She sat in seiza, with her small pack behind her, at the gates of the Uchiha compound, prepared to meditate while she waited. She had timed it as best as she could, to look as if she had been there indefinitely when Uchiha Sasuke returned home after a day at the academy, but not so long that the ANBU who had taken over internal village security would decide to actively disapprove.

The Uchiha child paused when he first saw her but then flinched forward, away from the pack of fangirls following behind, pushing him onwards.

The fangirls must be an ongoing torture, highlighting exactly how alone he was in the crowd now that he had no family to protect him from them. It gave her a pang of residual guilt to think of her own days as a young girl fangirling over the young Hatake clan head. At least she'd had the decency to not pester him in the immediate aftermath of his orphaning. Or perhaps she'd just had the luck to not have been of the age to fangirl at that time. And Hatake Kakashi had had a jounin sensei at the time to protect him as well.

As far as she could tell, Uchiha Sasuke had no one. It had been a month since the Uchiha massacre, and the children who were telling themselves that they alone could bring love to the heart of a traumatized pre-pubescent child were just gaining momentum. No one had stepped in to protect him.

The last of the Uchiha. A clan with the mandate of internal village security, it had been the clan most closely tied to defending civilians. And their last remaining member was left to fend for himself.

Maybe he had refused support from the other shinobi clans, correctly assuming that if he accepted their help, he'd also be accepting their control. He was in the impossible situation of being both child and adult, both clan head and student learner.

He couldn't be protected any more than he could be served. But she'd be damned if she weren't going to make the attempt. As a civilian in a shinobi village, she had long experience meeting impossible contradictions of social obligation.

"What are you doing here?" the boy was rude in his query, but she certainly didn't blame him for that.

"I have a petition for the head of the Uchiha clan." She spoke quietly but with certainty, her eyes modestly lowered. She had dressed carefully for this meeting, with a formality that she expected the Uchiha child would recognize but not fully understand.

The fangirls didn't understand either, and they hung back too. Glaring daggers at her, but not approaching either. There was power in formalized proper behavior, to keep outsiders out and insiders on course.

Before the Kyubi attack nearly a decade ago, she had been raised to marry well, trained to run a wealthy and high ranked estate, and in a hidden village, that meant interacting with the noble shinobi clans. Many of the daughters of wealthy civilians or of civilians who wished to be wealthy, were raised with such expectations, although a surprising number had been left without the training to back it up.

It meant that many of Sasuke's fangirls wore excessive perfume, had romantic expectations, and didn't have the know-how to actually maintain a secure estate in a comfortable manner. It also meant that they fought each other for a chance at romance that was never there to begin with.

She had somewhat more reasonable expectations. Although only somewhat given that she was here.

"My father is dead!" the child nearly snarled. They both pretended the tears in his eyes weren't there.

She didn't even pause, "Long live the clan head."

"I…" Uchiha Sasuke didn't know what to make of that.

"May we speak in your office, Uchiha-sama?" She never would have made such a suggestion to the prior Uchiha-sama. It would have been incredibly presumptuous of her. The child Uchiha-sama took the suggestion with relief.

"Yes." He jumped on the option because he knew it was the correct thing to do. He had likely seen his father meet with petitioners before. "Come inside and we will talk."

"Thank you."

She rose from her kneeling position with as much grace as any experienced performer of tea ceremonies, situated her pack, and ignored the growling of the fangirls. Uchiha-sama flinched again at the sound and then gratefully ushered her through the gates and closed them behind.

They walked in silence, the adult woman and the shinobi child, up a path going to weeds, past houses that were beginning to show their lack of upkeep. She was glad she hadn't waited any longer to come here, but none of her thoughts showed on her face.

It had been easy, after the Kyubi attack, to allow her face to settle into the calm blankness of an empty page. To refuse to show any feelings at all, and to tell herself as well as the rest of the world, that she didn't even have feelings to show.

There had been no more laughter and no more tears, just goals, and those goals were assisting with the cleaning and the funerals and the budgets and the packing. The family of her former fiancé had only arrived in Konoha the month preceding the attack, to establish their son and her future husband as an outpost of their business empire. Afterwards, without him to lead the outpost, there had been no point in them staying. They were kind to her and left her a gift of money and goods to help her through the following year, but they had no other sons to offer her, and her social connections were all in Konoha anyway.

