Remember
This one-shot is already about two years old. I just managed now to translate it. So there might be some instances in there that no longer go completely in accordance with the manga so far. But they still worked when I first wrote this story.
Disclaimer: The manga „Naruto", as well as its characters are property to Masashi Kishimoto. They are only borrowed for this story and are not used for the purpose of gaining money.
Remember!
Thunder echoed through the ravine and was thrown back uncountable times by the rocky walls. Its origin lay far up, somewhere hidden between the stacked, gathered clouds, which poured their grief perpetually to the earth; but down here, at the bottom of the world, the senses could easily be deceived. They would also have believed that the thunder came from the depths of the earth itself and announced the nearing apocalypse.
Remember the dead!
Unimpressed by the raging of nature, by its display of its overwhelming powers, a human figure stood at the bottom of the ravine.
It had not stirred as the sun had sunken and the ravine had been filled with shadows; it had not stirred as the dark of the night had become even more sinister with the upcoming storm clouds; it had not even stirred as the first, soft raindrops had turned into a deluge; and it did not stir now, within the most violent havoc of tempest, the fury of the winds whose gathered force could be felt, opposing all logic, down, at the ground of the ravine.
The figure showed no sign of resistance, bore the superiority directed against it, and just by doing that the figure appeared to be the real superior. It seemed the figure knew that no onslaught, no raging could last forever, that there was no endless strength, that the enemy, sooner or later, had to give up, if one was able to stand the ground long enough.
Or it had lost all hope, had no longer any goal and longed for death, waited for its own destruction.
Remember the living!
This patient invader into nature's domicile was a boy, caught between the age of a child and the age of a man. His skin was pale, almost white, seemed to be lifeless, like the skin of a dead. His dark hair and his dark clothes blended almost with his surroundings in this night of storm. Still, he seemed misplaced, like a statue carved from these rocks that had been left forgotten; and due to his immobility, he could actually have been one.
The only sign of life lay in his eyes, red, as if they had sucked up all the blood he had seen. Restlessly, they roamed around the ravine, searching over and over again for any movements; but until now, they had discovered none.
He waited.
Remember the dead!
They created you.
Remember the living!
They shaped you.
He waited for the messengers who should confirm the end of his mission. No matter, which message they would give him, he knew that he had fulfilled the last mission of his life. Whatever was still to come, it would mere jobs, trivial.
This mission, it had been his last one; it had been the bloodiest and most dishonorable of all. He had lost everything in its fulfillment he had once possessed. He had created his own destruction, his own end.
Whenever he closed his eyes, he was still able to see it, the blood he had been shedding, and that he still felt sticking at his hands.
Unfeeling, lost, mindless.
Blood, the source of life, elixir and gift of the gods.
Power over blood meant power over the being it belonged to, the power over its soul. Blood opened a way for mortals to become a god – even if that was lasting only a short time.
Animals tended to avoid blood since it meant death.
Predators were attracted by it and reveled in it. They killed their prey, their victim, and drank its blood first, licking for and over again over the wounds they had caused, so that not a single drop would escape, before they tore it further apart to open up new springs of that red juice.
But regardless how terrible this brutality of animals seemed to be, it was nothing compared to the cruelty of humans. That was what this mission had made him realize, more than any other.
Men were addicted to blood.
Remember the blood!
They praised themselves to be more civilized than other men, and praised their social systems which controlled and tamed the remaining animalistic urges. But, all of that were just lies, created to blind one another, to pull the farce of a sane world, to lull them in the feeling of security and to weaken them in this way, to make them careless and vulnerable. And usually, men were falling to this.
He certainly did not blame children for their naivety and inexperience. On the contrary, he himself wished at times back to that point and would have done anything to keep his own brother from such knowledge, at least for some time still. But both wishes had proofed to be impossible.
At the same time, while thinking those things, he felt sheer despise for those who turned themselves away from this truth, especially when they called themselves shinobi.
Remember the blood,
Sticking to your hands!
All wars, all assaults, all crimes only happened due to this blood-addiction. The endless fight, the desire for bloodline-limits, too, originated from there. It was not man himself, who mattered. His personality, his past were unimportant, meaningless.
All that mattered was blood: from which lineage one came, which value it possessed, how much blood one had already poured, and how much blood one was able to bear.
It was this easy to measure a man.
There was no fate determining everything. Destiny laid within the blood.
