A/N As ever, I thank Bob Saget for betaing.

Eagle eyed readers will note that about half of the second half of this update has shown up before now in a chapter that was since removed. Some of it got scrapped because of the re-write, but other bits I'm keeping.

ooo

Blink

White. Clean. Sterile. Hmmmm. Hospital? Ah. Voices.

"...muscles punctured… serious blood loss... awake tomorrow… no visitors today."

Mrmmmmm, warm. Sleep.

ooo

Tetsuo swam upwards through the haze of unconsciousness and a tide of cotton. He inspected the generic hospital room with light streaming in through the window and felt a glowing contentment holding at bay a number of sharp stabbing pains. Probably morphine or something.

Damn, different room. Can't make a familiar ceiling joke.

Sasuke sat beside the bed, reading a scroll. To an untrained eye he seemed perfectly composed, the very image of a calm, collected, controlled Uchiha. To Tetsuo, who had seen him build these defensive walls a brick at a time, he may as well have been weeping.

Sasuke turned, movements deliberate and spoke in a clear voice. "Tetsuo… what the hell is wrong with you?"

Tetsuo sat up in his hospital bed, cleared his throat, found it functional beneath the bandages and made a happy noise. "Well I just paid a beautiful woman to forcibly and repeatedly penetrate me with long hard objects in front of my best friend and honestly I'm quite satisfied with the result." He winced, "Could do without the pain though."

"This isn't how normal people behave, Tetsuo." His tone was ice, his eyes searched every micro expression and noted every movement.

"I told you it was cruel, dangerous and illegal, what did you think I was going to do?" Tetsuo responded, sounding entirely too reasonable.

"I don't know!" This was entirely too much for the Uchiha facade, it crumbled. "You told me not to think about it! Maybe something that wasn't completely and utterly insane!?"

"Pain is temporary. Sharingan are forever. It makes perfect sense if you think about it. Besides, aren't you glad that we did it this way? The other option was to wait until a mission went wrong and you were a breath away from death, then hope you and your team mates survived the experience." Or to manufacture such a scenario.

"Motherfucker!" Sasuke lunged, red eyes spinning with an arm cocked back to deliver a punch, then froze - his eyes locked on the bandages. A moment later his eyes returned to charcoal and he seemed to fold in on himself, dropping down to sit on the side of the bed facing away from Tetsuo. "Next time we spar I'm beating the crap out of you."

"With super-power eyes I should hope so. You're going to be a beast."

There was silence for a time as the sun drooped lower in the sky.

"How did you even know how to activate it?" Sasuke asked, despondent. "No-one should have known. Even I didn't know."

Good thing I got a solid excuse lined up for this "I was looking through the Uchiha mission reports - the ones that survived - and I noticed something interesting. Every time someone came back from a mission with a newly awakened sharingan, it was always after something bad happened. Combat, dead clients, injured team mates, dead team mates was the most common. I made the theory halfway through the files, didn't find enough to disprove it in the rest. Wouldn't get a second chance, you'd see through it in an instant, couldn't use genjutsu, you'd notice." Tetsuo smiled up at the ceiling, "One shot, so I went for the big guns right away. Figured I'd take a chance, looks like I was right."

"You did all that, because of a theory based on some old battle reports?"

"There was little risk even if I was wrong, Anko is very good with her needles."

"She's a fucking psycho." Sasuke replied, his voice raw. "And don't tell me that didn't hurt, you had needles straight through your throat."

"Less than you might think." Tetuso mused, "I gave myself a weak general anesthetic before we started. Still had to feel some pain to sell it, but there you go."

"Stop sounding so fucking reasonable!" Sasuke shouted, turning "You're in hospital after losing way too much blood and having every fucking limb used as a pincushion!" He slumped back down, wringing his hands, "I thought you died, you arsehole."

"You needed the powerup, Sasuke." His voice was a whisper, "I know you, you're going to fight your brother and unless I do everything I possibly can you're going to damn well die doing it. Friends don't let friends die, not by inaction, not by looking the other way and not by standing on the damn sidelines as they stride to their death." I want your eyes and you are going to give them to me willingly.

"You're insane, Tetsuo."

"Heh, you think I don't know that? I choose this, Sasuke, and I will continue to choose it." I may as well have taken a knife and carved my decision making process into my own brain. For me, now, there is no other way.

ooo

Personal Log - year 12 month 7

Kakashi wasn't too happy to hear about my stunt. Med-nin may beat conventional medicine into the ground and I may have had a couple days off before our next meet up, but I was still limping when I saw my team again. He sort of… subsided when I explained that it was necessary to keep a friend alive, but I think he came to his own conclusions in the end. He was nice enough to focus on chakra control that day. Then Naruto asked why I wasn't fixed already if it had been more than a day, and I had to explain to the kid that most people don't reform like play-doh after an injury. He seemed quite shocked by the idea of not waking up the next morning completely fine - he had just assumed that was normal. I swear to god I am buying that kid a book called "The Facts of Life" and strapping him down till he's read it.