She had only met Shinzo a handful of times, but she had been looking forward to their wedding and establishing her own household.

Instead, his family took his body back to their family lands, so she didn't even have a grave to mourn over. But there were enough graves in Konoha without his as well. Her parents didn't have graves either—her parents and their storefront had been too close to the original Kyubi attack to leave anything but ashes.

She still burnt incense at the main Konoha temple in honor of her parents and her fiancé, her past and her future, every week.

But it had been nearly ten years since then and she wasn't living the life she had been supposed to live. At closer to thirty than twenty, she had a job performing tea ceremonies at a small tea house and a dwindling correspondence with her parents' old work contacts and cousins in other cities and towns. She was the very image of a poor relation. She was unlikely to make any marriage that she'd be satisfied with, but she found, when she finally gave herself permission to think about what she wanted, that she didn't even want to get married. She wanted no more hostages to fortune. But she had been meant to run a large estate, to help run a large business empire. Instead, here she was, in a village that got hit every time it tried to recover. There were no large estates to run.

Except for this one, the Uchiha one. Recently available.

The blood had been cleaned from the floors of the house, the Uchiha child led her too, but the stains were still visible. From the papers on the desk in his father's study, she would guess that this was the first time he'd even entered the room.

"What do you want?" the child demanded again.

She kneeled down again and bowed low. "I would like to enter your service, Uchiha-sama."

"Who even are you?"

"I'm Kobayashi Naoki, Uchiha-sama. Please call me Naoki. The head of a founding clan should not be without service."

Her parents would be shamed, if they were still alive, to see her begging to be of service. There was a deeply bitter freedom to being an orphan with no family left to shame.

"I don't need anyone else! I can do everything myself!"

"Of course you can, but you are Uchiha-sama, you shouldn't have to."

"I do have to!"

"You should have someone to make you dinner. You shouldn't have to stop training to cook. You should have someone to run your bath for you, so that your muscles can relax and you can better train the next day. You should have someone to make your bed fresh so that you can sleep well and be better prepared."

"I, I don't need any of that!" The certainty in the child's voice wavered.

"And, if you have a woman in your household, then any of the fangirls who hope to court you will have to demonstrate that they are better homemakers than me."

That finally got his attention, as his eyes widened. "What?"

"I am sixteen years your senior and doubt I will ever be your concubine in truth. But that would be the role I would fill and anyone desiring to be your wife would have to challenge me." She spoke matter of factly about throwing away her honor, in a way she doubted a shinobi child could even understand. The only way a civilian lady of her standing entered into a clan was through marriage. Anything else was dishonorable. On a personal level, she didn't understand why formal marriage to a paid killer was honorable while casual dalliance was not. But she understood what the social rules were and was prepared to lose status over this attempt. If it worked, her status wouldn't matter; if it didn't, then it was time for her to leave the village entirely.

"You're a civilian. Most of my fangirls could beat you easily."

"They're shinobi and they're children, none of them will be better homemakers than I am. And that is how they'd need to challenge me."

It was a bit more complicated than that, of course, but the explanation was good enough for a nine-year-old boy and likely good enough for most of his pre-pubescent fans as well.

"What does a homemaker even do?" He spoke with a sneer, trying and failing to hide the real curiosity.

"Let me show you."

He clearly tried to think it through, but was confused by what he should even be contemplating. He had been a younger child of a large and noble household. The work that went into homemaking had been actively hidden from him his entire life until he'd been left to suddenly care for himself. He nodded. "Show me."

She rose and this time led the way out of his office to the kitchen. The blessing of old traditional houses was that she could guess the layout pretty well. The kitchen looked better than she had expected after a month, but also sadder: there were pre-made meal packages and a handful of utensils but no evidence of cooking, and no fresh ingredients for anything that couldn't be eaten raw. A quick check of the staples left behind and she was able to ask: "Would you like tea, miso, or hot chocolate?"

"… miso."

She knew from village gossip that he always ate on his way home from the academy, so he probably wasn't hungry, but he likely hadn't had anything home made since the massacre.

He watched as she heated the water and stirred in the miso and then added the dried mushrooms and seaweed. She showed him everything she did and made sure to clean the counters and the utensils as she went. Not rushing, but also not pausing until the soup was ready to be served. She made her movements like a ceremony, every movement done with intent.

