End and Beginning

The tension in the room coud be cut with a kunai: the argument that had steadily been building up, since a refusal offered months before, the youngest member of the household had been climbing the ranks inside of his classroom.

Shikamaru Nara had once been alright with the idea of life slowly carrying him forward, knowing that the end result wouldn't be anything to be displeased of. Then, a simple sort of question had spontaneously blossomed somewhere in the recesses of his genius: how far could I reach?

The opportunity to gain an answer to that question, something that could only be achieved through his own efforts, had been quickly shut down by his father: ironically, the shadow of the miserable or outright traitorous lives conducted by other genius-children of the village had been enough to stop any possibility of Shikamaru advancing past his average, ordinary peers.

"Why do you really want to skip ahead, Shikmaru?!" the exasperated question came in a paradoxically quiet tone, even if the face of Shikaku seemed carved in stone.

The academy student was sitting at the kitchen table with a displeased frown etched on his features while his teeth ground together in frustration. Even if his father had shut down his request months before, that hadn't stopped the young genius from shining so brightly that Iruka couldn't ignore him and his situation any longer. It had to look like a dream to the chunin-instructor: a student that used to spend all his time sleeping or trying to get away from work now tackled any task with singular minded focus, and Shikamaru didn't have the heart to tell his sensei that he wasn't the one responsible for the change.

"Because I'm not you!" the young shinobi-to-b snapped back, hands clasped on his lap to avoid any stupid outburst that would send his mother on a rampage about his lack of manners: "I don't want to keep going without any effort, only to end up in a team with Ino and Choji to cover the same roles and face the expectation that you built for those!"

"I thought that Ino and Choji were your friends, Shikamaru." Yoshino Nara spoke up from the side of the room while she slipped a hand through the short, black hair of her son, "Wouldn't you like to be with them on a team?"

I have just said it, are you even listening? the academy student bit back his caustic, instinctive answer and retorted to another road, since his father seemed set on stonewalling him because of some obscure fear that he'd end up as Itachi or Orochimaru, which had been taken up as final proof that skipping ahead was impossibly stupid. "That's not the point mom, I can do more, be more, and you're not even going to let me try. What happened to all those prayers to get my ass on track?"

"Language young man!" his mother's voice snapped like a whip, and he was quick to raise his hands in a placating gesture, also because he felt the weight of her hand increase minutely on his scalp.

He gazed deeply into Yoshino's eyes then, and went for broke: "What's the point of me trying if there's nothing worth the challenge? Why would I need to stop sleeping in class if everything is going to be the same in any case?"

It wasn't quite a threat of letting himself get killed on his first mission if he wasn't allowed to skip ahead of his peers, but it raised a valid point in the mother's mind: this was quite different from any prize that any child would ask for, but her precious son had always been beyond the norm. Would she really stifle him now, when she'd been the one to try and push him, to encourage to give his all?

Sensing the hesitation in his wife's body language, Shikaku felt the need to repeat himself: "No." this time however, he was looking at the woman that from time to tim had to scream at him too in order to get his ass on track, as their son had just aptly put. "He isn't graduating early, Yoshino, that's final!"

"A compromise then." Shikaku's mother stated, and while her eyes glared at her husband, her hands remained softly poised on her son' shoulders: "Maybe Shikamaru could graduate right this moment, and maybe it's true that outright graduating so young shouldn't even be contemplated in peacetime."

The woman walked around he table so that both the members of her family could see her as she leaned on the kitchen table: "Shikaku, dear, you want to protect him. Shikamaru, you want to push yourself and not be coddled. So here's what's going to happen."

Both the Nara males were well aware that once Yoshino took a position, there would be no moving her. Both knew, that no matter how far they could run, the real boss in their family would track them down and leave no escape.

So both tried to prevent her taking a stand that neither would ever be able to find a work around for: "Mom..." tried the younger Nara while the older attempted a placating gesture with his hands "Yoshino..."

"Here. Is what. Is going. To happen." the secret matriarch of the Nara hunched forward on the table and spoke what had might as well have been an inescapable prophecy: "Shikamaru is going to be allowed to skip ahead a single year. In order to not have him at risk of being put in a faded copy of your team Shikaku." the gance shot towards the veteran jonin shut him up before he could reply in any way only to turn towards her son, who really didn't relish at the idea of spending any time longer in that boring building.

