Chapter Text
Konoha Five-O
Chapter One
Voices were coming through the radio as she slipped the headset over her head, still listening to pass on from Ryoku from the day's events.
‘209 radio show me out with a suspicious person at the Naka shrine.’
“...and they didn’t stop jabbering all day long. It's been awful today, oh – we were out with Kyo Mitarashi again, he was drunk and stumbling over by the Nara compound…”
Mizuki quickly took Ryoku’s still warm, vacated chair and put 209 out at the Naka shrine on the screen, fingers already finding the keyboard before the words were out. “Again? That’s the third time this month.”
“I know! He doesn’t learn,” Ryoku’s long hair fell over her shoulder as she picked up her work bag and tried to juggle her can of tea, can of coffee, and water bottle all at once, she paused until Mizuki stopped typing, “anyway I’ll see you in twelve hours. I’m not going to curse you by saying the ‘q’ word so have a good night.”
“Be careful getting home,” Mizuki said as her partner for the night came shuffling in with a quick hello and goodbye to Ryoku.
The dispatch room sat at the center of the Uchiha Military Police Force headquarters, a long, low building that always smelled faintly of ink and rain regardless of the weather. Her window looked out not onto the street but onto the interior courtyard, which meant she spent her shifts watching officers spar, drink bad tea, and argue about filing reports in equal measure. She had opinions about all of it. She kept most of them to herself.
Most of the time.
"You're here early."
Inoko dropped into the chair beside her with boneless ease. She was forty-three, had been dispatching since before Mizuki was born, and wore her greying hair in the same flat bun every single day. Mizuki had once asked her why.
Fewer decisions, Inoko had said. I save them for things that matter.
Mizuki had thought about that for three days and concluded it was the wisest thing anyone had ever said to her.
"Ryoku said they were busy today.”
Inoko exhaled through her nose. "It’s a full moon tonight."
Mizuki looked over at her in horror.
‘209 radio, 29 check.’
Mizuki stepped on her radio pedal. “209, go ahead.”
She listened as 209 rattled off the name and date of birth of the guy he was out with and ran him through their database.
“Radio 209 he’s clear.”
‘10-4 no further.’
She and Inoko settled into the comfortable silence of people who had shared a small room for two years, the radio humming low between them.
Outside, the courtyard was coming alive. The night shift officers were doing their warm up katas, 225 was running laps along the inner wall, the distant clang of the gate logging the first field officers out. Mizuki listened to all of it without looking up from the computer, the sounds mapping themselves automatically against her mental register of who was where, who was due back, who was running extra patrols in which areas.
She was, by any metric that could be applied to a room like this, very good at her job.
Mizuki had not always wanted this job.
It was not a thought she entertained for long. She was practiced at that, at letting it surface and then sliding her attention cleanly away, the way you redirected a conversation before it arrived somewhere difficult. The thought surfaced now because of the young officer in the courtyard below who was moving through a set of drills she recognized. She had learned those drills. She had been fourteen, and her instructor had told her she had excellent instincts for—
The radio crackled. And the phone rang. Inoko picked up the phone.
“911 where is your emergency?”
‘223 radio, has anyone called about a fire near the ramen house on third and main?’
Mizuki could hear Inoko behind her: “Sir, where is your emergency? You said there was a fire, I need to know where.”
More calls started coming in.
It was going to be a long night.
The man outside the Naka shrine smelled like cheap sake and bad decisions, which in Itachi's experience described approximately half of all suspicious person calls and resolved in much the same way.
He was not, as it happened, doing anything particularly suspicious. He was sitting on the shrine steps eating a meat bun and looking profoundly unbothered by the presence of a police officer, which Itachi found either reassuring or concerning depending on the decade of life a man was in. This one appeared to be in his fifties. Reassuring, then.
"Identification," Itachi requested.
The man produced it without complaint, still eating.
Itachi keyed his radio. "209 radio, 29 check." He read off the name and date of birth in the flat, even cadence that field work had long since made automatic and waited.
The response came back quickly, the way it always did on her shifts.
"Radio 209, he's clear."
"10-4, no further." He handed back the identification. The man looked up at him for the first time, apparently satisfied that the interruption to his meat bun was concluding.
"Long day?" the man asked.