"Would you like to sit down at the table with a bowl or would you like to follow me with a mug?"

"… a mug. Please."

"Of course, Uchiha-sama."

He flinched a little at the title, but accepted the mug of soup and took a sip. He looked, not happy precisely, but pleased.

She had found a half package of incense in the kitchen and had noticed a small family shrine in the main entrance room on the way to the study. She took a stick of the incense and dampened a rag, and then led the way to the shrine.

She carefully cleaned the area of dust, lit the incense and took a moment to bow in honor of the people who had prayed before this shrine for previous generations. Uchiha-sama looked stricken when she stepped back, but took a moment to bow in front of the shrine himself. While he did so, she wiped the surfaces of the various tables and windowsills. This wasn't the time to do a full cleaning, but she wanted to make sure he could see the difference even a few moments of attention could make to the cleanliness of a room.

Once he had stepped away from the shrine and picked up his mug of soup again, she led him down the hallway, keeping a sharp eye out for a linen closet and was lucky enough to find one close to his bedroom. She got out fresh sheets and unmade and remade his bed. She also opened the windows to air out the room.

"It gets too cold at night."

"I'll close the windows before it gets dark enough to turn on lights that would attract bugs. But the room should air out, and sheets should be changed at least once a week."

"Oh." He looked awkward and angry and embarrassed. She just wanted to reassure him that this was all knowledge that had to be taught, but instead let it lie and allowed him to learn by watching. No one just knew about airing out rooms or changing sheets. His mother, or more likely his mother's servants, had probably always changed the sheets and aired the room while he was out. Even if his peers among the shinobi clans had offered to help him, they had probably done so from a militant perspective, training him to fight, rather than a familial perspective, training him to live.

After the bed was remade, the old sheets got bundled up and she took them with her to the bathroom to soak in the sink as she drew him a bath. She added oils and salts to sooth his muscles after a long day of training, and a vast quantity of bubble bath to preserve his modesty and her sense of decorum.

He had finished his soup by the time the bath was ready. "If you give me the mug, I'll return it to the kitchen and you can get in the bath."

"What are you planning to do," he stated more than asked, but with deep suspicion. It was appropriate. No one wanted a stranger wandering around their house while they bathed. It was not conducive to relaxation.

"I'll return here and see if I can scrub some of the stains out of the old sheets." The sink was actually more of a large bin that she would guess had once served as a bathtub for babies, but was positions in such a way that she could scrub the sheets while keeping her back to the bathtub. He would be able to see her but she would not be able to see him.

"… Okay."

She took the mug back to the kitchen as she said, spent a few moments peering into a few more of the cabinets, half to get a further lay of the land and half to give him more time to get into the bath, before heading back. She grabbed a couple of towels from the linen cabinet on the way. She knocked gently on the door frame but didn't enter until he spoke. "You can come in."

She kept her eyes lowered as she entered, set the towels down next to the door, and went right to the washtub to deal with the stains. These sheets had probably been freshly laundered and pressed when the massacre had happened. There were a few stains that looked like smears of blood left to dry, hopefully after the child had trained too hard rather than directly due to the massacre. She hoped that the ANBU who'd responded had gotten the child clean before he'd next slept in his own bed.

While she hoped they'd cleaned the boy, it was obvious they hadn't cleaned the house. Or at least done a half-hearted job of it, especially for such an honorable old house. The wood baseboards should have been replaced or at least refinished. She added that to her mental tally of things to be done.

"Why are you doing this?" The boy didn't sound nearly as relaxed as she might have wished from a warm soak but more relaxed than she had been a month after her own parents' violent deaths.

"Because the Uchiha are an old and honorable clan and deserve to be treated as such."

"What does that even mean?"

"You should not be left to care for yourself. You should not be hounded through the streets by fangirls. You should have someone to keep you company in the empty evenings. When you go out to fight, you should have someone awaiting your return. These are things that Konoha owes to the Uchiha Clan."

"Oh."

If he noticed that she hadn't truly answered his question, he didn't push further.

She went back to working with the sheets, which actually seemed to be getting cleaner. Whatever soap the Uchiha household stocked was pretty miraculous and she'd have to search the records to see where it came from. She hummed a light lullaby, as if doing so unconsciously, so that the child could close his eyes and still know where she was.

