Hikari carries me as if I am both a treasure and a task, one arm braced under my weight with practiced gentleness while the other hand makes the house behave, her steps unhurried and her breath even, and although I know perfectly well that being held is the pinnacle of a newborn's social calendar, I am still internally lamenting that being an armful of baby dramatically reduces the number of moments in which I can run the neat little circuits I have designed for myself, because it is hard to look unremarkable when you are humming Chakra 101 through your forearm while your mother is assessing whether the entryway flowers lean a degree to the left.
We tour the compound the way a queen tours a coastline, with Hikari stopping here to adjust a scroll so its edges are flush, pausing there to smooth an invisible wrinkle in the tatami, and lingering longest in the garden alcove where today's ikebana arrangement waits for judgment; I lie against her shoulder like a seal pup on a warm rock, breathing in the clean tea-and-linen scent of her while watching the arc of her fingers as she considers line and mass, one stem at a time, and although a large part of me would like to be horizontal and undisturbed so I can study the way a whisper of chakra along the trapezius keeps my head from bobbling during tummy time, the rest of me concedes that there are worse classrooms than this one, because the Hyūga idea of "ladylike" turns out to be equal parts geometry and restraint, which is, in its way, an excellent workbook for a month-old with ambitions.
Every so often I let my vision test its leash, not to pry but to check, because the seal around the house has taught me the comfort of routine safety checks, so I blink one slow, sleepy blink that is not sleepy at all and let a faint Byakugan bloom just long enough to sweep for the telltale starbursts of active sight, and when the room comes back plain I let the gift dim again, content to rely on ordinary senses while I practice appearing content; it is, to be honest, a relief to feel how smooth the toggle has become, the strain tucking itself away behind my eyes without the metallic aftertaste it used to leave.
Hikari hums a thread of melody as she moves, the kind of tune that does not quite become a song, and as we cross the threshold of the reception room a little tide of sleep rises through me, that heavy, pleasant gravity that babies treat like a tide table, and I let it take me, because there is fidelity in naps when you are growing at a cellular sprint; I drift under to the faintest rattle of porcelain and the thoughtful scrape of tatami under careful feet, and then, some unknowable time later, I surface into wakefulness with the disorienting sense that the world has changed shape while I was away.
I am not in Hikari's arms anymore but in a cradle placed near her knee, and the room that had been a corridor of chores now contains company: Hiashi sits where a man with quiet authority ought to sit, centered in the space without effort, and arranged around him like deliberate punctuation are three elders whose presences are as distinct to me as their faces would be to anyone else, because even half drowsy I can taste the differences in how their chakra sits—one crisp and dry, one heavy and moss-warm, one like a thin wire pulled taut—and all of them speak in the voices of people who think their words are ballast.
Hikari is at the low table with the tea things, and if there is art more precise than the way she warms the pot and measures the leaves and coaxes the water to the edge of perfect without ever looking rushed, I have not seen it, though I intend to steal the principle when my hands are large enough to hold more than a rabbit; she glances at me once, and I answer with the placid face of an infant who has just discovered that the ceiling is a friend, which frees her to turn back to her task while my ears open themselves toward the conversation as naturally as a sunflower turns to follow the sun.
"—unfortunate," says the crisp elder, and although I missed the opening clause my mind supplies the rest as he continues, "and it is not that one would fault the Uchiha for enforcing what is written; it is the manner of it, the way small things become sharpened until they draw blood."
Another elder, the moss-warm one whose voice arrives like a cushion set down carefully, adds that only three days ago there was a commotion in a sweets shop near the market square, nothing catastrophic, simply a child with sugar on his face and pockets who did not pay before he ran, and the patrol that answered the shopkeeper's complaint marched the boy away with the kind of insistence that turned a scolding into a sentence, which in this case became several days in a holding room and a mother who cried loudly enough that half the district now has an opinion about police discretion.
"They did nothing outside the law," the crisp one says, and he says it as if the statement is both shield and spear.
"And yet," the wire-elder replies, "word of the incident traveled as if it had legs longer than the truth's, and every telling leaned a little harder on outrage, which is what outrage is for when someone helps it along."
No one says the name that floats at the edge of their thoughts, but the room tastes briefly of suspicion, that bitter almond note, and then Hiashi sets his teacup down in the very center of its saucer and the conversation folds around the small sound the way a flock changes direction around a gust of wind.
"We will not pretend surprise that the Uchiha are being shunned more openly," he says, mild as rain and just as difficult to argue with, "because the village is very good at confusing fear with prudence, and men who wish to be seen as prudent have always found the Uchiha a useful mirror; the important part for us is to choose a posture that does not invite the same mirror to turn our way."
