra to her fingers and unseals the body. 

He poofs into place below the scroll, lying face up. She carefully lifts the scroll from him and rolls it up, setting it to the side. She adjusts her gloves, a pair she commandeered from the hospital. The med-nin rarely wear them, she thinks they can sanitize their hands with jutsu easily. 

Masuyo is not a med-nin, and touching dead bodies with your bare hands is a great way to catch something you really don’t want.

She checks the old man’s eyes, notes that they’re there with a grimace, and moves on to check the registries for him. She finds a photo of his face and his name after ten minutes of searching, before writing carefully the date of the massacre and his cause of death. ‘Stab wound to the heart by Uchiha Itachi.’ She may end up shortening that to just Itachi after a while. She’s sure no Uchiha in the future will ever forget his name. 

Then again, people like to think a lot of things are eternal. Better to be thorough for Sasuke’s sake. Or Sasuke’s future children. Whatever comes first.

She clears the stone bed of anything that she doesn’t want to burn, and then wonders if she should search the bodies before burning them. The idea makes her so sick she has to turn away and look up at the sky for a moment, stomach rolling. 

No. Nevermind. It all burns. If they have anything important in their pockets then it’s spilled milk.

Masuyo stares at the clouds for another few seconds, tracing their slow tread across the pale blue sky. Let’s out a little breath, and then looks down again. 

She steps back a few feet and draws on her chakra, muscle memory guiding her fingers into the hand signs for the great fireball jutsu almost seamlessly. 

Snake, her hands clasped together, chakra rolling at her core. Ram, index and middle fingers out, left hand covering the right. Her chakra moves up her throat, building at the back of her mouth. Monkey, hands flat atop each other. The chakra builds heat. Boar, she brings her hands closer to her lips. Pressure builds, filling her mouth and forcing her to purse her lips to keep it in. Horse, her chakra goes tighter than a bowstring and—

Tiger. Brilliant flame gusts forth from her lips through the circle of her hands in front of her mouth. The ball of fire slams into the old man’s body, burning him away like kindling. His nice kimono, his grey hair, his body and his blood. Everything becomes ash in a few moments. 

Masuyo stares at it, panting. The fire chakra has left her mouth tingling. Not in a bad way, but in a way that tells her casting more of those will make it worse. 

“One out of four hundred and sixty two,” Masuyo says, checking her chakra and grimacing when she sees how much she’s lost. Something like fifteen percent to one jutsu. She’ll have to try and put less chakra into it. Enough to cremate, but not enough to make her limited to a few bodies a day. 

“You could hire someone to do this,” Kakashi says unhelpfully. 

Masuyo shakes her head. Her memories are very clear on how this is meant to be done. “It has to be the great fireball, and I have to watch it be done. Until Sasuke-kun wakes up, this is how it has to happen.”

She gets ready to sweep some of the ash into an urn, before starting on the next one. 

She doesn’t think about her body. She doesn’t think about these people who are meant to be her family. She does not wonder if any of this matters at all. 

—

The Uchiha spends hours burning her kin. 

The smell of ash burns his nose, eventually. Uchiha Masuyo moves with the methodology of Kakashi on his low days, when he cleans the memorial stone and presses his face to its cold side, eyes locked on names. Tracing Namikaze Minato over and over again, then beside him, to Uzumaki Kushina, and four rows up to Nohara Rin. 

Obito is always last. Six rows above Rin, to the left. He was always late in life, it’s better to keep him late in his ruminations too. 

The Uchiha’s chakra control refines with every cast of the fireball jutsu, her hand signs becoming sharper and her chakra replying quicker. She’s a genin, but one with clear ninjutsu talent. 

And a commitment to her mission. He watches her cry after the eighth fireball, blink through the tears, and then start on the next. Listens to idle commentary when she has the stomach for it, through a croaking voice from channeling too much fire chakra through her throat. 

He feels like a voyeur more than a bodyguard, though sometimes those roles are one in the same. 

Her hands fly through the hand signs for her family’s jutsu once again, shaking, and she burns another corpse. A child, this time. One younger than Sasuke. 

Itachi, he thinks again, because his name hasn’t left his mind since he stepped inside the Uchiha compound hours ago. Why?

Why, he wonders. He watches her sweep the remaining ashes into a small urn, labeling the name on it with careful strokes of ink. Why why why, like the buzzing of an Aburame beetle by his ear. Masuyo sets the urn beside two dozen others. 

“You’re going to enter chakra exhaustion,” Kakashi comments. He can’t slip into the cool indifference of Hound since he left the compound. There’s only so many of Konoha’s children and civilians you can put into a body scroll before your conditioning starts cracking. Genma had thrown up. Kakashi couldn’t even bother with a reprimand.

