I don't know why I slid that door open. I was five. I should have stayed in my room like I was told. But something pulled me forward, something I couldn't name, and I walked into that room and saw everything I would never be able to forget.
My mother was lying on the futon. Her red hair—the same red hair I'd inherited, the same red hair that marked us as Uzumaki—was spread around her head like a fan. Her face was the color of old paper. Her eyes were half-open, but they weren't looking at anything.
The baby was in the midwife's arms, squirming and wailing. A girl. I could tell because the midwife said, "It's a girl," in a voice that should have been happy but wasn't.
My father was kneeling beside my mother, holding her hand. His eyes were open wide, and I saw them change. The Sharingan. I'd seen it before, but never like this. The pattern in his eyes was different. More complex. Three tomoe in each eye, connected by thin black lines that made a shape like a pinwheel.
I didn't know what that meant then. I learned later. That was the Mangekyo Sharingan. It awakens through the death of the person you love most.
"Mama?" I said.
No one answered.
I walked to the futon. I touched my mother's face. It was still warm, but there was no breath coming from her nose, no flutter of her eyelids, no squeeze of her fingers around mine.
"Mama, wake up."
She didn't wake up.
Something cracked inside me. I don't know how else to describe it. It was like a bone breaking, but inside my chest. Or maybe inside my head. Everything went sharp and clear, the way things look after you've been crying and you wipe your eyes and suddenly the world is too bright and too detailed.
I could see the chakra in the air. Little swirls of gold and red and blue, floating around like dust motes in a sunbeam. I could see the chakra inside the baby—dense and wild, a storm barely contained. I could see the chakra inside my father, dark and jagged, like cracks in a frozen lake.
I turned to look at my reflection in the metal basin beside the futon. My eyes were red. Not from crying—actually red. The pupils had changed. There was a single black dot in each one, spinning slowly.
The Sharingan.
I was five years old. The Sharingan isn't supposed to awaken until later. Sometimes not until the teenage years. But mine had awakened because my mother had died, and my blood had decided that grief was a good enough reason to evolve.
My father looked at me. For a moment, something flickered across his face. Something that might have been pride or might have been horror. I couldn't tell the difference.
"Ren," he said. His voice was hoarse. "Come here."
I went to him. He put his arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. I could feel him shaking.
"Your mother is gone," he said. "She's not coming back."
"I know."
"You have a sister now. Her name is Kushina. Your mother chose that name. It means 'country of the whirling tides.'"
"Kushina," I repeated.
The midwife placed the baby in my arms. She was small and warm and smelled like blood and something else, something sweet. Her face was scrunched up and red, but when I looked down at her, she opened her eyes.
They were blue. Not Uzumaki red. Not Uchiha black. Blue like the ocean on a clear day.
"Hi," I said. "I'm your big brother."
She stopped crying.
In the silence, I heard my father exhale. I heard the midwives shuffling out of the room, taking the bloody towels and basins with them. I heard the waves crashing against the cliffs outside, the same waves that had been crashing for thousands of years and would keep crashing long after all of us were gone.
I held my sister and promised her something I had no right to promise.
"I'll protect you," I said. "I'll always protect you."
I didn't know then that protecting her would mean losing everything else.