Here it is: the long-awaited sequel to Spectral Eyes! (Well, maybe long-awaited for me). If anyone hasn't read Spectral Eyes, White Moves First can be read as a standalone title, but some allusions to events that happen during the previous story might stump you.
Also, for anyone who has read Spectral Eyes, I am making a few definitive changes to the background of this AU. The first is that the Hyuga and Uchiha families have a little more interaction than I first implied in Spectral Eyes. The second is that I will officially be changing the kind of ghost the Akatsuki are (i.e., the ghosts of serial killers). The particular group will still be called Akatsuki, but instead of referring to the type of ghost, the ghost of a serial killer, as an "Akatsuki draugr", they will now be referred to as wraiths. I'm sorry for any confusion this causes, but it's something I've wanted to do for a while because Akatsuki the way I've been using it just doesn't work.
Well, that should be it, folks! Happy reading and enjoy the next installment in the Spectral Eyes saga!
Addi out!
Itachi's heartbeat thundered in his chest as Kisame pulled him down the hallway at a leisurely pace, paying no mind to the intercoms placed at regular intervals on the walls blasting out the warning for a code silver: a suicide attempt. His palm was sweaty in Kisame's grasp, even though the bandage was wrapped securely around it, slicking up his hand as he fought to keep his stride even and his face impassive. Even though the alarm was blaring loudly around them and he heard the footsteps and felt the movement of the air from several people running past him down the hallway, they kept walking calmly, without hurry, but they felt it was more likely to succeed than running pell-mell down the hallway and attracting the attention of everyone they passed. It was a calculated risk, but the plan they'd decided on counted on their deception buying them just enough time to make it out of the psychiatric ward before the doctors discovered Itachi was missing and the ward went on lockdown.
"How close are we?" Itachi asked in a low voice, quiet enough that only Kisame would be able to hear it over the alarms.
"Almost there," Kisame answered in an equally low voice, his hand tightening around Itachi's briefly. "Just a few more steps, and we'll be through the doors of this ward and into the general hospital."
A sharp intake of breath shocked Itachi's lungs with the smell of disinfectant and the sweat it tried to cover up. He was almost out, almost free; it was almost too good to be true. It was too good to be true; it was just too easy. Something should have happened by now to make their plan go awry. And if it hadn't yet, it would soon.
Sure enough, Itachi heard Kisame give a quiet curse and abruptly start to tug him in a different direction. "What is it?" Itachi hissed under his breath, feeling his heartbeat skip in trepidation.
"There's too many people; we won't be able to make it through," Kisame hissed back just as quietly, steering him down another hallway. "We'll have to take the side elevator down."
Itachi was about to ask how that would affect their plan as a whole, but stopped himself just in time. Kisame had been born and raised in an environment conducive to activities like this; it would be best for Itachi to just let him think it through himself.
"This is the elevator," Kisame said eventually, which was really only a few seconds later but felt like much longer. He let go of Itachi's hand in order to punch some buttons on the elevator control panel. "We're almost there; just a few more seconds-"
There is no way we can be this lucky-
"Hey! You there! What are you going?"
Called it.
His mind racing, Itachi turned around and fixed his nonexistent gaze above the footsteps of their assailant. "What do you want? He asked coldly, silently begging Kisame to follow his lead.
Luckily, the man stopped at the sound of Itachi's voice several paces away, giving Kisame a little more time to catch onto his plan. "Why are you leaving that way?"
"Why do I have to leave at all?" Itachi bluffed, crossing his arms over his chest and pointing his nose in the air. "I don't see why I should have to cut my visit - my scheduled visit - short because some damn alarm goes off for some lunatic I'm not even here to see! The nerve of this hospital, I tell you!"
A heavy hand settled on Itachi's shoulder as he heard the elevator doors sliding open behind them. "Sir, I've already explained this to you," Kisame said reproachfully, and Itachi's heart leapt a little in relief. "Our policy clearly requires that all non-employees be evacuated from the facility during an emergency. You have to leave."
Raising his noise even further into the air, Itachi snapped, "Your employers will be hearing about this!"
"I don't doubt it." Kisame's grip tightened on Itachi's shoulder. "I'm sorry, but could you let us go? I'd like to escort him out, and the front entrance is blocked."
"Why do you have to escort him out?" The voice asked, sounding even more suspicious than before, and Itachi's heart reflexively jumped into his throat.
"Exactly!" He snapped even more forcefully to cover up his nervousness, shaking Kisame's hand off his shoulder. "I don't understand why this monkey feels the need to escort me all the way out of the ward just because I threatened not to leave when he told me to! Unbelieveable! This is an invasion of privacy!"
"Ah." The voice grew smug, satisfied with Itachi's answer. "I see. Carry on."
"What?!" Itachi gasped with mock fury. "I thought you were going to stop him, I thought-"
"Oh, be quiet; I'll see to it that your visit gets rescheduled." Kisame grabbed Itachi's arm and pulled him backwards into the elevator. "Thanks for your assistance."