He pointedly doesn’t suggest Masuyo stop cremating corpses, well aware of what he would do if someone told him to leave the memorial stone after any of his own failures. His grief has the advantage of not being chakra intensive. Until he uses Obito’s eye, of course.

Masuyo nods, looking back at the bags full of body scrolls with empty eyes. 

“Twenty days,” she says shortly, sounding as though speaking hurts. The significance of the number takes him a moment to register, before he counts the number of urns again. At two dozen a day she will be at this for a month. 

If Kakashi’s clan had been larger, if they had died like this when he had been her age, would he have spent almost a month burning them? 

It’s a stupid question. Rin had just died when he was her age and he had been a Jonin. Minato-sensei—

Well. He wouldn’t have had to burn so many alone. And he’d had better chakra stores.

Kakashi says nothing in reply, simply helping her pick up the bags of body scrolls and the urns so they can be interred. Uchiha Masuyo moves sluggishly to the Uchiha shrine by the Naka. 

His eyes trail off to the side of the old shrine as she steps inside, sweeping the area for enemies. Through the woods he can see a path up to a cliff lined with fences. The fences look new, and in a moment he realizes that that must have been where Shisui killed himself. 

Kakashi turns away. 

Masuyo takes urns from his clone’s hands with soot stained fingers, stepping into the back of the shrine to begin setting them onto shelves. 

“They’re meant to be sorted by their branch,” Masuyo tells him as she clearly does not do so. 

The urns clack each time she sets them down. This back room is lit only by the sunlight trailing through the doorway, drawing her pale face wane. There are candles lining the ground that could be lit. She doesn’t bother.

Kakashi gets the sense he is not meant to be in this part of the shrine, just as he was not meant to see the Uchiha cremation grounds. Especially not him, not with his eye. Fugaku had made clear he was not to go near even the clan compound after the elders debated plucking out Obito’s eye.

Masuyo doesn’t object to his presence though, which is convenient. It would complicate him protecting her if she made him wait outside. It may help that she only sees him as a member of ANBU, and not as himself.

He keeps half an eye on her and a clone by the front to watch for any sign of threats, willing himself to become a weapon again instead of a thinking man. It works for a moment, at least until he hears another urn settle on the shelf, and then he’s back to the start.

She finishes eventually, stopping to simply stare at the collection of urns she’s placed. Her hands are limp at her sides, stark against the pale white hospital robes she was given. 

Then Masuyo turns, murmurs a quiet, “Let’s go back to the hospital,” and brushes past him. Kakashi follows. They’ll have to shunshin back, just as they did coming here. There's a higher risk of engagement and attention in Konoha’s streets. Especially with the Uchiha clan’s body scrolls in hand. 

—

Uchiha Sasuke is dead. 

He isn’t, not really. He knows because he wakes up tangled in unfamiliar sheets and staring at a white ceiling. But he’s dead. He should be dead. 

His heart thrums against his chest, hands trembling. He reaches up and grips his shirt. He feels his traitorous heart as it batters his ribs. 

“Itachi-nii,” he whimpers. He jerks up and looks around the room frantically, expecting his brother to be there, somewhere. Standing in the corner or the doorway watching him with his sharingan. Everything is so dark. Is it night, still? Was it real? Was he dreaming? 

He looks to the right and stops, panting. 

That’s his cousin, isn’t it? He doesn’t remember her name. She’s slumped in a seat beside his bed, sleeping. He watched—

His eyes go to her throat, widening when he sees a scar there.

Her throat. He watched Itachi slit her throat. He remembers now. He’d done his littler cousin first, Masao. It had been so red. He saw his bone.

Sasuke gags, clasping a hand over his mouth with wide burning eyes. There’s a rushing in his ears muffling everything else. It wasn’t a dream! It wasn’t— 

His cousin jolts awake in seconds, dark eyes shifting to red and her hand rushing down to grasp a bag at her feet. She looks around, then her eyes land on him. 

“Sasuke?” she says in a rough voice, eyes going dark again in a few blinks. She stumbles to her feet, looking to the door and back at him. “You’re awake.”

He must be dead. This must be a genjutsu, like the one before. His mind runs back to his academy lessons on genjutsu. Pain was supposed to break it, but pain hadn’t broken nii-san— it hadn’t broken his genjutsu. 

Sasuke reaches down and pinches his leg as hard as he can and ignores when his cousin hisses a curse. 

She reaches forwards, warm hand holding his wrist. 