The moss-warm elder clears his throat and, with the caution of a man rearranging stones in a river, suggests that what is happening looks familiar if one wears old enough eyes: that once the Senju were a forest you could not miss, and now they are a grove that keeps thinning if you are honest about counting, and nothing in this village vanishes without someone shaping the air around it first.
"Noted," Hiashi answers, and the word carries both acknowledgment and boundary, a small demonstration of how to agree without inviting intimacy.
Hikari pours, the scent of the tea lifting in a green ribbon that winds between us, and as cups are offered and accepted I watch the elder on Hiashi's left—Elder Hyūga Kōsuke, his name attaching itself in my mind with the satisfying click of a puzzle piece—because he has the listening posture of a man who came here with something he had not yet decided to say; Hiashi, being Hiashi, notices the same thing and turns to him with a tilt of his head that is both invitation and test.
"Kōsuke," he says, "you grew up with Uchiha Naomori, and last I recall you share a board most months when the guest lists overlap; what do the elders say to one another when the doors are actually shut, not just politely closed?"
Kōsuke accepts the question with a nod that acknowledges both the personal and the political, and when he speaks he does so without relish, which makes me trust the report more than if he had come eager to deliver it.
"They are angry," he says simply, and then refines the word into something with facets: angry at how often their loyalty is treated as a thing to be measured and weighed rather than assumed, angry at how loudly small mistakes ring when the Uchiha make them and how softly large errors land when others do, and angrier still that they cannot agree on what shape their anger should take; there is a faction"—and he does not spit the word, he lays it down like a piece on a board—"that will bend to whatever the Hokage asks in the name of peace, and another faction that says peace on those terms is the first cut of a thousand."
"Which faction holds the elders?" the crisp one presses, because crisp men cannot stop themselves from seeking numbers they can put in a ledger.
Kōsuke's mouth thins. "Both, which means neither," he says. "They argue in circles, and they leave the table with hands unjoined, and it is hard to move a house in any direction when half of it has decided standing still is nobility and the other half has decided that running is the only proof of breath."
While the adults consider that image, my mind is already running the fast track to the memory it does not want: the night when running and standing still become the same thing because the floor is soaked and the shouting has stopped, the morning when the village names what happened something tidy and necessary and calls it peace again because words can be made to fold like paper cranes; I had expected the prelude to be slower, somehow, all rumor and drift, but here it is in day 32, sitting in my mother's tea room and trying to decide whether to say the quiet part out loud.
The wire-elder wonders whether someone is helping the stories travel, because repetition is a different craft than coincidence, and although no one's eyes move, I suddenly feel the phantom weight of bandages and an arm that does not belong to anyone in this room and a voice that has learned to sound like the village's conscience when it is most convenient, and the syllables of Danzo write themselves across the inside of my skull the way a warning does when you cannot afford to speak it.
Hiashi lets the silence do work for a long breath and then, as if pinning a paper to a board so it does not blow away, gives a verdict that is both expected and precisely shaped: the Hyūga will, for now, stand where the Hokage stands, because declared loyalty is currency the village still knows how to spend, and spending a little of it buys time and lowers the temperature under which people cook rumors; the Hyūga will also continue—"as we always have," he says, and the elders nod because it is comfortable to believe the present is simply the past in tidy clothes—to keep their interactions narrow and their edges sanded smooth, so that friction has less to catch on.
He sets his cup down again and addresses Kōsuke without changing tone. "And when you take tea with Naomori," he says, "tell him that when a house is split, a visitor does not stand on the line and declare it a corridor; we will not be the hand that pushes, not to one side, not to the other."
Kōsuke bows his head and agrees in the noncommittal way of men who have already decided, and Hikari chooses that moment to place a fresh cup within Hiashi's reach, the steam unfurling as if to underline the statement; I, who have done nothing more strenuous than awakening and listening, yawn a newborn's yawn that threatens to split my face and then find my hand, which is the sort of gesture that reassures everyone in the room that I am exactly the thing they think I am.
Inside that safe gesture, though, I am threading cause to effect, tracing how a child's stolen sweets can become a village's sour stomach when the story is retold with a particular rhythm, and how that rhythm can be conducted by a man who smiles with only half his face; I map the lines that run from today's soft words to a night years from now when steel sings under a different moon, and while a piece of me wants to cry simply because babies cry and it would feel good to let the feeling out of my ribs, a larger piece of me files everything away with the care of a clerk who knows which drawer is fireproof.
Tea cools; the elders' voices settle into the low register of men who have said what they came to say; Hiashi's attention, which can slice like a knife when he chooses, diffuses the way a blade's edge does after it has done its work; Hikari lifts me with the same unthinking tenderness with which she set the cups down, and as she sways me into that smooth, practiced rhythm that convinces the nervous system to stop narrating and simply rest, I let my eyelids drift, not quite closed, just enough to watch the room through their pale veil.