"You will keep giving it your all, inside and outside of the academy, no matter if you find the coursework troublesome, got it?" still, under the glare of his mother, Shikamaru could only nod, defeated, but already thinking of a way to avoid the soul-crushing boredom of actually being awake in class knowing that he wasn't going to rush through it before the regular progression allowed it.

Well, it could have gone worse. Ignoring the part of his brain that underlined how the confrontation could have also gone better, Shikamaru left the room, distractedly wondering how the two ninjas that he personally knew had graduated at eight and nine years of age each were doing.

In another part of Knohagakure no Sato, there was a building most didn't know the true purpose of, and in that building, there was an entire wing dedicated to some people that only a handful knew the true identity of.

The ANBU-exclusive healing ward was a sequence of modular, painfully boring rooms: not quite cubicles, but spartan in a way that only those trained for it could endure. In one such room, a shinobi shifted uncomfortably on his cot, the green, flickering flame-like expression of chakra hovering about his last collection of wounds disappearing as the medic-nin attending him grunted in annoyance.

"Neji, I don't mean to disparage your discomfort, but this is difficult enough without you moving about." Kabuto reprimanded lightly his ex-team member as he restarted the healing process, the reflection on his glasses of the chakra rising from his crippled and sane hand covering his eyes from sight.

The impeccable facade of impassibility that the younger ninja had always worn as a second skin cracked minutely: "Had I been allowed to use the Gentle Fist, I wouldn't have needed to be healed now."

"It isn't like you to complain, my friend." Kabuto shifted around the cot, using one hand to set his glasses back on the right position on the bridge of his nose before he began to repeat the procedure on a longer, but less life-threatening than it looked, wound on the right calf of the Hyuga, "It must have been eating at you for a while to make you say something."

The blank-eyed, eleven-years old ANBU consciously controlled his breathing in order to control his instinctive answer, but the quiet, expectation-less prodding of his ex-teammate was perhaps the only thing that could easily get him to talk: "Since I've been put on babysitting duty for that recruit, the missions have shifted: we're more meant to be shown as a deterrent than to actually act, which means leaving witnesses of our presence within the borders of Hi no Kuni, which means..."

"That you can't use your individual styles in order to not reveal anything about what kind of person lives under the mask." Kabuto completed easily while he finished up his last touches on the wound plaguing Neji.

"What is the point of being enlisted because of my genius if I'm not allowed to sharpen my talents?" Neji would not have been nearly so open with anyone else about anything that might plague him, but years of exposure to Sasuke, and the forced familiarity of having shared both his first genin team and his chunin exams with his assigned med-nin, meant that he didn't feel the need to hold back as much of what he actually felt.

"I entered ANBU to become stronger and leave the Main Branch behind." the ANBU spoke, and for maybe the first time, he sounded like the child he was, "But my achievements are mine and I don't want to simply drop everything I've worked on until now."

Of course, there was also the fact that Kabuto had been slowly taking up the role that Sasuke used to cover, at least as far as conversations inside of his genin team went, and that he was an extraordinarily talented man when it came down to let others reveal their secrets.

"Being reassigned isn't really something that I can promise," Kabuto spoke slowly, straightening as he looked at the young ANBU who held a flicker of curiosity in his white eyes, "given the kind of attention on your protegè of sorts receives from the higher-ups, that's really not possible... but I might put you in contact with someone able to get you additional missions that would allow you to follow the purpose you chose: of course, they'd be taken in your down time, and they officially wouldn't exist, but..."

Neji Hyuga rose from his cot carefully stretching his muscles, his eyes never leaving the sheepish expression of his medic as his mind put together pieces that up to that moment had been ignored: "You weren't really a genin when you joined me and the Uhciha, were you?"

There was no threat of violence in either his tone or posture, but Kabuto knew better than most that if the prodigy were to attack, the crippled medic would be too slow to react in any manner that didn't lead to a sudden death of his quarry: for all of his talents, the kid he had shared a genin team with had no idea of what the silver-haired, older boy was capable of when backed against a wall.

"I wouldn't be able to answer that question if that was indeed the case, would I?" the bespectacled soldier turned the question on the kid, who didn't even twitch to reveal what he thought. Even if in this particular instance, it wasn't necessary: Kabuto had known how this conversation would go for weeks already, and now he was merely following the path he had prepared with months of work.

