30Disclaimer: I do not own the Naruto series. Itachi (7) and Shisui (9) are not my characters. I only own the characters Karasu Ren (23) and Uzumaki Fuyu (7). Author's note at the end.
Chapter 1 - Team Thirteen
Mere months after the nine-tailed fox leaves the village leaderless and in ruin, Karasu Ren is convinced that he-like most shinobi-will not make it far. He doesn't want to face the fact that Minato is dead, that the Uchiha are suspect, that the Hyuuga want nothing to do with him anymore-he doesn't want to face the fact that everyone he has-everyone he had-is gone.
(He should be six feet under, too.)
(He knows it.)
He doesn't know what to live for anymore. And yet in the dark of the endless sleepless nights, he reaches for the Will of Fire and prays that the torch will carry him forward. He wants to die with dignity and reason. He has no fears but one: that at this rate, he will die with neither.
Days bleed into the next, the months pass in a blur, and ANBU missions arrive one after the other. As the Sandaime transitions back into his leadership role, the Council insists that now, more than ever, Konoha is in danger. Karasu Ren agrees. Somewhat. The strain such periods of hardship provide is a mere fact of politics; but so is the fact that the Council wants him as far away from Uzumaki Naruto as possible.
He huffs under his breath. It's not like he wants to stare into the eyes of his best friend's tiny carbon copy. He recoils at the thought of Karasu green clashing with the distinct Namikaze cerulean and that obnoxious, horrid yellow he's poked fun of since he was old enough to walk.
No. He doesn't want anything to do with Naruto, nor with Kushina's little minion. A part of him hopes that Uzumaki Fuyu will fill the shoes that he cannot and take the child under her wing-but who is he kidding? It's the blind leading the deaf. Fuyu is only a child herself. Six years old? Seven, at best? Nothing but an orphan from Amegakure that recently trailed in with Jiraiya, with just enough time to settle and regard the Yondaime and his wife as a family before Hell's flames licked at their doorstep.
ANBU isn't a place of gossip, but it's not hard to catch wind of the murmurs circling around the underground headquarters: that Fuyu had been found covered in char and dried blood, clutching the demon baby next to her adopted parents' mangled bodies.
He hasn't seen her since. In fact, he'd only met her once at a quick dinner at the Yondaime's a few weeks before Kushina was due to give birth. He remembers thinking she looked terrified of him, but who wouldn't be terrified of how gruff and crass the years had turned Karasu Ren?
(Minato wasn't. As best friends do, Minato always understood. He understood when Karasu Ren retrenched after their teammate's death. He understood when he chose ANBU over life. He understood when those dinner nights grew few and far between, to the point Minato considered them sacred.)
Karasu Ren is just a shinobi broken by war. ANBU keeps him on auto-pilot. He meets every morning at a new location, but at each one he wakes up expecting death to greet him at the doorstep. He is not afraid.
(Except...-)
He quells the fear before it can take hold.
Things change at the end of December. He doesn't expect the arrival of winter to change anything, but suddenly he's kneeling at the Sandaime's side and being ordered, being forced, to take the mask off.
When he is told that he is being demoted from ANBU in order to teach an exceptionally skilled genin squad, he glares. The Sandaime looks at him knowingly, a strange glint illuminating his eyes underneath the heavy hat. Karasu Ren recognizes this as hidden knowledge-the Sandaime is more than aware of his near-suicidal tendencies to bury himself in combat, to escape the village one S-rank after the next until he forgets the wreckage that the demon left behind.
Unable to protest, Karasu Ren realizes one thing: he doesn't have a choice. The swirling red seal on his shoulder is a promise of loyalty to the Hokage, and to step down is a direct order from Sarutobi Hiruzen himself.
His genin squad is given the number Thirteen. No happy thoughts brighten his mind. Instead, shadows of doubt consume him, and all he can think is: thirteen is a bad omen.
Their first official meeting is on a snowy December evening. Ren's already there when the first two students arrive together.
One bows politely, if somewhat expressionless and reserved for a child. That's when Ren decides he doesn't mind this one, so long as he keeps quiet.