“I’m real,” she insists, somehow knowing what he’s already figured out. Her voice sounds like the croak of the elders. Is it because he’d slit her throat? “Itachi is gone, Sasuke, he’s gone. It’s been five days.” 

“You’re lying,” Sasuke insists even as he lets her pull his hand away from his leg. His skin throbs where he’d pinched it. He can barely see her, blinking through his crybaby tears. They trail down his cheeks hotly and gather at his chin.

Before his cousin can respond, he thinks her name sounds like her brother’s—he gags again—the doors to the room open and someone flicks on the lights. He flinches.

“Stand back, Masuyo-chan,” a woman says. He can blurrily make out a doctor’s coat as his eyes adjust. 

Sasuke’s cousin steps back, letting go of his wrist and leaving it cold. His hand reaches out for her again, grabbing her own. Will she die again if she leaves? Will the genjutsu end and leave him alone? 

“No!” Sasuke says, holding her tightly and looking at the doctor. Is the doctor Itachi? Sasuke knows what henge is, Shisui used it to trick him before. 

“Post-genjutsu paranoia,” the doctor murmurs calmly, looking back through the door at another person peeking in. The person nods, leaving. 

“Sasuke-kun,” Masuyo says. She doesn’t try to leave his hold, just stands there. He wants to claw her closer. He wants to hide behind her. “It’s been five days. You’re in the hospital. Itachi left the village after the attack.”

“You died,” Sasuke insists. He can feel her heartbeat in his hand. He can see her throat being cut, her brother’s. His parents. The neighbors. 

Masuyo nods. The silvery line of her scar shines in the light. “He cut my throat but I lived. Did you see it in the genjutsu?” 

Sasuke can’t say anything else. His throat stings and the tears won’t stop. He can’t— he shouldn’t cry. Shinobi don’t cry. Itachi said he needed to become strong to kill him. 

He manages to choke out, “Kaa-san?” because he’s weak. He’s weak and he wants Kaa-san. If his cousin lived, could she have? 

Masuyo’s face shudders like crumpling paper. That’s weak too. Maybe that’s why they’re both alive. She shakes her head. 

“It’s just us, Sasuke-kun.”

Just them. Just them and Itachi. 

The doctor comes forwards and starts testing him, asking him stupid questions about where he is and what he remembers after he gets control over himself. She says they’re going to tell the Hokage he’s awake, and Masuyo frowns. 

“Can it wait until morning?” Masuyo asks. Will her voice stay like that forever? He’s starting to place it. It sounds like when he practiced the great fireball too often and— and that man told him to stop. 

The doctor sighs, rubbing her eyes from under her glasses. “He gave direct orders to be notified when he wakes, Masuyo-chan.”

Masuyo turns and looks at Sasuke. She’s Izumi’s age. She babysitted him when he was younger. She looks so tired. 

“The Hokage is going to ask you about what Itachi said and did, and what you saw. He didn’t tell anyone why he hurt people before he left. The Hokage thinks you will know.” 

“You’re too weak to kill, otouto,” Itachi whispers in Sasuke’s mind. “I had to prove my power.” 

Sasuke looks down at the white blankets. Something awful lodges itself in his throat, and he thinks he’s going to cry again. 

—

Masuyo would like to see less of the Hokage. 

He steps through the hospital room door with tired eyes and an exhausted slope to his shoulders. He’s getting old. It can’t be good for him to wake up in the middle of the night. He offers Masuyo a smile from where she stands beside Sasuke, then the boy himself. 

“Good morning, Hokage-sama,” Masuyo says in her croaking voice. The doctors have refused to heal any of the irritation. A sort of silent protest against her personally cremating her entire clan instead of getting help. 

She does have help. She has Kakashi, who has somehow diligently been assigned to follow her around every day since this fucking mess started. He can’t help burn anything since he needs his chakra in case someone attacks her, but it’s still help. More help than the other two ANBU shadowing her are, anyways.

Doctor Sugimoto disagrees. She is of the opinion that she shouldn’t have to be the one to do it at all. Masuyo doesn’t argue, just takes cough drops from more sympathetic nurses and prepares for the next trial.

“Good morning, Masuyo-chan, Sasuke-kun,” Sarutobi replies, stopping to stand towards the end of the bed. “I am sorry to disturb you.”

No, he isn’t. Or maybe he is but it won’t stop him anyways. 

If he were really sorry then Danzo would be dead. 

Sasuke stares down at the blankets, hand tightening where it's gripping her own. His hold has gotten sweaty after fifteen minutes, but Masuyo has a feeling that if she lets go then whatever follows will be worse than a little sweat. 

“May I sit down?” Sarutobi asks politely, glancing at Sasuke and then at her.

