Aphrodite
"Be careful Itachi-chan, the woods have snakes."
Mikoto's words are fading from his mind when the four year old Itachi ambles gracefully (paradoxical, and yet suiting for him) through his spacious backyard, and the Uchiha manor disappears out of his eyesight (as extensive as it is, even as a toddler) as his small feet tread the soft ground, the smell of dead animal unrecognizable just yet in the scent he passes naively as Nasty. (Because even Itachi was once naïve,) – and the dirt is sickeningly, sweetly soft as it takes his awkward weight, one step before the next and a small, cheerful grin on his face.
(He has yet to be corrupted.)
And he says "I'll be alright mother." Before he lets her kiss his forehead, and from there he had stumbled out of the traditional style manor, one not kept up with the times as a business family moves across it dressed in Yukata and Kimono. (He knows not of how strange it is just yet.) And the material of his own, a brown and red that compliments an eye color he will soon have and an essence he always carries with him, an I Aka moon that only he and his cousin Shisui can see just yet. ("What color is the-") but Itachi is still innocent as he treads into the base of the woods, such ones his mother always warns him about, even when he is only going outside to read under the dead Sakura trees, and they are so I proud of him when he does that.
"Good job son."
("Itachi, you're going to be a be a big brother soon.")
The trees tower above him like the city's streetlamps casting lights across his form, and those lights are various hues and colors, blues, reds, and whites that make him different shades of himself under each of them, and maybe that is why Mikoto keeps him out of the city. Maybe that is why Fugaku insists to drag him in. And those same trees cast leaf shaped shadows across his colorless cheeks, for even as a child there is nothing to Itachi except the prettiness and the politeness drilled into him too early. (Much too early. And they will pay.)
He steps into the dense woods, searching for a place to set himself down and the textbook he'd taken from his father's study is in his small left hand, and a tall oak beckons him quietly in all of his innocence and yet distrust. (Paradoxes make so much sense to Itachi.) And there's a cavern of area from where the tree had been torn from the ground during a storm or whatnot that he sits down in, back resting a bit painfully against the ridges of the bark, and he balances the anatomy text on his knees and folds it open.
A soft sigh (-and Tayuya closes her eyes, pressing her lips around her flute and her fingers against the appropriate holes, the noise echoing about the dance hall for her teacher a pleasant and beautiful one that is created from hours of training and dedicated practice. Her hair isn't long yet, and it's all tied back except for the stray lock that falls on the bridge of her nose as it always does, and the Leotard that clings tightly to her five year old form suggests the youth that she has locked away under her instruments and thighs bruised from rape.
The other girls giggle as she plays with an intensity that none of them are mature of them to match, and her nose crinkles in anger, her only restriction from ripping the instrument from her mouth and jabbing it into one of their pretty blue eyes the fact that this is the Flue I he gave her, and she would never taint that flute, because it is precious to her and she can't afford to let it rot. (And that is what it would do. It would rot in the presence of ugly bodies and blood and the million other nasty things that humans have, and she doesn't exclude herself from this. At five years old, Tayuya is tainted.) And she finishes the piece obediently, bowing her head for the polite applause and rude giggling from the other little girls sitting down on the wooden floor.
"A good job, Tayuya-kun."
She blinks and stares at her teacher.
"Thank you, Orochimaru-sensei."
The ride home he gives her as he does every day is melancholy, for when she opens the car door and steps out, her black leotard still on, though her pantyhose harboring a distracting run, she can only nod before she jogs lightly through her front door, all the more prepared to get beaten by her mother and touched by her father as she does every night, and Orochimaru does not have sympathy (he never does) – but something like distant sadness for his best flutist in the class. (Her language grows more and more colorful every day, but she respects him enough to not use the words she learns from her parents around him, and that is something reserved only for him.)
But what is a five-year-old's opinion?
And when her mother is done hitting her until her nose finally breaks again and she begins to bleed and scream and Tayuya runs out the backdoor into the woods, she doesn't care what she's wearing or how stupid or pathetic she looks (though she usually does) – only swearing and grabbing her towel from a tree branch in he front of the density, already stained with blood from the last night and the night before, and all through the night, before her sick father slips fingers inside of her and whispers "Don't say a word, baby girl" she's dodging the-) snakes Itachi has to dissect the first day of his advanced Biology class of ninth grade, and Orochimaru-sensei smiles at him, putting an arm at his shoulder and congratulating him too closely for doing so well. But Itachi is used to it at this point, from different teachers and the cousin he drowned in the manor pool at thirteen. (I love you Shisui.) But he doesn't want to be so any more than the next.
The organs are lined up neatly, charted and diagrammed with an artist's hand he had been blessed with from the time Mikoto gave him a pack of crayons and told him he could draw on anything. He didn't do any intelligible scribbling as most children do, though his works weren't masterpieces, but the talent followed him to the art's High School he was entered into on an island away from the mainland. (Away from the lights.) The heart, the brain, the liver, everything so perfectly removed that his partner, a student with a full-body tattoo that smelled like the sea, had not to do anything.
