▸ Column · The shinobi world of the Hidden Leaf — a medical-nin bloodline-reading scroll standing in for the DNA test, an ailing mother, and a blood-relation stranger two valleys away.
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Sasuke Uchiha.
The letter
My sister gifted each of us a bloodline-reading scroll from the medical-nin guild — a fun novelty, she said, to chart our chakra lineage. I was the only one who actually pressed my thumb to the paper and sent it back. I am forty-one. The reading says the man who raised me, the father whose name is on my registry, shares no blood with me at all. My parents have been wed forty-six years. My mother is seventy-two now, and a chakra-wasting illness has begun to take her; her healers warn that stress hastens it, and for the moment she seems genuinely at peace. The reading surfaced a true blood-match: a shinobi from the village two valleys over, who has already sent a hawk asking whether we are kin on my mother's side. I have not answered him. I have not slept in three weeks. My sisters keep asking why I never shared my results. Do I owe my mother the chance to explain first? Does the stranger deserve a reply? Or am I permitted to roll the scroll shut and never speak of any of it again?
Itachi Uchiha replies
Three weeks without sleep tells me you have already understood the thing you wrote to ask. So let me only help you name it.
You keep listing what you owe — your mother, the stranger, your sisters. Notice who is missing from that accounting: you. The man on your registry is your father. Blood did not make him that, and a scroll cannot unmake it. Hold to that; it is the one certainty here.
But hear the rest carefully, because I waited too long once and it cost my foolish little brother years of a grief he never needed. Do not roll the scroll shut forever. That is not protection of your mother — that is protection of yourself from a hard conversation, dressed as mercy. The truth is hers as much as yours.
Go to her. Privately. Gently. Before a sister stumbles onto it in the group chat, before the man two valleys over forces the moment. Let her tell you, in her own words, while she still can. Some burdens are meant to be carried alone — but this one was never yours alone. It was always hers, and you are only being handed the chance to carry it together.
— Itachi Uchiha
Sasuke Uchiha weighs in
Hn. My brother would have you tiptoe around a dying woman until the moment is gentle enough. There is no gentle enough.
Stop hiding inside what you owe everyone else. You're not losing sleep over your sisters' group chat or some stranger's hawk. You're losing it because you need to know who you are and you've decided her comfort outranks that.
I built my whole life on a story about my brother that turned out backwards. I learned the truth too late to do anything but grieve it. Your mother can still answer. Ask her now. The stranger can wait. The truth cannot.
— Sasuke Uchiha
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