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Three days passed without an order from the Hokage's residence.
Sarutobi Hiruzen had proven considerably more cold-blooded than expected. The Raikage's offensive was real, the front in the Land of Lightning had broken, and yet no mobilization order for Root had arrived. Danzo waited, and when waiting produced nothing useful, he walked.
........
The streets of Konoha moved at the particular pace of a village that had been at war long enough to forget what ordinary life had looked like before. The stalls were open but not busy. The restaurants were half empty. Most shinobi were either at the front or on the training grounds, and ordinary people had developed the habit of staying close to home, of not being where things might happen.
This was still animation, by recent standards. Two years ago, at the height of the war, these same streets had been deserted entirely.
Danzo moved through the quiet without hurry, examining things. A cultivator who had spent decades sealed in a stone and then absorbed the memories of another man's lifetime still found the surface texture of this world worth observing directly. Memory was one kind of knowledge. Walking through a place was another.
He stopped at a shinobi tool shop and stepped inside.
The owner looked up from behind the counter. Then his face drained of color. He took two steps back without appearing to notice he had done it, the movement purely involuntary, the body responding to something the mind had not yet fully processed.
"Seal all of this in a scroll," Danzo said, indicating his selections.
Root possessed the finest weapons in the village. That was not the point. He wanted to handle the tools of this world himself, to develop his own familiarity with how things were made and measured and valued here, to fill in the spaces between inherited memory and direct experience.
He had also developed a particular appreciation for the sealing scrolls of this world. The technique that allowed physical objects to be compressed and stored within paper was not so different in principle from certain storage arts of the Tao World, but its accessibility was something else entirely. In the Tao World, comparable techniques were guarded by the sacred schools with the particular jealousy of people who understood that information is power and power should not be distributed freely. Here, a shinobi tool shop stocked sealing scrolls as basic inventory.
Whoever had first spread this technique among ordinary people had performed a service of genuine and lasting value.
"Yes, yes, of course, Danzo-sama, right away..."
The owner sealed the tools into the scroll with hands that were not entirely steady and presented it with both hands and a slight bow.
"How much?"
"No, how could I possibly take money from you, you are Konoha's hero, your—"
"I asked how much it costs."
The cold repetition cut through the performance of deference. The owner flinched and mechanically produced the number.
"Six thousand eight hundred ryo."
Danzo paid. He left.
........
Outside, he walked for a moment before allowing himself the observation.
More unpopular than Orochimaru, apparently. Orochimaru at least produced fascination alongside the fear. What this body produced in people was simpler and less complicated. They recoiled. They went pale. They completed transactions with the focused efficiency of people trying to conclude an experience as quickly as possible.
He filed it without particular feeling and continued walking.
........
At the Hokage's residence, Sarutobi Hiruzen sat before his crystal ball with the particular expression of a man who has seen something that does not fit into any available category.
The ball showed Danzo stepping out of a roadside restaurant, unhurried, apparently having eaten with some degree of genuine enjoyment.
Hiruzen's pipe dropped from his mouth.
He did not pick it up immediately.
Two advisers entered at that moment to report on the front situation and found him staring at the crystal ball in silence.
"Have you ever," Hiruzen said, without looking up, "seen Danzo go shopping?"
The advisers looked at each other.
Neither of them had an answer.
........
The Yamanaka flower shop stood on a quieter street, its display of blooms somewhat reduced from peacetime levels but still carefully tended. The surrender of the Wind Country and the subsequent peace treaty with Konoha had allowed most of the Yamanaka clan's main forces to return from the front, and the young clan head had been making up for lost time in his shop with visible pleasure.
He was watering new seedlings with his wife when the bell above the door rang.
He went to greet the customer with the natural warmth of a man who genuinely enjoyed his work.
Then he saw the face.
The warmth did not disappear. It simply went somewhere else very quickly and left behind it a cold sweat that his wife would later describe as instantaneous.
"One bouquet of black roses," Danzo said. "Tatsuma placed the order yesterday."
Yamanaka Inoichi had not expected Elder Danzo to appear in person. On a battlefield, facing enemy formations, he would not have hesitated. Under this particular cold gaze, in this quiet flower shop, with the smell of fresh soil and cut stems around him, something about the context made it worse rather than better.
"Inoichi, you are still this clumsy." Danzo's voice was not cruel exactly. It carried the particular tone of someone who has watched a person grow up and found the results only partially satisfying. "You spent all that time alongside the Nara boy and absorbed none of his composure."