The other one, however, saunters over with a grin stretching his cheeks. Ren isn't particularly fond of the mischievous look in his eyes, and for a moment he wonders how two brats can look so alike in their pale skin and dark features, but be so different in how they carry themselves.
The third member arrives exactly thirteen minutes late, awkwardly rubbing the back of her neck. Ren expects to see an apologetic look, but instead he's met with deep pools of blue-eyed pride as she animatedly explains how she was obliged to save her civilian neighbor's kitten from the top of a tree.
Once the recognition settles in her eyes as she takes him in, Karasu Ren expects her to glare; to belittle him for running away just like Jiraiya had; to blame him for turning his back on a crumbling village. She may have met him only once, but he knows she's seen his face plastered on photos around the Yondaime's childhood home, that Minato's likely told her more stories from their younger years that he can recount, that she probably had the impression of a better man before she first met him a couple of months ago (when he knows he left her with lingering disappointment).
Perhaps she knows too much of the role he had in Minato's life. The role that he should've kept in hers and Naruto's.
Because she is an orphan-an Ame orphan, at that!-even a distant blood relationship with the demon child couldn't convince the Council to let her take care of the kid or even tell him the truth.
That's why Karasu Ren prepares himself for anger. In some ways, he is to blame. All the Uzumaki need is a parental figure, and not a single person has stepped up from an entirely village. Uchiha Mikoto, the only one who tried, was entirely dismissed by the Council.
Instead, Uzumaki Fuyu's recognition sinks in with a sad smile.
"It's so nice to meet you, sensei!"
She sweeps it all under the rug, pretends that they can start over. Despite that, her eyes glisten in the light. She's close to tears, he can tell. He can only stoically nod and look away.
Team Thirteen's members choose to sit in a circle on a frosty tree stump in what would later become their own training field. Ren doesn't feel like testing their skills, he realizes, so instead he tells them the story of the tree whose very stump they're sitting on. The tree that loved a boy so much that it gave, gave, gave until the tree had nothing left to give. In the end, the boy had given nothing in return, and all that was left of the tree was a stump.
Ren's two male students wear contemplative expressions. The girl, however, hugs her knees close to her chest. "That's it?"
The ending is sad, she murmurs, and perhaps the boy is cruel. She pats the tree stump gently and rubs her knuckles against its jagged edges-"I'd never do that to you, y'know."
The boy with the longer hair-Itachi- quietly confirms that the boy in the story left the tree, and only ever returned when he wanted to take something.
Their third teammate huffs dramatically and hopes never to find a love like that because isn't the meaning of love not only to take but to give as well?
Ren sighs and waits. He doesn't really know what he's waiting for, but when the silence turns five minutes long, he realizes that perhaps the brats are too young to grasp the concept of the Will of Fire. Maybe they won't at all — after all, what are the chances that the clueless Ame-born Uzushiogakurerefugee will ever accept Konoha as her home, and that the two Uchiha will ever transcend the limitations of their clan?
So he shakes his head. One day, perhaps, they will understand.
A/N:
Story has been trudging along slowly since 2014, on and off. In 2023, I'm coming back to its roots. You'll see chapters that are a little longer, but I'll try to maintain the same style of writing and stick more-so to "drabble" series and slice of life. I don't want to fall into the redundancy of reiterating manga or anime excerpts, as most fics fall into. Still, I want to create something worth reading that weaves a story around what Itachi and Shisui's childhood could have looked like. This will definitely be a slow burn that spans years, beginning right after the Kyuubi attack and sticking faithful to the manga-with the exception of Fuyu and Ren. At some points, the story may enter AU grounds. I'll let you know if that happens.
Team Thirteen are all too young, so for now the chapters will remain mostly from Ren's point of view. You won't see true romance until they're older. That being said, I *mayyy* push the Uchiha Massacre up til Itachi's 15 :)
In Ren's story, the boy depicts the village while the tree depicts the shinobi who harbour the Will of Fire. I used the story of The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein to illustrate this belief.