This came about because I started off with "what if Itachi was a girl?" thought about how little we've seen of Uchiha women in canon, period, and this was the result with bonus Mikoto-POV.

Oh, and what if canon Naruto accidentally time-travelled back to this reality?

Trigger warnings for rape, abuse and forced pregnancy. And it's AU. Very, very AU. More than I expected.

Rage Against the Ordinary

Her daughter is a little thing. She looks very much like her, and loves the dresses her father frowns at. Perhaps because he frowns upon them; the glint in her eyes, her mischievous hands, is good evidence of that.

Her daughter is a little thing, and very good at the things she is minded to learn. She is most often minded to learn the things her mother and father expect of her. So she learns to cook and sew and detect genjutsu, and fight, and ruins dress after dress at the waist-seam crawling around on her knees, and tucks the hem into her undies when she learns to water-walk at three, with her father standing on the riverbank, his shoes discarded on the path and his toes flexing impatiently in the mud.

She doesn't walk on the water. She dances, ridiculous in her tucked dress, and hops onto a tiptoe, flailing as she spins the water around her with chakra and turns with it, slow and wobbling like an old music box.

Mikoto watches from the kitchen window, green tomatoes and cut ginger a sharp tang in her nose, and blames the cut onions when six-year-old Shisui, curious and reckless, touches tears from her cheek.

Her daughter falls into the water, sputtering, and her father's toes become muddier as she pants her way onto the bank and takes her father's hand, pulling herself up. She flinches from her father's words, wobbling in the mud, and tries again, her round face set into a serious frown and her wet pigtails stuck to her neck, and this time walks neatly, perfectly, joylessly, on the surface of the river.

Fugaku is smiling when he returns to the house, his trousers soaked to the knee, and she watches her daughter look up at his face, calculating with narrow eyes, before relaxing into a smile.

Her daughter has already learned to navigate Fugaku's temper, and Mikoto fears for Midori's future.

However strong a fighter she might be, however well her potential - for she is indeed quick and clever and beautiful - the clan needs women to breed, and breed quickly; more so since their numbers have been depleted by war and internal struggles. It was during the worst of the shortage that she herself had her menses at nine, and due to necessity was pregnant by her brother at twelve, her father at fourteen, and did her best to deliver every other year until she married and her eyes turned toward carrying Fugaku's heirs. It was all an unpleasant and uncomfortable duty, but not overly so. Her husband was kind, in his way.

There are few daughters of the clan, and the clan itself is dwindling again. There are only so many children who survive birth, and fewer still that survive long enough to be named. Mikoto watches her daughter smile and tug at her father's hand to demand the stick of dango she cannot quite reach, and worries for her.

Fugaku might, as a commander of the Police Force and a shinobi himself, encourage her strength and talent, but the father and Clan Head will never allow her to use it.

Midori doesn't know, and Mikoto hasn't the heart to tell her.

Mikoto is used to comments on Midori's beauty, but Kushina frowns after she gives the obligatory praise of her daughter's prettiness, tilting her head and squinting.

It's the first time Kushina's seen Midori since Midori was an infant. Mikoto supposes if anyone would notice, it would be the Hokage's wife, she of the sharp eyes that could track patterns no Inuzuka or Hyuuga could detect.

"Something's wrong. She's too perfect," she says in private, her broad face troubled.

Mikoto studies her child's face. Even at this age the Uchiha features are obvious, refined through however-many-decades of breeding. It makes it difficult to tell apart distinct generations when they are so intertwined, but Mikoto has a suspicion that her father was also her mother's brother, and her mother her sister. Fugaku's history isn't quite as tangled, but tangled all the same.

If their twisted breeding has to show in perfection, then it shows, and Mikoto looks up to smile at Kushina, her only friend outside of the clan if their infrequent meetings could be called friendship. She knows Kushina thinks so.

