AN:/ Word of warning, I'm uploading most of my stories to A03 these days since I don't have time to upload twice (and I like it better)

—

Two important things happen in the following months. The first is that Yoko gets sick, the horrible, not-sure-if-she'll-make-it kind of sick.

The second is that the Uchiha massacre happens.

These two things are maybe not as unrelated as she would like.

—

At first it's just a seasonal fever, low-level and more of a nuisance than anything. She has experience with migraines from her original life, and because of that she might have ignored the symptoms for longer than she should have. It's not really her fault, the orphanage workers are overworked and underpaid, and although technically Konoha has free health care everyone knows it doesn't actually work that way.

So she works through the muscle pain and headaches and the only real effect it seems to have on her is a rising irritability. Most people think it has something to do with the upcoming exams and leave her to it. Even Hinata keeps quiet after a few too many sharp-toothed smiles.

She's dealing with it, making sure to keep hydrated, waiting for the worst to blow over. She's dealing with it, until she very emphatically isn't.

That's not her fault either.

Because it turns out to not be a seasonal fever at all, and she's just lucky she was reading with Hinata when the other side of her illness showed its ugly head.

If she was one for gloating she would congratulate herself on recruiting such a good minion, since it's shaping up already to be a lifesaver.

—

Hinata is waiting in their designated reading spot when Yoko walks in looking like she's a step away from death. This isn't necessarily weird for Yoko, but usually it's someone else's death that her expression predicts. Hinata can't help the worry that wiggles in her chest at the way there's deep gouges under her friend's eyes. She's pale, paler than looks healthy for someone who normally sports a permanent tan.

But as she's done for the last few weeks she pushes that aside and greets Yoko with a soft hello instead. She gets a grunt in response and an irritated arm wave that trembles just slightly. Yoko has no time for worry or sympathy, and whatever is bringing her friend down isn't something she is willing to have others meddle with.

Some days Hinata wishes that Yoko would just get around to using her, like everyone else wants to. She knows her worth, and she knows she could make Yoko's life a lot better if only she asks. The difference in their social status isn't something they really talk about, but Hinata isn't blind either.

Instead she quietly passes over a scroll to her friend and pretends to not notice the relief when she sits down.

"Copied from the clan library, like you asked," she whispers, keeping an eye on her attendant dosing standing up in the corner. By now they've worn down the haughty shinobi into complete ennui and it doesn't even get an expression of distaste when they enter the library. Still, giving out clan resources is something her attendant would be against.

Yoko nods, flashes another of her mercurial smiles, and tucks the scroll into her pocket. Hinata hasn't asked why she needs information on obscure medicinal plants used for interrogation in Iwa territory, and she doesn't really want to know either.

In return Yoko takes out a slip of folded paper and hands it to her. Hinata feels her face blush as she snatches it out of her friends hand, carefully unfolding it to reveal a place and time, just like the last time. She tucks it into her yukata and pretends to not notice Yoko's amused glance.

'Still haven't talked to him, huh? Well whatever, I think you could have a better obsession anyways,' Yoko writes on the pad of paper she's taken to carrying around now.

Hinata blushes harder.

"He's not an obsession!" she hisses, frantically looking around. Shinobi-in-waiting shouldn't have obsessions, and shinobi clan heirs even more so.

"I just, I admire his determination…" she continues in a calmer voice. She does, is the thing. Maybe at some point she would have become obsessed with the way Naruto is so bright and untouched by the politics of the clans, or the way he's just as bad at shinobi arts as she is but so much more motivated to get better. Maybe she would have grown up with the idea of him as some sort of idol.

But that's before she met Yoko.

Yoko, who is just as untouched by the clans, even less so than Naruto. Who doesn't want to be a shinobi, has a dripping disdain for them that carries into all of her interests. Who is not very nice, but who looks at Hinata with something that could be called fondness.

Yoko is scary, and weird. Yoko doesn't care about Hinata's failure as a clan heir or her weird interest in things that are bright and cheerful and warm. When Hinata is crying because she doesn't want to learn how to trap and kill animals in lessons, Yoko is there with a sneering expression against her clan and a soft hand in hers.

She peeks out against her fringe and watches her friend pick apart the selection of books on their table. Today seems to be a geography day, shiny books on the elemental countries and smaller ones on the surrounding villages and towns.

Yoko's hands shake.

Hinata frowns, turning towards the younger girl. Sometimes she forgets that Yoko is younger, she's so mature, but watching her shiver in the big chair of the library makes it obvious. Hinata isn't all that sure how she feels about it. It seems almost wrong to think about.

"Are you ok?" she finally pushes out, days of worry coalescing into a knot in her throat. Yoko doesn't like pity, or sympathy, or any sort of empathetic response from those around her. But it's obvious at this point that she also doesn't have anyone to worry about her, no parents, no distant cousins. No friends besides Hinata.

Glassy eyes snap to her. Hinata feels the worry mount.

The shakes get worse.

"Yoko!" Hinata cries out, getting out of her chair and to her friend's side just as the seizures start. Behind them the attendant snaps awake and runs over, almost bowling Hinata over in her haste.

The librarians all step out of their offices, some with weapons drawn despite it being a civilian building, and a few walk briskly over. Down on the floor Masumi, Hinata's attendant, is already reaching out with green-lit hands, snapping orders to the worried librarians and ignoring Hinata completely.

Hinata watches this with wide eyes, heart beating loudly in her ears. She's routed in her spot, limbs heavy and immovable. There's a monster in her chest that's digging into her, trying to get out. For some reason she feels like she's been transported back to that night with the Kumo nin, the way he'd gurgled as blood dripped down his throat. The way her own throat had been restricted by panic, the rough hands forcing her eyes away from the sight but not before she saw, with absolute certainty, how easy it is for men to die.

Somehow she didn't think those rules applied to Yoko.

—

Things go quickly, a testament to Konoha's experience and training. Masumi picks up the still-shaking Yoko and forces Hinata into a piggyback before using a shunshin to get to the hospital. The librarians have already called ahead, and by the time they land in the gleaming room of the ER there's a medic waiting for them.

Hinata goes through a gamut of panicked responses. She clings to Masumi on the way there, grabs a hold of Yoko's hand around her attendant's even breathing. There's relief when they enter the hospital, the hope that maybe it will be ok now.

The medics work quickly, doing all sort of things that Hinata can't follow with charts and fluid lines and chakra.

And then they try to take Yoko away to one of the exam rooms.

That's when Hinata's memory gets a little blurry.

—

Hiashi is in a meeting when a messenger drops down from the eaves and kneels. He feels his eyebrow raise and forces it down back into placid neutrality. Being a shinobi clan leader means there's always interruptions, but usually they know better than to happen while he's dealing with the finicky and overbearing clan elders.

"Speak," he says after a few seconds of making the man sweat. The clan elders all look a variety of insulted when he waves them off, although none protest verbally.

The messenger straightens up and bows.

"Message from the hospital, Hiashi-sama. Hinata-sama and her attendant appear to have been caught up in an incident of some kind. The medics are requesting you come down to restrain the young miss."

Hiashi can feel every man and woman in the room blink.

"Restrain her?" he asks slowly, already rising from his seat.

"Yes sir, she seems to be in a large amount of distress and the medics are unable to get close enough to sedate her. She's created some sort of chakra field around her, a few of the medics, and a patient."

Hisashi finds he's unable to keep his eyebrow from rising this time.

"What sort of distress?"

—

The kind of distress that awakens the Byakugan, it turns out. Hisashi would be impressed, if he wasn't so annoyed.

"What even happened?" he asks as he gently pulls his daughter up onto one of the beds the medics provided. He hadn't even needed to do anything, as the amount of chakra she was using quickly exhausted her and she passed out soon after.

"They came in with a code 7-09 about twenty minutes ago, we were able to stabilise the girl relatively quickly, but whatever the cause of the seizures would have required more examination. Hyuuga-sama—protested the separation of an exam room," the tired looking medic taking vitals says.

Hisashi feels, once again, his eyebrows rise.

"She protested?" he asks incredulously. Hinata doesn't protest, doesn't fight back. You would be hard pressed to get her to even express a preference of food items. It's the thing he's been trying to train out of her for years.

"Quite vehemently," one of the other medics agrees. "She was in shock when she came in, it became obvious, and as soon as the girl was taken out of sight she quickly became agitated."

"Enough to awaken the Byakugan?" he asks rhetorically. Agitated would have to have been an understatement.

His eyes find that of the attendant, hovering just in sight and already bent in a bow.

"Report, shinobi," he snaps, leaving one hand on his daughter's gurney and turning his full attention to the one who really should have prevented all of this.

"If I may, Hyuuga-sama, it might be best to explain the incident elsewhere," the nin says, rising from the bow with such little hesitance that Hiashi is almost impressed.

"Very well."

He leaves his daughter in the care of the medics, a small contingent guarding the doors, and walks into the hallways with the attendant following.

The hall outside the ER is quiet, only the soft shuffling of steps of passing medics doing rounds audible through the walls.

"I would like to apologize, Hyuuga-sama. I was not aware of the impact the sight of the girl would bring about in Hinata-sama."

Hiashi hums.

"This girl, who is she?"

He hasn't seen the patient that brought his daughter to tears, to protesting. He would very much like to.

There's a hesitation on the part of the attendant that catches his attention. This whole affair has been singular, an annoyance and yet interesting at the same time. To make the well-trained second house shinobi hesitate means a lot: they expect to die young for their village without thanks. Very little makes them afraid.

"She is a mute orphan civilian Hinata-sama has grown close to, Hyuuga-sama. They read in the afternoons together. The medics say she had a fever that rose significantly in the past few hours and caused the seizures. She's harmless."

"Except for how she was able to emotionally compromise a clan heir simply by being sick," Hiashi points out, already turning for the door.

"I am going back to the compound to deal with more important affairs. Stay here with the rest of the guards and make sure nothing else happens to my daughter," he says while the attendant bows again.

"And—" he continues thoughtfully, "have the girl brought to me when she is healed."

—

The days pass with a haze of drugs and whitewashed walls. Yoko is with it enough to realise she's in a hospital, but the first few days she's not sure whose. Is this Konoha general, with it's tired medics and languishing budget? Is it's roots underground intake centre with its bloody instruments and blank faced weapons? Is it Orochimaru's lab with his twisted creations and lack of morals?

It's only paranoia when the pressure on your brain makes you see shadow monsters in the corners.

Luckily there's a few faces that pop up that lay those paranoid thoughts to rest.

"What did you do?" Masao complains with a worried look in his eyes, peering over her like some benedictine figure from past memories.

"We leave you for a few days and you end up in the hospital," Katsuro says with a grin, leaning against the door frame. Yoko goes cross eyed looking at him.

"S'not my fault," she rasps.

There's silence as two wide-eyed faces stare at her.

"You talked!" Masao cries after a few seconds of shock. He points a finger in her face that she doesn't even try to focus on.

"You talked! After years refusing to do so! Years!"

Yoko blinks at him, forehead scrunching down. She thinks back to the past few seconds and realises that he's right. There's the vague disappointment of a bet lost, but her brain is a little too fuzzy to grasp it completely.

"What d'ya expect? That I was gonna be mute forever?" How strange that out of all her body parts currently, it's her tongue that works the best.

"Yes." Masao gasps out, hand on his chest. Behind him Katsuro chuckles, but even he looks rumpled. Yoko doesn't know why, she's only really interacted with him twice. Maybe she's just that famous, which, ugh, is going to be a pain to work with. Maybe selective mutism wasn't the best route to take to avoid suspicion.

