Chapter 49: Once Again She Does It!

Botan was teaching.

She found him at the Academy, in the long practice yard behind the main building, standing in front of a row of nine-year-olds sparring with one another. The pinned sleeve of his outfit hung empty on the left, and one eye was still that milky, scarred-over white, and he watched the children carefully. They seemed to be doing just fine. When one student seemed to be a bit too fired up, he easily appeared between the two students, caught the girl’s kick mid-swing and set her back on her feet.

“The match is finished, Totaru.”

“Sorry, Botan-sensei…” The girl rubbed the back of her head while blushing.

Mikoto waited at the edge of the yard until he dismissed them back inside. The children went past her in a stream, some of them gawking, two of them whispering "Red-Eyed Angel" with their hands over their mouths. Botan saw her last. He came over when he saw her.

"Uchiha-san." He bowed his head. "Didn't expect to see you here. Come to check on your patient?"

"In a way." She looked at the empty sleeve, and then at his face. "Botan-san, I have something to tell you, and I need you to sit down first."

His one good eye narrowed. But he sat, on the low wall at the edge of the yard. 

She told him. Ishikari. Heita. The eye. Kinta's arm. And she watched his face while she did. It didn't change. It didn't change at all, and then she reached the part where Kinta closed his new hand into a fist, and a muscle at the corner of Botan's mouth jumped once.

"I told you it couldn't be done," Mikoto said. "I was wrong. I'm sorry I was wrong. I'd like to try to give you your arm back. And the eye, after. It will take a full day for the arm, maybe longer, and the new arm will be weak for a long time. Months before it's what it was. Maybe longer for a sword. I can't promise you'll ever fight the way you did before." She held his gaze. "But you'd have all of yourself back again..."

Botan didn't say anything.

He looked out at the empty yard, where the children's feet had scuffed lines into the dirt following his footwork. His right hand came up and touched, very lightly, the pinned fold of his empty sleeve.

"My wife," he said finally, and his voice came out rough. "My wife cried for a week when I came home. Not in front of me. She thought I didn't hear." His hand tightened on the sleeve. "My boy's six. He asked me if it was going to grow back. I told him no, humans aren’t lizards. He asked me if he could have my old sword, then, since I didn't need it." A sound that might have been a laugh. "I gave it to him."

"Then let's show him humans aren’t that different from lizards anymore…" Mikoto said.

…

The operating theater at Konoha Hospital was a round room with a tiled floor and a gallery of benches stepping up the walls, built for teaching. By midday every bench was full.

Medical-nin packed the gallery shoulder to shoulder, ward medics and field medics and two grey-haired specialists who hadn't left the poison ward in a month. Mikoto recognized faces from her classes. The wide-shouldered field medic with grey in his hair. The young chunin who could only work with a field kit. The older woman who'd told her she'd lost people for want of knowing how to choose. Every one of them had a notebook open on their knees.

Tsunade sat in the front row.

Botan lay on a mat in the center of the floor, stripped to the waist. The stump of his left shoulder was a smooth, puckered dome of old scar, long since closed over by the camp medics. His wife sat on a stool by the wall with her hands knotted in her lap, because Mikoto had asked if he wanted her there and he'd said yes before she finished the question.

Mikoto knelt beside him and began to draw.

The formula went down in chakra-ink across the tiles, spiraling inward toward the shoulder, the lines tightening and doubling where they neared the stump, four heavy anchor marks set at the corners of the mat. It took her most of an hour. Nobody in the gallery spoke. Pens scratched.

“The Regenerative Healing Jutsu…” Tsunade watched her work. “Funny. I nearly used it last month. I offered to take the scars off my knuckleheaded brother’s face. Before any of this. I had the whole procedure planned out, the burns cut away and regrown one section at a time. A week of work and he'd have looked like his cute self again." She uncrossed her arms and crossed them again the other way. "And do you know what that brat said to me?"

Mikoto had a guess. She kept drawing.

"'No thanks, nee-chan,'" Tsunade said, in a deep, solemn voice nothing like Nawaki's. "'Scars make a man. Scars are stories a man should never forget.'" She dropped the voice. "Where does a kid his age even hear that garbage? Some drunk in a bar? Jiraiya? It was Jiraiya, wasn't it, I'm going to kill him."