"Mikoto?" Kushina looks uncertain, chagrined. "If I've offended you ... she really is lovely -"

"No, no," Mikoto hastens to reassure, well aware that Kushina has her insecurities about putting her foot in things now that she has to deal with more political attention than she's ever been prepared for. And though her gaffes are infamous, Mikoto considers her accidental honesty one of her charms.

"It's all right. She is very pretty, but all babies are and she's still young. She'll grow up."

Kushina tilts her head again. "I guess."

Mikoto smiles, poised and perfect. "We'll have to see, won't we?"

As sweet as Midori is, she is also sharp. Too sharp to be pretty, quite yet: the mismatch of keen interest and soft cheeks unsettles most of the women and offends the men, who excuse impertinent questions only up to a point. Even if her daughter is barely five, she has passed the boundaries of their tolerance too long ago to be spared punishment. Midori lowers her gaze in proper subservience only when she is whipped into doing so, and the clan medicnin are used to setting broken ribs and healing spiral-fractured arms.

Still she meets their eyes.

The overall effect of her appearance in the little-girl robes she wears is rather as though someone wrapped their most lethal kunai in tissue paper and presented it as a bouquet.

There are whispers that she is too stubborn to be useful. That she is unsuitable, and Mikoto is a poor mother for allowing her wilfulness to continue.

The older men who come by in the mornings for their weekly teas where they make decisions too important to bring before the monthly clan-wide meetings indulge her. They think she is adorable, harmless, a little girl who can be allowed a few fatherly chuckles at her misbehaviour even if they later murmur to Fugaku about controlling that child.

Midori watches them with wide eyes and too-innocent questions, leading them into traps they don't understand, and Mikoto watches from where she kneels and stifles apprehension. They don't understand her daughter like she does. They don't know her well enough to understand how much she hates them, how intelligent she is, how bright, how much influence she already has over their decisions in the midst of war, and they'll never bother to try.

As long as someone repeats Midori's ignored ideas and accepts them as their own without realising where they come from, they won't have to.

Mikoto has heard many times that if the clan is a body, the head is controlled by the wife, who is the neck that tells it where to turn. She thinks this may have been the case with Hyuuga Hiashi's wife but she has never seen, until watching her daughter's antics, how it could be true.

She envies her daughter, and grows to dislike the risks she takes in interfering, her wide-eyed guile. Surely it is better not to speak at all. Surely.

But the things she said were terrible things. Clever, crafty, cunning and terrible things. Decisions of who would live and die where and why. Decisions of who returned, who continued, who could take another duty. Things of spies and agents and dead drops and cryptic messages. Things of subterfuge and politics. The sweetest suggestions of corpses and torture and tools.

She hadn't realised how much attention Midori paid when the men thought she wasn't listening, and how much attention she pays to their responses.

They are her puppets, and it all seems like a game where she smiles poised upon the board with a sword hidden behind her needlework fan, and they have no idea of their strings.

Mikoto does not fear for her daughter, no.

She is afraid of her, and the more her daughter smiles and drops her eyes and kneels in gracious obedience, the more a trembling terror grips her throat.

"Mother."

Midori is five, nearly six, and Sasuke is a year old. Seven months since the Kyuubi attacked and in the process killed a quarter of the clan's viable forces, and Fugaku has begun to ask her if his daughter has reached menarche yet. One of Mikoto's other daughters, a lass of seven, had her first blooding a month ago. But he asks as though it is reasonable to expect it of Midori simply because she is his daughter and not Tomori's.

Mikoto is more worried than ever. Her daughter was not allowed to enter the Academy, and volunteered her own understanding that she had to take care of the house and her family, but still steals ninjutsu scrolls and practices her kenjutsu and taijutsu every day in the garden while Mikoto watches. She bites her tongue and says nothing about it when Fugaku comes home, unwilling to give either of them the satisfaction.

