Family Ties

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Sasuke struggled to keep his eyes open against the glare of green medical chakra, the shinobi doctor's hand hovering less than an inch from his face. The hand pulled away, revealing the doctor's Anbu mask, and began the same procedure on Hanako. She was laying back on a hospital bed, her unmasked face as pale as the sheets. He remembered watching Kakashi take her away during the preliminaries and having no answer when everyone asked him about it. For once, he was just as clueless about the Hatakes as everyone else. It wasn't a nice feeling.

He turned to look at his sensei where he sat on the other side of Hanako's bed, his head propped in his hands and an eerily blank expression on his face.

"What's going on?" He asked, only half expecting an answer. "What's wrong with Hana?"

Kakashi's one visible eye flicked from him to the Anbu doctor. The masked shinobi sighed before removing his hand from Hanako's face.

"You were right, Captain," his voice sounded tired. "She has the Sharingan."

What!?

Sasuke leapt to his feet, the folding chair clattering to the floor with the motion. "What are you talking about? How—what—how is that possible?"

Kakashi let out a long, tired breath. With a single gesture, he dismissed the doctor. When they were alone, he pulled a paper tag from within his jounin vest and stuck it to the wall. One of Hanako's privacy seals, then. Sasuke froze under the combined weight of his sensei's gaze and chakra, the latter a comforting layer of static which dampened his anxiety.

"Sasuke," Kakashi began seriously. "What I'm about to tell you is a village secret. It absolutely cannot leave this room."

Sasuke swallowed thickly, nodding his head.

"Hanako isn't my daughter."

What?

"Not by blood, anyway," Kakashi ran a hand through his silver hair. "She was born outside the village—raised there, until she was five years old. You knew all that, though." Yeah. Everyone did. "The truth is, your brother and I found her in the woods while on a mission. Her mother had been killed—pretty savagely—and she was wandering around looking for help. We have no idea who her family are, if she has a clan, or if there's anyone out there still looking for her. After weeks of searching, we found no traces of combat or habitation within a fifty-mile radius of the village, which raised the question of why they came so close in the first place. Although," he sighed and leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms over his chest. "The answer to that's pretty clear, now, huh?"

Sasuke followed his sensei's gaze down to Hanako's sleeping face. He knew her mother had been killed, but he'd never asked about it—he wasn't that insensitive—and the new information suddenly raised a whole new batch of questions.

"Wait, is she an Uchiha?"

Kakashi shrugged. "If every person born with a Sharingan is an Uchiha, then, yes. All I can say for sure is that it's very likely her mother knew she might have one and was probably trying to bring her to the village for the clan's protection."

Sasuke stepped forward, head bowed as his mind ran circles in his head. "Did—did she know?"

"Come on, squirt, you know that's not something she'd keep secret."

Yeah. Yeah, he knew that. But...

He looked up at the man who'd been all but forced to take him into his home; the man who, until two seconds ago, was the only other person in the village with a Sharingan—the only outsider his clan trusted to keep one. Those had been Hanako's arguments when convincing them both to accept the Hokage's decision to place Sasuke in the Hatake's care—a decision she most definitely had a hand in. Four years of living with the weirdest father-daughter pair had lessened his heartache some, but not entirely. When he thought of what might have happened had Hanako made her Sharingan known from the start—

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