Chapter 563: Nephew
"We're here. Itachi is inside this room."
Naruto stopped walking and turned sideways, putting the door fully in view.
It was a sealed door. Metal. No surface decoration of any kind. A thick strip of rubber sealing ran along every edge of the frame, and the lock mechanism looked like nothing standard. The kind of door you would use when confining someone dangerous.
"Are you ready, Sasuke?"
There was something in Naruto's expression that was hard to categorize -- a particular seriousness. His tone wasn't quite asking "are you prepared." It was closer to "do you really want to go in?" The kind of tone that functioned as a quiet warning: what's behind this door might not match what you're imagining.
"Mentally, physically, whatever you mean -- I've been ready."
Young Sasuke answered without thinking. The words came out before he'd consciously formed them. He found himself wondering, slightly, why Naruto kept circling back to that word.
Naruto said nothing more. He reached into his coat and produced a spare key, inserted it into the unusual lock, and turned it gently.
A clean mechanical click. The indicator light on the lock shifted from red to green. The sealing strip around the frame relaxed by a fraction.
Young Sasuke drew a slow breath and put his hand on the door handle.
This was it. He was about to see this world's Itachi. Witness how his story ended. Not as an enemy. Not carrying the kind of hatred that wanted to reduce someone to nothing. Something else -- a different role, a different feeling -- and this door between them.
He let himself imagine it briefly. Maybe a dim room, Itachi shackled in a corner, wearing that expression of his that gave nothing away. Maybe an empty cell, Itachi standing at a window with his back to the door, turning slowly at the sound of it opening. Maybe a room with ANBU stationed around the walls, Itachi seated at the center, waiting.
He pressed down on the handle, beginning to push.
"Waaah --"
A sound came through the gap in the door. Clear. Unambiguous. Reaching him before the door had even moved an inch.
It was a broken, unselfconscious wailing. Instinctive. Definitely coming from inside the room.
Young Sasuke's hand went completely still on the handle.
...That was a baby crying.
He stood without moving. His mind worked through the possibilities at high speed, searching for any explanation that wasn't what his ears were telling him. Had he misheard? Was it the wind through something? Was it some other kind of sound?
The crying came again. Louder this time. Clearer. Less deniable.
He had not misheard. That was a baby crying.
His expression moved through puzzled, then confused, then arrived somewhere in the territory of completely blank.
Something was not right here.
Itachi was a prisoner. A dangerous person. Someone kept in a sealed, locked room with a specialized security door. That was the established situation.
So then why -- why was there a baby crying from inside a dangerous prisoner's cell? What possible logic led to placing an infant in the same space as someone classified as a high-level threat? What kind of organization made that decision? What kind of reasoning produced it? What kind of child-rearing philosophy resulted from it?
"...Don't look at me like that." Naruto's voice carried a note of genuine exasperation. "This has nothing to do with me."
He really hadn't seen this coming. Shisui, of all people. That utterly straight-faced, serious individual. He'd actually gone and done it.
Young Sasuke pulled his gaze back to the door. His fingers rested on the handle for a moment. Then they began to turn it slowly.
Please let it be fake.
How could there be a real baby? This had to be a genjutsu. A genjutsu specifically designed to confuse anyone entering without authorization. Or a television -- maybe the cell had a television and someone left a parenting program running. Or a radio. A broadcast from somewhere nearby that sounded like an infant when filtered through a wall.
Please let it be something other than what it sounded like.
He pushed the door open.
"Shisui, you're back -- "
A woman's voice from inside the room, stopping itself mid-sentence as the person speaking registered that the figure in the doorway was not who she had been expecting.
Young Sasuke stood in the doorway and felt as though something had discharged through him.
This was not a prison cell.
Or if it was, whoever had designed it had a very unconventional idea of what a prison cell should look like.
Warm-toned wooden floorboards. A wardrobe in the corner, its door left half-open, the clothes inside hanging in neat order. A table against one wall with an accumulated collection of objects across its surface -- baby bottles, folded diapers, a few open books with their spines bent back, a water cup that was about half full. There was a faint smell in the air, something like baby powder, soft and domestic.
And on the bed at the center of the room -- large enough for two people -- a young woman who appeared to be in her mid-twenties, half-propped against the pillows.
She was wearing loose, comfortable home clothes. Her collar was slightly open. Her hair fell unstyled over her shoulders. Her whole bearing had the particular kind of soft, unhurried quality that belonged to a woman in the days after giving birth -- the body still catching up to everything, the mind already entirely elsewhere.
In her arms, a small baby boy was crying. She had her head bowed over him, looking at the child's face with an expression of tenderness that had no restraint in it, humming something very quietly under her breath, one hand rhythmically patting his back.
Uchiha Itachi.
No. The name she went by now was Uchiha Yuu. She had thought Shisui was returning. But when she raised her head, what she found instead was a boy she had never seen before -- a stranger -- who nonetheless produced in her an immediate, inexplicable sense of familiarity.
The boy was standing in the doorway with one hand still on the handle, and his expression was --
His eyes were very wide. The expression on his face was cycling rapidly through shock, confusion, bewilderment, and disbelief before landing on a kind of total vacancy that might be summarized as: who am I, where am I, and what exactly am I doing.
Yuu looked at young Sasuke for approximately one second.
Then -- without apparent hesitation -- she brought her gaze back to the child in her arms and gave it her complete attention.
"There we go... no more crying, mama's right here..."
She bent her head close to the baby, using that particular register of voice -- soft, a little slow, almost melodic -- that seemed to exist only for use between a mother and a very small child.
The boy in her arms was still crying, but quieter than before. The sharp edge had gone out of it; what remained was more of a grumbling murmur, the sound of someone protesting rather than genuinely distressed.
A mother holding her crying baby. Her head bowed over him. Murmuring softly. By every available metric, an image of uncomplicated domestic warmth -- the kind of image that belongs on the front of a parenting magazine.
Young Sasuke felt an acute pain behind his eyes.
He closed the door.
A soft, final-sounding thud as the seal caught.
Then he put his hand back on the handle and opened it again.
"There we go... no more crying, mama's right here..."
Young Sasuke's expression remained fixed. He closed the door again.
Then opened it again.
"...Excuse me. What is it you actually want? If you're looking for Shisui, he's not here at the moment, but he should be back fairly soon."
Young Sasuke did not respond to anything Yuu had just said. He stared at the scene in the room for three seconds. Then he closed the door.
"I think we may have come to the wrong room."
"In terms of blood," Naruto said, extracting young Sasuke from his chosen self-deception, "that person is your sister. The one she's holding is your nephew."
"WHY?!"
Young Sasuke turned around. His face had arrived at an expression that defied classification -- something that required more category labels than were readily available.
His hands moved in helpless arcs at his sides. He had the general aspect of a fish that had been removed from water and deposited on a shoreline, thrashing with the full force of everything it had but unable to find its way back.
His mind had room for exactly one thought, and it was this: I came here to see Uchiha Itachi. I came to see the man who chose to become a demon on the night of the massacre. I came to witness how his story ended. I did not come here to see him having become a woman sitting on a bed holding an infant and making soothing sounds at it.