A few of the medics in the gallery were very carefully not laughing.

"He told me something like that too," Mikoto said. "That he keeps them so he never forgets the day he made a mistake in the line of duty. So he never does it again."

"He can remember it without a face full of burn scars!"

"That's what I told him."

"And?"

"And he smiled at me like I was the one who didn't understand." Mikoto set the last anchor mark and sat back on her heels, and frowned a little at the formula, because she still didn't entirely understand. She'd watched Nawaki stop turning his face away from people. She'd watched him start volunteering for the boring missions, the safe ones, the ones where nobody exploded. The lesson was there. It had sunk in all the way to the bone. She just didn't see why it needed to be written across his body for everyone else to see, too.

Maybe it wasn't for everyone else. Maybe it was for the boy who looked in the mirror every morning.

"Boys are stupid." Tsunade announced to the room at large.

“Boys are boys…” Mikoto replied.

Mikoto took a lock of Botan's hair, laid it against the dome of the stump, and turned to him. "Last chance."

"Do it." Botan said.

She put him under a deep genjutsu, a quiet one, an empty field in summer with nobody in it. His body went slack on the mat. His wife made a small sound by the wall and pressed her fist against her mouth.

Then Mikoto turned to the gallery.

"Before I start," she said. "I want all of you to understand something, because you're going to go home tonight and try to work out how to do this yourselves, and I want you to try. But you need to know what you're up against." She tapped just below her own eye. "I can see cells. That's the only reason I can work alone. I'm going to look at his right arm the whole time I'm building the left one, and I'm going to copy it, piece by piece, and I'll know when I've put something in the wrong place because I'll see that it's wrong."

The gallery was very quiet.

"You won't have that. You'll be working by feel. By what you know about how a body is put together. By how well you know anatomy, and how fine your chakra control is, and how deep your reserves go." She looked at Tsunade. "Tsunade-san could likely do it by herself. Most of you would need four to five, and a full day, and you'd need to study every bone and muscle and nerve of an arm until you could picture them with your eyes closed. It'll be much slower. Much harder. You'll fail at first." She let that settle. "But this was never impossible. It just takes a lot to pull off. A monumental amount of effort, time, control, and research."

Tsunade nodded in agreement.

Mikoto turned back to the mat, let her Sharingan turn, and laid both hands on the stump.

The first thing she did was open it.

The Chakra Scalpel slid through the scar dome in a single long curve, and the old, tough, pale tissue parted, and blood welled up dark and fast from underneath. Someone in the gallery drew a sharp breath. Botan's wife looked away. Mikoto cut deeper, down through the closed-over muscle to the end of the bone, and peeled the scar back, until what lay in front of her wasn't a healed stump anymore. It was a wound. Raw, red, open, the white knob of bone standing out of it, the severed ends of muscle and vessel and nerve that had been sealed off and forgotten for months suddenly exposed to the air again.

The formula lit beneath him, pale blue, crawling inward along its lines.

Now the body knew it was hurt. Now there was something to mend.

She began with the bone.

Her Sharingan went to the right arm, lying limp on the mat on the other side of him, and down through the skin and muscle to the long upper bone underneath. Its shape. Its weight. The ridges where the muscles anchored. The spongy honeycomb at its heart where the marrow lived. She pulled from the lock of hair, felt the cells there shift under her chakra and change, and laid the first layer down on the cut end of the bone. Then the next. Then the next. A finger's width. A palm's width. The new bone grew out from the old one pale and soft as wet chalk, hardening as it came, and every few minutes she stopped and looked at the right arm and looked at the left and corrected a curve that was a hair too straight.

The gallery stopped writing somewhere around the elbow joint.

She built the joint whole, the rounded end of the upper bone and the two long bones of the forearm meeting it, the cartilage capping each one smooth and white, the ligaments lashing them together. Then the wrist, eight small bones packed together like river stones. Then the hand. Five fingers, every joint in them, twenty-seven bones in all counting the wrist, each one copied from the hand on the other side and flipped like a reflection in a pond.

