Warm crimson rays shaded by rising smoke painted a frenetic dance upon the fractured façade of the room. Shattered concrete and splintered wood crunched underfoot as the acrid scent of burnt flesh spread throughout the cave-in.

His stern countenance shrouded by the darkness, Fugaku bore the mark of his clan, his Sharingan aflame with suspicion as he stared at the pale shinobi standing across from him behind twisted metal, rubble, fallen beams and molten debris.

“Orochimaru?” the undead clan head intoned as he formed another spear of chakra in his susanoo’s right hand before setting it aflame with Amaterasu and punting it at the sannin. Orochimaru, in response, flickered out of the projectile’s path watching with narrowed eyes as Fugaku created another.

“Fancy seeing you again, Lord Fugaku,” the enigmatic serpent said as he regarded Fugaku with a slight smile, eyes gleaming like emeralds in the dimly lit cave-in.

“What is going on?” Fugaku asked as the sannin dodged yet another flaming projectile lobbed disinterestedly at him. Much to the Uchiha’s compounding confusion the sannin tittered in response.

“Oh, you know,” Orochimaru said, giggling still, “The usual … Hehe. Konoha is on the verge of annihilation with the nine-tails power once again ravaging the village at the whims of an Uchiha. I find it hilarious that it happened twice.”

Fugaku spaced out for a moment before suddenly realising his body was still moving of its violation, lobbing flaming spears at the sannin, intent on fulfilling the command of the puppeteer behind him. “...how many years has it been since I died?” he asked a feeling of dread suffusing his being.

“Give or take seven,” Orochimaru replied as he dodged before lobbing a barrage of kunia bearing explosive tags in Fugaku’s direction. The clan head willed his Susanoo forth, a great skeletal arm swinging into his field of view to defend against the salvo.

A frown creased Fugaku’s face as he absentmindedly lobbed another spear in retaliation. “Itachi?” he asked, baffled. The wicked child was loyal to a fault—to the village at least. Fugaku couldn’t imagine a world where his traitorous firstborn would turn against his leaf.

The sannin guffawed in response. “Itachi? No! Of course not!”

“...Then who?”

“...Guess.”

“Stop conversing with Orochimaru, Fugaku,” Danzo intoned, distracted as he worked. Clanking noises rang from behind Fugaku where the vile elder stood as Danzo continued to unseal whatever it was he kept hidden underneath his robes.

“...He can’t be any more than fourteen,” Fugaku whispered as his Susanoo’s arm swung again to shield him and his puppeteer from harm. Spectral fingers unfurled to catch a pillar of compacted earth shooting out of the wall to their right. “Itachi promised me he would protect him…?”

“And you expected him to keep that—” The sannin began only to look down to see a blade sticking out of his chest. “Ha, good one—the sannin swung the kunai in his arm in an arc forcing his attacker to disengage to a distance he could now see her. He flickered immediately after, dodging another flaming spear launched at him from behind—Mikoto-san?”

“You pulled out all the stops now did you, Danzo?” Orochimaru continued even as blood leaked from his ruptured heart. Mikoto silently chased after him as she was compelled to do. In response, the sannin swung his right hand at her and a twelve-meter-long serpent slithered out of his sleeve, crossing the distance between the two of them in a blink of an eye to instantly constrict her within its gigantic coils.

At the same moment, the sannin crawled out of his mouth, shedding his old body and slithering away in a new one on a streamlined serpentine tail in a sudden attempt to flee the battle, seemingly unwilling to continue fighting with the odds stacked so high against him.

Fugaku lobbed another flaming spear at the sannin in an attempt to dissuade him from leaving the battlefield only for a wall of iron dust to rise from the rubble to stop the projectile. The black mass, caught aflame in Amaterasu’s all-consuming wrath, instantly began to disappear but that meant little at the end. The sannin had escaped.

Freed herself from her restraints Mikoto moved to pursue only to be intercepted by a green-haired Kunoichi bursting out of the debris in front of her. Fugaku watched as his reanimated wife allowed a kunai to sink into her torso before whipping around—eyes lit in a baleful crimson—to snag her opponent in a Genjutsu.

The green-haired kunoichi dropped like a puppet that had its strings cut. Seemingly seizing the moment, a wave of iron dust burst out of the rubble to engulf Mikoto. Fugaku looked away from his cocooned wife, his eyes scanning the rubble in search of the hidden shinobi.
Instinctively, his eyes swivelled to his feet to see tendrils of the black mass creeping up his sandals and without any conscious effort on his part his body willed his Susanoo to punt the vile elder behind him away from harm. That split decision saw the tendrils explode into thick cords that
coiled around his waist in an attempt to pull him under.

“Amaterasu!”

With his right eye, Fugaku summoned the undying flames and with his left, he shaped it to consume nought but the iron dust coating him. A flicker of his gaze cast the tame flames at the cocooned Mikoto before swivelling around to coat the entire cave-in and flush out his opponent. A figure blurred out of the rubble and Fugaku’s Mangekyo tracked it, nicking the shinobi's right limbs. With a noisy clatter, The Third Kazekage tumbled into the spreading flames and was summarily consumed.

Having fulfilled his directive to protect Danzo, Fugaku immediately burst his eardrums and sped away to escape receiving another. He crossed the apparent ruins of the village at a blazing pace racing towards the edge of the village to stop just outside the barrier surrounding it. Outside was a great monstrosity—a Susanoo of mythical proportions—raging across an equally monstrous battlefield. Many miles separated them both, but Fugaku could clearly see the frail figure of a teenager floating within the legendary summon.

His son.

Sasuke.

…what have they done to you? Fugaku whispered to himself unable to believe what was before his very eyes.

“...W-who are you?” a broken voice asked from behind him. His hearing now restored, the clan head glanced sideways at a ruined figure behind him. Cracks spiderwebbed across the fellow’s earthen visage as his obliterated form was slowly being reconstituted.

“...Lord Hashirama,” Fugaku intoned expressionlessly, the righteous anger of a helpless father still burning in him.

“Uchiha?” the First said as he caught sight of Fugaku’s Sharingan.

“Fugaku Uchiha,” Fugaku replied. “Last clan head of the Uchiha… and the father of the child your village has ruined so.”

Silence.

Hashirama pushed himself upright on one partially reconstituted limb. “...It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way,” the Hokage mumbled as he looked away in shame.

“...It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way?” Fugaku asked after a monetary pause. “The successor you chose, your brother, Tobirama … The boon he maliciously handed my Uchiha was, in fact, a poison chalice. One in a list of many devised to see the eventual downfall of my people … and you say it wasn’t supposed to turn out this way? How then, oh great leader, was it supposed to turn out?”

“I am—”

“Amaterasu.”

Fugaku looked away from Hashirama’s burning form, his gaze panning back to the barrier before him as he thought of how he might bypass it without ruining his child’s evidently well-thought-out plans.

If he could overlook Itachi’s disloyalty and accept death at the hands of his kin, what then was indulging his youngest in a little iniquity?