Curse These Old Bones - SFW Extra - What if ? N°2

Ibiki’s eye twitched. He had interrogated countless shinobi, endured the screams, the threats, the silence. But this? This was something else entirely.

“And I’m sure she would not be proud of me!” Danzo wailed, his skeletal hands clawing at his chest as if his undead heart had suddenly reanimated just to break. His voice, rasping and hollow, managed a bizarre, almost operatic quality, filling the interrogation chamber with echoes of self-pity.

Ibiki watched in stunned silence as the once-dreaded leader of Root—reanimated by the Hokage for the sole purpose of confessing his crimes—collapsed into a heap of misery. He hadn’t even gotten past his first question. Why did you do it? He’d expected cold logic, some grim explanation for the slaughter, the treachery, the endless web of conspiracies. What he got instead was a therapy session for what seemed to be an entire lifetime of maternal neglect.

“She would never let me play outside with the other children!” Danzo sobbed, his voice rising to a pitiful pitch that grated against Ibiki’s ears. “She said, ‘Danzo, you’ll catch a cold and die like your father—at least he was useful!’” He buried his decaying face in his hands, and an unsettling squelch followed as bits of rotted skin sloughed off.

Ibiki took a moment to compose himself, though it wasn’t easy with the scene unfolding before him. Danzo continued, unprompted, his lamentation gaining momentum like a boulder rolling downhill.

“She was ruthless, you understand! A legend in the Warring States era. She’d look at me, a child barely five, and say, ‘Danzo, if you can’t kill a man with a spoon by now, you’re already a failure.’” His voice cracked, and he rocked forward. “A spoon, Ibiki! Do you know how hard that is?”

Ibiki didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he was supposed to.

“And when I did it—when I finally did it—do you think she praised me? No! She just said, ‘Took you long enough, boy. Hiruzen did it with a ladle at three.’”

The corpse convulsed with sobs, shaking as if his entire body were breaking apart under the weight of the memory.

“I trained,” Danzo gasped, clawing at the floor. “I trained until my fingers bled. I mastered jutsu no child should even see! I schemed, I plotted, I created Root itself—all to hear her say, ‘Well done, Danzo.’ But no. Nothing!” He raised his ghastly, hollow eyes to the ceiling. “Even on her deathbed, she said, ‘You’re still no Hiruzen.’”

Ibiki leaned back slightly, arms crossed, his expression an unreadable mask of disbelief.

Danzo didn’t notice. He was too far gone now, his voice taking on an almost evangelistic fervor. “Do you know how many Sharingan I implanted to prove my worth? Do you?” he shrieked. “I thought, surely, if I wielded their power, she’d see me as a visionary! A man willing to do what others could not! But when she saw me, she said, ‘Isn’t that cheating?’”

He slammed a skeletal fist into the ground, the brittle bones cracking under the impact. “She said cheating, Ibiki! Do you know what it feels like to be accused of cheating by your own mother?”

Ibiki said nothing. He suspected Danzo was going to tell him anyway.

“She was impossible!” Danzo raged, his voice bouncing off the walls of the chamber. “Do you know what she gave me for my birthday one year? A list of every shinobi who had accomplished more than me by the same age! There were six pages, Ibiki. Six! Including Uchiha Madara, whom she described as ‘a bit overhyped, but at least ambitious.’”

Ibiki suppressed a groan, unsure if the twisting sensation in his stomach was frustration or the urge to laugh.

“I burned villages! I committed atrocities!” Danzo howled, his bony fists shaking toward the heavens—or what passed for them in his undead state. “And for what? To hear her say, ‘Well, at least you tried’? She never even said that much! She only ever said, ‘Danzo, you have your father’s chin but none of his courage.’”

Ibiki shifted in his seat, clearing his throat. “So,” he began cautiously, “you’re saying—”

“I’m saying,” Danzo interrupted, voice quaking with unbridled despair, “that no matter what I did—no matter how many Uchiha I massacred, no matter how many secrets I buried, no matter how far I went to control this cursed village—it was never enough! Even in her death, I dreamt of her, and of her gaze and...” He sagged forward, crumpled like a puppet whose strings had been cut. “She would look at me and say, ‘Well, I suppose it’s something.’ And then she’d go back to polishing her war trophies.”

The room fell silent but for the faint rasp of Danzo’s undead breaths. Ibiki stared at the man—or what was left of him—unsure whether he’d just witnessed a confession or a breakdown centuries in the making.

For a long moment, neither spoke.

Then Danzo, his voice barely above a whisper, murmured, “I even wrote her a poem once. She laughed. She said, ‘Save the rhymes for the poets and the epics, Danzo. You’re barely fit to be a footnote.’”

Ibiki leaned forward, elbows on the table, pinching the bridge of his nose. He needed a drink. Or maybe a vacation.