#shisui survives au: teacher edition

[uchihashisui-kun]

Shisui doesn't become an academy teacher in time to teach Sasuke's class.

He has to heal first, starting with the physical aspect of it. His body was injured pretty badly between the fall and the river's harsh current slamming him left and right, and the medics have been very clear with him: if Itachi hadn't dove after him, he would have died without a doubt.

He has rehab to do. He had risked a punctured lung because of his broken ribs, and he had fractures a bit everywhere. His right leg was unusable for the first period after he woke up, it took a lot to slowly heal the damage and sometimes, even years after, Shisui has to use a cane to help his leg take his weight. Not much often, it gets better with time, but it does happen once in a while.

Not to mention his hands. Not as bad as his leg, but, for the first time since he became a shinobi, he can't keep them completely still. They tremble sometimes, and there are moments where objects as light as a pen feel much more heavy. They are better, though. They take less time to heal, and for that Shisui is glad.

It takes a long time to heal enough to be able to stand up and walk on his own, and even then he's in no state to stay out for too long. He gets tired easily, and he feels much more older than the twenty-something he should be.

After that, of course, there's the mental part of healing. He mostly stays at the hospital first, and at home second while his body is slowly healing. He has nightmares, and he wakes up choking on a scream more often than not.

Inoichi takes it as his personal job to help him, because he's a familiar face and he knows Shisui better than any other Yamanaka. He would never leave Shisui in the hands of someone who doesn't know how to deal with him, especially in such a fragile period.

Shisui starts his sessions with Inoichi while his body is still healing, and it takes a while before he can tell the Yamanaka about everything that happened. He refuses to, at first. He knows how these things work, and he knows that talking and working through his problem will help, but at the same time trauma is a bitch, and he can't find it in himself to talk about it for a long while.

Inoichi is a patient man though. He is used to working with traumatized minds, he knows how they work. He knows when to push and when to let go, when to ask and when to stay silent, and even when Shisui finally decides to tell him the truth- he doesn't speak. No. He gives Inoichi the permission to mind-walk his memories instead. He makes him experience that night through his eyes.

To say that Inoichi is horrified is an understatement, and he's so very glad that Itachi was able to save Shisui. He now also understands why they have Danzō locked in the lowest, deepest, most protected and sealed cell available in T&I.

(Shisui doesn't want to know what happens with Danzō. Itachi asked him, once, if he wanted to know, and Shisui was happy with not knowing.

He doesn't need to know that Team Ro took care of him, or that he's now kept in T&I for questioning, or that ROOT has come to light, the stolen clan kids bringing all the clan heads together against the Hokage alongside the Uchiha clan.

He just needs to know that there will be no coup, and that Danzō is gone. He doesn't want any more details. He doesn't even care that Danzō destroyed Shisui's right eye to not let anyone retrieve it. Danzō's name is too big of a trigger for him to care.)

It takes years for Shisui to finally feel like a somehow functioning human being once again. To be able to walk in the village without flinching away from anyone who gets a bit too close for comfort, even if it happens on accident.

It's around that time that Itachi asks him what he would like to do, and Shisui finds himself at a loss.

He won't re-join ANBU, and he's sure only about that. But other than that? He doesn't know what to do with this life he had been ready to throw away.

It's Inoichi that tells him that the academy might use someone to take over Mizuki's now empty spot, after the mess with Naruto and the stolen forbidden scroll has passed, and Shisui is like- might as well. He can just decide to nope out of the situation if he doesn't like it, after all.

[uchihashisui-kun]

Shisui survives the fall into the Naka river, but he's deeply messed up and traumatized after that.

He can't stand to be too high up from the ground, he flinches away whenever someone tries to go for his face, be it to tuck a strand of hair behind his ear or to caress his cheek or give him a playful buff on the nose, and he absolutely cannot get anywhere near running water.

The bath is fine, the water is still and shallow and nice and warm, but every kind of river is completely out of the question. Whenever he jumps from a tree branch to the other he's afraid of falling to the ground, whenever he's in the forest and has to hunt down some food he takes twice as long because he won't go fishing.

The mask is nice though, it hides his face, it protects it.

Only three people know why Shisui has so many new triggers (four, if in an AU where Kagami is around, because I don't doubt that Shisui would tell him the truth about what happened):

Itachi, who was there to see Shisui try and kill himself. The Hokage, who Shisui had to tell the story to. And Inoichi, who personally takes care of Shisui's therapy sessions.

It does go better with time. He doesn't flinch away near as much, and the height he can stand on without having a panic attack increases. He still has some problems with running water, but he's able to go back fishing or walking near the bank of the river, as long as he doesn't have to enter it.

He's pulled away from ANBU, obviously. He's in no mental state to continue with his work. For a while, he's pulled away from shinobi work entirely, and he has to start back again slowly, from D- and C-rank missions that keep him close to the village in case something happens.

At some point, Shisui would have to admit that he cannot go back to how his life was. He will never go back in ANBU, obviously, he doesn't even think about it, but also just a regular jōnin. The idea of taking A- or some of the easier S-rank missions makes him sick. He doesn't want to have to fight or kill anyone anymore unless strictly necessary.

This would be an AU where he either takes the path to become an academy teacher, or to become a medic.

The idea of teaching children how to kill and survive in the shinobi world wouldn't sit right in his heart, but he has seen first-hand how terrible that world is and he would be better than any other chūnin teacher. Not because the chūnin can't teach, but because a chūnin very rarely takes A- or S-rank missions, while Shisui has done too many of them and knows very well how they work.

On the other hand, the thought of becoming a medic would be a nice one. Getting to heal and save instead of injuring and killing, taking little to no missions and staying in the village, at least until Tsunade comes around and wants every team to have at least one medic in it, but even then, the medic is not always meant to fight. They can, but they can also stand back and make sure that everyone survives.

Mh... I do like both ideas. I might split the AU in two and expand more on both paths and the different ways they would affect Shisui.