"No problem."
"Unhand me, you wretch!"
SCREECH! "CODE BLUE! CODE BLUE! LOCKDOWN THE UNIT! I REPEAT, CODE BLUE! LOCKDOWN THE-"
Click.
The elevator doors shut.
Tinney elevator music, a soft jazz version of a song Itachi didn't recognize was playing in the elevator, a stark contrast to the blaring code blue alarm. A strange mixture of nervousness and relief bubbled up in Itachi's chest, forcing an almost hysterical chuckle up though his mouth that mixed with the soft-shoe-like music. Beside him, he heard an answering nervous laugh, and Kisame's hand grasping his arm tightened slightly.
"Holy shit, I can't believe that actually worked."
"You're telling me?" Kisame gave another shaky laugh. "I can't believe you managed to talk us out of that. That was brilliant."
Itachi allowed himself a small moment to bask in the praise. "Thank you. Who was that, anyway?"
"You didn't recognize him?" Kisame's voice was incredulous.
"No." Itachi frowned in annoyance. "I'm blind, remember?"
"Sorry, but I thought you might recognize his voice. That was one of the more high-ranking doctors, the doctor in charge of all patients recognized as stable after coming out of a period deemed as high risk for self harm. Ergo, he as your main doctor."
A bolt of pure fear shot though Itachi, and he felt his legs start to shake. "Wh- what!? How did he not recognize me?"
"Well, you do look very different in the clothes and without your bandage. I'd have a hard time recognizing you myself, if I didn't know it was you. Besides, people see what they expect to see. I doubt he'd ever suspect that the man he used to sedate into unconsciousness could be someone like you are now." Kisame's grip on Itachi's arm loosened slightly, changing position before tightening again, signaling that their floor was close. "Are you ready to run?"
"As I'll ever be."
"Good. We're going straight, then a hard left, down some stairs almost immediately, then out a window. There'll be someone there to catch you."
Itachi was about to nod his agreement when a single word in Kisame's statement caught his attention. "Wait, a window!? We're breaking out through a window!?"
"Did you expect we'd just waltz out through the front door?" Ding! "Don't question it- just run!"
Itachi felt a rush of fresher air on his face as the elevator doors opened, then a harsh tug on his arm as Kisame pulled him forward and they started running. Here, too, an alarm was going off, but it was softer, less grating, simply informing the doctors on this floor that another floor was experiencing an issue. So far, it appeared that the news of their breakout hadn't been passed down to the lower levels yet - perhaps they hadn't yet realized that they'd made it off the floor for the psychiatric ward before the code blue alarm had sounded and the lockdown initiated - but that probably wouldn't last much longer.
"Left!" The sudden order came with a violent yank on Itachi's arm, pulling him to the left and causing him to half-stumble, half-fall down a short set of steps.
"A little more warning might have been nice," he remarked dryly as he righted himself and kept running.
"Sorry." Kisame came to an abrupt stop, causing Itachi to run into him. "And for that, too. Here's our exit."
"A door?" Itachi asked hopefully, but his hopes were dashed by Kisame's next words.
"Window."
"This was not part of the plan I agreed to!"
"Last minute change."
"What floor are we on?"
"The second."
"The second- Kisame, you are not throwing me out a second story window!"
"Oh, yes I am." There was a strange sound, as if Kisame was dragging something heavy across the floor. "If you want to get out of here, I am."
Without warning, Itachi heard a screech and felt a rush of true fresh air, as if something heavy had been lifted off the floor and thrown, then the sound of shattering glass and the blaring of an alarm.
"Kisame!" Itachi shouted to be heard over the alarm, pressing his hands over his ears. "What did you do?!"
"Created an escape route." A note of warning crept into Kisame's voice. "You agreed to this plan, Itachi!"
"That was before I knew it included throwing me out a second story window!"
"Itachi!" Kisame grabbed Itachi's shoulder and gave him a hard shake. "We have less than thirty seconds before security pinpoints our location and comes rushing down that corridor-"
"Because you broke the window!"
"-and unless you want to go back and be placed under even tighter security than before, we jump now!" Abruptly, Kisame's voice and hands softened. "Itachi, there's someone outside waiting for us. Don't you trust me?"
The words gave Itachi pause. His trust, both the trust he gave and the trust he received had been put through a grueling process that morning. It wasn't fair that Kisame knew his weak points.
"Of course I trust you," he said quietly, not sure if Kisame could hear him over the alarm but knowing that he could predict his answer anyway.
"You, there! Stop right there!"
The shout echoed down the hallway, galvanizing the pair into action. Kisame, not wasting time waiting for his consent, pushed Itachi toward the shattered window - which, judging by the size of the rush of wind on his face, was a large ceiling-high glass wall - then shoved him out the window and into the open air.
