Constellations (complete)

Six months later, armed with tomes of family genealogies, actual construction began. It was mind boggling how family relations intertwined and would continue to intertwine in future generations. Already the names displayed were from every country on earth.

Indeed, it was a creative nightmare how to display the information in a coherent way and Neji found it fascinating as several of his most valued warriors discovered the creativity that made them the most skilled fighters served them just as well when armed with paper and ink. Their ideas were brilliant and he found himself struggling to restore a dwindling military presence.

The design had come down to a series of giant granite slabs arranged in an outer circle with the names of each Konoha family carved into the rock. This ring was followed by concentric rings, one inside the next, each smaller and smaller ring going farther back in time.

Still they struggled. Aesthetically it was intriguing. Theoretically, it was poignant. Practically, it was disappointing. The only way to actually find a name was to already know where it was, or barring that, wander around potentially for hours. A paper directory was added and finding a name became much easier, but still, it didn’t display the connectedness that Neji and Shikamaru’s committee envisioned.

Then one day, Sasuke’s youngest son came to sit with him under the tree. Sasuke sensed he wanted to talk, but as always, was uncertain.

“It’s nice here, isn’t it?” Sasuke asked.

“I, uhm, have an idea.” Maro picked at the grass in front of him. “Sort of.”

“Tell me.”

“Come with me?” Father and son walked to the giant slabs. The boy found his name and rubbed his finger over it, then moved to Sasuke’s name and repeated the motion. He did the same for his mother’s name and then moved to a different slab that held the names of his mother’s relatives. He wandered around from slab to slab until finally he got to the center, which held the oldest names on record.

Then he returned to his father, did some hand signs that raised his father’s brows, and then picked up a nearby stone, holding it until it glowed. He dug a hole with his heel, dropped the rock into it and covered it with dirt.

After wiping his hands on his shorts, he turned to his father. “Touch your name.” Sasuke studied his son and then reached out an index finger to touch the letters of his name.

He gasped as, an instant later, a web of thin, glowing chakra strands zoomed from his name to every name the boy had touched. Maro hadn’t gotten a fraction of the family, but enough that Sasuke could see an actual web of his connections to other slabs and his connection back in time to the beginning.

He was stunned. This was brilliant and very insightful for a nine year old boy. His heart swelled with pride.

“If you let go,” the boy said, “it should stay for a couple of minutes. Enough time to move to another name. And you can touch any name in our family and create the same web.”

His little face fell. “But the only way I can make it work is to stand here and keep the chakra flow through the earth. If I leave, it won’t work.”

Sasuke smiled. “I’ve got something to show you.” He closed his eyes and drew on an old sage technique Naruto had shown him, a way to maintain chakra in a battle even if he was unconscious. The technique they’d used to sleep together at the end.

He made a couple of clones and infused each with enough chakra and consciousness that one could maintain the other back and forth, no matter where Sasuke was or even if he slept.

Maro was almost vibrating with excitement over his father’s display of power. He looked up at him in awe and bowed. “Father, I am so…” He was too young to articulate the pride and longing he felt.

“Shall we show the others?”

The excitement over this brainchild was tumultuous. Everything became clear and many design details were redone. Getting chakra signatures to make it work took the creation of a whole new committee.

The only way to make it work for now was for Sasuke clones to meditate all day and night, everyday. They had expectations that Shikamaru would find a way to do this without Sage power eventually.

But for now, Sasuke had to learn to deal with an ever increasing awareness of each and every time a person touched their finger to a name to generate their family web.

He’d pretty much learned to ignore it and it hovered in the farthest recesses of his mind.

But word of the marvel had spread. Ever increasing numbers of people were coming to Konoha to see if their family was there. As this happened, another permanent committee was created to handle the addition of new names to the slabs.

Eventually, one of the elders asked why the memorial stones and individual tombs and gravesites couldn’t be part of the chakra connections. Another committee and further renovations.

People were finding lost relatives, learning that the neighbor they didn’t care for was actually family if you looked back or sideways far enough. They were learning exalting and humbling things about their own existences. Nearly every person that came to the park left at the side of a new family member or friend.

