Chapter 1: Rule Four
Four rules hang on a board above your desk in the third sub-basement of the Konoha Archive, painted in your own careful brush hand.
One. No food near the scrolls. Two. No fire jutsu below ground level. (This means you, Uchiha.) Three. Nothing leaves without a slip. Four. The archivist is not a library, she is a person. Say good morning.
The fourth rule was added after your second week, when a jonin had walked up to your desk, said "Second Hokage, water-release theory, all of it," and walked away. Nobody has broken it since. Mostly because the board is the first thing you see when you come down the stairs, and you have a reputation for losing slips.
It's a quiet job. The third sub-basement holds the pre-founding records, the Warring States material that nobody reads because nobody can. Clan treaties written in old court script. Battle reports on bark. A captured Uchiha supply list from ninety years ago that you once spent weeks translating, convinced it was a coded message, before realizing it really was just a lot of radishes. Most days you see nobody but Old Masa from upstairs, who brings you tea at three and complains about his knees.
Then, eleven weeks ago, Itachi Uchiha came down the stairs.
You heard him before you saw him, which is to say you didn't hear him at all. One moment you were alone, bent over a cracked Hagoromo-era fragment with a magnifying lens; the next you looked up and he was standing on the other side of the desk, very still, reading the rules on your board.
He finished reading. He looked at you.
"Good morning," said the heir of the Uchiha clan.
You nearly dropped the lens.
That first day he asked for nothing grand. He asked whether the archive held any household records from the Uchiha encampment before the founding, and you said, without thinking, "Only the ones the Senju stole," and then went cold all over, because you had just said that to the heir of the Uchiha clan.
He considered this. "Stole?"
"Confiscated. After a raid. It's catalogued as 'captured correspondence.' I call it stolen in my head. I shouldn't have said it out loud." You were already standing, already reaching for the ladder, because when you are nervous you fetch things. "There's not much. Letters. A ledger. And a list I think is a cipher."
"A cipher."
"Nobody writes that many radishes," you told him, "without a reason."
He came back three afternoons running to sit at the big table, reading over your shoulder while you worked through the list, offering nothing but the occasional quiet "That character could also be 'daikon'" and "My great-aunt still pickles them that way." When you finally sat back and admitted that it was, in fact, just a very large order of radishes for a winter camp, he looked at the scroll for a long moment.
"Someone was very hungry," he said, and you laughed so hard you had to put your head on the table, and when you looked up he was watching you with an expression you couldn't read at all.
Then he returned the next week. And the week after.
He comes every week now, sometimes twice. Always in the early afternoon, always alone, always with a request so specific and so obscure that you suspect he lies awake inventing them.
Today it's: "The Uchiha-Senju non-aggression accord from before the founding. The draft, not the signed copy. The one with the marginal notes."
You set down your brush. "How do you know there's a draft with marginal notes?"
"There's a reference to it in a later letter of Tobirama's."
"Which letter?"
"The one complaining that my great-great-grandfather's calligraphy looked like a drunk crow had walked through ink." There's the faintest change in his face. Not a smile. Itachi doesn't smile, as far as you have been able to tell. But something around his eyes loosens, just slightly, in a way you have started, much against your will, to watch for.
He looks tired today. He always looks a little tired, it's the lines under his eyes, two faint creases like he was born squinting into a hard light, but today the tiredness has settled into his shoulders too. He's in the dark clan shirt with the red-and-white fan on the back, and the forehead protector is pushed up slightly where he must have been rubbing at it. The ponytail at the nape of his neck is coming loose.
"Long morning?" you ask.
"Council meeting."
"Ah." You know enough not to ask more. Everyone in Konoha knows the shape of it, if not the details: the Uchiha and the Hokage's council have been circling each other for years like two dogs who've agreed not to fight but haven't agreed to stop growling. Fugaku Uchiha sits at the table now, which is new, and his son sits beside him, which is newer, and the village has been holding its breath for a decade waiting to see which way it all goes.
"Aisle fourteen," you say, standing. "Top shelf. You'll have to hold the ladder. And if you sneeze on it I'll have you banned."
"I don't sneeze."
"Everyone sneezes. It's three hundred years of dust."
He holds the ladder. You climb. The draft is where you remember, in a lacquered tube with a cracked seal, and when you bring it down he takes it from your hands with a kind of care that you feel in your own fingers, like he's handling something alive.
You unroll it together on the big table under the lamp. He leans in. You lean in. His hair smells like cedar and smoke, faintly, and the edge of his sleeve brushes your wrist, and you are a professional, so you ignore it.
"There," he says, and points to a cramped note in the left margin. "Can you read that?"
You squint. The script is old and hasty, written by someone who was angry. "It says... 'He will not agree to the stone. He says the stone is ours.' Then something crossed out. Then: 'Let the stone keep its secrets. They have always been more trouble than they are worth.'" You look up. "What stone?"
He doesn't answer right away. He's looking at the margin note, and you're looking at him, and you are close enough to see that his eyes, which are dark grey, almost black, have a faint ring of red at the very edge of the iris. The Sharingan, half-woken, the way other people's hands tremble when they're thinking hard.
"You read old court script," he says. "Fluently. Even the cursive."
"It's my job."
"No one else in this building can. I asked." He straightens. "I asked in every archive in the Land of Fire. There are four people living who can read pre-founding cursive the way you can. Two of them are over ninety. One of them is a Hyuga, and the clan would never permit it."
"Permit what?"
He's quiet for a long moment. Upstairs, faintly, you can hear Old Masa's slippers shuffling across the floor, and the creak of the third stair that never gets fixed.
"Why do you keep coming down here?" you ask. You haven't meant to. It comes out anyway, eleven weeks of it. "You could send a clerk. You could have the scrolls brought up to the compound. Half of what you've asked for you could have found in your own clan's library, if you'd looked."
"I did look."
"Then why come?"
He meets your eyes. For a second, just one, you think he's going to tell you something real.
"You say good morning back," Itachi says.
It's the most he's ever said. It knocks the air out of you more effectively than if he'd kicked you. You stand there with your mouth slightly open and your face going hot, and he looks down at the scroll again, as if he's said something about the weather.
"Thank you for the accord," he says. "I'll return it by Friday."
"You always return everything by Friday."
"Yes."
"You're the only person in this village who does."
"I know. I've read your slips." He rolls the scroll with that same terrible care and slides it back into its case. Then he hesitates, his hand still on the lacquer, and says, in a lower voice: "If I asked you to read something for me, somewhere outside the Archive, something that would be... a great deal of trouble if anyone found out you'd seen it. Would you?"
You think about it. You think about the four rules on the board, and your nice quiet job, and your nice quiet basement where nothing has happened in three hundred years except radishes.
"What kind of trouble?" you ask.
"The kind that ends careers," he says. "Possibly mine. Certainly yours."
"Where?"
"The Naka Shrine. Under the main hall." He picks up the scroll case. "There's a stone tablet that only an Uchiha is permitted to see. No one outside the clan has looked at it in a hundred years. I think something on it is wrong. And I think the reason the clan and this village have been at each other's throats for three generations is written on it, in a script that no one alive in my family can read."
He tucks the case under his arm and turns toward the stairs. At the bottom step he stops.
"Tonight. Midnight. If you don't come, I'll understand." He doesn't look back. "Good afternoon."
The third stair creaks behind him. He's gone.
You sit down very slowly at your desk and stare at the rules on the board for a long time. Then you get up, take your brush and, under rule four, in small careful letters, you add a fifth.
Five. Do not fall for the patrons.
It's already too late, and you know it, but it makes you feel better to have it in writing.