Remember the pain
Sawing at your soul!
However, at no other time, he had felt this addiction to blood, this overwhelming power this strong as he had felt it on this his very last mission. At no other time had he fallen so desperate a victim for the insatiable thirst for this red juice.
Quite the contrary was true; if possible he had tried to avoid unnecessary spilling of blood. After all, he had witnessed early the consequences coming along with it. The pain, the grief, desperation. Even if those were just dark, nearly lost memories for him, pictures coming right out of a nightmare, the feeling, the adoption of visual perception towards the emotional basis, had carved itself deep within him.
How old had he been at that time? Perhaps three or four years old? So, were those really his own memories? Or just pictures distorted to horror's images after being fed by adults' narrations?
In the end, it did not matter. Regardless, whether it were memories or not, they could not cleanse him. They could not legitimate his action, or excuse. He had known the truth of spilling blood, or at least had thought so, and still he had ignored it, banned it from his consciousness to fulfill his duty.
For this one task, he had left his very honor behind, had committed treachery, had given in to his blood-thirst.
Remember the blood,
Sticking to your hands!
Remember the pain
Sawing at your soul!
Remember yesterday!
Forget tomorrow!
He had murdered his family. It had been easy and he had the feeling that this fact should concern him, which it did not do. Strangely, he felt nothing when he thought about it.
He, also, had not felt anything as he had killed. It seemed more like he had been standing beside and watching how he had killed one after another. He had not felt disgust about his deed, no remorse, and no pride, too. He had not cared about what happened to his family.
The first body had fallen down, a muffled impact. It had been an elderly woman. She had not seen the attack coming, had not resisted, had been helpless.
In that moment, he still had been one person and just there he had wondered what he was doing. But then her husband had entered the room and had seen him at first, then the blood on his blade, then his dead wife on the floor.
Second victim had fallen down.
When he had left that house again, the sky had clouded itself almost completely in night's darkness. Just one single, dark red stripe could still be seen behind the roofs.
Remember the dead!
He had continued on his way, and the more members of his clan had fallen down lifelessly, the more his mind had seemed to separate: into an observer and one who hungered for blood.
The observer had found the people's actions around him incomprehensible. He had heard them, every single of their words, the pleading he should come to his sense and stop this slaughtering, they were his kin. Their behavior had not been comprehensible.
Why had they still talked while everyone around them had been slain? Why had they not defended themselves? Why had their eyes closed to the truth? Why had they denied his blood-thirst?
Up to the last possible moment, they had hesitated to resist, and, when they finally had been attacking, it had been too late by far. They had not been able to stop him. The blood-thirsty had awoken fully, had hungered for their blood, had become intoxicated by the scene in front of him and had gone farther and farther into ecstasy. He had been the one possessing power. He had been the one deciding. And he had decided for death.
Slowly, he had made his way for the main-building. It had been dark, and the observer had shortly wondered about that before he had turned his attention back to his blood-thirsty companion.
He had gone through the single rooms and finally reached the door, behind that he had thought his remaining family to be.
Remember the blood!
He could not remember how he had killed his parents. They had been suddenly lying before him, dead. In the silence following, his mind had cleared itself; his two faces had become one again, his greed for blood had ceased. He had stood within the shadows looking down on the corpses' silhouettes.
For just a moment, he had thought to see a movement, a mere flickering of the moonlight in the dark room, but he had not been able to focus his attention on that, as hasty steps could be heard out in the corridor leading to this room.
His brother had come, the only one to survive that night.
And the only one, thought the boy while standing in the rain and still searching through the darkness, whom he never would be able to kill. Still, there was the slightest doubt inside his mind if he really had spared him in his savage frenzy.
Two days had gone by since then. He had then, following his instructions, retreated into this ravine waiting for further orders or the confirmation that his mission had been completed.
It had been an order. Still, why had he obeyed? Why had his decision been against his family?
It had been a decision of logic. He had known, regardless of own choice, blood would be spilled. Had he sided with his family, the blood spilled would have been that of innocents – during his family's attempt to regain their hegemony, their reign of blood. It would have been an attack.
Siding against his family had, also, meant spilling innocent blood. But in this case, it had not been out of self-interest. It was a sacrifice for defense.
Spilling blood for attacking or spilling blood for defending?
It had been logical. It was a bizarre, a disgusting logic. The logic of this world.
