Fandom: Naruto
Title: Lost Cause
Author: hana-akira AKA rurichi
Genre: General, Angst
Character: Uchiha Shisui, Uchiha Itachi
Rating: 17+
Warning: OOC, doesn't-really-follow-Canon
Prompt: Sharingan eyes, the height of one's capacity, blindness, the fate of the Uchiha, lost causes, and the mysterious Uchiha Shisui. Because we've all wondered how Itachi beat Shisui.
Summary: Because the Uchiha Clan is a lost cause and everything that's in it, even the children, are one, too.
A/N: Switches constantly from third person to another third person. By the way, implied!ShisuixItachi and implied!ItachixSasuke, but very subtle.
—
My brother, my brother, do you see, do you see?
Everything is going to die and so will we.
—
The Uchiha Clan is a lost cause.
It's not obvious when you first look at it, because it's one of the old clans, one of the clans with an ancient history behind it that's been going on for years now, so long that even the people on the outside know their names. But it's true.
It's their fate to be a lost cause, a complete failure, and there's nothing anyone can do because it had been written in the stars, tattooed in their veins, and embittered into their blood. It's signs, little signs that give them away—a particularly cold shoulder, an otherwise hidden and resentful glance, stoic faces, blunt yet truthful words said at the wrong time, and long list of other things which would have been normal in anyone else unless they were an Uchiha.
They're monsters with spinning red eyes in carefully stitched human skins and there's nothing that any of them can do to change it. They are like time, always moving but their base purpose never really changing, like the sun which will always rise from the east or the color of the newly fallen snow always being white. They cannot evolve, cannot become more than what they already are, and it's obvious to anyone who looks hard enough that this is their fate and curse to never be free.
They are a lost cause and it's inevitable that they will all fall.
—
Sometimes, he wonders if there's blood in his eyes. And sometimes, he wonders if he's blind, too. It's weird, knowing that his eyes go from black to red in an instant (Sharingan Red Black Pinwheel eyes—), and that he doesn't really think he's necessarily blind in the physical or conventional sense, but more in the emotional and mental sense (Since, you know, Itachi was always telling him that he put his foot in his mouth and that he always leapt before he looked.) He wonders this from time to time, more fleeting than the wind, drifting like the clouds on a sky blue day.
(Secretly, though, he knows that he's both. Knows it like a gut instinct in his stomach or when the hair at the back of his neck rise when something untoward is coming. It's not natural, he knows, and it's scary, truth be told.)
Uchiha Shisui wonders, but his thoughts wander too far for him to really do anything about them.
(There's blood in his eyes, red and black blood, and it blinds him, stinging and throbbing like a heartbeat that won't stop. His thoughts morbid and dark, like a black cancer that spreads like spilled ink on a blank piece of white paper.)
His name is Uchiha Shisui and his thoughts are filled with blood.
—
The Uchiha Clan is a lost cause and Uchiha Shisui loves it. Loves it like how a mother loves her newborn child, like how God loves all of his creations. He loves the Clan from the bottom of his heart and his heart is like a well that's always filled.
It's an unconditional love, irrational to the point of grief and born from just feeling, but he truly and sincerely loves it so much that he would live and die for it. There is no extent to his love—no limit or boundary—and it is as endless as the universe and the sky above them all.
He loves his aunts and uncles, his mother and father, his cousins, his grandparents—he loves everyone in the Clan and he even loves the beautiful red and white fan which is the symbol of their family.
They're dysfunctional, an absolute mess, but they're real and there and that's enough for someone like him. They're odds and ends, bits and pieces, defective and rejected material, puzzle pieces which would never really fit together to become the bigger picture. They don't fit, not like the rest of the Village, and not like the rest of the people in their little boxes and squares, but they're alive and breathing like actual human beings. It's enough.
They are a lost cause and Uchiha Shisui loves them.
—
Itachi doesn't love the Clan and Shisui understands. He understands more than he should.
It's not that Itachi doesn't love some parts of the Clan—he loves his little brother Sasuke, and he has some sort of affection for both of his parents, but it's the rest of the Clan he can't stand. The Council and the Elders, their cousins which blatantly show their jealousy and greed, and many others which strut their sins out like they're out drying their laundry. It's obvious and they're absolutely shameless in their indecency, but there's nothing either of them can do about it without making it worse (There are some sicknesses that are self-inflicted and you can't really help anyone unless they actually want to help themselves, first.)