"That's dumb. You're dumb," Yoko snaps out, wiggling to try and get comfortable again. Her whole body hurts.

"Well what else was I supposed to think?" Masao replies, looking put out.

Yoko thinks about that for a second.

"That I'm an antisocial asshole who hates talking?"

Twin flinches from the shinobi. She blinks at them again.

"Aww, c'mon, I live in the bad part of town, you can't expect me not to swear," she complains. There's a pillow under her lower back that's probably supposed to prop her up properly but only seems to serve as an annoyance. She tries futilely to fish it out.

"I take it back, I prefered it when you didn't talk," Katsuro jokes, ignoring Masao's glare.

Yoko nods.

"Yeah, me too bro. God, I have no filter right now, you could probably ask me anything and I would answer. Probably wouldn't be the truth, and you might feel bad about it later for the obvious ethical infringement, but eh…" she trails off, staring into the distance. She can't quite remember what her thought process was.

She really hopes she doesn't have brain damage.

"Hey, does anyone else smell that?"

"Smell what?" Masao lunges forward, hands moving to check her eyes. She's confused for a second, before she remembers she had a stroke or something.

"Naw, not toast. The blood."

Both men go still, and then Katsuro curses. There's the growing sound of yelling and rushing feet.

A giant bell chime rings out, deep enough Yoko can feel it in her bones. She has the inane thought that it feels like the bells of war, even though she's neither heard nor felt anything like it.

"You two stay here, that's the call for all active shinobi to report in," Katsuro snaps out, patting his pockets frantically before grabbing Masao by the lapels of his shirt and staring at him intently.

"Stay, ok?" he says into Masao's worried face.

Yoko rolls over and groans into her pillows.

"Kissss already. Or kill me now before I drown in the UST."

Katsuro is gone before Masao can even start to blush. There's a pause of a few minutes before a hand finds hers under the pile of blankets and pillows she's being swallowed by.

"I need to check on the other students, ok? I'll be back. Right back," Masao says, something trembling in his voice that she doesn't want to even try and untangle.

"Yeah sure whatever. Go get killed by whatever maniac is outside by being a stupid side character. I'm sure your death will motivate someone important into leveling up and saving the day," she mutters into the linen.

Masao is already gone.

Yoko rolls over again and squints out the window. She's pretty sure the Uchiha massacre happened at night, and she doesn't think Konoha is that oblivious not to have noticed it until morning. Which means either some other wide scale event involving blood is going on that canon forgot to mention, or something's changed the timeline.

She doesn't like either options.

—

It turns out to be option two. And it's the stupidest thing too.

She stares at the wall as two medics talk in hushed whispers outside her door. Supposedly the Uchiha massacre did happen at night, but the shinobi who were supposed to patrol that side of the village all came down with fevers a few days before. It's been something that's been going around, the medics say. No one knows how so many of them got sick right beforehand. The village is so stretched thin anyways that somehow it got overlooked. Some are calling treason and sabotage, but Yoko has the feeling Itachi wasn't even aware.

No, it's pretty obvious what happened when you take everything into account.

Yoko contracts Red Alley Fever, a virus that's found mostly in the poorer neighbourhoods and the red lights district, hence the name. It targets people with low immune systems, and most clan shinobi would have been too healthy to contract it. She's contagious for weeks, in contact with Hinata for weeks, who goes home to her giant household filled with active shinobi.

The virus has a high transmission rate. It mutates rapidly. When confronted with chakra-enhanced white blood cells it simply grows stronger. Starts attaching itself to the chakra pathways themselves.

One thing leads to another and a large chunk of shinobi come down with a fever that most wouldn't even think of. Active shinobi are wealthy enough they don't have to worry about a peasant disease. She might be the first transmission, the patient zero, but in reality what really doomed the shinobi were their insular nature.

It's a civilian disease. They are completely unprepared for it.