A committee was formed to send out invitations to the world to bring chakra signatures to the memorial. When the elders came, the connections increased exponentially.

Interestingly, those most reluctant were the wealthy and powerful. Early on, a feudal lord came to Konoha in a flashy procession with a large entourage. He was convinced he’d place his hands on the stones and the world would see his ancestry filled with kings and lords, as his father had told him.

What was learned was that three generations prior, his family was actually in service in the stables of the family of the boy that now tended his sheep. Research revealed that the role reversal was a result of murder and betrayal.

Ever since, the signatures of the most powerful were the hardest to obtain.

Neji knew that something remarkable was happening when, one day, his Anbu had hauled a struggling middle-aged thief into Konoha, instead of their usual ‘behead now, ask questions later’ methodology. They dragged him to the park and forced his hand to the entrance stone that searched the memorial for matching chakra signatures.

The struggling man froze when a glowing strand shot out and created a complicated web throughout the park.

“Wus zat?”

“Your family.”

“Ain’t got no family.” He looked at the him. “Do I?”

A few minutes later, several people showed up in front of them.

“What’s going on? We felt someone touch our chakra.” They were staring at the filthy bandit, now shivering in the middle of the guards.

“That looks like Uncle Ankoh,” one newcomer whispered.

“More like that painting of Ankoh’s father, Matsu,” another said.

“Matsu-san?” The criminal cried out. “You know Matsu? Saitou Matsu?”

“Well, I’d never met him, but we know his son Ankoh.”

“Ankoh,” the man whispered, tears filling his eyes. “I remember Ankoh. He was my cousin. Died a long time ago. In the fire with Matsu-san.” He swiped his running nose. “I was eight. Been by myself ever since.”

“Then you’re…you’re…” A middle aged woman grabbed his hand and pulled him bodily to a granite slab by the east wall. She looked for a moment and then pointed to a spot on the wall.

The shivering, sniffling man stepped tentatively forward and then cried out, “That’s me. That’s my name, Matsumura Makoto.” He laughed and touched it, then jumped back when the web shot out again.

He whispered, “That’s me.”

“We didn’t know. We thought you died in that fire. Poor Ankoh. He didn’t die and he was devastated by your death.” She placed her hand on his shoulder. “That’s what that asterisk means by your name,” she said gently. “Deceased.”

“I ain’t deceased,” he said with conviction. “I ain’t.”

Makoto was now a caretaker at the memorial and tended it more lovingly than anyone else on staff ever could.

One afternoon Sasuke answered a knock at the door. He tensed when a middle-aged man bowed and asked for Keiko. Neji appeared at the door with her, his arms crossed, wary as well.

The man bowed happily several times to her and said, “Nori-san said to see you.”

He bowed a few more times and then dropped a large untidy stack of scrolls and books and loose papers into her arms. Then he backed away, bowing and smiling.

Keiko looked at the pile in her arms for several seconds and then burst into tears. Neji and Sasuke said together, “Keiko?”

“Father? Daddy?” She looked from one to the other, her chin quivering and tears streaming down her face.

“What is it?”

Then she sniffed and straightened. After wiping her cheek on her shoulder she bowed to Neji.

“Hokage-sama.” His eyebrows climbed up his forehead. “I need a building.”

Both men blinked at each other. “A building?”

She bowed again and held out the pile in her arms.

“How about a box?”

She harrumphed in impatience and said, “Follow me.”

She led them to her room and slid the door open with her foot. The two men, admittedly, hadn’t stepped foot into her room in a very long time. The last time they’d seen it, it was well on its way to becoming a preteen girl’s no-man’s land.

Both males’ jaws dropped open when they saw that her room was nearly bursting with piles similar to what she held in her arms. They had to crane their necks just to find her bed.

It seemed that piles of family trees, memorabilia, mementos and other related things were pouring into Konoha for inclusion in the ‘family project.’ Keiko had demonstrated some ability that caused her to become the recipient of all of it.

“Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry.” Neji thought a moment. “There’s a room on the third floor of the Hokage Tower that should hold all of this.”

