Yōji Aburame

Robbed of his voice as a child, Yoji learned to force words out through the hum of his insects, but the trick strained him and warped his speech, so he leaned toward silence whenever he could. That quiet suited a life spent in the shadows: he served as a patient, obedient watcher for Danzo Shimura, carrying out surveillance and lethal orders without protest. His long stint tailing Itachi Uchiha was defined by wordless observation rather than any bond.

An abusive father, resentful of the boy's natural gifts, raised Yoji. On his fifth birthday the child spilled juice on the man, who cut his throat as punishment; Yoji killed him in return. Left an orphan and stripped of speech by the attack, he was taken into Root, the Anbu offshoot under Danzo, who trained him to voice words through the insects nesting in his body.

When Itachi enrolled at the Academy, Yoji was slipped in as a fellow student to monitor him and feed reports to Danzo. A year after Itachi graduated, Yoji joined his Team 2, though Itachi soon moved on. Later, when Itachi entered the Anbu's Team Ro, Yoji rejoined under the name Sugaru, ostensibly an ordinary member but secretly charged with keeping Itachi alive. As the Uchiha edged toward a coup, Sugaru trailed Itachi both on duty and in secret, uncovering the plan he shared with Shisui Uchiha to turn Kotoamatsukami on Fugaku. He reported it, then used his insects' venom to incapacitate Shisui so Danzo could seize one of his Mangekyo Sharingan. Shisui fled before the second eye could be taken, yet the untreatable poison doomed him anyway while conveniently dissolving before any autopsy.

Sugaru kept his vigil on Itachi. When Itachi departed the village after the Uchiha's fall, he called out to Sugaru, certain he was being followed. Sugaru doubted anything could stop him and was swiftly corrected: Itachi bound the insects within him using Tsukuyomi, freezing him in place, then loosed Amaterasu to reduce the operative and every insect to ash. Screaming through his swarm as he perished, Sugaru's death finally settled the score for Shisui.

As an Aburame, Yoji sheltered insects that drank his chakra and answered his direction in battle. He carried a particular breed called kochu, whose bite laced a target with a fatal poison that first stiffened the body and then killed, only to vanish afterward and leave no trace for examiners. That made the insects perfect instruments of assassination, as harmless-seeming as mosquitoes yet as deadly as scorpions, and it was precisely this mastery that drew Danzo to enlist him for Root. Yoji also bent the insects' droning sound into imitated speech to work around his muteness, though the effort wore him down quickly.