Fugaku Uchiha

Off duty, Fugaku favored a plain kimono paired with grey trousers that bore the Uchiha crest across the back. His hair was brown and cut to shoulder length, and his onyx eyes carried pronounced creases beneath them that deepened with his frequent stern looks, a feature Itachi would inherit. On the job he switched to the regulation flak jacket over a black shirt marked on the shoulders with the Military Police emblem, along with shin guards and a dark open-front apron trimmed with white diamonds.

As clan head, Fugaku put the welfare and standing of the Uchiha above nearly everything, carrying his responsibilities with unusual gravity; he counted among the shrewdest security captains the clan had ever produced and could sense a distant observer at a glance. Sasuke experienced him as cold and severe, while the wider clan looked to him as a father figure. Because Itachi was groomed to succeed him, Fugaku poured his attention into his elder son and spared little for the younger, and Sasuke trained relentlessly hoping to earn a share of that notice. Praise came rarely from a man who expected greatness and smiled seldom, and he showed open disapproval whenever Itachi dodged his obligations.

The stern surface hid genuine devotion. Mikoto noted that in private he spoke of almost nothing but Sasuke, though he never grasped how badly the boy longed to be valued as a son rather than measured against his brother. When Itachi turned on the clan, Fugaku still offered him the chance to explain, and once he understood the massacre was meant to spare Sasuke, he and his wife accepted death without resistance, asking only that Itachi look after their youngest. He later carried deep guilt over Itachi's fate, admitting that the burden of the clan's ambitions had robbed a son who might have become the first Uchiha Hokage. In the anime he embodied the Will of Fire, pressing for peace with the village, sparing Kakashi's borrowed Sharingan, and conceding to the coup only with reluctance and a wish to spill as little blood as possible.

Other nations shook at the mere mention of Wicked Eye Fugaku during the Third Shinobi World War, a reputation built on formidable chakra and a talent rare even among the Uchiha. His skill was set beside that of Minato Namikaze and the Sannin, and he was floated as a candidate for Fourth Hokage; Itachi himself hoped never to face him in a fight. A natural with Fire Release, Fugaku commanded the clan's signature Great Fireball at a scale only one other Uchiha could match, and his Sharingan let him read chakra, anticipate motion, and cast illusions. In the anime a comrade's sacrifice during the war awakened his Mangekyō Sharingan, its pattern three dots trailing three curved arms; convinced it could bend the Nine-Tails to his will, he told no one he possessed it.

When peace returned, some pushed for Fugaku to take the Hokage seat, yet the tide turned against his clan after the Nine-Tails rampage, which the village pinned on the Uchiha. The clan was forced to the village's edge, and the resentment that grew there hardened Fugaku toward a coup. He slipped Itachi into the Anbu to feed intelligence back home, unaware that his son had become a double agent working for the village instead. Struck by Itachi's brilliance, Fugaku trained him closely and marveled when the boy reproduced the Great Fireball after a single viewing, and he defended Itachi even when suspicion fell on him over Shisui's death.

Once Itachi lost faith in the clan, the two grew apart, and Fugaku turned to Sasuke, teaching him the family's fire techniques and praising his quick mastery while warning him against walking Itachi's road. In a private conversation he revealed the stone tablet hidden in the Naka Shrine and the Mangekyō he had long concealed, expressing a hope that the uprising could be carried out without bloodshed. When the clan's destruction came, Fugaku recognized Itachi's hand at once. Rather than fight, he and Mikoto told their son they remained proud of him, asked him to protect Sasuke, and let him end their lives; Fugaku was afterward found fallen across his wife's body.