He spent long enough in the bath that it must have gotten cold by the time he said, "I'm ready to get out."

"The towels are here. Would you like me to hold them for you or would you like me to go prepare your bedroom?"

"The bedroom," he said quickly, an immediate response. She nodded and left the bathroom so that he could get out and dry off on his own.

She closed the windows in his room, and folded down the blanket so he'd be able to slide right into bed when he was ready. She was tempted to do a quick dash around the other rooms in this section of the house, to see what was available, but resisted. She would either have time later or she wouldn't, and if she didn't, then it wouldn't matter. Plus she wouldn't betray his trust that way. No adult shinobi would have allowed a stranger this amount of unsupervised time in their house. For that matter, no reasonably intelligent civilian would have done so either. But a traumatized child who'd been left alone for a month and probably didn't think he had anything more to lose? It was both terrible that she was able to do this and a sign of how important it was to do.

When Uchiha-sama left the bathroom wearing his bed clothes, she was sitting in meditation outside his bedroom door. She waited until he hesitated to say, "There was a lap harp in the linen closet. Would you like me to play to you as you go to sleep?"

It would have been something that he'd seen done for his parents and older brother, to fend away nightmares after particularly awful missions. It might have been the only time he would have seen any adult shinobi cry, when the sounds were muffled by music and a trusted musician kept them company.

"It's still really early. I should train more."

It was still early, just dusk, but he had dressed himself in bed clothes rather than anything else, and he looked exhausted. He wasn't objecting, he was asking to be convinced.

"Sleep is important to training. You've practiced enough while tired. It's just as important to learn how to get the sleep you need."

"Oh." He paused. "Yes, I want you to play music. And, and I want breakfast in the morning!"

It was a demand, an attempt to act spoiled, almost, to hide the plea that she still be here in the morning.

"Of course. Let me get the harp, and then you should sleep well and eat well before training again."

"Yes." He nodded decisively before going into his room and getting into bed. He didn't close the door, so once she'd retrieved the lap harp, she settled in the doorway to play.

She described what she was doing, as she tuned the harp, so that he could see exactly how it worked. Then she stopped speaking and proceeded to play every lullaby she knew at least three times.

She wasn't sure when he fell asleep, whether he had cried silently in this guarded privacy or not, or if a long day, a warm bath, and a fresh bed for the first time in a month lulled him to sleep quickly. But she still played until her hands cramped.

If she had married on schedule, her first child might have been just a year younger than Uchiha-sama. She wasn't sure how she felt about that.

Instead of thinking about it, she played until it was full dark out, then quietly listened to his breathing to confirm he slept before getting up and shutting the door. She put the harp back in the linen cabinet and grabbed a change of sheets for one of the guest rooms as well. She retrieved her pack from the study and got herself situated there, including hanging up the wet sheets she's been cleaning before to dry on the line overnight. Then she left to do some shopping in the night market. She wanted to prepare him a bento box for lunch tomorrow as well as a full breakfast.

It felt good to have a plan. To have a household of larger than herself, even if it wasn't, strictly speaking, hers. Sleeping in a new place, an empty compound filled with unseen ghosts where she had invited herself to stay, did not lead to the best sleep, but that just meant she was easily awake with the sun.

The next morning, she made breakfast and a lunch for Uchiha-sama while she wore her good robe again, spoke gently and kept her eyes lowered. She was pretty sure the excessive formality was freaking him out at least a little, but he rose to the occasion and sat at the table to be served and thanked her with the correct formulaic responses. Then he was off to the academy and she got to work.

The very first thing she did, as soon as Uchiha-sama was out of sight, was walk the perimeter of the compound looking for animals. Thank all the gods that someone had opened the pen doors. There was clear evidence that predators had gotten to many of the chickens, rabbits, and goats now freely roaming the grounds, but none of them had starved due to lack of food or water. Many of the surviving animals were filthy and it would take a lot of effort to get them clean. She couldn't start today, just made a mental note and moved on.

The main house had been dusty and blood stained, its kitchen garden full of weeds, and from the look of it many of the other houses were in even worse shape. At least the Uchiha didn't have the elaborate flower gardens of the Aburame or she'd have to give up on the gardens before she even began. But she fed herself with fresh fruit from the vines, and collected some for Uchiha-sama's kitchen as well. She wouldn't have to buy vegetables or fruit again, which was good since she didn't plan to spend her own saving here.