Her bags of body scrolls are nestled under the uncomfortable hospital seats. Masuyo figures they’ll probably be even safer with a Hokage on top of them. Provided that he is the Hokage. 

“Hokage-sama, forgive me. May I look at you with my sharingan before you sit? Sasuke was worried the doctor earlier was a genjutsu. It may make him more comfortable,” Masuyo says with an appropriate level of apology. 

Sarutobi nods easily. Good. She didn’t want any of the ANBU nearby getting twitchy because she started looking at the Hokage funny. She remembers very distantly that Danzo went around impersonating the Hokage, and that’s part of why Itachi killed the clan. She could be misremembering, but she’d rather be paranoid than dead. 

Well. She’ll still probably die if she does realize it's Danzo. Maybe someone else will be able to do something about him.

Masuyo’s chakra jumps to her call almost eagerly, rushing to her eyes in seconds as red bleeds through her dark eyes. 

Masuyo had had the sharingan before she watched the massacre, but her brother dying—

She has the mangekyo now. How fucking exciting. She would rip it out with her bare hands if it’d just bring her home.

The room fills with clarity, individual grains of wood on the floor and every one of the Hokage’s pores on display. She scans him, then the room, and then Sasuke. Sasuke stares back at her with a pale face. 

It looks like Masao’s face, her not-brother. She can see his throat being cut in startling clarity, Itachi’s hand moving with clinical efficiency before he pounced on her. She can see the bodies, the bloodied living room. She can see when she found Sasuke in the clan head’s house, knocked onto the floor beside his parents. She’d worried he was dead and that she lived in some kind of disgusting trade.

She blinks, cutting the chakra off. She hates the sharingan.

“No genjutsu, no Itachi. Just the Hokage.” And no Danzo either.

Sasuke relaxes, then pointedly looks back down at his blanket again. 

The Hokage sits down in one of the uncomfortable little chairs after levying a heavy look at the bags underneath them. He doesn’t say anything about it, which is good. Sasuke has only just calmed down. Masuyo doesn’t need him to know his whole family is in the room with them because she couldn’t trust ROOT not to tamper with them. 

“How are you feeling, Sasuke-kun?”

Sasuke scowls, looking up finally. His eyes are red rimmed from the crying earlier. “You want to ask about—” he cuts himself off harshly, swallowing. Then continues. “About that man.”

Sarutobi Hiruzen, faced with two temperamental Uchiha children instead of just one now, simply nods. 

“You were the last one he spoke to after the violence. What happened when you entered the compound, Sasuke-kun? What did he tell you?”

Sasuke fumbles through a retelling of the events, straying to odd details like the child he is and then back on track. He stops when he gets to entering his house. Haltingly mentions searching each room until he found his parents. 

Itachi. His supposed wish to prove his strength. The genjutsu. An order to come find him and kill him, once Sasuke is strong. 

Did Itachi wonder about who was going to have to burn his family when he was killing them? Did he care at all? 

The Hokage leaves, eventually, citing the lateness of the hour and giving them privacy. Masuyo watches him leave until the door shuts, then carefully lets go of Sasuke’s hand. She can’t feel her fingers very well anymore from how hard he was gripping it. 

“Is it really…?” Sasuke trails off in a small voice, hands limp at his lap. He looks younger than he is in the hospital bed, white blankets swallowing him and his arms looking too thin.

Masuyo sits down heavily in one of the uncomfortable chairs. Her body aches from all of the chakra usage, her mind is heavy with the work she’s done. She’s not a child, not really. She hasn’t been for years. But even adults balk at the sight of the dead, let alone washing crematorial ash off of themselves every night. 

“What do we do?” Sasuke asks instead, looking at her with shining eyes. 

There isn’t hope, or some kind of overwhelming familiar love in them. It’s fear. The sort of fear a drowning person has when they finally spot a life preserver but it's a couple feet too far away. 

“The Hokage ordered the houses cleaned already, so we could move back in if you wanted,” Masuyo starts. Sasuke’s face blanches at that, which is to be expected. It was a week ago for her, but a sleep ago for him. “And the funerals—”

“Did I miss them?” Sasuke interrupts urgently. 

Masuyo grimaces. “No. Not most of them, anyways. You went to Elder Shun’s funeral last fall, didn’t you?” 

Sasuke nods, uncomprehending. Masuyo has pulled most of her knowledge of how the funerals work from that one, since it was recent and she was finally old enough to be included in the interring process.

“I’ve been doing them all. The burning parts, at least. I think we can hold a mass funeral at the end of this month for people’s friends and teams. The other clans will probably have their heads attend too.” 

