Naruto x Fairy Tail: Fairy's Shadow

"Normal Dialogue"

'Inner thoughts'

[Year X790]

~ With Shisui ~

Shisui was now in a secluded area near Konoha with Danzo standing right before him.

"Besides, someone who's always suspicious like me will never change. What will you do then?" Danzo asked Shisui's past self.

"But Lord Danzo…"

"When the time comes, will you use your Kotoamatsukami on me too?" Danzo asked threateningly as he stared into Shisui's eyes.

Before Shisui could respond, Danzo was already on the move. "Your Sharingan, shall be in my safekeeping!"

However, Shisui was quick enough to disable Danzo in a genjutsu. Yet, to Shisui's surprise, Danzo had suddenly reappeared right before him, almost as if Danzo had re-written reality. This had caught Shisui off guard as Danzo utilized Shisui's momentary surprise to secure Shisui's right eye for himself.

The vision ended, but the phantom pain in Shisui's right eye socket remained. He touched his face reflexively, feeling the whole, undamaged eye that had somehow been restored when he'd arrived in Earthland. But the memory of its loss was as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.

He couldn't protect his teammates. He couldn't protect his aunt. He couldn't protect an innocent child. He couldn't even protect himself.

The pattern was clear now, laid out before him like a map of his failures. Every time he'd tried to save someone, every time he'd thought he was strong enough to make a difference, he'd been proven wrong. The innocent and the people he'd cared about had paid the price for his inadequacy.

'I couldn't save anyone... I was never strong enough. Never fast enough.' he confessed to himself as he tightened his fist in a vice like grip.

The whispers returned, but now they seemed to speak in his own voice, listing his failures ruthlessly. 

"Shisui of the Body Flicker..." the whispers seemed to mock. "The prodigy of the Uchiha clan. The hope for peace between the village and the clan."

But what was he really? A failed teammate. An absent nephew. A killer of innocents. A tool in the hands of men who saw him as nothing more than a useful weapon.

He tried to scream, to release the agony that was building in his chest. But no sound emerged from his throat, no voice broke the oppressive silence of the void.

The void swallowed everything. He was being slowly erased, piece by piece, until nothing remained but the raw weight of his failures.

By the time the latest visions faded, Shisui wasn't sure if he was still himself anymore.

Shisui moved like a ghost through the endless darkness of Umbra Noctis. His steps were purposeless, the movements of someone who had forgotten why he was walking but couldn't remember how to stop. The visions had broken something inside him, leaving him detached from his own existence.

The whispers had stopped, but their absence felt more apparent than their presence. The silence suggested something was building, some final revelation that would complete his destruction.

Then, without warning, doubt crept into his shattered thoughts like poison. He found himself retracing his memories, but this time with a different perspective.

The Genin mission that had gone wrong. Why had his team been assigned to investigate the missing patrol? Why had they been sent into that specific area without adequate backup or intelligence?

His aunt's death. Why had she chosen that particular day to go to the market? She'd been so excited about the spice, talking about how the merchant had finally gotten it in stock. But how had she known? Who had told her?

The child hostage during his ANBU mission. Why had intelligence failed to mention such a critical detail? ANBU operations were planned with obsessive precision and information. Hostages weren't simply overlooked.

The patterns began to emerge from the chaos of his memories, connections forming that filled him with a cold dread that had nothing to do with the void around him. Each failure, each tragedy, each moment of helplessness. They all shared common elements that he'd been too grief-stricken to notice before.

'Was I always a pawn?' The thought sent him stumbling backward through the darkness.

His hands began to shake as the implications crashed over him. The Genin team assignment had come directly from village command, but who had influenced that decision? His aunt's death had been blamed on random bandits, but what if it hadn't been random at all? The ANBU mission had been classified at the highest levels, accessible only to those with the deepest connections to the village's power structure.

'Who was watching me?' he thought dreadfully. 'Who pulled the strings?'

The questions multiplied in his mind, each one spawning new doubts and suspicions. Had his entire life been orchestrated by someone else? Had every choice he'd made been guided by invisible hands? The possibility was too horrifying to contemplate, but the evidence was mounting with each memory he examined.

He began pacing like a caged animal. Everything he'd believed about his life, his choices, his failures. All of it might have been lies.

The void around him shifted, and he found himself watching a scene that made his blood boil with rage.

Itachi stood among the corpses of the Uchiha clan, his sword dripping with the blood of their relatives. But the young man's face wasn't filled with the cold determination that history would remember. Instead, Itachi looked broken, his eyes filled with tears as he surveyed the destruction he'd been forced to create.

"It's done," Itachi said to the figure emerging from the shadows. "The clan is no more."

The vision then shifted Danzo walking along the streets of Konoha at night with two of his operatives in the aftermath of the massacre. Danzo's lone visible eyes went alert as he noticed something was wrong with one of his agents. It was at this moment that Itachi's voice could be heard.

"My eyes see everything. And I will continue to watch. If you so much as touch Sasuke, I'll pass on classified village intel to every enemy nation."

The vision ended as Shisui was left by himself once again in complete stillness.

~ End of Chapter 65 ~

You can read advanced chapter on [email protected]/The_Editor982