Note: So. I just uploaded a new story, "Blind Spot," when I realized that I have so much more inspiration, momentum, if you will, for this one. Please enjoy, give it a shot, if you're feeling bored and in need of an obscure pairing and alternate universe fix, as I do.

This is a completely revamped version of an old (and most likely discontinued) story, "Mistress of the Hounds." I should probably add that this is COMPLETELY AU, like a version of feudal Japan written by someone very ignorant and slightly unhinged.

Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine - not even the more obscure ones.

He will return any day now.

Two months ago, word arrived that he would be back before spring; this is what the yamabushi wrote, and men like him do not lie, nor have any reason to. As winter draws to an end, the household flings itself into frenzied activity. It sweeps up the marketplace and scatters the Uchiha's army of servants in its wake; in the rush to find priests who will furnish the house with the appropriate blessings, reserve seasonal delicacies that cannot be purchased this very moment lest they spoil before the clan heir sets foot in Konoha, and (most of all) educate every member of the clan on the exact hierarchy which even the four-year-olds must know, there is no time to seek solace in clean silence or singing blades.

Nonetheless, Hana is sure that Shisui has been practicing daily. Sometimes on a frigid evening, she hears – above the melancholy shamisen strumming of a disgraced Uchiha grandmother who remembers only her geisha days – (and perhaps the distant echo of a glass chime) his shout as the sword in his hands slashes through boundaries drawn in air by light. She steals purpose and peace from the sound as she hurries on with a bucket of dirty water in her hands. Once emptied from the small sluice gate in the wall, the water slips through the cracks in the ground and winds its way to the lowest levels of the city, where the dark silence stifles more screams than the crows made when their youngest fell out of the nest.

There are beats in time that resonate in Hana's awareness; a flash of images when she turns her zori around before stepping onto the engawa and sees the smaller slippers of a child. She remembers a day when her five-year-old self, too consumed by the urgency of her mother's orders, neglected to turn her zori around and almost sprinted right into a staid, younger boy with intent, soot-grey eyes. Then she finds herself listening for the wrong kind of footfalls, expecting the space near her to suddenly fill with the presence of a thirteen-year-old embedded too deeply in her memory to be exorcised. To her, he will never be more than thirteen, a lithe youth with deadly grace reminiscent of leaping flames. She cannot see him as a man, as Shisui has been even before he turned nineteen this year.

But any day now, Itachi will walk among the shadows of the house once more, and perhaps he will look the part of an heir then; he always did have the aura, and now, after these four years, he may have gained the physical stature. Or maybe his demeanor is unchanged, though he will have spent nearly half a decade on a lonely mountain with little else but snow and wind.

Maybe he will bring some of that distant, impersonal calm into the city and quell these frenetic rumors of conspiracy and spies and dark futures. Or perhaps he will bring the long-awaited war instead.

She stops speculating there, and tries to imagine him grown tall and formidable; her mind's eye conjures up at most an Itachi on the verge of fourteen, give or take two months. There is no knowing for sure until his actual arrival.

Until then.