Fugaku pays special attention to Sasuke, pays attention only to Sasuke, and Midori has comes to shadow Mikoto much more than before, understanding without being told that her presence is unwanted when there is a male heir to fuss over.

Mikoto is used to having blood in her mouth, and swallows quickly before dropping her needle and looking up to see Midori's scissors half-open and poised over one of her own eyes.

"Put that down this instant," she hisses, terrified of the knowing look her daughter gives her, terrified of having to explain to Fugaku why one of his son's spare eyes is missing.

Her eyelashes brush the scissors when she blinks. "Does it matter, Mother?"

"Yes."

"Why? Why does it matter?" Mikoto watches helplessly when she starts to cry, the scissors lowering to her lap. "It's Sasuke, isn't it? They're not my eyes, they're Sasuke's, that's why you're looking at me like that. You love him more than me." She's not accusing her. It's not a question. She's stating confirmed fact.

Midori bends her head and moves the robe she was embroidering aside, careful not to stain it even in the midst of what seems remarkably like a tantrum, if Uchiha were allowed to have tantrums.

"I hate him and I hate you too," Midori mumbles, her sniffles obscenely loud in the quiet afternoon.

Mikoto has nothing to say, no comfort to offer. She has never been one of those mothers who can kneel and squash their children close, like she sees civilian mothers do to their children in the market when they return from minor adventures, and she knows better than to think Midori would appreciate being patronised.

She leaves the room and starts the process of preparing dinner, unsurprised when Midori joins her at the first sizzle of oil, sullen and dry-eyed.

"I want to be a good sister," she tells Fugaku at dinner, showing absolutely no sign of her tantrum, and Mikoto tastes blood again when Fugaku nods approvingly.

Mikoto fall asleep to the sound of whimpers, alone in her marital bed.

When Midori is seven she runs away and takes the Academy exam behind their backs. They only find out when a chuunin knocks on their door in the middle of the night and gingerly explains that he'd found Midori hiding under one of the staff-room desks, and also that she was extraordinarily talented, would they consider allowing her to attend the academy as long as she was supervised?

Midori is very serene during the argument that follows, standing with her hands clasped behind her back and blinking absently at the wall.

Fugaku is in favour of it, citing that all Uchiha women were expected to activate their Sharingan to the third tomoe and have a level of skill anyway, even if it was usually handled by a male relation. But she would be in the class taught by an Uchiha, which would count even if he was a pathetic Uchiha, and Fugaku was too busy to teach her now.

Mikoto does not trust her daughter's intentions in the slightest. Her daughter has grown into a fey and silent creature, condescending to the very air she breathes, and she knows better than the poor chuunin that Midori was found under the desk only because she let herself be.

But she cannot voice these suspicions to Fugaku, has nothing to base them from other than her daughter's tone and eyes, and she loses the argument with sinking inevitability.

"You're not allowed," Mikoto tells her, when Fugaku has dismissed both of them and left to his study. She's careful to keep her voice quiet. "It's not ... it's just not done."

Midori stares up at her, not quite a roll of her eyes, but threatening it. "I am now."

"You didn't wipe under the rim," Mikoto whispers through a smile. She is powerful now, and it feels very good to have a weapon.

Her daughter blanches.

Fugaku and Shisui's introduction to matters between the sheets has changed her very little that Mikoto can tell, but she knows however much Midori pretends to be dutiful she resents the lack of sleep and privacy.

Pregnancy would be even more restrictive. It would mean giving up everything that took her out of the main house until she gave birth and never having it again. Never relying on it. Never trusting that she would be childless long enough to advance. Mikoto was extremely fertile, and she didn't doubt Midori knew she was likely to be as well.

If she did try to be a ninja, she'd never be a higher rank than genin if she managed to graduate at all. Perhaps chuunin if she was very lucky.

She'd never be better than Sasuke.

If Mikoto told Fugaku, he would redouble his efforts and limit her movements even further, but there would be no telling when he had time to copulate.

