Chapter 564:
"Complaining to me won't help. I didn't arrange for your sister to fall for Uchiha Shisui."
Naruto could feel the reproachful weight of young Sasuke's stare boring into the back of his head.
Young Sasuke's thoughts were producing a loud, persistent ringing. Uchiha Shisui. Uchiha Shisui?! That person?!
He knew who Shisui was. A genius-level Uchiha shinobi, a few years older than Itachi, with experience in ANBU, reputed to possess ocular talent that even exceeded Itachi's.
But young Sasuke had no close relationship with him. They were essentially strangers. More accurately -- when he was younger, he had actively disliked the man.
Because Shisui had a habit of appearing at exactly the wrong moments and taking Itachi away.
And every time Itachi was called off, he would say the same thing: "Sorry, Sasuke -- next time," and then leave with Shisui, and young Sasuke would be left standing there with a feeling in his chest that had no clean description.
This person had now married his sister.
Why?! Did changing gender somehow convert that kind of feeling into this kind of feeling?!
Same soul, same blood, only the gender different -- how could it produce a result so dramatically unlike anything he had known? Was this the world's doing? Fate's doing? Was it somehow his?!
"...So," Naruto's voice reached him, "are you going in or not? If you've changed your mind, we can leave."
"...No." The words came through the gaps between his fingers, where he had placed his hand over his face. "I'll... I'll go in. Just give me a moment."
He worked through it methodically, listing his own arguments back to himself. What did it matter that she was female? This was another world, entirely separate from his. What did it matter that there was a child? That was this world's Itachi's own choice, her own life -- what did any of it have to do with him? He was here to ask a few questions. He was here to see. That was all.
He repeated the word "probably" several times in his head, trying through repetition to upgrade it to "definitely." It remained stubbornly, stably "probably" no matter how many passes he gave it.
He drew a breath, put his hand back on the handle, and pushed the door open.
"...Excuse me. What exactly do you want?"
Yuu's voice came from inside. She had shifted to sitting up more fully against the pillows, the baby still in her arms, and she was looking at the unfamiliar boy in her doorway with an expression of genuine confusion.
"You're making me uncomfortable."
Her tone wasn't hard. There was something almost yielding in it -- a quality she herself couldn't have named. But underneath that softness, something else was operating: a baseline, instinctive watchfulness that had not been there a moment ago.
By rights, a strange boy suddenly pushing open the door of a room belonging to a woman barely past childbirth should have prompted immediate alarm. A raised voice. The child drawn protectively close.
But Yuu had not done any of those things. She looked at the boy standing in the doorway and found, somewhere inside the confusion, a feeling she hadn't expected. Something particular and close. Like a word on the edge of recognition.
"...Uchiha Itachi."
Young Sasuke's voice came out with the name in it.
The name he had said to himself thousands of times. The name he had hated for so many years. The name he had held between his teeth on dark, solitary nights in an empty house, turning it over and over until it was worn smooth and still gave him nothing.
"I have some questions for you. As for who I am -- I'm a surviving member of the Uchiha clan."
The expression on Yuu's face changed after she heard this. The confusion and uncertainty receded, replaced by something that came from further down.
Her hand, patting the baby's back, slowed its rhythm slightly. "You're here for revenge?" A small pause. "About how I... decided the lives and deaths of many people, without asking their permission?"
As she said it, she drew the baby a fraction closer to her.
"About revenge..." The corner of young Sasuke's mouth moved slightly. "That's exactly why I need to ask you questions first."
"...If you had come to me a year ago, I would have said yes."
Yuu's gaze moved away from young Sasuke and settled on the child's face. That small face, currently in a state of peaceful sleep, his earlier distress entirely forgotten. The corner of her mouth lifted just slightly.
"Because that was the ending I had chosen for myself..."
"But not now."
Her tone changed with those three words. The softness, the quality of looking back at something -- both of those went away. What replaced them was firmer. More grounded. The kind of weight that belonged to someone who had taken hold of something and had no intention of releasing it.
She raised her head and looked at young Sasuke again. The uncertain hesitation was gone from her eyes now. In its place was something clear and awake.
She was fully alert. No shouting, no panic, but everything in her posture had organized itself quietly toward readiness. She was looking for something -- a chance to call for help, an opening to create distance, a way to protect herself and the child without putting the child in harm's way.
Young Sasuke felt the ground shift under him slightly.
He was looking at something very familiar, arriving in a form he had never expected to see.
In Yuu's eyes. In the particular way she was holding the baby. In the weight behind those words, "not now."
That gaze. That resolve. The thing that placed another person entirely above one's own life, without hesitation, without qualification, not because it was a rational decision but because it simply was.
Tenderness and fierce protectiveness both at once -- the look of someone cradling the most precious thing the world had given them, with the absolute conviction that they would give up everything else before they gave this up.
When young Sasuke was small, Itachi had looked at him like that.
In those years before anything had happened. On those ordinary afternoons with decent sunlight. Itachi had looked at him with exactly that look.
It was because of that tenderness and fierce protectiveness that young Sasuke, as a child, had loved his brother more than anyone.
In his world, Itachi was the best older brother there was. The most capable person he knew. The one who would never hurt him. The one who would always be there.
He had never doubted it for a single moment. Had never thought that gaze would someday be absent. Had never imagined that the person who looked at him like that could look at him any other way -- could stand in the middle of what remained of the clan, surrounded by what he had done, and call him "my foolish little brother."
But that deep love -- that love that would go to any lengths, that acknowledged no limits in itself -- had hurt too many people who had nothing to do with it.
Those people weren't sacrifices made within the love. They were the love's price. And with prices, the one paying feels they have given enough. The ones bearing it don't even know what they're paying for.
But watching Yuu's eyes right now: that gaze no longer belonged exclusively to him.
Yuu did not want to die.
It didn't matter how many crimes she carried. It didn't matter how many people had died on that night by her hand. It didn't matter that she still felt her debts weren't settled. She did not want to die.
After being cut off completely by the sibling she loved most. After Satsuki had turned and walked away and left her standing alone, in those days when Yuu had thought she would never have anything to look forward to again, she had believed this was all she had left. This cell. This diminishing. Some quiet disappearance someday.
She had thought there was nothing in the world worth staying alive one more day for.
And then she had found something.
Something that made her look forward to tomorrow. Something that gave her back that feeling of "being alive is good." Something that made her willing to keep holding on in this world for the sake of one person.
Not revenge. Not atonement. Not a blade someone else would bring to her eventually.
A child. A small, sleeping child in her arms.
"This child..." Young Sasuke heard himself ask, without having decided to. "What's the child's name?"
"...Uchiha Yo."