He understands Itachi's hatred like the rising sun, like the sinking sand in the deserts. The hatred will always come up like how the sun would always rise from the east and it would grow so much that Shisui knows Itachi will practically sink in it like quicksand. He understands enough for the both of them and then some and never really says anything about it because it's already hard enough for him to love the Clan without breaking down and crying. After all, the Clan was a lost cause. Shisui knew this. But that didn't mean he didn't still love it.
(He wants to change them, help them to become better people and model citizens, nurture their righteousness and their sympathy, but he knows that they'll never change—they're still, stagnant, and if there's one thing that Shisui has learned from history of humanity it's that humans never learn from their mistakes or their successes.)
He loves the Clan, he really does, but it takes all that he has to not turn his eyes away, away from this beautiful yet withering sight of the Clan, of his only family—
('Babe, I love this place with all my heart, but I can't stay and watch as it all falls apart,' his traitorous heart whispers, in the dead of night, and it takes everything and nothing to not look at the others and feel guilty about his less than pure thoughts.)
The decay is slow and painful, drawn out like some kind of twisted form of torture, and Shisui understands perfectly why his cousin cannot love the Clan at all as a whole.
(He never asks Itachi if he loves him, not when they first meet and start to get to know each other and definitely not when they're supposedly older and wiser. He may understand Itachi's hate, but even he has limits for his own socially impaired emotions. He's afraid that the answer would be "No," and he honestly doesn't want to know how he would react if the one he considers his little brother rejects his love for him.)
—
Itachi's eyes could see his own hate, but his mind doesn't know what to do with it. Shisui could see it, too (He was his best friend, after all), but he didn't have a solution, either, because the fact was that you couldn't solve it.
("How do you explain color to the blind? How do you explain music to the deaf?" Shisui asks Itachi and both know immediately that the two things that had been asked are rhetorical questions.)
The concept of hatred is vague, more obscure than the smoke from an opium pipe, but more rooted than a tree's roots or a tumor. Neither can really explain it even though they both understand it and so Itachi ignores it in favor of another question.
"How?" The hate in Itachi's eyes temporarily replaced by a quiet curiosity as he leans his arms onto the wooden railing of the vermilion bridge they're on.
Shisui smiles at Itachi, his smile too wide with the sun setting behind his back, amused and indulgent as a grandfather would be when humoring his favorite grandchild. "I've got good eyes," Shisui croons, and he leaves it at that (Such a wonderful pair of eyes, eyes that are forever doomed to bleed tears of black and red.)
Itachi looks at the older boy, a deadpan stare at the sparkling grin on his best friend's face, and doesn't believe him.
—
Their days are long but their days together are longer.
It's filled with missions, time Itachi spends at home playing with little Sasuke, or just them spending their free moments with each other. Peaceful moments, downtime before the next big movement, and they spend it in a tranquility that's hard to find most days.
Their backs are against the trunk of a tree, the sky blue with clouds and sunny.
It's days like these that makes Shisui forget that the Clan is a lost cause, days where everyone around them is smiling and there's actually nothing to worry about for once. But there are limits to these kinds of things, even things like happiness. So it's only natural that when Itachi talks about peace that Shisui keeps things realistic and in perspective.
"Peace in death," he says softly, his smile faint as though he was remembering some far-off memory.
("Birds of a feather flock together," Itachi murmurs like a gentle river. 'Birds of a feather fall together,' Shisui's mind quietly corrects. They are birds, crows and ravens and vultures, harbingers of death and despair and scavengers at heart, and it's times like these that Shisui wants to ask Itachi, "How far will you go? How high will you fly? What is the height of your capacity?")
"Peace in death," Shisui gently repeats, like the feeling of fingertips tracing circles behind one's back, and Itachi keeps quiet because the moment between them is like a music box playing deep into the night.