Midori would have to wait, and wait, and wait, inside the walls she hated.

Her daughter recovers quickly and looks not at all surprised by Mikoto's viciousness, but shocked nonetheless. They both know what it would mean to her to have another month or two of freedom.

"One," Midori whispers. "I'll give you one."

"Two. One month per child."

Midori crumbles, and this is how Mikoto knows her daughter still loves her.

Sasuke asks about his sister's engorged stomach when he is six and Midori is ten, and Midori kneels with the careful awkwardness Mikoto remembers from her own pregnancies and musters a smile. She only smiles for Sasuke now.

"I'm growing us a little brother."

"How?" Sasuke is fascinated, eyes round, and Midori looks like she's crying when Sasuke oohs and ahhs over the movements he can feel through his pudgy little palm. "Sasuke do!"

Midori looks up at her, and Mikoto maintains her placid expression.

"You can't, Sasuke," her daughter says, sounding tired. Mikoto knows how much she hates being pregnant, has restrained her through the attempts to cut her stomach open. "You're a boy."

"Why not?" He pouts enormously, beginning to get upset.

Midori smiles again and pokes his forehead with two fingers, some sort of secret gesture between them that neither of them have grown out of yet. "It's growing in me. But it needs somewhere to grow. Like a plant and a pot. I have a pot for the baby in here. But you don't have a pot. It won't have anywhere to grow, see?"

Sasuke thinks for a moment, then brightens. "Can you be my pot?"

Midori makes an odd noise and wraps her arms around her brother, pulling him awkwardly close despite his protests. "I already am, Sasuke. I am. Don't worry."

There is nothing in her eyes but hate, her cheek pressed against Sasuke's hair, and Mikoto looks away.

It's a difficult pregnancy but an easy birth, taking only a few hours of active labour, and the child is hale with healthy, squalling lungs, its eyes flaring brightly in response to Fugaku's Sharingan. So much potential, and Midori looks both exhausted and relieved when the baby is whisked away.

Left alone for the moment with Mikoto, she reaches down around the prominence of her deflated uterus and gingerly touches herself, her swollen lips and thick mucus, and makes a face when several of her fingers slip inside her vagina.

"My cunt is huge," she says, sighing and wiping her hand very thoroughly on the sheets, careful to clean between each of her fingers. "Ugh."

"Language." Mikoto feels almost tender, almost like a mother, and continues to slowly pull the cord out of her daughter's womb, coiling it around her bloody hand. "It'll get better."

"Soon, I hope," she mutters, and lies back, her beauty ruined by exhaustion into a faded sort of prettiness, and Mikoto startles at the exact replica of her reflection.

Does she really look that tired? That unhappy? That resigned?

"What?" her daughter snaps, panting with the effort. "Jealous I have a cunt that isn't dried up like yours?"

Mikoto bites back reprisal, reminding herself not to hit a girl just out of labour and calming down when she remembered how she'd felt after she'd been pregnant the first time. She'd been angry too. Furious. Livid. Enraged. Enough to push chakra to her hands and swing the entire operating table at the midwife telling her how blessed she was, how lucky, how good she was at doing her duty. She didn't remember what happened after that; she was certain someone had knocked her out with Sharingan, and when she'd woken up time had passed, her belly was flat and strange, and she was alone. No baby, no midwife, just her empty body and aching stitches.

When she'd seen the baby at last, she'd felt like she ought to know it, but didn't, and looked at it with very little other than satisfaction that it was over and the faintest glimmers of that rage she'd felt. It had been a stranger. Could have been anyone's baby, and knowing she'd given birth to it had felt odd. Wrong.

She remembered thinking she wanted her doll. She'd said as much, and they'd given her the baby instead. There was no milk for it, and they took it away.

"Brace yourself," she says, rather than anything else she possibly could have said if they were different people. "The placenta's coming out."

