Remember
by Portrait of a Scribe

Prologue: Deterioriation.

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
--Christina Rosetti, "Remember" (1890)

It began slowly, too slowly to be noticeable. At first, it was just a little more fatigue than he would normally feel after training, and he chalked it up to the fact that he hadn't been sleeping. Then it progressed to a painful tingling in his left arm, and it was then that he knew that something was wrong.

He took a trip to a nearby village on one of his missions for the organization, and took the time to disguise himself as a civilian before going to the hospital. It was one of the few times that he would willingly subject himself to such a degrading experience, but it had to be done.

When his partner found him two hours after the meeting, he was sitting in a café with a plate of nori onigiri and boiled cabbage in front of him, though he hadn't so much as touched the food, instead staring blankly into the distance.

It was two months later that he began painting his nails.

When it became clear that he could no longer ignore or fight the pain and weakness that the disease brought, he began taking various steroids and immunosuppressants, antibiotics and vitamins, in hopes that he could, at the very least, beat it into remission long enough to accomplish his goals. Of course, when it also became clear that his little brother was taking his own sweet time with becoming stronger, the realization of the fact that he would not live to see twenty-five also sent a pang through his heart.

At a younger age, he had wanted to be a father. