The last days of summer were really hot.
This was Haruka's first day off in a while. Shinobi always got a day off whenever they came back from missions, and even with her special schedule that allowed her to both go on missions, and work in the clinic, she was no exception. Except that she preferred working on her experiments instead of going out with friends like the others did. Not that she had friends to begin with. Even if she was extroverted and liked to have fun, she had the mind of a seventeen years old woman and so, mingling with kids more than ten years her juniors was not on her list of priorities. Having fun could wait until she reached the age where she could smoke and drink. This would be in seven or eight years. She wouldn't mind casting herself in the role of the rebellious teen. But so far everybody seemed to think that she just shared Madara's introverted personality.
Madara was something else. He was like an onion. Multiple layers, that you need to peel off, only for more to come up. To his enemies, he was a cold blooded killer, a demon on the battlefield, that tore through them like a mini-war god. To his allies, he was a slightly aloof heir, with great insight and diplomatic ability, a leader in the making. To his clan, he was a beacon of hope. Their future leader. He was strong, diligent and a lot more caring than Tajima. He had inherited Himiko's style of making small gestures to win over the hearts of his people. She had noticed that a lot of times, when the shinobi couldn't gather the courage to ask something out of Tajima, they would go to him instead. He wasn't sociable, the art of small talk seemed to elude him completely, and his hot temper was as famous as he was, but the Uchiha had gotten used to the quirks of Tajima's kids, and they just let him be. Even at only nine years old, they held a great deal of respect for him. Even his father had started relying on him a lot more.
Only Izuna and she knew the real him. His caring personality, behind his anger fits. The awkward kid who failed to find friends his age who could keep up with his precarious mind. The dreamer in him, who came out sometimes, when it was just the three of them. His competitive nature that liked a challenge. And just how much he loved his siblings, and his clan. Everything he did, he did for them. Now that she was on his squad, she could spend a lot more time with him than earlier, and she just loved him every day a bit more.
Izuna, however, seemed to not be plagued by the same disease as his siblings. He was quite popular with the kids his age and even with the adults of the clan. He was cheerful, funny and when he wasn't killing people, or clashing with his official nemesis Tobirama, he was just a plain six years old kid. He was cute, and the little shit knew it, and so liked to use his charm to get what he wanted from the female population of the clan. So far it was just candy or some specially made kunai, but she had a feeling that she might need to start working on birth control options in the coming years.
She also met the infamous Tobirama once, when they were escorting a shipment of gold to a nearby village. He seemed to hate Izuna as much as the other boy hated him. They kept glaring at each other from a distance and she had to practically drag him out of there. Thankfully, there was no altercation as both clans respected the cease fire that was going on. And, other than Tobirama, who she knew was a year older than Izuna, all the other Senju were adults, and she doubted that their squad, no matter how skilled, could take them.
The cease fire was an idea of the Nara Clan, who had also been affected by the Daimyo's reorganization project.
Now that all the powerful shinobi clans were in the south, the fighting never seemed to stop. They kept bumping into each other and no one wanted to back down first. The situation was bad on the mental level, as stress levels were high, but more importantly bad on the economic level. Because they were either attacking or defending, nobody had the time to pick up missions or do some trading. The situation was bad as spring and summer were when shinobi had the most work and when they made most of their money. Everybody was seeing the disaster coming in the winter. And so the head of the Nara clan decided to hold a conference of the clan leaders. The Nara-Akimishi-Yamanaka axis was still neutral in terms of alliances and so both the Senju and the Uchiha were willing to listen to what they had to say. There was no official meeting between the two clan heads, as everybody with mush between their ears knew that Uchiha Tajima and Senju Butsuma in the same room was equal to a disaster. But through a couple of weeks of three-way mediation, they managed to come up with something:
—Both the Senju and affiliates and Uchiha and co. would cease any fighting that was done on the side.
—If they were to come across each other by accident, shinobi were under strict orders to ignore each other.
—If and when their missions require them to be on opposite sides, they should try and avoid any unnecessary deaths. For example, if the Uchiha were hired to steal a caravan guarded by the Senju, they were allowed to injure them to do their jobs, but if they couldn't do it without killing them, they had to retreat.
—Clans were still allowed to try and spy on each other but if anyone was spotted on a territory where they didn't belong, patrols were allowed to kill them.
The plan for this summer was to try and salvage the losses of the spring. They even came up with special roads to avoid bumping into each other as much as they could.
So far both sides had managed to keep their ends of the deal, and things were going smoothly. Less fights, meant less injuries, and less time at the clinic. She had managed to separate her days into three categories: shinobi work days with the squad,( but they didn't need her much and often left on missions without her), medicine production days (those were grueling because the clan was starting to become independent on that level, but there were still only two of them working on production) and finally research days.