"Ugh," her daughter groans, but strains obligingly, and the veiny mass slithers out into Mikoto's hands in a pungent blood-filled mess of slime. Midori lifts up her head to stare at it, then says, very certain: "If you try to feed that to me I will make you think you're a chicken for the rest of your life."

Mikoto laughs as much as she's ever dared to and puts the entire mess into a basin. "I won't."

"Good," her daughter says, still emphatic. "Get it away from me."

Midori is asleep before Mikoto can say anything in response, and Mikoto pauses a moment, then washes her hands and changes the bedsheets and her clothes. It reminds her of when she took care of her sometimes, when the nurses were doing other things or were inclined to let her, and she was floppy and cranky, frowning in her sleep when she tried to dress her.

She has the same frown, makes the same grumpy noises when Mikoto bathes her groin with a cloth and wriggles her arms into the robe. It's a wave of overwhelmingly fond nostalgia, and she brushes her sweat-damp hair, careful to catch all of the strands around her face, and settles it over the pillow in the way she knows hurts Midori's scalp the least.

Mikoto almost feels ... fond, of her, and she bends to kiss her daughter's forehead, knowing she never has before. It just hasn't been something she's done, much like holding her, or speaking to her really. But it feels right to kiss her now, and she does so very carefully.

It isn't something she could've done any other time; Midori is paranoid and alert, and normally would've woken before she was touched, let alone moved. But not now.

Her brave, brave daughter. Not beautiful, no, not when she frowns like that, but brave. She hadn't screamed or cried, even when the baby's head tore her open, far too big for her tiny child's body, and Mikoto knows she couldn't have done the same. Hadn't done the same.

Brave.

Mikoto hopes it's enough, and leaves her to her well-deserved sleep.

Her relationship with Midori is more and less cordial after that, and they slowly start taking tea regularly, slowly start to speak to one another a little more. Not that Mikoto knows her any better - they would need to be friends for that, which they are absolutely not - but it is soothing, in a way, to have the routine.

She dares to tell Midori of it once, and is more surprised than she should have been to hear her say that she feels it too.

She does not like her better for it. In fact, their relationship curdles for the worse as Midori has more healthy children with easy births and pregnancies that make her daughter's eyes flatten with exhaustion while Mikoto's womb remains uncooperative despite Fugaku's insistence that she should deliver another son.

Eventually Midori's first-born is named as their second son and Sasuke's spare, and the beauty of seclusion is no-one in the village can say it is not Mikoto's child.

Kushina could have, but she is long dead.

Midori spends the last six months of her second pregnancy under a genjutsu that induces paralysis, fatigue and suggestibility after Shisui returns for his coat and finds her cutting into her abdomen with a stolen shuriken.

To see her writhe desperately for Mikoto's touch makes her choke bile and regret at seeing her proud, fiercely arrogant daughter reduced to a whimpering creature nuzzling into her hand as though she is a kitten still bleeding from the loss of its claws, helpless to move or feed itself.

Her eyes are glazed, her cheek raw with saliva, and her binds, while soft, are far too strong for her to break free.

The deep, curving scar on her stomach, long-since healed by a medicnin, purples accusingly while Midori twists and vomits. It winks at her, half-hidden by the pale of Midori's spasmodically twitching thigh, and Mikoto holds her down while the medicnins check her uterus and force food and medicine down her throat. Her tongue has been removed for the moment so she cannot choke herself with it, and her teeth are blunted, the beds of her fingernails raw to the air.

Her first child was the healthiest the clan had seen for some time. They are anxious, very anxious, to ensure there is another.

Mikoto decides, with slow reluctance, that a living, healthy child with a strong Sharingan and a good mind is not worth her daughter's torture.

She begs her not to let it happen again, undeterred by the wild roll of Midori's eyes. She sits at her bedside and speaks to her, blames her, accuses her. Why must she be so defiant? Why can't she learn her place? Why can't she give up and accept that there is nothing more than this? Why is she doing this to herself?