Itachi considered the question with more seriousness than it probably deserved. The Naka district was quiet, the shrine steps were empty except for one unbothered civilian, and somewhere across the village Shisui was doing something that had required him to split off forty minutes ago with an expression that suggested it was either very important or very stupid. The line between those two things, where Shisui was concerned, was not always clear.
"Not yet," Itachi said, and left him to his meat bun.
He found Shisui two streets over, leaning against a wall with his arms crossed and looking over the area with mild interest.
Down the street, a thin column of smoke was rising from somewhere behind the ramen house on third and main. Not a fire. Cooking smoke, probably, caught wrong by the wind. But probably was not the same as certainly, and Shisui was, underneath all available evidence to the contrary, a conscientious officer.
"Called it in?" Itachi asked.
"Not yet." Shisui tilted his head in the direction of the smoke. "Looks like Yamato-san's exhaust again. The angle's wrong for anything structural." He paused. "Mizuki-san's on tonight."
Itachi said nothing.
"Night shift always runs the checks faster," Shisui continued, in the tone of someone making innocent observations. "I've timed it. Thirty seconds average. Ryoku on days takes almost twice that."
"Ryoku-san is also managing four times the radio traffic and call volume on days."
"Sure," Shisui said agreeably. He was quiet for a moment, which was unusual enough that Itachi looked at him. He was still watching the smoke disperse, expression settled into something that was almost but not quite neutral. "She sounds tired tonight."
Itachi said nothing to that either. He had noticed.
He had not, until Shisui said it, examined the fact that he had noticed.
The smoke thinned and disappeared. Down the street, the ramen house showed no signs of structural distress. Shisui pushed off the wall.
"Yamato-san's exhaust," he confirmed. "Call it in?"
"Call it in," Itachi agreed.
Shisui keyed his radio. "223 radio, has anyone called about a fire near the ramen house on third and main?"
They waited.
‘Affirmative we’re getting multiple calls from businesses in the area.’
It was going to be a long night.
The shift had indeed been long.
Kyo Mitarashi had been processed and released to his nephew with the cheerful indignity that only the very drunk could manage with any grace. The smoke behind the ramen house had turned out to be Yamato-san's exhaust exactly as reported, plus one very alarmed cat. Two domestic disturbances, one noise complaint from a civilian who had filed the same complaint four times in the past month and would almost certainly file it again, and a missing child call that had resolved in eleven minutes when the child was located hiding in their neighbor's garden shed, unbothered and eating stolen tomatoes.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a perfectly average night.
Mizuki was updating the incident log when the dispatch room door opened and Shisui Uchiha arrived like a weather event.
He did not so much enter a room as redistribute himself into it. He had his flak jacket half unzipped already, his headband pushed up haphazardly.
"Mizuki-san." He dropped into the spare chair beside her desk with no invitation and complete confidence. "How many calls did we generate tonight?"
"Collectively?"
"Personally."
She pulled up the log without looking at him. "Shisui-san, you called in the same exhaust issue Yamato-san has had since spring.One call, first thing."
"In my defense," he said, "it could have been a fire."
"You have the Sharingan."
A brief pause. "It really, genuinely could’ve been a fire."
Behind him, the Itachi Uchiha came through the door at a pace that suggested he had not been trying to catch up with Shisui and simply happened to arrive at approximately the same time. He had his jacket still fully zipped, headband correctly placed, and the expression of a man who had known Shisui for his entire life and had developed a kind of patience around him the way other people developed calluses.
He stopped at the edge of the desk. "We're logging off."
"Shisui-san is bothering me," Mizuki said pleasantly. She was already pulling up the log-off screen.
"I'm not bothering you, I'm visiting," Shisui corrected. "There's a difference. Bothering implies I'm unwelcome."
"You pulled this chair over without asking."
"The chair wanted to come."
Inoko, from across the room, did not look up from her screen. "Log off or leave, Shisui-kun.”
Shisui looked genuinely wounded. He was, Mizuki had long since concluded, one of those people who treated mild reprimands as a form of affection and responded accordingly. He placed a hand over his heart. "After everything I've done for this office."
"You've been assigned to this district for four months," Inoko said.
"Foundational months," Shisui huffed. "Formative. I've been a presence." He looked at Mizuki for support.
She gestured at the log-off screen. He sighed theatrically and leaned forward to complete it.