She shook her head in frustration and looked like she was going to cry again. “No.” She inched her way around the room, considering and rejecting one teetering pile after another until her shoulders finally slumped and she dropped the bundle onto her bed.

Then she took their hands and led them out of her room.

After an hour, Neji sat shell-shocked on the porch. All twenty-seven, previously empty buildings on the property were packed full of neatly labeled scrolls, books, maps, portraits, letters, boxes, jewelry, garments, and coats of arms. Every imaginable type of family legacy was now in the possession of their precocious blond daughter.

“Sasuke, how do you think the population of Konoha would take a shift in purpose? Put our ninja business at a lower priority and dedicated the bulk of our resources to something completely different? What if we became a sort of…Alexandria?”

Sasuke shrugged. “A portion of the population has been moving in that direction anyway.” He leaned back on his elbows and looked at the blue sky. “We do provide a security service for Leaf; we can’t abandon it altogether. And honestly, if the number of visitors keeps increasing at the rate it has been, we probably ought to expand it, but maybe with a division that isn’t so…deadly.

“But I don’t want to see what we’re doing here stop. The memorial and what it’s becoming has done some amazing things.”

He looked sideways at Neji. “Brotherhood is becoming more than a word here.”

But Neji felt that the next step was an indication of a monumental shift in Konoha’s existence and didn’t want to make the decision alone. So he and the council put it to a vote. It was a landslide and construction on a massive library started shortly thereafter.

Konoha had been transforming itself ever since. Industries had formed around genealogy and tourism. Schools for language, genealogy, museum and library services, history, curatorial studies, landscaping, security and specialized chakra research had all cropped up.

And then the park transformed Sasuke in hidden, deeply personal way.

One day, Sasuke was just wandering around the grounds, and he heard two men nearby.

“So, we’re related,” a man with obviously fake hair and a round belly sounded displeased.

“Yes!” Another, reed thin man smiled happily, bowed and clasped the other man’s hand.

The portly man was wiping his hand on his pants when their chakra web was activated around them after just having faded. Both looking surprised, they followed it into the next circle inward. Curious, Sasuke inched his way surreptitiously nearby; not many people from that circle were still alive.

When he got close enough, he saw the two men looking at a third man who sat in a wheelchair that was being pushed by a nurse.

“Marvelous! A miracle!” The old man was cackling in delight.

The two men approached the wheelchair and the thinner man smiled broadly and bowed. “We are family!”

The heavier man leaned to see the name under the ancient, knobby finger. “You’re him?” At the old man’s nod, he raised his brow. “You were a great general in the second war. I am named for you.”

“The second war…” The expression on the old man’s face was wistful. “Yes, I was there.”

He cocked his head and his eyes got misty. “Lot of heroes made and lost in those years. It was all so…”

“Glorious?” the heavy man asked.

“Stupid!” A harsh look filled the ancient face. “It was stupid, young man. War is stupid.”

“You should have seen it,” he continued after a moment, the faraway look returning. “There was never a more terrified chunin. So scared my knees were knocking.” He sighed wistfully. “Yep, if the Raikage hadn’t swooped in when he did, I’d be worm food.”

“A chunin?” The fat man sneered.

“Yep!” The old man’s eyes sparkled and he laughed. “Only took me three tries.”

“Tch.” The fat man turned on his heel and stalked off.

The thin man bowed and dropped to one knee. “You’ve lived so long and seen so much. May I buy you tea and ask you to share some stories?”

“Why, yes.” The old man nodded. “But first I was going to the library to see if they wanted to display this in the section on the second war.” He pulled his lap blanket aside and winking shrewdly, opened a wooden box. Inside was more fruit salad than any one man ought to have.

The young man laughed with delight. “I am quite certain that they would.”

“I was going to pass it along, but thought I’d give it to the library so the whole family could enjoy it.” He cackled loudly and pointed to the man who could be seen stomping out the gates. He slapped his knee. “The whole family…”

“Great Grandfather, you honor us.” He smiled. “The library and then some tea?”

“Yep. Nishi-chan, let’s go.”

“Yes, General.” The nurse winked at Sasuke, who had gotten so caught up that he’d turned fully and had been listening openly.