The first thing Midori says when they restore her tongue and teeth and fingernails, three months after the child is born and it continues to be in perfect health, is: "You are pathetic."

It's odd how it seems so authoritative, even slurred while Midori is collapsed on the floor, betrayed by broken hips set wrong to allow for easier examination and delivery in the future.

Her own ache at times, particularly when she has been kneeling for too long, and Mikoto would offer her help if she ever believed her to take it.

Midori claws herself to her feet, shredding curls of wood from the scroll frames beside her, and leans against them, crumpling their calligraphy. She looks around. She is both more and less disoriented after so long under the genjutsu and so long confined than Mikoto expected, and she can hear her throat click when she breathes.

"How long?"

"Nine months," Mikoto says, not minded to soften the passage of time.

Midori exhales. Her knees are shaking, visible through her robe, and her collarbones are very sharp against her skin. "Sasuke."

"You were very sick, so you were on a pilgrimage to the north shrine," Mikoto says, knowing what she wants and finding a kind of pleasure in granting the pain on her face. "He was not very worried," she adds with relish.

She lowers her eyes, a huddled sack of despair, and Mikoto knows there is no more scope for cruelty. Her daughter will not give her what she wants.

Midori is more beautiful as she grows older, and Mikoto resents the growing emptiness of her marital bed, resents Midori's sneer when Mikoto over-brews their morning tea in an act of utter pettiness. She devotes all the time she has to Sasuke, coddling him, teaching him, giving him all the affection he'll stand. She likes how he looks at her with adoration, and likes how he tries to wriggle out of her arms but stands still long enough for a proper hug regardless.

He's a genius, a true prodigy, the shining star of the clan, the one who will bring them back to their rightful glory, and she deliberately ignores Midori's patient teaching, the songs she sings to him when he has nightmares. Whatever her daughter could give him is worthless, more likely to hold him back than lift him into greatness, and she finds herself raising a hand to her daughter more often than not when she finds them training together.

She resents, too, the sly smiles she sees Midori give Shisui, resents how the boy knowingly wraps himself around her pretty finger and between her slender legs and brings her anything she asks - scrolls, jutsu, dango, jewels.

She only knows Midori has the third tomoe in each eye, only knows she has Sharingan at all, because Midori shows it to her one morning, red above her mocking coral-painted lips.

"Isn't it pretty?"

"You're not allowed to use it in the house," Mikoto scolds, knowing she sounds exactly as spiteful as she feels. Midori is very, very lucky that Fugaku is away and Sasuke is still in school for another month despite her husband's efforts to have him graduate early. Either of them would be able to tell that someone was using chakra.

It's a silly pretence at being mother and daughter, this habit of mid-morning tea where Mikoto prepares the leaves and water and Midori performs the ritual with delicately lowered lashes. Still neither of them have broken the tradition in the last four years, and Mikoto wonders if it means she cares for her daughter, if it means Midori still cares for her.

Perhaps they are simply creatures of habit like most Uchiha, and there is no symbolism at all.

"Fugaku doesn't care," Midori says, shrugging an arm over the back of her chair in disrespect equal to the flagrant use of her father's name. Swathed in red linen, her lush hair pinned with quartz and ruby Uchiha fans, she is thirteen and the most beautiful girl in Konoha.

But there are calluses on her fingers and palms, and her lips are parted, ready to murmur poison, and whatever emotion there remains in her cold little heart is indecipherable even when her eyes fade to black. She is the perfect clanswoman. Obedient and ornamental.

If Mikoto didn't know her any better, she'd say Midori's childish, stubborn, entirely un-Uchiha spirit broke long ago. But she is her mother, and she knows it is that same spirit looking at her now and treating them all with such disdain. While it angers her and she hates her daughter quite more than she thought she ever would, a tiny part of her is glad of it. If only to give her jealousy a focus.

