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Uchiha Minoru had been wandering for as long as he could remember.
Uchiha Minoru was unwanted by his mother, who had abandoned him in the woods when he was five; by his father, who had never acknowledged his existence—the result of a fling with a dancer; and by his clan, for his eyes would never be able to awaken the Sharingan.
Uchiha Minoru walked, walked and walked, only forward and never back; he walked through snow, swamps, mountains, seas, and deserts; he walked for so long that he could barely remember when he had last stopped.
Finally, his legs give out, his throat and skin are parched, he doesn’t remember when he last drank or ate; the sand beneath him is scorching, and his vision blurs from the heat rising in the middle of the day. He knew he would die as pitifully as he had lived. It was to be expected.
Then a shadow looms over him.
“Oji-san, do you need help?” asks a child’s voice, and Minoru barely manages to look up at her; the girl has red eyes, white hair, and a chakra so bright it nearly blinds him. At that moment, he’s actually glad he doesn’t have the Sharingan. “Dad! I think he needs help!”
A second shadow appears; strong arms lift Minoru off the ground, and a man, just like the girl, smiles at him.
“Well-well, you’ve really been through a lot on your journey, haven’t you?” their white hair is long and tousled, and a hood shields their head from the heat; their clothing is strange, made entirely of animal skins layered upon one another. They lift Minoru into their arms as if he weighs nothing. “Come on, our new friend, I’ll introduce you to my people”.
“They’ll like you!” the girl says cheerfully, skipping along. “You smell nice!”
Uchiha Minoru thinks they are very strange people.
A few days later, he comes to, surrounded by about a dozen people — men and women of all ages, and two children: a teenage boy and that little girl who prefers to sit on his lap.
“She likes you”, laughs the man, Hatake Ayumi, the leader of the group, as he hands him a bowl of soup.
“Oji-san is warm”, says the girl, Akane, the man’s daughter.
“Everyone in my clan is like that”, he says, having already demonstrated his mastery of the fire element. That was the only reason he was given the Uchiha surname in the first place, before they realized he was a failure.
“But they’re not here, and Oji-san is”, Akane smiles at him with her childlike logic, which brooks no criticism. “Oji-san, can you teach me how to make a fire? Please, please-please!”
Minoru looks at Ayumi with a hint of desperation, but the cunning wolf has already stepped aside, leaving him to deal with this on his own.
“...of course,” he says, and the girl jumps up and down on his lap, nearly hitting his chin with her hand as they raise their arms in triumph.
“You’re the best, Oji-san!” says Akane when, after much struggle, he manages to teach her the basics in twenty days, and she’s able to create a small flame on her fingertip.
Ayumi mutters sadly behind Minoru.
“Akane, what about your dad?” he asks, which is rather pathetic for such a strong man, in Minoru’s opinion. The bruises from their sparring haven’t healed in a week.
The girl folds her arms across her chest, just as Minoru often did, and her white braid sways slightly from side to side.
“Dad is dad, but Oji-san is cool”, the truth comes out of a child’s mouth, and Minoru bites the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
Hatake Ayumi was inconsolable.
They drift apart and then come back together over the course of several years.
The first time Minoru heard the cough, Akane was seven years old, and it was strange. If there was one thing Minoru had come to understand about the Hatake family, it was their indomitable health.
It wasn’t just Ayumi who was coughing, but also an old woman who was probably two centuries old, yet Ayumi still carried her across countries and cities, explaining that it wasn’t the way of the pack to abandon anyone.
At the very end: Minoru sees them a year later in the land of rivers; it is a sunny day, and the riverside village looks like a scene from the end of the world. Ayumi Hatake wears her usual smile, but to Minoru she seems as lifeless as his own gaze.
“Long time no see, old friend. Glad to see you”, Ayumi repeats what she always says, and a shiver runs through Minoru’s body; the whole village reeks of death, the rot of decay, and disease.
He already knows the answer.
He doesn’t want to ask, but he asks anyway:
“Where is Akane…?” it’s rude, it’s crude, and Hatake Ayumi smiles in a way that takes his breath away, narrowing his vision to a single point.
In the end, she leads him through the village, several kilometers to a high slope, where there is a stunning, picturesque view and a lone grave cross with no body in the grave; all the sick are cremated, but their ashes can be scattered elsewhere.
In the end, his green eyes bleed instead of shedding tears, but the Sharingan never appears; no, none of that happens; it feels as though a sword has pierced his heart, as though it’s raining and the rain will never stop, as though he’s dying in place of the person he loved — then he opens his eyes, and the world isn’t so kind; the grave is still staring at him, and Ayumi’s hand is on his shoulder, as if it’s he who needs comfort from the two of them, not the girl’s father.
In the end, the world goes on, and none of this matters.