This encounter had given Sasuke much to think about. He’d been ashamed of the name Uchiha, going so far as to name all the children Uzumaki. But he suddenly realized that Itachi was just a part of the warp and weft of his family. There was good and bad and one could fear it or love it, but it was there, nonetheless. It came to him that the history of Konoha was incomplete without the history of Uchiha.

So he emptied the family library and gathered all the things he’d put in storage and taken them to Keiko. She was ecstatic and dug in a drawer for the plans she’d made for the Uchiha display with hopes that someday there would be something to put in it.

Weeks later, she gave the family a guided tour of the newest display. Her insight gave him a long forgotten perspective of his family history. There were many heroes and a few villains interspersed with regular families. She had included humor and tragedy in a heartrending mosaic. It was humbling and awe inspiring.

During the tour, Sasuke’s oldest boy said, “Father, I thought being an Uchiha was a bad thing.”

Sasuke struggled for a response. “It’s not…I just…and Itachi…”

The next day while the adults sipped tea after an unusually quiet dinner, during which Hiashi studied everyone in amusement, all seven children returned to the table. They’d obviously had a meeting.

“Why are we all Uzumaki?”

“Well, the main reason is that we wanted you all to have the same last name so that you would feel like siblings. We chose Uzumaki, because, at the time, I thought there should be no more Uchihas.” Sasuke scratched his cheek. “Which seems kind of irrational now.”

He leaned on his arms. “And there was a problem with the name Hyuuga.”

“Which seems kind of irrational now,” interrupted Hiashi.

The children fidgeted and Neji’s oldest son finally said, “What if we want our names?”

“Wouldn’t that leave three of you as Naruto’s orphans?”

“Now we’re all Naruto’s orphans.”

“Yeah, if one more person feels sorry for me for having no father when I have two…” Sasuke’s oldest ground his fist into his palm. The other six all muttered in agreement.

“Whatever our name, what changes?” Keitaro asked, then answered, “Nothing. That’s what.”

“Children can often be wiser than adults.” Hiashi smiled. “I remember a young man standing on my porch, yelling at me for the one and only time about, of all things, fluffy pink bunnies. Turned out to be the wisest man I’ve ever known”

Neji’s oldest son bowed. “Naruto was special and we are awfully proud to be his kids. But you two are special, too and it would be sad if neither of you have any kids.”

“The Uchiha name needs to go on because of what you made it, Father.” Sasuke’s youngest spoke up. “Our father is Uchiha Sasuke, hero many times over, strongest ninja in the world. We would be so proud to have your name.”

“And our father is Hyuuga Neji, the greatest Kage the world has ever known. We would be proud to have your name.”

They all looked at the three blonds. “Tch. Our father is Uzumaki Naruto. Don’t even think about touching that.”

One night at dinner, after the park had been in existence for about two years, Sasuke suddenly clasped his heart and threw himself backward, toppling his chair.

“Sasuke!”

“The memorial. Now!”

The family transported themselves to the slab with their names on it. Neji held Sasuke up as his knees buckled. There before the stone, his finger on Naruto’s name, stood…Naruto.

“Papa?” The youngest blond ran up to the newcomer.

A young man, who was the absolute image of Naruto, except for the lack of whisker marks, turned to the family.

“Hi.” He rubbed the back of his neck and Sasuke fell to his knees.

“Hey, is he okay?” The broad shouldered boy rushed over and grasped one of Sasuke’s arms.

“Naruto?” Sasuke gasped.

“Uhm, yeah. Do you know him?”

Neji left Sasuke’s side and pulled the boy several feet away by his arm.

“Who are you?” Neji’s voice was shaking.

A woman, who they’d missed previously, yanked Neji’s arm, pulling him off the teenager.

“Leave him alone. What’s wrong with you?”

Neji breathed deep. Then he bowed. “Forgive me. We’d like to start again. I am Hyuuga, Neji. This is my family.”

He turned to the older boy to introduce himself and found him in a staring contest with Naruto’s twins.

The woman was also staring at the blond children. She recovered more quickly and turned back to Neji.

“We are from Rock Country and we’ve heard about your amazing memorial. We had hoped to come and find information on my son’s father. His name is Uzumaki Naruto.”