"He cares," Mikoto says, finding no need to moderate her tone. Not for her daughter, the seductive little wretch.

Midori smiles incredulously, the plucked slope of her eyebrows drawing downwards. "You think I like it?" She huffs a breathy noblewoman's laugh, hiding her teeth with her hand as is proper and expected.

Mikoto is careful to clench only her toes. "You sound willing enough."

"Mother, he is a brute." She inspects her fingernails, too long for practical work with a kunai, but the layered half-moon scars on the base of her palm speak to how little she cares about practicality. "I don't know how you stand his rutting. Though aren't you glad you don't have to count the beams these days, Mother?"

"You presumptuous little -!"

Midori easily dodges her slap, boredom written over her entire face, and picks up her teacup with languid fingers. "That's right, I remember now. You're counting other beams these days."

Mikoto feels her mouth pinch. "How much do you know?"

"Oh, everything." Midori looks at her, faintly curious. "Did he always babble like that when he got oral sex?"

Mikoto smiles reluctantly despite her internal cringe at how clinical she sounds, at discussing something so forbidden. "Yes. It was how I knew we were betrothed."

"Ah," eyebrows raised in a wealth of understanding. "Well then. He hasn't changed at all."

She sips her tea. It's too bitter. "How much did he say?"

Midori thinks a moment, as she almost always does when she takes something seriously. It's gratifying, to be asking a question she considers worthy of contemplation. The other person to get that response - usually the only - is Sasuke.

Mikoto despises herself for sinking so low as to crave her daughter's approval.

"I listen to Shisui," she says eventually. "I listen to him relate tales of his friends. Who gets what assignments and where. Who can choose and who can't. I listen to Fugaku. Who gets what, and where, and why." She sips her tea, and Mikoto is compelled to be quiet despite herself. "There have been problems for some time. The problems have become a pattern."

"Do you agree?"

Midori blinks slowly. "With your plans?" She giggles girlishly, deceptively sweet as she hides her teeth behind her teacup. "Not at all." She lowers the cup. She is still smiling.

Mikoto feels her skin grow cold with realisation.

Midori is beautiful.

Beautiful enough to have the clan's men at her beck and call. Beautiful enough, with her three healthy children with powerful potential, her pregnancy swelling her robe, to put an end to all their secrets.

Beautiful enough to have Shisui, their linchpin, their soon-to-be Godaime Hokage, do as she pleased when she pleased.

Even when the coup succeeds and he is installed in office as the clan's puppet, that will not change.

And they are already marching, Shisui at their head besides Fugaku, marching into the trap of Midori's long, long legs, her pretty, pretty smile.

She half-rises, too afraid to scream or move or attack.

"Too late now," Midori says, patting her hand in a pretence of comfort so mocking Mikoto tastes bile. "Do sit down, Mother. I would rather hate for the time I spent with Danzo to go to waste."

"How could you?" Mikoto says, too stunned to lower her voice, and she sinks back into kneeling. Even her husband could not win against a full squad of Root ANBU. "How could you?"

Midori shrugs a shoulder, elegantly dismissive.

"He's your brother," Mikoto spits, desperate to hurt her. Her husband could die, could already be dead, and she'd never realised how they'd made her, this ... this weapon, how far someone determined could carry beauty is power past its limits, and all she wanted to do was hurt her.

Somewhere, in a stupid, cowardly little part of her soul, Mikoto had still nursed some affection for her daughter.

"And my cousin as well. I know, Mother." Midori gives her a pitying shake of her head. "You deserve better."

Better than - than - "Than what?"

Midori gestures around them. "This." She regards her. "Haven't you ever wondered? If they were gone?"

With most of the men dead, they could ... the clan could change. It would have to change.

Their role would be different. Mikoto would have to use the skills and knowledge she'd absorbed over the years and put them to good use.