There were more than a hundred houses in the compound and each of them needed to have their kitchens emptied, their contents stored safely, and their doors closed and locked to prevent animal infestations. It wouldn't take that much money to commission some D rank missions of genin teams to fix things up, but for all that the Uchiha clan had been wealthy, she wasn't sure if Uchiha Sasuke actually had any available funds. And she was absolutely sure that he wouldn't want other shinobi in his compound. No injured or grieving shinobi wanted strange shinobi in their space.

So she would have to do it herself.

It was a ludicrous thought for a variety of reasons. If she did one house a day, which was optimistic, it would still take several months to accomplish. And she didn't have to do any of this. She could just go home. Leave the child to live or die on his own. He wasn't her responsibility except for how she was making him her responsibility without asking permission from anyone in authority. In spite of the implied refusal of such permission even.

The Uchiha had been set up to fail, caught up in the ongoing battle between the Sandaime and the Kyubi, and no one was willing to acknowledge it.

They were expressly forbidden from acknowledging it.

A blanket S-class secret: no one was to talk about the Kyubi, the creature who had attacked the village and killed so many of them, shinobi and civilian alike, and how it was still here. Living among them.

The first time she really saw the demon child to look at, not just the remains of some prank or running past leaving low level destruction in its wake, she had laughed so hard she cried. It had not been a nice laugh, either. She had been so angry at the world and her inability to change anything that seeing someone else's petty revenge, even an enemy's, had been a comfort.

The Yondaime had won the battle with the Kyubi, sealing it into the shape of a human child, but it had made sure to have it's revenge: it looked like the Yondaime. Anyone who saw it would think it the Yondaime's bastard child. She had choked back the words, since everyone knew speaking of the demon child was forbidden.

She sometimes wondered if the Kyubi's appearance answered the question of why the Sandaime hadn't had the child killed once the Yondaime had made it vulnerable. She would not have thought the Hokage sentimental enough to allow its appearance to sway him. He certainly wasn't too sentimental to execute those who disobeyed him by talking about it. More than one civilian had disappeared, their belongings silently packed up by shinobi from the central tower, after showing a bit too much negative interest in the demon child. Whatever the cause, the demon child continued to run around the village years after it's original attack doing the best it could to leave more mayhem in its wake.

It was still alive and it still had power and that power was growing every day. Was it taunting that the mayhem was more mischievous than truly destructive?

Every prank was a mockery of the village that had captured it and reduced it to this. Or maybe it's continued existence was the revenge of the Sandaime, instead, a mockery the creature of fire and spirit that had decimated the village, that it could be reduced to this.

A spiteful war of petty revenge.

She wanted to kill them all for treating the villagers as pawns in their game. The amorphous "them" of killer shinobi and powerful elders who created impossible situations and watched their people die caught between orders and honor. Except that she really, really didn't. She didn't want to kill anyone. She just wanted to make them stop it. And she couldn't do that either.

So instead she had laughed. And laughed. And laughed.

Kobayashi Risu, the tea house owner, had sent her home that day.

She was far from the only person to have a hysterical break when thinking too closely about the Kyubi attack. Risu-san had been sympathetic but told her to only come back if she could control herself. Reacting too strongly to the demon child could get a person disappeared after all.

Risu-san had been right: Naoki couldn't stay at the shop while uncontrollably laughing at the pettiness of powers capable of killing her without a thought.

At least she wasn't Uchiha.

That was the thought that had finally calmed her laughter. Like oil on troubled waters: at least she wasn't Uchiha.

Rumor had it that the Uchiha had been involved in the original Kyubi attack, but due to the Hokage's edict of silence and secrecy, she actively didn't think about it. Asking such questions was dangerous in this village. She doubted it was true, but she wondered how much of their downfall was due to the Kyubi attack, one way or another.

The Uchiha's mandate had been to deal with civil unrest internal to the village rather than external defense. As a clan, they'd been buffered from the losses in the original Kyubi attack but were directly responsible for maintaining peace in the aftermath and the Saindame had forced them to do so without allowing them to actually remove the Kyubi. It ran around causing chaos under the Hokage's protection while the Uchiha were held accountable for the results they were not allowed to prevent. Now they were all dead because one of them finally snapped under the pressure and provided them all with mercy deaths.