Someone was approaching him through the veil of rain. His senses were alerted at once, and he tried to recognize who it was. When he was curtained that those were the persons he awaited, he let the blood cease out of his eyes; otherwise, they could take it as some kind of provocation. Now his eyes were black.
'Just like my soul.'
He could not restrain those bitter thoughts.
The strangers made their halt at some distance from him. Surprisingly, there were only two of them: an elderly man and a child, a boy of six years or so perhaps.
This stunned the waiting boy. He had expected a larger group of shinobi, especially those who were more proper when it came to fighting. But who knew; they probably waited hidden, in ambush. But if that should be the case, they must be waiting at the upper edge of the ravine, since he could sense no further chakra close by.
This way of acting was just stupid.
He took a closer look at those two persons. The elderly man was the leader of the anbu. His dark hair showed the first signs of thinning his face held besides the first wrinkles scars. His right eye was covered with a bandage, some old battle damage, which together with the prominent an slightly curved nose gave him the look of an old, experienced eagle that gained victories rather by ruse than brute strength. This man, Danzou, he knew all too well; after all, he had served under him lately, making his conclusions about carelessness most likely seem hastened. No one should ever underestimate Danzou.
The boy, on the other hand, was a complete stranger for him. He had dark, seemingly short hair and just as dark eyes, as far as he could discern that by such weather. The clothes he wore were old and torn in several places, while his composure and the look on his face reflected insecurity. It was visible how much he suffered from the rain. He was completely soaked, as were the waiting boy and Danzou. But in contrast to those two, he seemed to be shivering. Whoever that boy was, he was obviously no ninja, no warrior, more likely a war's orphan. But this circumstance was seemingly about to change in the near future, when he accompanied Danzou. Another child, another innocent soul, pulled down into darkness.
"Uchiha Itachi." Danzou finally spoke and was about to inform the addressed how he was supposed to act further on. Danzou's voice was hoarse like a crow's voice calling its brethren to feast on a wake. "Konoha thus confirms the successful completion of your mission."
Itachi stayed silent and just nodded towards the man as a sign that he had understood while waiting for the old war-veteran to continue speaking. Just for confirming the mission was concluded, Danzou would not have taken up the effort of coming out here himself.
"Uchiha Itachi, you are from now on being accused of high treason to Konoha-gakure. You are said to have extinguished mercilessly one of the village's most important clans, and thus have weakened our ninja-society crucially. If you are ever, from this moment onwards, to enter Konoha or come near the village or to encounter one of its ninjas, you will be treated like every other criminal. You will have to take responsibility for your actions in front of the whole village and will accept your punishment, which is execution. From this very moment onwards, you are announced to be a nuke-nin."
So, for now, they would let him go. Konoha and its honor. But, perhaps, that was just their way of taking responsibility for ordering him to eliminate his own clan.
There was nothing else to be said.
Itachi bowed – low enough to signal politeness and respect, but not low enough to be mistaken as servility, a movement he had to train to perfection -, showing for a last time this way that he accepted the instructions.
Danzou turned for leaving, but the boy he had brought along did not move and kept looking at Itachi.
Just for a moment Itachis considered taking the child along with him, freeing him out of Dnzou's fangs. But what right did he possess for such action? He was a murderer, and he himself did not know exactly what awaited him. It might be more harmful for the boy if he took him along.
But if Itachi wanted to be honest with himself, that consideration had nothing to do at all with the child. It had just been egoism speaking within him, a desperate attempt to lessen his blame.
Still, could he really let that boy go away like this? Should he really hand him over to destiny without a warning?
Without noticing it himself, the words he directed at the boy just formed: "Remember the dead!"
Itachi himself did not understand what those words were supposed to mean, he did not even know why he had spoken them, just that they seemed strangely familiar for him.
Danzou had turned around again, when he had heard Itachi's voice, and now looked at him questioningly. But Itachi did not answer. He showed no sign of raising his voice again anytime soon; so Danzou turned towards the boy: "Come now!"
Both went away.
Itachi was alone again in the ravine, in the rain. There were not a lot of things that remained to be done.
His past laid lost behind him, a of rubble made of memories. He just could head forward, into the future by turning towards the forgotten old days that had come closer to a their return by the destruction of the past.
That was where his way led him now.
And thus, Itachi set out on his journey into a black morning, while wind and rain seemed to whisper all around him.
Remember!