"You cannot control the behavior of others, but you can always choose how you respond to it."
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

0

She's had some suspicions of who the mystery person might have been, but this, honestly—this is not it. Her cousin, over whose apparent 'suicide' the clan had absolutely lost its shit for a few weeks, standing before her in the flesh after she'd seen him die onscreen and then remembered the original hearing so much about his death… really isn't it.

So forgive Ren if the first thing she does is punch the actually-not-that-dead Shisui square in the nose. It's a reflex, really. She supposes, a split second later, that he's lucky that she isn't actually armed with anything; a punch to the face, unpleasant as it is, is likely preferable to a knife to the gut—startling shinobi is generally a bad idea, random reveals out of the blue included.

Also call it testing the waters. After all, how can she be sure he isn't some trippy hallucination? Sharingan's done worse to its users, and she had liked Shisui, even if he wasn't much smarter than Itachi. Maybe it was his general emotional self-awareness that Itachi could only dream of?

"Ow," says a still very alive and very corporeal Shisui. "I guess I deserved that. Wish I'd gotten a name from you first, though."

"Ren, your first cousin, and it's your fault for suddenly being alive, dipshit!" Ren hisses, fanning her arm. She had punched him, sure, but it had felt like punching a wall, not a face, and there's different mechanics for each. Her knuckles are going to bruise from that, and Ren can only wonder why his skin is not at all soft and why it had felt like punching bare bone. "Everybody was convinced you were dead for over four years, so forgive me for freaking out!"

"Ah, so you're Aunt Madoka's—Wait. Over four?" he asks. Shisui stops for a moment and turns towards Ren, his body language screaming of confusion. "I've been here for a bit over two, though?"

Ren blinks at him in confusion, not that he can see, and says, "Huh."

"That's… concerning," Shisui says and sits down on a boulder. He clearly hadn't been aware of this being a thing before, judging by his reaction.

"Actually," Ren says, remembering the conversation she'd had with Matron Chiyo and Inoue just before they had gone to see the abomination that is left of Ikeda Shoichi, "that might not be weird at all?"

"I just lost something like two years of my life and you're saying it's not weird?!"

"Okay, okay, yeah, that can freak you out, but—sit the fuck back down, let me tell you what I think. Yeah?"

Shisui huffs, but sits back down. Only now Ren notices that, while her punch did leave a mark, it isn't nearly the blooming bruise it should be. As if she had slapped him instead of punching, and even that not with much power. Skin-deep.

"I'll explain it at length later, but in short what I understand is that dimensions of summons, like Jōren Falls here, are outside of our plane of existence, in their own pockets, also kinda beyond our time and space. And how we get summons is that those pockets overlap with our world sometimes and the summons interact with people. But they don't exist at a fixed point in time and space, and they also don't overlap that way I think. It sounds plausible at least."

"Okay, interesting as it is, how does that explain me losing two years?"

Ren gives him a stink eye. He seems to notice the concentrated glare at least.

"I'm getting there."

"I'm waiting," he says, raising his hands in a placating gesture.

"You're interrupting," Ren complains, and Shisui grins rather unapologetically. She sighs, but continues: "basically, since summon realms exist outside of our time and space, it's entirely possible that passages to them open at some wild time discrepancies, though I'd say it's also rather rare. May or may not have something to do with the fact that Jōren didn't have a summoner anchoring it for years, and therefore became much more unstable on its own, allowing for bigger time-space-travel fuckery than normal."

"Huh," Shisui taps his chin. "That's... That makes a lot of sense actually."

"Don't take me for any authority on this, though," Ren warns. "I'm just taking what the spiders told me and making up what they didn't tell me based on that in hopes that I'm close."

"That's a surprisingly astute observation, though," Elder Kana says from where he's sitting on the ceiling of the entrance of the cave, where she certainly hadn't been half a minute ago. Shisui startles but forces himself to calm down a split second later, and the only way Ren knows is a hard-to-miss jerk of his shoulders. She herself gasps and turns around. Damn spiders and their damned quasi-teleportation, and damn their attunement to nature chakra that makes them nigh impossible to sense if they don't want to be sensed even more.

"Really?" Ren asks after she forces her pulse to calm the fuck down. "I'm just making shit up hoping it makes sense."

"And that way you've almost figured out the whole truth," Kana says, dropping down to the floor, unbothered by the reactions she had caused. "It takes others many years to understand this but they often fail anyway, and you just grasped the time-and-space theory like it was nothing."

Ren scratches the back of her neck with a light chuckle. She can't very well say it's all because she used to play DnD in her past life, now, can she? Nobody would really understand it and if she wanted to explain it in-depth then it would take a lot of time, and she is more interested in talking to Shisui about things other than her reincarnation.

About things other than her not actually being his cousin, but instead someone else wearing her body.

Like what has he been doing for the past two years, how did he survive, how did he adapt to being eyeless (if his staff and the way he moved was anything to go by, the lack of eyes didn't actually bother him much at all), why is she sensing nature chakra around him as if he is generating it. Like their dead clan, that she only now realizes Shisui has absolutely no idea about. From where he stands, they are all hopefully fine and his and Itachi's crazy plan had worked, while for Ren she and Sasuke being the only Uchiha living in Konoha is something normal.

For all she knows, Shisui could've taken her existence as confirmation that his and Itachi's plan succeeded—because there is no reason for her to be here otherwise. Not in his mind, at least.

The realization makes Ren uncomfortable, and its implications even more so. How will he react to the truth? She isn't going to keep it from him, that's for sure. The real question isn't if she'd tell, it's when she'd tell him.