Speaking of Naruto, the med-nin have a way to share chakra for medical procedures, but it will do me no good if Jiraiya takes Naruto away, so I have a different plan. It all depends on the butterflies. I asked Kakashi about shadow clones - the other part of the plan - but presumably I don't have clearance to learn exactly how they work right now. All he would tell me is that they're dangerous to the user and cost large quantities of chakra. The latter I can deal with, the former we shall have to see.

D-ranks are boring but at least it's cash in hand and the civilians mean well when they're not glaring at Naruto. After the first week we started finding ways to make them more challenging. So we started walking dogs while holding the leash with chakra or pressing in nails with a thumb, or two of us would be defending and working while the third tried to ambush us. Hiring shinobi to do such simple things seems to be half conspicuous consumption and half patriotism. Like buying old timey war bonds mixed with flashing a rolex. I can't tell if it's more a triumph of propaganda or legitimate gratitude from the civilians, but it keeps the economy turning either way. It also fills up my wallet. I finally have enough spare to make a custom order for camouflage clothing. It's strange to me that more don't wear it, but then even in WWI most everyone was still walking around in single colour uniforms.

Elemental training goes so much easier when you can ask someone like Kakashi for tips. He knows mostly lightning, earth and water but his fire is still far enough ahead of me that I can pick up some tricks there too. One of the marks of high intelligence is the ability to reach the same conclusion in less time and with less information. Unfortunately that doesn't lend itself to being a good teacher with no practice; I think he expects us to learn as quickly as he did. I mean, I'm quick for a bloody 12 year old but that's hardly a fair comparison. Presumably that's why he taught tree walking by saying 'there's the tree, use chakra to walk up it' - step one, draw some circles, step two, draw the rest of the fucking owl indeed. Naruto's lucky I was there to actually explain things.

Kakashi'll answer specific questions if you ask him, but it's easy to miss things if you don't ask the right questions, and it's easy to ask the wrong questions if you don't understand. Still miles better than scrolls and guesswork though. I can't be too hard on him, it must be years since he had to learn a jutsu the hard way. 'Just do what the eyeball tells you' is both entirely accurate to the first part of his learning process and hardly something he can tell me to do.

Speaking of eyeballs, I've been working with Hinata on the days we wait for Kakashi to show up instead of hunting his arse down and those things are amazing. One reason chakra is so hard to use is the lack of feedback once it's out in the open. Sure, you can sort of feel it but it's a bit like watching ants through layers of frosted glass: very easy to miss delicate things. With Hinata there I finally managed to bring the rasengan under control. Turns out it was leaking chakra in five different directions in concentrations too weak to notice. In return I gave her a crash course on paralytics which seems to suit her gentle nature.

Kakashi will find out about the rasengan eventually, I'm sure. Maybe he already knows, I wouldn't put it past the sneaky bugger. Hell, even if I swore the two to secrecy till I'm ready to show it off this village leaks secrets like a sieve. I've got an excuse ready, but I don't want to try it till after he considers me a team member.

Rasengan though, that thing is amazing. It's like smacking a ball of buzzsaws into your target. It'll even chew through metal if you can manage to hold onto the piece in question. Needs a fair bit of pressure to really get in deep to hard things, but that's not the important thing. The important thing is that it takes less than a second to create and no seals. See, it's all about acceleration, speed and power. The heavier the thing you're moving, the slower you accelerate and the slower your movements. That's why ninja use tiny little kunai a lot of the time, you can shift the little things faster and it's not like there's much in the way of armour once you arrive.

All this means that a barehanded ninja can get something like a 10-30% improvement in speed over the same ninja with a knives in their hands. It's also another reason why Hyuuga are such beasts, they can get all the deadliness of knives with all the speed of bare hands. All this is relevant because now, so can I! Rasengan barely has weight at all and I pity the fool who decides to block one. I think it might be possible to make the thing detonate but I'm not risking my arm to find out. I need those shadow clones.

On the subject of things shadow clones would make easier, I got a sealing teacher! She's a vicious old granny called Chie. Tongue sharper than a blade and she takes no shit at all. I don't give her any, either. She survived in this world till retirement; she could probably crush me to dust and shows an inclination to try if I get lippy. I think teaching sealing and selling the occasional set of scrolls and tags is her version of a pension. So far we've been working on the fundamentals, and it's kind of amazing how much there is to learn. I'll basically have to create my own custom seals for anything beyond sealing scrolls and tags: each person's chakra is so different from everyone else's that what works for one person will often not work for another, sometimes violently. I can use most of the standard languages and pieces, but I'll have to put them into a different order and use compensators in very specific places and there's this whole theory of how to figure out what will work for me without turning my arms into 15 metres of bloody flesh noodles.

The Uzumaki were supposedly the big outliers there. The legend goes that their bloodline made their chakra so similar that they could mostly use each others seals with no issues. It meant they could use a standardised language and library to build on each other's work, and pull off some really crazy things. Shame, guess I won't be pulling off any of the crazy shit they managed any time soon.

The Hokage requested Kakashi train Sasuke in sharingannery (totally a word), so he joins us for training once or twice a week. Once he figured the basics out I let him copy all my jutsu. Sasuke got a bit weird about that, so I asked him what he thought I meant when I said we'd share everything? He just sort of mumbled something and looked to the side. I think Ino and Sakura might have finally gotten to him.

Today Team 7 was called for a mission.