As vassals of the Sarutobi clan during the Warring Clans era, the InoShikaCho families had always stood behind the Hokage faction. Danzo had been a classmate of Sarutobi Hiruzen. He had watched the current generation of InoShikaCho emerge from childhood, had corrected their behavior on more than one occasion when they were small enough that correction was still the appropriate response.
"Forgive me, Danzo-sama."
It was Inoichi's wife who rescued the moment. She moved with a soft smile to the shelf, lifted a prepared bouquet of black roses, and presented it to Danzo with the ease of someone for whom customer service was a genuine skill rather than a performance.
"One other thing," she added. "A child came in for black roses just before you arrived. He picked them up and left only moments ago."
"A child."
Danzo looked at her.
"I understand."
He did. The memory was already there when he reached for it, precise and without ambiguity. In all of Konoha, only one person reliably bought black roses. Only one household had maintained that particular habit across generations, keeping it as a private symbol understood by almost no one outside the family.
........
At the Hokage's residence, one of Hiruzen's advisers adjusted his glasses and watched the crystal ball with an expression of mild and genuine sadness.
"It looks like Danzo is preparing to go to the battlefield."
Hiruzen watched his old comrade accept the bouquet of black roses from the flower shop and stand for a moment in the street outside before beginning to walk.
"Yes." He retrieved his pipe from where it had fallen and held it without lighting it. "For Konoha's sake he will accept any burden placed on him. That is the Will of Fire we inherited from our teacher."
He was quiet for a moment.
"As Hokage, I owe Danzo a debt I cannot repay. Every time the most dangerous sector of the front requires attention, it is Danzo who goes. It has always been Danzo."
Of all Senju Tobirama's students, only these two had reached the level of Kage. A Hokage could not be spent carelessly in the field. Which meant the weight fell elsewhere, on the man who had always been one step behind the title and had nevertheless carried more of the actual cost than the title holder.
The bonds formed by that kind of shared history were their own category of thing. Stronger than friendship in some ways. More complicated than friendship in all ways.
........
The Memorial Stone.
A boy of about ten stood before it, his posture straight in the way of children who have learned stillness too early. He held a bouquet against his chest. Dark flowers. Black roses.
Danzo looked at him and found, somewhere in the inherited memory, the face this boy's features had come from. Open and cheerful and unusually sensitive for a shinobi's child, the kind of person who felt things more completely than the people around him realized.
"Shisui?"
The boy turned. His eyes were composed and careful, the expression of someone already practicing the art of not showing everything at once.
"Greetings, Danzo-sama."
Not long ago, Uchiha Shisui's father, the son of Uchiha Kagami himself, had died on the front in the Land of Water at the hands of the Third Mizukage. The news had reached Danzo while he was still managing the situation in the Land of Rain. The loss had registered as something more than information, the particular weight of a thread connecting him to the dead.
Shisui had always been a reasonable child. Years ago, Danzo had set aside his longstanding distrust of the Uchiha clan specifically for this boy's sake, had extended the unusual gesture of an invitation to join Root. The father had refused on his son's behalf, and Danzo had understood the reasoning even while disagreeing with the outcome. A man of conservative views, trying to protect his son from the moment when loyalty to clan and loyalty to village would require a choice.
Now the father was gone too.
"Beautiful flowers," Danzo said. "If Kagami could see this, he would be proud of his grandson."
"It was my father's instruction." Shisui's voice was even, carefully even, in the way that children are even when they are working very hard at it. "He asked me to remember to bring flowers to my grandfather's stone before I went to the battlefield myself. Compared to my father, I am only a small talent in this village."
Danzo placed his bouquet of black roses beside the boy's and turned his back to him.
In his right eye, beneath the bandage, something stirred.
A scarlet light flickered briefly in the darkness.
"Do you know why Kagami loved these flowers?"
"Please, Danzo-sama. Tell me."
Danzo turned around.
The Mangekyō was open.
The boy saw it clearly in the elder's eyes. Scarlet pupils, and within them a six-petaled pattern arranged with perfect symmetry around a black center point, four diamond shapes enclosed within a circle, the whole design carrying the particular quality of something that had been waiting a long time to be seen.
Shisui went very still.
"Because black roses," Danzo said quietly, "are the symbol of your grandfather's Mangekyō Sharingan."