The world seemed to freeze around Itachi. His fingers searched for something, anything to grasp onto, his ears tried and failed to hear anything but the rush of moving air, his senses of taste and smell were useless in gathering any meaningful information about his surroundings - he was, completely and utterly, blind, and truly understanding for the first time in his life how vulnerable that made him. Without his sight and cut off from his other methods of data collection, he was unable to tell anything about his surroundings, from complex things like the nature of the sky above him to the simple fact of how far away he was from the ground. And it terrified him.
For a second longer, Itachi felt like he was suspended in the black expanse of nothing that stretched out indefinitely on all sides of him, then gravity took hold of him and pulled him down, down, down into the maw of darkness. He wanted to scream, but pure, abject terror and the force of rushing air had stopped the function of his lungs. The fall seemed to last for a lifetime, or perhaps an eternity, though Itachi knew it couldn't have been more than a few seconds before he felt the rough sting of a net bite into his flesh and his descent abruptly slowed.
The sunglasses precariously perched on Itachi's nose fell off and skittered out of his limited range of perception, leading to a different and altogether more terrifying sort of panic sending a shot of pure adrenaline into his bloodstream. Curling up on himself, he slammed the heels of his palms over his empty eye sockets as he felt multiple pairs of hands pulling him from the net, terrified that their owners had seen his face and knowing by the hesitating way they touched him that they had. Wincing, he tried to pull himself away from the grasping hands that had helped him up, but was foiled by a set of arms stronger than he was expecting.
"Don't be worried," a voice said startlingly close to his ear, causing Itachi to jump. "Boss Kisame told us what to expect."
Boss Kisame? It felt strange to hear him referred to as that, but Itachi supposed he should have predicted it; Kisame had agreed to go back to his father's - now his - gang in order to escape the rival gang after him and get Itachi out of the hospital.
Grunts of pain and the sound of a body collapsing to the floor echoes out the window Kisame had just thrown Itachi out of, followed by the sound of a large body leaping from the window and landing solidly next to Itachi.
"How are you?" Kisame asked, laying a hand on Itachi's shoulder. "They caught you alright?"
"Never… Never…" Itachi stuttered, his legs shaking so hard, his knees weakened and collapsed, leaving him to cling weakly to Kisame's frame. "Never do that to me again! I thought… I thought…"
Kisame tightened his grip reassuringly on Itachi's shoulder. "It's okay, Itachi. I'm sorry; I won't do it again. But you're safe now, and that's all that matters."
"I wouldn't go making those kinds of claims just yet," a voice called from several paces away, followed by the cough of an engine starting. "We need to get out of the city first."
Shouting abruptly erupted from the window Itachi and Kisame had just escaped from, and Itachi felt Kisame tense beside him as the sound of sirens began to wail in the distance.
"You're right, and I think that's our cue to leave." Kisame joked tensely, then pushed Itachi towards the purring engine. "Get in the car."
The sound of a car door opening close in front of him made Itachi jump slightly, but the steady pressure of Kisame's hand at the small of his back propelled him forward. He ducked his head instinctively as he entered the car to avoid knocking the top of his skull against the metal frame, his body taking over and performing the task it had performed thousands of times already - before he had lost his eyes - without the aid of his sight.
As soon as he was seated in the car, Itachi heard the door slam shut behind him, then the driver's seat door open quickly and just as quickly close. Two answering slams were heard from the passenger side door and the door across from Itachi's seat, and as soon as the last one shook the frame of the car, the driver slammed the car into drive and took off with a squeal of tires on the pavement before any of them even got the chance to buckle their seatbelts.
Itachi was thrown against the back of his seat by the force of the acceleration before being abruptly jerked forward by a reversal in said acceleration, then thrown backwards again and to the side as the car took a sharp turn. A large, gentle hand Itachi recognized as Kisame's grabbed his shoulder and held him steady while the other fastened his seatbelt, providing him some stability in the wildly jerking car that felt like it was weaving through rush hour traffic at a daring breakneck pace. He didn't realize his hands were shaking until Kisame grasped both of them in his large hands.
"Itachi?"
Itachi didn't respond; he was too busy experiencing the things around him. When they had been escaping, he hadn't had time to just listen and feel the things surrounding him, but now that they were in the car, rocketing away from the horrid hospital, it finally hit Itachi: he was free. He wouldn't ever have to go back to his padded room with the stale air and the bland food and the ever-present egocentric doctors. Instead, he was here, with Kisame, and he was free. He pulled one hand from Kisame's grasp and trailed it down the seat in front of him, feeling the exquisite texture of the rough, patterned leather on his fingertips, bereft of feeling anything except clinical hospital surfaces in years.
"Itachi?" There was a slightly higher note of urgency in Kisame's voice, and Itachi felt the large man grab his face and force him to turn toward him. "Are you… okay?"
Itachi sucked in a deep breath, his throat catching. He reached up and mirrored Kisame's movement, touching the other man on the cheek.
"I… I'm fine," he finally managed to say, his heart beating faster than normal, free from the constraints of the heart rate monitor. "I'm more than fine… Kisame, I'm free! I just… I just…" The breath in his lungs catches again. "It's just… at times like these… I wish I still possessed the ability to cry."