Right now, after managing to find ways to create most of the medicine she needed to treat the common disease and infections, as well as stocking up on what she might need if an epidemic was to break out (they had a few cases of chickenpox last winter, but Touko spotted it early and so they were able to contain it fast), she was tackling a serious problem.
She had been using her Sharingan a lot as a microscope of sorts in her research. But one day, even if her chakra reserves were still good, her eyes started hurting. She had asked Touko about what it meant, and came to know some disturbing information. The use of the Sharingan was not without consequences, the more you use it the more your eyes get tired and sometimes you can go blind. It was a slow process and it took decades of use for the vision to seriously deteriorate, but it was inevitable. After that she had gone around asking shinobi about their vision, gathering information, examining the eyes of the people who let her, and making some charts to track the progress of the deterioration, depending on gender, frequency of use and age. She came to the conclusion that she had a good forty years before it became a problem for her, but as she was planning on living for longer than that, she had to start looking for a treatment.
And also, a lot of people were suffering from deteriorating vision and this will benefit them too. Her motives were not entirely selfish.
But to be able to do something, she needed to know more about the Sharingan. She needed to study it. The monthly Uchiha assembly was a good time to bring it up. It was held in the compound's shrine. The shrine was just a huge room really, lit by big torches at night, when the meetings were held. It could house about five hundred people at a time, and most of them sat on the ground or on cushions they found (those went fast; first come, first served). In the back of the room facing the huge double doors, was a small stage. Tajima and the elder council took place there, and the people with complaints or matters to bring to the clan's attention went up and spoke facing the crowd.
When she spoke up about the problem she was facing, a lot of people were interested. It was a problem that concerned them all. Even the elders who didn't usually like her interventions were attentive this time. The problem was that no one was willing to let the body of a loved one go through an autopsy before being buried. They didn't mind when it was the body of an outsider, but clan members were a taboo. And even if they were willing there were no recent deaths in the clan anyway.
It was starting to go nowhere when help came from an unexpected source: Elder Genryu. She and that old bag of bones didn't like each other. He was the most traditionalist of the Uchiha, and her ideas about medicine, the involvement of kunoichi in the clan's leadership and even the creation of the greenhouse were the complete opposite of his. He thought it disgraceful that the members of a warrior clan as great as them, would lower themselves to become gardeners, or basically anything other than shinobi. She liked to argue with him a lot, and forgetting that she was only supposed to be six and a half years old, no matter how prodigious, she tended to get insolent with him. Usually, that's when Tajima stared her down and took the matters into his own hands. But behind her, some of the clan members gave her discreet sheers. Even Madara smirked. Touko was over the moon.
Nonetheless, this time he was surprisingly helpful. Maybe it had something to do with his almost blindness. He told the clan that sometimes, some dojutsu thieves got their hands on the Sharingan. Standard procedure was to hunt them down, kill them and take back the stolen eyes. They were always successful so far, but sometimes they took too long, and the thieves already had the opportunity to made some research. The results were always brought back to the clan and the elders kept them, in order to study the Sharingan someday, but that never happened so far. He had three of those scrolls and he promised to deliver them to her later, as well as some reading material on the clan's old legends concerning the Sharingan. It wasn't what she wanted, but she could do with it, and so she thanked him, while trying not to get angry at his self-satisfied smirk. He had delivered them personally the very next day, when he came to pick up his stomach burns medicine. And so she had been studying them carefully for more than a week now. They were surprisingly helpful and clearly detailed, but she still had a long way to go to even start formulating theories.
The legends were, however, something else. She wasn't sure what she was expecting, but it wasn't exactly that. They didn't talk much about the Sharingan, but they spoke about something called the Mangekyou Sharingan. It was supposed to be the ultimate form of the Sharingan, even better than the three tomoe forms. The scrolls spoke about some magical powers that were unbelievable even in the unbelievable world she had been living in for nearly a year day to day now. The general idea was that the Mangekyou Sharingan was the mirror of the soul, and that its powers took the form of the wielder's deepest desires. It was also supposed to be able to read the Uchiha stone monument. That was a big rock with a lot of inscriptions on it, currently on the stage in a shrine, that was supposed to hold all the secrets of the Uchiha clan, but no one was actually able to read it. She put the scrolls away, as their content was not her current problem and she was multi-tasking enough as is. But she didn't forget to ask Tajima about it later, and he told her that some of their ancestors were supposed to have awakened it. But to him, it was as much a legend as the Senju's Mokuton.