Purpose
By xannychan
Disclaimer: Character not mine.
Short A/N: It's more a character study than anything, kind of written on the spot in the middle of the night. This came around in about 27 minutes.
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There are reasons behind the fighter. Fighters are the ones who battle enemies for their families, face demons for their revenge, wrestle nightmares for their dreams. Fighters fight for people and principles—their village, their honor, their lives.
Itachi is not a fighter.
He is the one who destroys because he can, murders because he wants to, slaughters because he has the power to do so. And he can do it all with a clear conscious, because he needs to.
Itachi is a virus. He kills thoroughly, indiscriminately, silently, from the inside out, because he feels it is necessary. To prove his own existence. To feel alive.
Itachi is not a fighter, because fighting implies that there is a struggle, that there are regrets, that there is a real reason. Itachi wastes no effort when he kills. He sees in black and red and thinks in blood and death. Itachi does not do anything with reason but with purpose.
Itachi kills for knowledge.
Why is blood so heavy on his tongue? Why is it that a boy's tears will fall as he dies? Why do people blink for a full ten seconds after a beheading? There are questions about nothing that haunt him, and after all these years he has not found the answers.
The only thing that he has learned so far is that humans bleed black and blood stays far longer on his skin than it does on the bodies of those he kills.
He has yet to find the reason why.