Masuyo hasn’t had time to contemplate the politics of it all or to care very much about anyone other than Sasuke. She’s sure there are plenty of Uchiha who had teams outside of the clan, senseis, lovers, whatever. They just knew it was impolitic to talk about it near the ones who were committed to the coup. She doesn’t know. Some of her memories are clearer than others, and Masuyo had been a fresh genin. Her biggest concern was learning water walking, cute boys, and joining the police force.

Sasuke stops listening somewhere at “burning parts” and looks increasingly stricken. “That’s why your voice is so rough!”

“It is,” Masuyo replies.

“Why? Why didn’t you wait until I woke up? Are my parents already— did you do them without me?” 

“No, Sasuke. I didn’t do your parents yet, I knew you would want to be there,” Masuyo starts carefully. She doesn’t want to be the one to explain this to a child. She doesn’t even want to be awake right now. “You know that sometimes people steal our clan’s eyes, right? For the sharingan?”

Sasuke doesn’t react well to her more gentle tone, glaring. “Of course I know about that!”

“If you were a shinobi who didn’t care about bloodline theft and several hundred Uchiha entered the village morgue, what would you do?” 

Sasuke gapes, then goes a bit green. Masuyo almost gets up to find a throw up bag before he speaks again. 

“Have any of their eyes been stolen?” 

“None that I’ve seen yet. And I will see, because I am checking every single one.” 

She’d rather it be her than Sasuke, who probably didn’t even know what happened with the bodies until he was shoved into funeral robes in another life. After Konoha got their pickings, of course. 

She still may find missing eyes once she gets to some of the Konoha Police members. They’re towards the bottom of the bags, and she was warned they were the most gruesomely injured. Probably because they put up a fight.

They sit in uncomfortable silence for a few moments. Masuyo imagines that if Sasuke could pick a cousin to wake up with, to have been kept alive, he probably wouldn’t have chosen her. 

“What happens after?” Sasuke asks, avoiding looking at her face. “Am I— I need to go back to the academy.”

His teacher has been dropping off homework as far as she can tell. Little booklets and small vases of flowers have appeared on the table in the room when she’s not here. She hasn’t seen him yet. She doesn’t particularly want to. 

“If that’s what you want, then that’s what we’ll do,” Masuyo agrees.

“We?” Sasuke repeats. He doesn’t sound upset about it, just a twinge relieved.

“We’re family, Sasuke-kun. I’m not leaving you. Someone has to take care of you until you’re an adult, and after, since being a genin is barely an adult.” 

“You’re only a genin,” Sasuke says mulishly. 

Masuyo sighs, rubbing her face. “Fine. I’ll get promoted to chunin so that I’m more adultlike.”

“That’s not how that works!” 

“Jonin then, since you’re so picky. Can we go back to sleep now? I’m tired.” 

Sasuke pauses, looking towards the door, then the window. Checking for places someone could enter. 

“The window is locked, and there’s four ANBU assigned to this room until you recover.”

“...he wouldn’t be stopped by them.”

“Maybe. He would be stopped long enough for me to carry you to the Hokage tower, though.” 

“I’m not worried about myself,” Sasuke hisses, childish voice going harsh. He looks sharply over at Masuyo, staring pointedly at her neck. 

Ah. Okay. She’s going to have to become a jonin. If she doesn't, Sasuke will almost definitely use her survival as an excuse for his revenge obsession. She can see it now. 

“If Itachi gets within fifty miles of the village he will be apprehended. He got out because he attacked when no one was expecting him, Sasuke-kun. If he comes back for me, a genin, then it’s because he’s stupid.”

And he won’t come back for her because the Hokage has turned him into a spy for the village. He would be obligated to execute him if the ANBU brought him in. 

Sasuke doesn’t seem to agree with her, likely because he’s a traumatized seven year old with no future knowledge and who watched her die. Which is understandable. If she were the real Masuyo she’d be hiding under the covers of her hospital bed still, terrified that he’d come back and finish the job. 

But she isn’t actually thirteen. There’s work to do. She needs to sleep to do it.

“Sasuke, I promise if he manages to break in I’ll set him on fire. I’ve gotten very good at that. After he’s on fire, I’ll grab you and run. Is that better?” 

Sasuke vehemently disagrees. So Masuyo stays up an extra hour for him watching the exit points until his eyes finally get too droopy to stay awake. 

Masuyo never really wanted to be a parent. She figures she’ll just suck it up and do her best. She can be an older sister, maybe. She's done that before. 

She falls asleep seeing her sisters’ faces, indistinct and nameless now, and her not-brother clutching his throat.