Yoko wonders what happened to Sasuke while the rest of the village was unaware. Was he catatonic in the blood of his family for the hours it took someone to notice? Was he awake but paralysed? Is he going to go even more off the wall crazy now?

She doesn't really care, she decides. She has no interest in Sasuke besides what his eventual betrayal will mean for the political and economical landscape of the elemental countries. Sure, there's some benefits for her if he never goes missing nin, but they're inconsequential when compared to the annoyance of dealing with the other villains of the story. The village gets destroyed more than she would like in the later chapters.

She wiggles down in her bed and frowns.

It might be smart to make her base not be in Konoha, actually. Eventually Akatsuki is going to come here, and she has no wish to get caught in that mess. Unfortunately, Konoha is also where she has the most information, and thus the most power. She can always gather other intelligence when she is in a better position, and more settled in her power, but trying to untangle another village's underground would be a pain without having that starting base.

And just because she is out of the blast range doesn't mean she won't end up as collateral. She never did pay enough attention to the canon to know which areas of the country are safer.

Not to mention that she just doesn't have time. She's a few years younger than the canon cast, and all the shit hits the fan while they're still teenagers. She'll have to have her empire settled by the time she's twelve to have the flexibility to move.

How troublesome.

The medics leave, taking their gossip with them. Yoko sighs.

She hates being sick. Not only is it interfering with her plans, she hasn't been able to feed her cats in a while. If she's not careful someone else will snatch them up, probably for something not as benign as spying, and she's grown fond of them. She would have to find someone to murder said thief, and she just doesn't have a list of contract killers yet.

And if she leaves the rest of the kids in the orphanage on their own she'll lose all her potential disposable minions. There's a very short window of time that she can manipulate them into doing her errands before teenagehood steals about all their respect for her.

She sighs again.

And she was going to talk to matron at that one tea house on Block A about an apprenticeship for next year. Now she'll have to wait until the panic about the massacre dies down and the civilians go back to business as usual.

She kicks the end of her cot and grumbles.

She can't even take advantage of the chaos since she's stuck in bed. There's going to be a sharp rise in crime in a few days once the high alert goes down and the criminals realise there's no longer a police force. She could be out there recruiting and advancing her plans, but the medics say she's not getting out of the hospital for at least a week.

Supposedly seizures are dangerous things, and they want to keep an eye on her to make sure she hasn't broken anything important. Well, anything more.

She kicks the bed again.

"Yoko?" a soft voice asks from the doorway, and she blinks up into the anxious face of Hinata and her attendant.

Yoko feels a smile spread over her face without any conscious thought from her brain.

"Hinata! Man, you've gotta get me out of here," she chirps. There's a part of her that enjoys the shock on both their faces, but the larger part of her is just happy she's able to get the words out her mouth.

She might have started her mutism from a place of tactical spite, but as the years went on she lost the knowledge that she could end it at any time. Part of her was afraid she's lost part of herself forever.

So she'll mourn her quiet anonymity, but maybe it's time she grew out of it anyways. She's going to be a crime boss after all, and it's going to be through the power of words. She should make sure she has as many of them as she can.

"Yoko?" Hinata asks carefully, stepping into the room. The expression on her face seems strangely fearful.

"Weird yeah? The medics say my language centre got knocked around a little. I thought it was just the drugs, but nope, I'm going to be chatty like this until I can relearn silence. Anyways, I guess I've gotta thank you and your babysitter for saving my life."

Hinata blinks for a few second before smiling wide. She trips over her own feet running to Yoko's side. She throws her arms around the other girl and buries her face into the tangled mess that is Yoko's hair. It's outgrown the shorn close style she prefers.

Yoko blinks at the affection as the Hyuuga heir starts crying into her shoulder, great gasping breaths of relief, some muddled words that Yoko can't even pretend to understand. She thinks there's a few apologies thrown in there but she can't be sure.

The attendant gently closes the door.