By the time the skeleton was done, the sun had moved a long way across the high windows.

"Break," Tsunade said quietly, from the front row. Somebody had brought a cup of water down from the gallery and Tsunade took it from them and held it out.

Mikoto drank it without taking her eyes off the arm. Then she went back to work.

Vessels next, because nothing else would live without them. The great artery that ran down the inside of the arm, branching and branching again, into the forearm, into the palm, into every finger, and the veins running back alongside. She threaded them through the bone-frame like roots through soil and connected them to the cut ends at the shoulder, and when she let the first blood through, the whole pale skeleton of the arm flushed faintly pink, and Botan's wife gasped.

Then the muscle, which was the longest part. Bundle by bundle. The thick cap over the shoulder. The heavy front muscle of the upper arm and the one behind it that straightened the elbow. The dozens of long thin muscles in the forearm whose tendons ran down like koto strings into the fingers. She wound each one onto its bone where the right arm showed her it belonged, and stitched the tendons into place, and it was nearly dark outside before she started on the nerves.

The nerves were the part that mattered most and the part she was least sure of. She grew them out from the severed ends at the shoulder a thread at a time, following the paths the right arm showed her, down through the muscle, splitting and splitting, until the finest of them reached into the fingertips. Every thread had to find its way home, the brain had to recognize it, and she couldn't make it do that. She could form it and hope it reconnected.

The skin last. Pale and soft and hairless as a baby's, drawn down over all of it from the shoulder to the fingertips.

The formula's light faded.

Mikoto sat back. Her hands were shaking. She hadn't realized how badly until she tried to unclench them and couldn't, entirely. Her eyes burned. The gallery above her was so silent she could hear the lanterns someone had lit along the walls.

On the mat, Botan lay with two arms.

The left one was thinner than the right. Paler. The new pink skin almost shining in the lantern light, the join at the shoulder an angry red ring where the new met the old. But it was there. Elbow and wrist and palm and five long fingers, every nail on them.

Mikoto released the genjutsu.

Botan opened his eyes. He blinked at the ceiling. He turned his head, and saw his wife first, standing now, both hands over her mouth. And then he followed her eyes down and to the left.

He looked at the arm for a long time.

"Try your fingers," Mikoto said. "Slowly. It'll feel strange."

His face went tight with effort. Nothing happened. Nothing happened for so long that Mikoto's heart started to sink and she was already reaching for the shoulder to check the nerve roots again, and then the smallest finger of the new hand twitched.

Then the ring finger. Then all of them, together, curling in a weak, trembling, uncertain motion toward the palm. They didn't make a fist. They didn't get halfway. But they moved because he told them to.

“I-I can move it…” Botan muttered.

His wife crossed the floor without anybody seeing her move and dropped to her knees beside him and took the new hand in both of hers and pressed it to her face, and he couldn't feel much of it yet, the nerves were still finding their way. But he felt something. She saw it in his face when he felt the wetness of his wife's tears against his new palm.

Up in the gallery, the wide-shouldered field medic with grey in his hair stood up first. Then the woman beside him. Then the young chunin with the field kit. Then the whole room, every bench, on their feet, and nobody clapped, because it wasn't that kind of thing. They just stood. And stayed standing.

In the front row, Tsunade Senju didn't stand. She was leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, staring at the arm, and her lips were moving very slightly, naming the muscles to herself. One after another. Down the length of the arm.

When she got to the fingers she sat back, and looked at Mikoto, with appreciation and exhaustion.

“Do you know how much more work they’re gonna force on us after your little stunt here, Uchiha?”

“What’s wrong with that?” Mikoto was genuinely confused.

“Forget it. I was complaining to the wrong person. I forgot you’re the little Red-Eyed Angel who loves helping people all the time.” Tsunade said as if that was a bad thing.

Mikoto just had a confused smile on her face. Why be a medical-nin if you didn’t want to help people?

…

She did the eye the next night, with half the same gallery and all of Tsunade.

It went faster this time around. When Botan took the cloth off the next morning, his wife and both his children were waiting in the hospital room, and his daughter, four years old and very serious, climbed up onto the bed and held her face right in front of his new eye. “Can you see me now?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

Then he closed his old eye, and she asked again. “Can you see me now?”