(The sun sets, stars cascading, and they're hopeless dreamers who make plans of a life where they can read each other's thoughts and where their promise of a lifetime would never get caught. They won't get caught in the ladder and it's a fool's dream that they have and share, but it doesn't stop them because they'll get around it.)
—
He wonders if Itachi really knows how much of a lost cause the Clan really is. Wonders if Itachi knows how much of a lost cause little Sasuke is with his "dream" of being a ninja, how much their dead relatives like Ancestor Izuna and Cousin Obito are, and how much Auntie Mikoto and Uncle Fugaku (Itachi's parents, respectively) and the rest of the Clan are with their delusions of grandeur. Wonders if Itachi knows that he's one, too.
After all, the Clan was a lost cause. It's only fitting that Itachi would be one, too.
(And you are one, too, Shisui. You are a lost cause, too. You, with your bleeding heart on your sleeve, golden in its sheen and gleaming with its own inner light from within.)
They are a lost cause and together they'll all fall.
(They're all a lost cause, Shisui knows, so he doesn't understand at all why he isn't crying about it. Itachi never quite comes around in telling him that he's always outside in the rain when he thinks these thoughts and that no one can see tears in the rain. Itachi never has the guts and Shisui never forgives him for it.)
He wonders, but he never asks.
(Misery loves company and they are a lost cause together forever.)
—
It takes one to know one and Uchiha Shisui knows Uchiha Itachi better than anyone else, even better than Itachi knows himself. So it's only logical and natural that he knows Itachi plans to kill him in order to get the Mangekyou Sharingan.
"How did you know?" Itachi questions, his black eyes sharp (Not yet turning into the Sharingan because both of them were saving it for the climax) and his voice low and serious. Their blades press against the other's, silver gleams in the pale moonlight that flit though the foliage and onto them with the sound of the Nakano River churning behind them.
"It's because you want to test your capacity, right?" Shisui's eyes are slits and there is a smile on his lips, like a fox's whose plan has come together or a shark's who has smelt the blood of its next prey (He gives Itachi a reason, an excuse, because Itachi had never been able to think ahead or even lie very well. But Itachi knew how to play along, if nothing else. They played games before—tag, hide-and-seek, go, shogi—they played and so Itachi always knows the rules and guidelines by the time the game ends.)
Itachi doesn't understand that they're one and the same and that it's so easy for Shisui to just smile and close his eyes (Because they both love the Clan, utterly and irrevocably so. It's just that Itachi loves Sasuke more while Shisui loves the whole.)
There's no hope for Itachi, for either them, really, because Itachi understands too little (Only one piece of the puzzle) and Shisui understands too much (The whole picture.) They're hopeless and they're both doomed to fail because both of them are fools in love and lost causes.
(And all Shisui really wants to do is break down and cry, because love is a curse—it hurts, it burns, it aches, and all Shisui wants to do is ask why must they sacrifice, why must they give and take in an endless cycle of hate?)
"Foolish little cousin. You should have known better." He says, smiling grimly at the other, and knows, deep down, that all along he would not get out alive (This is the height of your capacity, Uchiha Shisui, and this is all you'll ever amount to be.)
He wonders if there's blood in his eyes and whether if he's blind or not, and wonders if his best friend will ever know better, will ever know that his little brother (Sweet, cute, little Sasuke whose cheeks were as puffy as a chipmunk's and had such a cheerful voice that it even made him forget sometimes that all he'd ever be was just another Uchiha, another demon in a human's skin whose swirling eyes hypnotized on sight) is a lost cause, too, and that, in the end, there's really no hope for him, either.
The Uchiha Clan is a lost cause and everything that's in it, even the children, are one, too (And it shows in unshed tears, their self-imposed isolation, the walls they build for others to knock down but never falling fast enough, their bitterness and resentment that burns at the touch and is tart in its aftertaste. It's so obvious, so blatant, but everyone's helpless to do anything about it and all the bystanders and onlookers can do is just watch an empire fall and fade away as it eats itself from the inside out in starvation and desperation.)
Uchiha Shisui drowns in a river of his own blood and wants to ask, but will never tell.
("You should have known better, Itachi. You should have known better than to fall into yourself and your own needs.")
—
You cannot see, my brother, my sea.
We have drowned ourselves in our own blood and greed.