"What's the full truth?" Shisui asks. Kana turns to him, and Ren startles out of her thoughts.

"The full truth is that it has nothing to do with the instability of the realm—that doesn't affect the passages at all, but a bit with the summoner's blood. We only found you after Ren signed our contract. The realm has the odd tendency to pop by the contracted summoner or their bloodline ever so often, and for that, you were lucky. Very, very lucky. And also it overlaps without regard for time and space. That Ren got right."

"Lucky how?" Ren and Shisui ask at the same time, ignoring the time-space confirmation.

"Other than being saved, I mean," Shisui clarifies. "Because it sounded ominous."

Kana huffs. There's something darkly amused in the sound.

"Because if you weren't of Ren's bloodline, we'd never have saved you, and fresh meat doesn't go to waste here," she says breezily, as if she's talking about the weather. "Anyway, I only came here to check up on you two, I have waylaid you enough. Continue your conversation without me, now that I'm sure you're not killing each other."

And then she just left.

For a moment, there's only silence, as realization sinks in. Shisui's jaw hangs open at the blatant confession.

"They would've eaten me," Shisui whispers. "Sweet Sage, Ren—if it weren't for you, they would've eaten me."

That gives Ren a short pause as she tries to remember if, in canon, Shisui's body had ever been found. She can't remember for shit if it was, but she's reliably sure that the answer is no, and that—had the spiders found him regardless of her existence?

Had he, in fact, become just another food ration for them then?

It is a wholly intriguing thought to her, as morbid as it sounds.

"I hate this information, take it away," Shisui complains animatedly. "They've been nothing but nice to me, I don't want to know that it was conditional!"

"It still is conditional," Ren says, because she's mean like that, and Shisui whines. She pats him on the shoulder. "Don't worry, even if I die, Sasuke is sharpening his teeth for their contract if you don't want it yourself."

Shisui turns to face her instantly. If he had eyes still, she bets they'd be sparkling.

"Didn't he want Itachi's crows?" he asks. Ren grimaces.

"He… he used to, I guess, but some things happened and I ended up spending a lot of time with him. Sooo… he shifted gears."

Shisui faces her for a moment, searching for something. Without the ability to see her face, it's likely proving more difficult than normal, but she tries to calm herself anyway.

"Is he dead?" he eventually asks worriedly. "Is Itachi—"

He doesn't know, Ren thinks, trampling down on her response. He's allowed to have a high opinion of his best friend. He's allowed to be worried. Last he saw Itachi, the murderous dipshit had still seemed salvageable.

"No," Ren says and tries her best to not sound like she's disappointed about it. "He left Konoha, though. Shortly after your… Ah, assumed death."

She knows where this is going. Fuck.

Maybe this is for the better. Open the reunion via ripping off the bandage.

Shisui notices her increasing stress, of course; without sight his other senses are bound to be heightened, and stress comes with a staccato of heartbeat and a chakra spike, not to mention the pheromones.

"Ren," Shisui asks, now serious. "What is going on? Why do you have enough of a relationship with Sasuke to share with him your summons? Why is Itachi out of the village? Why not Aunt Mikoto's cats? Why—"

"Because they're dead."

The next few seconds, within which her words are processed, are almost deafening. That, or it's the pulse in her ears, suddenly uncomfortably loud and fast-paced.

Her pulse is going buckwild. Shisui's hands start shaking.

"What?" comes out a choked, small, barely audible question.

"They're all dead," Ren tells him, somewhat softly, and she hates herself for the way his face crumbles under that blindfold. She hates herself for the quiver of his lips and the tilt of his eyebrows. And, for the first time since she's been here, her eyes get glossy specifically because of that particular family that she's never truly been a part of—except, she was, wasn't she? The line between Renee and the original Ren has been blurred for so long it's nonexistent now. She has assimilated the original's memories as her own; for all intents and purposes, she has always been Ren. And that's without accounting for her love for Sasuke. As far as she's concerned, he's hers.

The realization hits her like a sledgehammer, forcing the air out of her lungs in a shaky, stuttered exhale.

"They're dead," Ren says again, and this time it sounds wet, raw, and accusing. "Mom, dad, uncle Ichiro, granny Chikako from across the road, miss Sayu and her fiancee and their two month old child—"

"No," Shisui whispers, then jolts up and grabs Ren by the collar. She lets him. "No, no, no, no—Danzō, it was Danzō, wasn't it? It had to be—"

"It was Itachi," Ren says, low and angry, and Shisui freezes.

"What—"

"It was Itachi who killed everyone. Everyone but Sasuke. The only thing that saved me was my heart being on the wrong side and help arriving fast enough."

The next 'no' comes out as a broken whisper, and his grip on the front of her shirt becomes lax before he falls down to his knees like a puppet with strings cut, face pressed against Ren's abdomen and his loud sobs the only thing Ren can hear over her heartbeat pumping blood in her ears and her stuttered breath. And for the first time, Ren lets herself cry; because for the first time it feels like the Uchiha, other than Sasuke, had been her family.

They hadn't been perfect, of course. But they had been, ironically, better than what Renee had had, and had they lived… Maybe she would have had a somewhat happy adolescence.

And, above all, nothing could ever excuse all the defenseless children Itachi so efficiently slaughtered.

Ren let out a laugh, bitter and hollow, and put her hand on Shisui's head, slowly running her fingers through his hair in a soothing motion.

He weeps for a long time.