It could be different. All of it. The ceilings, the menses, the children, the silence in presence of their superiors, who would no longer be there, because they would be dead, and her heart keened at the loss of Fugaku even as her mind whirled with panicked logic. They would rule. They would have to.

It would have to be different.

They would have to speak in public. They would have to leave the enclosures. They would have to learn to fight, all of them, even the girls. They would need new blood. Alliances. Fewer dead and deformed children. They would have power.

Power.

The thought of it is heady, incredible.

"You did it for me," Mikoto says, so cold all over again, so shocked her words feel like they are coming from very far away. "Didn't you?"

Midori rises to her feet, her hair spilling over her shoulder and pooling on the table like the darkest ink, and kisses her forehead.

Then smiles at her, tiny and warm and so like that child she had worried for a very long time ago. "And for me."

Mikoto watches her walk away in her robe the colour of blood, clan symbols sparkling in her hair, and allows herself to weep.

The funeral is really a mass grave. Twenty Uchiha men died in the first wave, and thirteen after that. Shisui's grave is beside his father's, and Fugaku's is beside her brother's, and they are all written in neat rows on the obelisk cut from a shard of glossy obsidian.

Mikoto stands with Midori, looking at the names, her free hand curled in the black sleeves of her mourning robes. Sasuke is between them, small hands wrapped around theirs, and they listen to him cry for his father, for his uncles and cousins. It feels strange to be outside, stranger still to be representing the clan as Uchiha Mikoto and not Uchiha Fugaku's wife, even stranger to have her daughter beside her.

Sarutobi was very nice about explaining that there would be sanctions, and penalties, and it would be a while before they would be allowed to take over control of the police force again, if ever. Mikoto watched Midori haggle with Sarutobi - haggle! with the Hokage! - over the terms and conditions, watched her sharp confidence in his promises, and came to understand that they knew each other, Midori and Sarutobi. That Sarutobi had known. That Midori was a traitor to the clan long before Mikoto ever thought Midori knew anything at all, and Fugaku lay atop her again and again and never suspected.

The way the councillors looked at her daughter was troubling, Danzo's eyes the most intense, and she looked at Midori's steadfast pride and knew there was more to it all than Midori had bothered to tell her. Would ever tell her.

At the stone she gathers Sasuke close to her and asks her daughter if it is worth it. If standing here with half the women and young men and war-disabled at their back is worth it, worth losing Shisui, worth destroying their reputation and most of their function, if it all is worth what she has done. How she had done it to begin with.

She takes her time answering, her chin high in the air and her arms folded now that Sasuke is huddled against Mikoto's leg.

"I loved Shisui. But there's nothing noble about me. I didn't do it for love," she says, gentler, calmer, than she's ever been. "I didn't do it because I care about the village or because I care about the clan. I did it because you couldn't. None of you could. I was the only one powerful enough."

She shifts Sasuke to her other leg, then holds out a hand to her daughter.

Midori looks at her, the lines of her face tired. Tired like childbirth, tired like the mornings after. Afraid and too proud to show it as anything other than contempt. "Does it matter how I did it?"

"No," Mikoto says, and holds her arm steady, though her back trembles. "I'm proud of you." She's never said it before. Perhaps she should have.

She closes her eyes and steps into the circle of her arm, and Mikoto wraps it around her waist and holds her close, surprised and not surprised when Midori clings to her.

"Mother," a strangled whisper into her skin, and she can feel the humidity of her daughter's tears.

It feels like falling together. Like power that doesn't hurt, and she sighs and strokes her daughter's hair. Doing it in public feels ... right. Even if there are questions, these are her children. That will not change. Ever.

Sasuke tugs at her sleeve. "Mama, what's wrong with her?"

Midori giggles a sob, and Mikoto smiles down at his tear-streaked face. So sad at the loss of much of his family, and still so concerned for his sister. There is hope for him, and it eases her own fear. "Nothing, sweetheart. Nothing at all."