Neji simply huffed as he picked up his mask from a shelf, his voice echoing minutely when he spoke after having donned it: "I might be interested in your proposal."

Far away from Konohagakure no Sato, on a high cliff that looked over a strip of sea that lost itself amidst far away mists, with the stars hidden beyond an iron-grey cover of clouds, a shinobi sat, with a blue feathered eagle the size of a horse perched on a small outcrop of rocks and a regular sized bald eagle lazily twirling around his position.

The two summoned creatures were tangentially curious about the new direction that their summoner intended to take, and they hadn't hesitated to showcase that curiosity with questions that would sound like sharp screeches to anyone else.

"There is more than one reason for this." the Summoner shrugged, his altered voice and appearance contrasting a lot against the looks he held back when he first signed the Contract with the Eagles, "First, there are limits to how much I can grow without ever truly challenging myself, and as Jiraya said, war is the only true forge for a shinobi to become an S-rank, which is what I must be in order to be truly free."

The old-looking boy spoke with a scratchy voice as he adjusted his perfectly realistic fake beard before he took up a porcelain mask from a hook on his belt: that too would need to be modified if he truly wanted to sell the ruse, but at least on that Jiraya could be trusted: "Second: I don't really want to play babysitter for Karin and her mother any longer than I need to in order to guarantee their survival, and once left Uzushio, which isn't going to be safe for much longer... well, this is for the best."

Kyōfū let out a low croon that made the disguised Uchiha raise his head with a grin on his face: "Yeah, too much care can be smothering, but I can't really ascribe to the practice of letting another hatchling throw her off the nest in order to prove their worth."

The giant blue eagle shuffled, its feathers rising minutely as its inquiring eyes met the Sharingan of its Summoner, who took a deep breath: "And Itachi... no matter how some might define him a hero or a martyr, he's still a genocidal machine-like human that would sooner kill me than accept who I truly am."

The boy disguised as a slightly hunched, old shinobi grunted in distaste even as he contained the hilarity he felt at his own private joke: "Maybe this will be an opportunity to rip that particular weed in the nub before it grows up to strangle me, and frankly, having all this power only to never use it would probably end up driving me to do something stupid or outright suicidal further down the line."

The bald-eagle landed in a flutter of wings over the extended arm of the shinobi, her inquiring golden eyes peering into the red, spinning ones of her contractor, an approving clacking of her beak pushing the boy to speak further. "Jiraya asked for help, and my intervention will prevent the likes of Danzo from setting up some hare-brained bloodline acquisition scheme."

"I chose." Sasuke Uchiha concluded, his eyes turning once more to the sea, "And this simply feels like the right thing to do."

With those last words, he turned back towards the small house with a lit fireplace that he had spent months sharing with Karin and her mother, Jiraya's towering presence by the lake shifting as he perceived Sasuke, no, Haruto, move.

For now, Sasuke needs to be set aside, and Haruto needs to become more than Karin's sensei. That thought rang clearly in his mind as he began to run, chakra finely controlled to empower him without being wasted as his summons dispelled themselves.

AN

I used this chapter to sum up the situation and the changes that our SI-Sasuke's existence has brought to canon, and it is a good point to end the first book of this series. I still have to set up a patre on account, and while I'm publishing on AO3 and webnovel, I only have Meddling Giant and With the Eyes of God uploaded on the latter. Frankly, this whole fic-stealing business annoys me to no end and manages to put me off writing in a way that I wouldn't have believed had it not actually happened.

I'm not sure about how to keep publishing chapters for this fic without having them copied with impunity: I mean, I understand that I own nothing about this fiction, as I don't own Naruto: but there are people who are actually putting this behind paywalls and getting away with it. I'll think about it.

The next Arc will cover from Sasuke's entering Kiri's Civil war as Haruto up to the end of the chunin exams: I had first thought to simply cut this book as our MC went to Uzushio, but there were Neji and Shikamaru's storylines not yet fully set up.

For now, I've published a handful of SI-Naruto fics, all available on my profile: there's one as Gaara, one as an OC in Neji's class, one as Sakura, one as Temari, and obviously, one as Naruto. I'll try to make them all interesting and novel, while avoiding the pitfalls of OP-ness that plague all SI fics that don't manage to change canon in any way that makes sense.

And as always, let me know what you think!