She could sympathize.

And yet, what kind of mercy death left behind one traumatized survivor to carry the entirety of the weight of a noble clan, a founding clan even?

If the Uchiha had overthrown the Sandaime, as she'd sometimes thought they might, she would have supported them as best she could. But they hadn't. Instead, they'd died to maintain an impossible honor and left their one surviving child to do the same.

In the aftermath of the Kyubi attack, the civilians had come together to help one another. She had slept on a living room floor with five other civilian women who'd lost their homes, in the house of a sixth. Hundreds of civilians spent their days cleaning the streets and sorting rubble, offering free service because no one could afford to pay and eating what was offered because no one could afford to buy.

She knew what a good community did in the face of a disaster. It had been the worst days of her life, and she still had nightmares of the fire and smoke, but it had also been a time of kindness that came with a clarity of purpose. She had worked harder then ever before, even as she'd cried for her family and her future, and had made list after list of things that needed to be done and what she could do.

The Kyubi attack had decimated the village but the village had come together to get through it.

The Uchiha massacre had decimated the village as well, but this time, the village simply watched from the sidelines and did nothing.

It was sickening to watch. It was more sickening to watch nothing happen than it had ever been to sort through the rubble to find bodies to be buried. She would rather work hard to accomplish some good than continue on in her life of easy stagnation as people turned away from suffering neighbors. So she had told Risu-san that she was leaving the tea house, for now at least, and made her way to the Uchiha compound.

There was so much she couldn't do, but not nothing.

By the time Uchiha-sama returned from his day at the academy the next day, she was weeding the front walkway. She was ready to greet him with a small smile and to ostentatiously ignore the fangirls trailing after him, shutting the gate in their faces.

He had arrived home earlier than he had the previous day, so he had likely skipped his normal dinner to get back to the compound sooner. She was glad she was able to immediately present him with an arranged fruit platter.

She also gave him two pieces of paper, two lists.

He looked confused by the paperwork but she remained silent and left him to contemplate them.

The first one read:

1. Clean main house
a. Clean kitchen
b. Clean bathroom
c. Dust entire house
d. Replace stained floorboards
e. Update artwork for new Uchiha-sama *
f. Update training space for new Uchiha-sama *

2. Care for Animals
a. Chickens
b. Rabbits
c. Goats
d. Others?

3. Clean and close houses on the compound (120 houses, listed separately)
a. Move spoiled food to compost heaps
b. Sort possessions for saving, donating, or throwing away *?
c. Sort possessions for leaving at house or taking to main house *?

4. Review Paperwork in Office *
a. Identify contracts: clan rights and responsibilities*
b. Identify financial situation*

5. Update Inventories
a. Food
b. Weapons *?
c. Library *?
d. Security features – potential traps, jutsus, seals *

6. Gardens
a. Weed and harvest kitchen gardens
b. Weed flower gardens
c. Weed walkways

It had been tempting to just start doing the work, treating Uchiha-sama as a child to be catered to, but if he was to succeed, if she was to help him succeed, then she needed to treat him as the clan head he was.

He finally spoke. "This is the type of paperwork that Father was always looking at, isn't it?"

"Most likely, yes. It's two lists. The first is an outline of tasks that I believe need to be done. The second is a list of buildings in the Uchiha compound. You can add or remove anything. Let me know which tasks, if any, you'd like to do yourself, with or without my assistance, and which ones you'd like me to prioritize. I've put a star by the ones I think you would find of particular interest, and a star plus a question mark by those I was less sure of."

"This is my compound. I should be doing all of this." He tried to be demanding but he mostly sounded daunted.

"This is your compound, so you must be aware of everything that takes place in it. But you don't have to do it all yourself."

"My Father…."

She interrupted him because there was a difference between treating a clan head with suitable respect and letting a child mislead himself. "There is no way your father ever turned compost heaps after he became clan head."

He looked bug-eyed for a moment before relaxing and maybe even had a tiny little smile. "No, I can't imagine that either."

He fell silent after that, but his eyes distant. It wasn't until they grew more haunted that she interrupted his thoughts. "Look over the lists, write down your thoughts. I'll make dinner in the kitchen. The past is always here, but it's the future a person can effect, Uchiha-sama."