Chapter 273: The Prodigy's Tears
The Uchiha Clan — The Mirror Lineage
Uchiha Kagami was a paradox made flesh.
A loyal son of Konoha. A bearer of the Uchiha blood. In a clan where suspicion of the village had curdled into something approaching tradition, Kagami had chosen differently. He had stood with the Hokage. He had believed in the Will of Fire. And for that, his own people had never quite forgiven him.
The relationship between Kagami and the Uchiha main family was, at best, awkward. At worst, hostile. The clan leadership—Uchiha Dunzan among them—viewed Kagami's pro-village stance as a betrayal of blood. They could not move against him openly; his strength was too well-known, his connections too deep. But they could make his position within the clan untenable.
So Kagami had simply... left.
Not in body—he was still an Uchiha, still carried the name and the blood—but in practice. He did not live among his kinsmen. He had accepted Konoha's offer of a separate residence, a quiet estate tucked into a peaceful corner of the village, far from the simmering resentments of the Uchiha compound. The Third Hokage had arranged it personally. Even Danzo—Danzo, who distrusted the Uchiha with a passion that bordered on the pathological—had signed off.
Because Kagami was different. He always had been.
Danzo did not trust the Uchiha. But he trusted Kagami. The two of them, along with Hiruzen, Koharu, and Homura, had all been students of the Second Hokage. They had trained together. Fought together. Buried comrades together. Danzo, for all his darkness, still carried a core of respect for Tobirama Senju. And if the Second Hokage had seen fit to embrace Uchiha Kagami as a worthy student, then Danzo could tolerate one Uchiha in his world.
One. No more.
As for the Uchiha clan, their current head—Uchiha Dunzan—was far from pleased with the Kagami lineage. But he held his tongue and averted his eyes. Kagami was a contemporary of the Third Hokage. His strength was, by any reasonable estimate, Kage-level. There were whispers—unconfirmed, never proven—that Kagami had awakened the legendary Mangekyō Sharingan. If true, he would be the most dangerous Uchiha alive. Dunzan did not intend to find out firsthand.
So Kagami had retired. Stepped back from duty. Withdrawn from the games of politics and power. He had chosen a simpler path: family. Children. Grandchildren. A quiet life in a quiet house, filling its rooms with laughter and the pitter-patter of small feet.
And he had succeeded spectacularly.
Sarutobi Hiruzen, his old friend, had only just fathered a son—Asuma, still an infant. Grandchildren were a distant dream. Danzo, that eternal bachelor who seemed married only to his own ambition, had no known descendants and probably never would. But Kagami? Kagami had grandchildren. Plural. Groups of them. He had retired young and dedicated himself to the ancient and noble art of creating life. One man had built a small clan within a clan.
The Uchiha Mirror lineage was thriving.
In the sun-dappled courtyard of the Kagami estate, two small children were deeply engaged in the serious business of playing in the mud.
One of them was Uchiha Shisui. His enormous Kazilan eyes, still red-rimmed from his earlier crying jag, were now focused with intense concentration on the lump of wet earth before him. His small hands worked the mud with surprising dexterity, shaping it into something that might eventually—with enough imagination—resemble a castle.
The other child was younger. Smaller. He still walked with the unsteady wobble of someone who had only recently figured out how his legs worked, and as a result, he spent a significant portion of his playtime simply rolling across the grass like a cheerful, goggle-wearing tumbleweed.
The goggles were the key detail. Perched on his head, slightly askew, a pair of orange-tinted goggles that were currently smeared with mud and grass stains and possibly something unidentifiable. A trail of liquid hung from his nose, quivering with each breath, occasionally retreating upward with a wet sniffle before immediately beginning its slow descent again.
This was Uchiha Obito.
Yes. That Obito.
The boy who would one day orchestrate the Fourth Shinobi World War. The man who would challenge the entire shinobi world to create his vision of paradise. The shadow who would wear the mask of Madara and pull the strings of Akatsuki. The architect of the Infinite Tsukuyomi.
He was currently wearing crotchless pants and playing in the mud.
It was difficult—genuinely, profoundly difficult—to reconcile the child before him with the monster he would become. His face was open, innocent, utterly devoid of malice. His laughter was high and bright and completely unguarded. When his nose dripped, he wiped it on his sleeve without a trace of self-consciousness.
Childhood. Brief. Precious. Doomed.
"Obito," Shisui said, examining his younger companion's handiwork with a critical eye, "your mud is too crumbly. You have to add more water. Otherwise it won't stick together properly."
Obito looked down at his pathetic, crumbling mud pile with the solemnity of a student receiving wisdom from a master.
"Oh. But... there's no water, Brother Shisui."
Shisui furrowed his brow in deep thought. The problem was real. The solution required creativity. His young mind worked through the possibilities with the methodical precision that would one day make him a legend.
"Water Release," he declared at last.
Obito's face lit up with uncomplicated adoration. "Yeah! Water Release!"
"But... I don't feel anything right now." Obito's face fell. "The chakra. It's not coming out."
Shisui rose to his full, unimpressive height. His expression was one of absolute seriousness—the gravity of a general addressing troops before battle.
"Don't worry. I'll help you."
He positioned himself in front of the crumbling mud pile and took a deep, preparatory breath.
"Water Style: Great Waterfall Technique!"
He dropped his pants.
Time froze.
The arc of the waterfall caught the afternoon sunlight, scattering it into a thousand tiny rainbows. Obito's expression—eyes wide, mouth open, nose drip suspended in mid-quiver—was the expression of a child witnessing something beyond his comprehension. Not merely a bodily function. Art. The perfect marriage of form and function. A masterwork of improvisation.