In the brief quiet, she became aware that Itachi had not moved. He was standing at the edge of her desk with the stillness that she had noticed before, that quality of attention that didn't announce itself. His log-off could have been done from the field. He had come in anyway.
She pulled up his log without being asked and turned the screen slightly toward him so he could confirm the entries.
He looked at them for a moment. "The Mitarashi incident," he said. "Who responded?"
"Takeda-san. Logged and closed." She tapped the entry. "His nephew is used to it by now. It’s becoming a thing."
Something moved briefly in his expression. Not quite amusement. Adjacent. "Thank you."
"It's a full moon," she said. "We had a full house tonight."
He looked at her then, a fraction longer than the conversation required.
"Get home safe," she added, the way she always said it, the same thing she said to every officer who logged off on her shift, automatic and genuine in equal measure.
"You as well," Itachi said, which was not, now that she thought about it, something officers usually said back.
Shisui, who had been watching this exchange with the focused interest, stood up and zipped his jacket with great ceremony.
"Goodnight, Mizuki-san, Inoko-san" he said, with considerably more warmth than the occasion technically required.
"Goodnight, Shisui-san."
She was already back on the radio before the door closed behind them.
The walk home from headquarters took eleven minutes on a good morning.
This was not a good morning.
Mizuki knew within the first block. It announced itself the way it always did — not with pain exactly, more like a delay, a half-second gap between what she told her left leg to do and what it actually did. Like a radio transmission running just slightly behind. She had spent two years learning to read that signal, cataloguing its variations the way she catalogued everything: the difference between tired and tired, between the leg that would cooperate if she was patient and the leg that had already decided the evening was over.
This was the second kind.
She adjusted her pace without thinking about it. Shorter stride on the left, weight distributed slightly right, the small unconscious recalibrations that had become so habitual she barely noticed them anymore except on nights like this when they weren't quite enough.
The streets of the Uchiha district were quiet at this hour, lanterns burning low along the main road, the last of the night shift officers long since logged off and home. She passed the training grounds and did not look at them. She had learned that one early. What you didn't look at couldn't cost you anything.
She had been sixteen when her left leg first failed her mid-kata.
Not dramatically. That was the thing nobody told you about the way your body could betray you — it didn't always announce itself. It wasn't a collapse or a break or a moment anyone else would have clocked as significant. It was just her foot not landing where she told it to, a stumble she'd caught herself from, a correction that took a fraction too long. Her instructor had seen it. Had seen it again the next session, and the one after that. Had sent her to the medics with the careful, neutral expression adults wore when they already suspected something and didn't want to be the one to say it.
Limb-girdle muscular dystrophy, the medic had told her. Progressive. Manageable, for now.
For now.
She reached the steps up to the residential lane and paused at the bottom, looking at them with the calculus she applied to anything involving elevation these days. Seven steps. Stone, slightly uneven from age. The railing on the right side was solid, she knew from experience. She shifted her weight, took the railing, and went up slowly and without drama because there was no one to see it and no point performing stoicism for an empty street.
At the top she stopped and breathed.
The thing about muscular dystrophy that nobody who hadn't lived it seemed to understand was that it wasn't always the big things. It wasn't only the kata she couldn't finish and the promotion she never made and the future that had quietly restructured itself around her absence from it. It was also seven steps. It was a walk home that used to take eleven minutes taking seventeen. It was the exhaustion of a body that worked twice as hard to do half as much and never, ever let her forget the difference.
She had been athletic, once. She had been fast. Her taijutsu instructor had told her she had a natural instinct for footwork, that it was rare, that it would serve her well when she made chunin.
Nineteen was too old to still be grieving something that happened at sixteen.
She was aware of this and found it largely unhelpful.
The residential lane was flat from here, which was something. She let go of the railing and walked the rest of the way home in the quiet, her left leg doing its uneven best, the lanterns burning low on either side, the village asleep around her.
Help people, she had told herself at seventeen, sitting in the dispatch office for the first time with Inoko looking at her across the desk like she was being assessed, which she was. You still want to help people. Find a way to do that.
It had seemed, at the time, like a very small consolation.
It seemed less small now, most days.
She let herself into her apartment, took off her shoes at the door, and sat down on the low bench in the entryway for a moment longer than she needed to.
Seven steps, she thought. She'd manage them better tomorrow.
She usually did.