The scroll did not bother with ceremony.
After Danzo's name had hung in the chat like smoke that wouldn't clear, after Hiruzen's bunker-sealing order had been logged and acknowledged and quietly second-guessed by half the village council, the parchment simply pulsed once and moved on.
[Ranking continues.]
[Most Likely to Become a Villain — Second Place.]
[Reveal pending. Subject is currently deceased. Reveal will include cause-of-death footage, motive reconstruction, and one (1) sealed conversation never witnessed by any living shinobi.]
A long pause. The chat, which had been mid-argument about whether Danzo's root cellar counted as a war crime if the roots were technically vegetables, went quiet.
Tsunade: Deceased. That narrows it.
Mei Terumī: Narrows it to about four hundred people, you old hag.
Tsunade: Try me at arm-wrestling again and I'll narrow your jaw.
Hashirama: Please. Both of you. Please.
Tobirama: Tch. The scroll said "sealed conversation never witnessed." That rules out anyone who died loudly. We are looking for someone who died with a secret in their mouth.
Madara: @Tobirama Listen to the little brother actually thinking for once. Rare. Frame it.
Tobirama: Stinking monkey. Shut up before I seal your tongue to your forehead.
Hashirama: Madaraaa~ don't poke him.
Madara: Hmph.
The scroll glowed deeper red, then white, then settled into the soft parchment color it used when it was about to hurt someone.
[Second Place — Uchiha Shisui.]
[Villain trajectory at time of death: zero percent.]
[Villain trajectory had he lived: ninety-four percent.]
The chat did not react immediately. It took three full seconds, which in group-chat time was a geological era.
Then Itachi typed one word.
Itachi: No.
Just that. No punctuation after. No follow-up. The cursor blinked next to his name for a long while and did not move.
In the Uchiha compound, Sasuke looked up from where he was still sitting against his brother's shoulder. He did not know who Shisui was, not really — a name on a memorial stone, a cousin who had died before Sasuke was old enough to remember his face. But he felt Itachi go still in a way that was different from the stillness of earlier. Earlier Itachi had been a held breath. Now he was a closed door.
"Nii-san?"
Itachi did not answer. His hand was on the scroll-mirror, fingers spread flat against the parchment, and the parchment was warm under his palm because the footage was already beginning.
The footage opened on water.
The Naka River, at dusk, the cliff above it gone gold in the last light. A figure stood at the edge — short hair, lean build, the kind of posture that did not belong to anyone who expected to walk back down. The chat saw his face in the same instant it saw the missing eye.
Naruto: Wait — wait, who is — Itachi-nii, who is —
Sakura: Naruto, shh.
Kakashi: Quiet. Watch.
Shisui was speaking. The footage gave them the audio clean, no wind-static, no distance-blur. He was speaking to someone behind him, someone the camera-angle of the scroll refused to show. The chat saw only Shisui's back, his profile, the bandage already wrapped around the socket where his right eye had been.
"You took it for the village," Shisui said. His voice was not angry. That was the worst part. "I believed you when you said that. I want to keep believing it. So I am going to give you the other one too, and then I am going to step off this cliff, and you are going to use them both the way I would have used them. Peacefully. Do you understand me, Danzo-sama? Peacefully."
The chat made a sound that was not quite a sound. It was the absence of typing.
Tobirama: Ah.
Just that. Ah. From the man who never let a sentence go unfinished.
The footage continued. Shisui's hand came up to his remaining eye. The angle still refused Danzo's face, refused even Danzo's silhouette — only a single gloved hand entering frame, palm open, waiting. The hand was patient in a way that made Hashirama physically turn away from his scroll.
"Tell Itachi," Shisui said, "that I am sorry I could not stay for the work. Tell him the coup will end without blood if he is willing to be the one who does not bleed. Tell him I chose this. Not you. Me."
The gloved hand closed around something small and wet.
Shisui stepped backward off the cliff.
The footage did not follow him down. It held on the empty edge, on the gold light fading, on the gloved hand withdrawing from frame with its prize cupped careful as an egg. Then it cut to black, and the scroll said, in the small grey letters it used for footnotes:
[The conversation above has never been spoken aloud by any surviving party. Danzo Shimura has, to this day, denied that Uchiha Shisui spoke any final words. Footage authenticated by the Scroll.]
The bunker under the Hokage tower, which had been sealed less than ten minutes ago, made a sound. Not a loud sound. A small structural sound, the kind a building makes when something inside it has stopped pretending to be calm.
In the chat, Itachi finally typed again.
Itachi: He said peacefully.
Itachi: He said peacefully and Danzo used the eye to order me to kill them all.
Itachi: He said peacefully.
Sasuke, beside him, was reading the messages over his brother's shoulder because Itachi had not turned the scroll-mirror away. Sasuke read them twice. Then he read them a third time, slower, because the third time was when his hands started shaking.
"Nii-san."
"Not now, Sasuke."
"Nii-san, the village —"
"I said not now."
It was not sharp. It was not the cold voice Itachi had used on him for years to keep him at arm's length. It was just tired. The tired of a man who had carried a corpse on his back for a decade and had finally been told, by a piece of paper, the exact weight of it.
Hashirama, in the Pure Land, was crying without making any noise about it. Mito had her hand on his arm. Tobirama was looking at neither of them. Tobirama was looking at the spot in the air where Danzo's name had been printed twenty minutes ago and his jaw was doing something his jaw had not done since the night his brother had taken the hat from him.
Tobirama: I trained him.
Hashirama: Brother —
Tobirama: I trained Danzo. I told him the village came before everything. I told him a Hokage's tools were sometimes shaped like crimes. I told him —
Tobirama: I told him.
Madara: @Tobirama
Madara: Shut up.
Madara: Not because you are wrong. Because you are about to say something you cannot unsay in front of the boy.
The boy being Itachi, who was twenty-one and looked, in that moment, about nine.
The scroll pulsed once more, gently, like a hand on a shoulder.
[Reward pending acknowledgement.]
[Recipient: Uchiha Itachi.]
[Reward: One (1) authenticated copy of the above footage. Transferable. Admissible in any Hokage-sanctioned tribunal. Cannot be destroyed by genjutsu, fire, or council vote.]
Itachi looked at the offer for a long time.
Then he typed, very slowly, with one hand because the other was still on his brother's back:
Itachi: Accepted.
The chat held its breath.
In the sealed bunker beneath the Hokage tower, Danzo Shimura sat in the dark with his bandaged arm in his lap and listened to the sound of something he had buried thirteen years ago walking back up out of the river.
[First Place reveal queued. Estimated delay: twelve hours of in-world time. Subject requires preparatory footage.]
[Scroll resting.]
The parchment dimmed.
Outside, in the real Konoha night, a hawk that had not been summoned by anyone landed on the roof of the Uchiha compound and waited to see if it would be needed.
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