The mud received its blessing.
If time could be folded into a scroll, if this moment could be preserved and examined years later by the man Obito would become—what would he feel? Nostalgia? Humiliation? A sudden, overwhelming urge to activate Kamui and erase his past self from existence?
"Divine Water Style," the future Obito might mutter, his eye twitching beneath the orange mask. "He used Divine Water Style on me when I was too young to know any better."
But there were no ifs in this world. Only moments. Only memories. Only two small boys and the dazzling arc of a waterfall that was, in its own strange way, an act of love.
"Wow!"
Obito clapped his hands together. His mud—now properly moistened, now perfect—gleamed with fresh potential. "Brother Shisui, you're amazing!"
"Ha ha ha!"
Obito's laughter rang out across the courtyard, high and pure and utterly carefree. He scooped up a handful of fresh, wet mud and, in a gesture of pure childhood joy, hurled it directly at Shisui's face.
Splat.
Shisui blinked mud out of his eyelashes. His expression shifted. A grin—wild and competitive—spread across his features.
"Oh, it's ON!"
He grabbed his own handful. The counterattack was swift and merciless. Mud flew. Grass stained. Goggles were spattered. Two small bodies rolled across the lawn in a tangle of limbs and laughter, smearing dirt into each other's hair, shrieking with the kind of joy that only children could access, a joy untainted by knowledge of what the future held.
Noses were picked. Beads were flicked. The world was reduced to the simple, perfect calculus of play.
Simple. Beautiful.
Childhood.
"AHHH!"
Shisui's shriek cut through the laughter like a blade.
He stopped mid-roll, his hands flying to his face. Obito, instantly abandoning the mud castle he had been constructing, scrambled over on all fours.
"Brother Shisui?! What's wrong?! What happened?!"
His voice was high with panic, his goggles fogging with the heat of his sudden fear.
"It's... my eyes. Something's in my eyes. It stings."
"Maybe it's mud!" Obito leaned in close, his nose nearly touching Shisui's. "Let me blow on them!"
"No. No, I'm fine. I'll just rub—"
Shisui pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, scrubbing hard. The sting intensified. His eyes watered. When he finally pulled his hands away, the whites of his eyes were shot through with red, and tears were streaming freely down his cheeks.
"Your eyes... Brother Shisui..."
Obito's voice had changed. It was no longer panicked but frightened. Truly frightened. He had gone pale, his goggle-framed eyes fixed on Shisui's face with an expression that bordered on horror.
Shisui blinked, trying to clear his vision.
Something was different.
The world looked... sharper. Clearer. Colors were brighter, edges more defined. He could see the individual blades of grass beneath his feet. He could see the pulse beating in Obito's throat. He could see—
A strange, hot pressure built behind his pupils. His eyes itched—not externally, but from within, as if something inside them was stirring awake.
And then his vision tinted red.
Two black magatama slowly materialized in each iris, rotating in a slow, silent dance. Chakra—wild, untrained, but undeniably powerful—surged outward from his small body. The grass around him flattened. The branches of nearby trees swayed despite the absence of wind. In the distant sky, a dark cloud gathered where moments before there had been only blue.
A figure appeared in the courtyard.
No sound. No flicker of movement. One moment there was nothing. The next, a middle-aged man stood at the edge of the grass, his expression unreadable, his presence so absolute that the very air seemed to bend around him.
Uchiha Kagami.
He stared at his grandson. At the two magatama spinning in those young, tear-streaked eyes.
"Sharingan," he breathed.
Two tomoe. Two. Not the single tomoe that marked a first awakening. Not the slow, gradual development that most Uchiha experienced over years of training. Two tomoe, at once, at an age when most children were still learning to walk without falling.
In the entire history of the Uchiha clan, there had never been such a prodigy.
The average Uchiha awakened their Sharingan around the age of ten. The talented did so at eight. Itachi—young Itachi, already whispered about as a genius among geniuses—had opened his eyes at eight, and the clan had spoken of him in reverent tones.
Shisui was two.
Two years old.
"WAAAH!"
Obito's wail shattered the silence. He had scrambled backward, his goggles askew, his face a mask of pure terror. Brother Shisui—his beloved, mud-flinging, waterfall-creating Brother Shisui—had suddenly transformed into something frightening. Something other. The red eyes. The swirling black marks. The pressure in the air that made his ears pop and his skin prickle.
He did not understand what was happening. He only understood that his friend was scaring him.
Uchiha Kagami remained motionless, his gaze fixed on his grandson. The Sharingan in Shisui's eyes slowly began to fade, the magatama receding, the crimson draining back to normal brown. The child blinked, confused, tears still wet on his cheeks.
He had no idea what he had just done.
Kagami's expression did not change. But behind his calm facade, a storm was gathering.
A prodigy. A blessing. A curse.
The clan would hear of this. They would come. They would want to claim him, mold him, use him. And if they could not have him—
Kagami had seen enough of the Uchiha to know what happened to things they could not control.
He stepped forward, his shadow falling over the two small boys. Obito was still crying, his face buried in his muddy hands. Shisui looked up at his grandfather with wide, confused eyes.
"Grandfather?" His voice was small. Uncertain. "Did I... did I do something bad?"
Kagami knelt. His hand, calloused from decades of service, came to rest gently on his grandson's head.
"No," he said quietly. "You did nothing wrong."
But the world will punish you for it anyway.
(End of Chapter)
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