“Yes.”

She screamed.

His son brought the sword.

The old one. The one Botan had given away. The boy came into the room dragging it in its sheath because it was nearly as long as he was, red-faced with the effort, and held it up with both arms over the bed and said, "You can have it back now, Tou-chan. I'll get my own."

Botan took it with his right hand. He looked at it. Then, very slowly, so slowly that it trembled the whole way, he reached across with the new left hand and laid it on the scabbard beside the right one.

He couldn't close his fingers around it yet. They just rested there.

The story left the hospital before Mikoto did.

By the next afternoon it was in every ward. By evening it was in every bar. A medic told her husband, who told his squad, who told the squad they were drinking with, who told a chunin with a missing foot who'd been sitting at the end of the counter. The chunin set down his cup and didn't pick it back up again.

By the third day there was a line.

It started outside the hospital before dawn. Old shinobi and young ones. A kunoichi in her thirties with her right leg gone at the knee, leaning on a crutch, standing in the cold with her eyes fixed on the door. A retired jonin with three fingers missing from his throwing hand. A boy no older than eighteen with a black patch over one eye and his mother beside him, holding his elbow. A man with no legs at all, carried up the steps on the back of his brother. They didn't push. They didn't shout. They just stood there, a long quiet line of people who'd been told by every medic in Konoha that what they'd lost was gone for good, waiting to hear whether it was true.

The hospital director came out at sunrise, looked at the line, and went back inside to find a very large ledger.

"Every name gets written down," Mikoto told the director, when she arrived and saw it. She was looking out the window at them, and her throat was tight. "Every single one. Hokage-sama is setting the schedule. I can't do more than a few a week if I'm going to keep my team and other duties, and Tsunade-san says the other medics need at least a year before they try it without me." She swallowed. "But every name gets written down. Nobody goes home without hearing that they're on the list. I’ll try to knock down that year for the other medics as soon as I can."

"There are sixty people out there," the director said.

"Then sixty names."

…

"Four thousand." Koharu Utatane shared.

The Hokage's office was dim, the shutters half drawn against the afternoon. Hiruzen sat behind his desk. Homura stood at the window. Koharu sat across from the desk with a sheet of paper in her lap that she'd covered in numbers.

"That was the figure from the reports," she went on. "Four thousand shinobi. Dead, crippled, or unfit for continued service. We never broke that number down in public, but I did, afterward." She tapped the page. "Roughly a third of it is the crippled. Lost limbs. Lost eyes. Injuries the medics closed over and called finished. Over a thousand shinobi, Hiruzen. Trained. Experienced. Veterans of this war. Sitting at home or teaching at the Academy or doing nothing at all, because we told them there was nothing to be done." She set the page down. "If even half of them can be returned to the field, that's an entire front."

"She's one girl," Homura said from the window, without turning around. "One girl, who needs a full day per arm. Do the sums on that, Koharu. Two arms a week if she does nothing else, and she does a great deal else. A thousand shinobi would take her ten years."

"Which is why she has to teach it."

“Which she’s already promised to do, faster than anyone thinks she can. Tsunade disagrees. She says a year at the very least before any medic could attempt it, and likely longer, and only the best of them, working in teams.” Homura finally turned. "I'm not saying it isn't a gift. It's an enormous gift. I'm saying we cannot plan a war around it. Not yet."

"We're not planning a war around it," Hiruzen said. He was looking at Mikoto's report again, the second page, the eye. "We're planning a hospital around it. That's a different thing." He set it down. "The schedule stays as I've set it. Two procedures a week, no more, and only on days she isn't in the field or with her team. The gallery stays open for every one of them. Every medic who can be spared sits in and takes notes. Tsunade or the hospital director will lead the teaching when she’s unavailable." He tapped the pipe against the edge of the desk. "And I want the names on that list sorted by what returning them would mean. Jonin first. Then instructors. Then the rest."

Koharu was nodding. Homura's mouth was a thin line, but he didn't argue.

"There's another matter," Homura said instead. "She's an Uchiha."