But Itachi doesn't care.
(He works better alone anyways.)
The classroom files empty when the three-toned bell rings the end of the period, and he slips away from his teacher, pressing his lips together and keeping his eyes (red) forwarded towards the back of the red of the person in front of him. (I am not a-) She utters a curse when another boy walks into her, and Orochimaru is distracted by the beginning of what could be a fight when he slips out into the hallway. Sasori is waiting for him silently, and Itachi greets him with no words or comments, the vile scent clinging to the redhead of blood and the sand not from the island's beaches. (Another sand that he cannot place.) And Itachi is not obsessed with that scent, or the way that Sasori's tongue works or the way he's apathetic to everything and sees I everything .
Itachi is not obsessed. (He doesn't have enough emotion to be obsessed, but the boy interests him enough to hold his attention when he's fucking him against the Janitor's closet wall.)
"Itachi-kun."
Itachi freezes and turns as the girl and the boy walk out, and he turns to his teacher, eyes blank and Sasori is already walking away. (Apathy. Itachi does not need to tell him when to go and when to stay, or anything, because they are too much alike to be together anyways and he knows it will end soon enough. And maybe Orochimaru knows it too.) "Yes, sensei?" And the words come bitter, like the taste of the blood in his veins that seems so very different from the way Shisui's tasted. (His was like Metal. Itachi's is like cum.) Orochimaru's grin would sicken anyone else, but Itachi does not allow himself to feel such things, and that is what is trademark to him.
(He envies Sasori. Unlike Sasori, Itachi can only I pretend he doesn't feel.)
"We need to discuss your work."
On his table, the (-snake is alive in Tayuya's hands, working up her arms in her fascination as she toys with it, for at sixteen, Tayuya has few true things she finds interest in, and fewer that are beautiful. But such is. And Orochimaru smiles at her as he walks through the door, his "Be careful now" slurred with an accent from a country she cannot place, but one that is suiting to him and foreign to anyone who attempts to imitate it. (She beats them up anyways.) And she replaces Manda into his cage, the large Python seeming oddly disappointed to no longer be held when she closes the top of the case.
"You wanted to see me, sensei?" She asks, and the formality in her tone is reserved only for him, because nobody else matters enough to her besides him. And he only smiles and nods to her, beckoning her to him with a finger, and she comes to him without question, because he was the one who stabbed her father to death when she was seven instead of her It was he that saved her from what he was doing, and in effect stopped her mother dead in her tracks, so Tayuya owes him everything and she knows it.
"Yes, Tayuya-kun, I wanted to ask a favor of you."
And an hour later she is ambling out of the classroom, and she isn't crying because she is repeating to herself how he didn't rape her at all, and that it wasn't exactly the same situation she had had with her father. Because Tayuya is a very talented girl, and a very talented liar, and her apartment is a string of curses an-d sour notes through the rest of the night, the smell of sex still on him the next morning when he greets her with a smile and a "Good morning Tayuya-kun."
(But of course it wasn't rape.)
And she knows that no one can notice it the way no one noticed what her father did to her. Because history repeats itself like the bruises on her inner thighs she hides with tall stockings for a body curved in time and attractive to the majority of the boys in her class she hadn't already scared off by fighting them. (Most of them.) And they examine the best student in the class's work, an example set for everyone else who failed to see how the I smart kids do it.
She glares coldly at-) the snakelike smile Itachi receives upon his entrance into Orochimaru's classroom, and a girl is already waiting there, resting against a chair and feet propped up on a desk. And he doesn't make any conversation, only doing the same, waiting for Orochimaru's hands the way he knows precisely this girl is, and it makes him furious in a way he cannot quite describe. And perhaps it makes him furious because he hates women and he hates Orochimaru and soon enough he will hate everything, the way he hates the Uchiha he'd slain during a school week he took on sick leave for a lack of self-control. (Because Itachi is sick.)
"Itachi-kun, this is-" (-"Itachi-kun, and I want you to-") and Tayuya obediently takes off her clothes, while Itachi only stares at his teacher in disgust while Tayuya fights the urge to let herself (-go wild.
A week later she shoves her flute through Orochimaru's left eye and takes a flight home, and upon arrival does-) he amble through the woods, feet so much bigger than they used to be as he gracefully avoids tripping over anything (-the violent tangles of roots over what had once been flat trail confuses her slightly, but she makes it back to-) the tree with the gaping hole where he'd read his father's textbooks (-over and over again she'd venture to, digging through the rotting dead oak to play games and be-) the smartest in the class as he'd always been.
When they arrive the hole is filled with snakes and Tayuya and Itachi can only stare.
He fucks her against the other side, and she loves it.
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I worked really pretty hard on this fic x3 Can someone review it and humor me? I'll be posting lots of fics around now that MY STUPID HAS DECIDED TO W O R K A G A I N.