Konoha — The Uchiha Compound, Midnight
Fugaku was asleep when the shadows in his room began to flicker.
Something was wrong before he even opened his eyes — a pressure at the edge of sleep, the particular wrongness of a room that wasn't quite the room he'd fallen asleep in. He sat up fast, Sharingan already spinning.
The world around him didn't resist him so much as replace itself, the way a backdrop changes between scenes in a play and when it settled, he was no longer in his bedroom.
He was standing in Naka Shrine.
He wasn't alone. Elder Kaede stood a few feet away, leaning hard on his cane, blinking against the same disorientation written across the faces of half a dozen other clan elders scattered through the hall, pulled from their beds the same way he had been, wearing the same stunned confusion.
One thought surfaced clean and immediate in Fugaku's mind.
Genjutsu.
Before anyone could speak it aloud, a woman's voice reached them from everywhere and nowhere at once.
"You are all under my Genjutsu."
Two figures resolved out of the dark at the front of the hall. Satoshi. Beside him, Kaori.
Every Sharingan in the room fixed on her.
It wasn't the three-tomoe pattern any of them wore. It wasn't anything most had ever seen outside the clan's closely guarded records. Three curved marks swept from the pupil to the rim of the iris, spinning slow and unhurried. For the elders standing in that hall, it was the first Mangekyō Sharingan they had ever laid eyes on.
The silence that followed had weight to it. One elder's hand went white-knuckled around his cane. Another took an involuntary step back before catching himself.
It wasn't only fear. There was a kind of vertigo underneath it too. Everyone in the room was already certain that Satoshi possessed the Mangekyō, most of them had seen the purple Susanoo five years ago, the night he and Kaori attacked Konoha during the Nine-Tails transfer. But Kaori was a different matter entirely. A woman half the room remembered as a medical-nin who'd retired before most of their grandchildren were born, standing in front of them with the rarest eye in the clan's bloody history.
There was one thought in every mind in that hall, unspoken but shared: did they find a way to awaken it?
Elder Kaede found his voice first.
"Satoshi. Kaori." He said their names like he was testing whether saying them aloud made the moment more real, or less. "How have you both been?" A pause, "How is Ren?"
Before either of them could answer, a sharper voice cut through the hall.
Isamu — leader of the Hawk faction, a man of Kaede's own generation, stepped forward with none of the old man's caution.
"Why did you defect?" His eyes were hard, demanding. "Was it the village elders? Were they behind this?"
The questions came faster after that, overlapping, everyone suddenly desperate for answers they'd been denied for nine years.
Satoshi raised a hand, and the noise died.
"Elder Kaede. Elder Isamu," Satoshi interrupted, his voice respectful to the men nearly two decades his senior, yet carrying an, undeniable authority. "We do not have the time to talk with you tonight."
The hall quieted.
"We are only here to tell you that we will meet you in person, at the next clan gathering, right here at the Naka Shrine, two weeks from now," Satoshi explained smoothly. "This illusion was the safest approach. If we stay longer, we risk detection."
He paused, his dark eyes sweeping over the elders. "As for the reason behind our defection... you will know after this."
He and Kaori were gone before anyone could ask what this meant.
The hall didn't return to normal. It changed again, the way one dream folds into another, and the elders found themselves standing as ghosts somewhere else entirely: the Land of Rain, nine years ago.
They watched Kato Dan's spirit slide out of the dark and possess Kaori. They watched Satoshi drop his sword rather than risk her life. They watched Kaori go still, and Kato Dan step out from wherever he'd been hiding, and Root agents close in around two unconscious bodies in the dirt.
Then the scene shifted. The rain vanished, replaced by the damp stone walls of a cave.
Satoshi sat beside an unconscious Kaori, holding her limp hand. Fugaku and the elders were entirely focused on the couple when a young, weary voice echoed through the cave.
"Her soul was damaged, Dad," Ren said. "Kato Dan tried to possess her. She fought him off, but the strain caused her spirit to snap. She's in a vegetative state. She might never wake up."
The elders turned toward him as one. His hair was disheveled, his sleeves torn, his clothes marked with the unmistakable wear of a battle just finished. But what stunned them wasn't any of that.
It was his eyes.
The second pair of Mangekyō Sharingan they had seen in a single night.
Elder Kaede instinctively stepped toward the boy, desperate to know more.
But before he could ask another question, the scene shattered.
Kaede's eyes snapped open.
He stared up at the familiar ceiling of his own bedroom, his breath slightly uneven. Pale morning light streamed through the window, casting long shadows across the room.
He lay still for a long moment before he got up.
Mikoto was in the hall when he came out, breakfast already laid at the table. "What happened? You stayed in bed so long." Kaede said nothing. He crossed to the table and poured himself tea instead of answering.
It wasn't like him. This was entirely out of character. Usually, the very first thing Kaede did upon seeing her was launch into a lecture about finding a husband. Before she could ask what was actually wrong, a knock came at the door.
Mikoto opened it to find a messenger, polite and brief: the Clan Head requested Elder Kaede and the other elders join him for breakfast.
"I'll be there in half an hour," Kaede called from the hallway before Mikoto could say a word, already standing with his cane in hand.
The messenger left. Kaede, as if he'd read the question forming on her face before she could ask it, beat her to it.
"I'll talk to you when I get back."
Half an Hour Later — Fugaku's Study
By the time Kaede and the other elders arrived, Isamu was already there.
He'd woken that morning and dismissed the whole thing as a strange dream, until the same summons reached his own door, and the dream stopped being one.
"The village owes us an answer," Isamu said, the moment everyone had gathered, his voice tight with barely-held anger.
It was hard to argue he was wrong to be angry. If everything they'd seen was true, then out of everyone touched by that night nine years ago, it was the Uchiha clan that had been wronged most of all.
"We won't get answers from the village," another elder said carefully. "We have no proof of what Kato Dan supposedly did. We don't even know for certain the vision was true."
"What do you mean, 'if it's true'?" Isamu refuted instantly, slamming his hand onto the low wooden table. "It is definitely true! I know it in my bones. The village higher-ups and the Senju were in cahoots! Those bastards orchestrated the whole thing to steal our power!"
Kaede spoke before the argument could grow any louder.
"The picture is almost clear enough on its own," he said. "Ren went with the Hokage to negotiate with Suna. Satoshi and Kaori stayed behind at camp to wait for him, so the three of them could return together. Then, Kato Dan attacked and captured them."
He paused, letting the elders follow the thread. "Ren came back to rescue his parents. And that is exactly when he massacred the ninja in that camp, including Kato Dan."
Silence settled over the room. The pieces fit too perfectly to deny.
Fugaku, sitting quietly at the head of the table, finally spoke. His voice was carrying the responsibility of a man guiding a clan on the brink of treason.
"The full picture is still not clear yet," Fugaku stated, his dark eyes sweeping over the elders. "I suggest we meet them first. Only then should we reach a conclusion."