"Please remain quiet little one." Itachi silently pleaded as his eyes flicked over to his companion. The last three times he had tried to spare the children of a household, the man had not hesitated to kill them himself. On one level, he was sickened by this. But, on another, he was somewhat relieved because he'd been ordered to kill the entire clan, and if his companion killed the little ones, he wouldn't have to.

Killing those who had been involved in the planning of the coup hadn't been all that difficult. They had been traitors to the village. Killing those who knew but said nothing out of fear of what would happen to their relatives had been a little harder. Killing the clan's Genin and Academy students had been even more difficult. Killing the clan's children was the hardest of all, and he tended to leave that up to his companion who shadowed him like a wraith, blocking blows from those who were now his enemy that he couldn't let through until his grim task was complete.

He held a small hope that if some of the smallest children survived, the Hokage would spare their lives. The Hokage wasn't heartless, and he would have to be blind to not see the use of having Uchiha around that were too young to clearly remember their traitorous clan, and could be raised to be loyal to the village.

As Madara who had aided him in that night's slaughter watched, his kunai arced downward toward his three day-old cousin. Fortunately, Shiro did not wake when it impacted the crib's mattress. The child's luck held as he remained asleep and therefore completely silent throughout the rest of the massacre, unknowing of the fact that his mother's dead body rested on the floor next to his crib.

&!&!&

The morning after the massacre, as the ANBU ghosted through the silent streets of the Uchiha district recording everything they saw and cleaning up the crime scene before the gawkers could come out in force, Sparrowhawk's ears pricked up when he thought he heard...No, impossible, it was the situation getting to him. The grim task of cataloging and storing bodies had been bringing back some very bad memories of a certain week eight years before. Memories of silent streets filled with the dead which had haunted his nightmares and now haunted him as he drifted through more silent streets filled with dead bodies.

When he thought he heard the sound a second time, he decided to follow it just in case he wasn't hearing things. Eventually, the weak wails that he soon realized were real led him to a house in the middle of the Uchiha District. Following the noise upstairs, he found a nursery. The woman who lay sprawled out on the floor, her hand reaching towards the crib that occupied the space in front of the window was dead. The infant in the crib however was alive. There was a hole in the mattress next to the baby that had been made by a kunai strike. Itachi had apparently missed on purpose for some unknown reason.

It would seem that the massacre had two survivors, Uchiha Sasuke, and Uchiha Shiro.

&!&!&

Sarutobi Hiruzen listened to the concerns of his council. The opinions of his former teammates mirrored those of the Clan Heads who had already spoken to him about the matter. He too had some misgivings about the decision he'd made, as Uchiha Sasuke was so young and in a rather fragile state at the moment. But, the boy needed something to hold onto right now, and if that something was his infant cousin, so be it. It wasn't as if he would leave the children completely unsupervised, and family belonged together.

"Your concerns do have merit, but as Uchiha Shiro's only surviving family member besides Itachi, Sasuke does have some say in where he goes, and he has already spoken, loudly and repeatedly on this matter." the Sandaime said to the two people who had served alongside him since they had been younger that Uchiha Sasuke was now. "I will assign a caretaker to supervise the both of them, and teach Sasuke the skills he will need in order to care for his young charge."

With that, the matter was settled. Well, as settled as it was ever going to be with people constantly questioning it and bringing it up in hopes of convincing him to change the outcome to one that was more favorable to themselves.

Edited 3/17/2012