The room got a little quieter.

"Every shinobi she gives an arm back to," Homura said, "walks out of that hospital owing his arm to the Uchiha. His wife owes it. His children owe it. She's not asking for anything, I know. She's never asked for anything. But the clan doesn't need her to ask." He looked at Hiruzen. "A year ago the Uchiha were a police force on the edge of the village that people crossed the street to avoid. Now half the jonin in the village owe their lives to one of them, and soon the other half will owe their arms. I'm only saying that it should be thought about."

Hiruzen didn't answer right away.

In the corner of the room, in the chair slightly apart from the others, Danzō Shimura sat with his hands folded on the table and said nothing at all. Homura had already said what he needed him to say.

He said nothing on the walk back to his own office, either.

He sat down behind his desk in the dark and didn't light the lamp. He thought about it.

The girl was valuable. He had never pretended otherwise. A healer who could raise the nearly dead was worth a hundred jonin to a village at war. And now a healer who could make the crippled whole again, which in the long view was worth even more. A thousand veterans, returned. A medical corps reshaped around her teaching. Ten years from now, the Leaf would have an army that did not stay broken. Every other village would bleed itself white against shinobi who simply came back.

It was exactly the kind of strength the village needed.

It was in exactly the wrong hands.

He had already decided, months ago, in this same chair, that she had to be dealt with. Quietly. Far from the village. A mission that went wrong. He'd decided it when the village had loved her for saving lives. Now they would love her for giving those lives back their arms and legs and eyes, one by one, in a theater full of witnesses, for years. Every one of them would walk out of that hospital owing her. Every wife. Every child. Every squad.

Gratitude like that didn't fade. It grew. It became loyalty. Loyalty became a faction. And a faction with an Uchiha at the heart of it was the one thing Tobirama-sensei had spent his whole life making sure this village would never have.

Wait too long, and she would be untouchable. Every year he waited, more of the village would stand between her and the dark.

Danzō sat in the dark and thought about the mission desk, and which C-rank would land in Mikoto Uchiha's hands next. Outside the walls. Somewhere small, somewhere far, somewhere where a girl and three genin could go missing and nobody would ever be able to say exactly how.

He opened the drawer with the roster in it.

He couldn’t hold back any longer.

The Uchiha clan head's house was quiet that night, and the man who sat in it was smiling.

Uchiha Tajimu was not a man who smiled easily, and he didn't do it where anyone could see. But he was alone in his study with a cup of tea going cold beside him and the rumor still ringing in his head, and he let himself have it.

An Uchiha had given a jonin his arm back. In front of a gallery of medics. In front of Tsunade Senju herself. The whole village would be talking about it by morning, and every word would carry the clan's name with it.

But that wasn't the part that kept him sitting there long after the tea had gone cold.

He'd heard the second part of the rumor. The eye.

An eye, rebuilt from nothing. From the patient's own body. By a girl who could see down to the smallest pieces of a living thing and copy them.

Tajimu thought about an old story. Every clan head was told it, and almost nobody else. A story about the founding of the village. About Madara Uchiha going blind from the power in his own eyes, and the only cure the clan had known in those days, and what it had cost his brother Izuna.

A brother had taken his own brother's eyes, once, because there had been no other way to keep seeing.

And now there was a girl who could build an eye from a lock of hair.

Tajimu set down the cold tea. He sat for a while longer. Then he went to find his wife, who was sitting on the veranda in the dark, and who looked up when he came out.

"Yes, husband?" She waited for him to talk.

“You’ll have heard by now,” Tajimu said, standing beside her. He looked out over the compound, at the lanterns burning in the house where the girl's family lived. "The match I asked Yashiro to propose. Her father said the choice was hers."

"I know."

"He was right. I'm not going to push." His wife looked up at him, surprised, and Tajimu kept his eyes on the lanterns. "That girl will choose for herself. Whatever we want. Whatever her parents want. She's already too large for any of us to choose for her." He paused. "If she chooses our son, it'll be because he deserves it. Not because the clan head arranged it."

His wife was quiet for a long time.

"We can only hope for the best for our lineage…" She said.