The din from the children was immediate.

“Naruto?”

“Papa?”

“Is he our brother?”

Neji and the woman looked at each other.

“Can I invite you to our home? We can talk.” She nodded and soon they were all crowded in the kitchen.

“Please forgive us,’ Neji said. “We had no idea of your existence.”

She laughed. “Neither does Naruto, I’m sure.” She put her arm around her son. “First things first, though. We came looking for him. Perhaps you know where we can find him?”

Neji rubbed his forehead and took in the bleak look on Sasuke’s face. “I’m sorry, but he died five years ago. We are his family.”

“No!” The teenager cried out and covered his face.

“I’m sorry. Please forgive him. He’s been agonizing for months about what he was going to say when they met.”

Neji indicated a chair. “Naruto never said anything about another child, or…you.” She sat. “And forgive me, but how old is he?”

“He’s seventeen.” Sasuke gasped as she added, “And I’m sure he never knew about us.”

“Naruto was thirteen?” Sasuke grasped Neji’s sleeve. “Thirteen?”

“Is that how old he was? I wondered.” She smiled. “Explains a lot.”

“Certainly you are under no obligation to us, but if you could share your story…”

“Sure. That’s why we’re here after all, though obviously, I wanted to share it with him.”

She told them a story about how she was a prostitute at a house in Rock Country and how Naruto had wandered in, she suspected, to get out of the rain. The old man he was with was drinking and gaming and hadn’t gotten a room for the night yet.

The owner told him if he wanted to stay, he had to pay. So he gave her some money and went to sit in a chair in the corner to wait out the storm.

She said that he had looked lonely and that she had felt sorry for him, so she pulled him to her room. She asked him what he wanted to do and he had shrugged and asked if she had a deck of cards or a shoji board.

They’d played and talked. She’d told him she’d left home because of issues with a stepfather. He’d told her she should go back home. He’d made her think about leaving her mother alone with such a creep.

“He was really sweet and I finally decided that since he’d paid, he might as well get the full service. I was only fifteen myself. I think it was his first time; he only lasted ten seconds.”

“You got pregnant?”

“It’s ironic. He had all these condoms in his pocket, said some pervert kept giving them to him. But I told him that prostitutes didn’t get pregnant and not to worry about it.” She shrugged. “Go figure.”

“After I got pregnant, I went back home to my mother like he said I should. Turned out to be one of best things I’ve ever done. My mother really needed me. And, I really needed her.

“The second he was born, I knew who the father was. Not too many blonds like that, none in my life anyway.

“It was actually luck that I ever found out who he was. A few years later, reward posters started floating around with a picture on it. Damned if it wasn’t him. Now I had a name to go with the face.

“Life took over for a while, but the last couple of years I’ve tried again to find him. My son has some unusual…traits and I thought if we could find his father, we could get answers. Then I heard about your magic walls…” She shrugged. “Here we are.”

They talked long into the night and the family convinced the two to stay for a couple of weeks. They could tell the boy’s power was equal to any other Uzumaki but living in a civilian village, he’d had no idea what it was and had, in fact, been afraid of it.

They tried to talk her into moving into one of the empty buildings on the property, but she said her family was in Rock Country. As a compromise she let them fix her a house and after they showed the boy some faster means of travel, they had been living about half the time in Rock and half in Leaf.

The boy came quite often by himself, fascinated by his siblings, starved for the male companionship of Neji and Sasuke, and craving the information he was gaining about his father. He’d been afraid of the power in him that had made him an oddity in a civilian village. Here in a hidden village, they were able to show him another side of himself.

But Sasuke didn’t push him to become a ninja. He let his children find their own passions. He smiled when he thought of Keiko. She was arguably the strongest person on the planet but was destined to be a librarian.

So as Sasuke finished his lunch, he watched the webs come and go and intertwine. He watched family lines stretch sideways and forward and backward and he felt small. And it was a comfort. If he was a speck, so too were his problems. And Naruto’s death and indeed his own death didn’t seem as tragic. Because the webs that came and went were complete lines, unbroken by death or life.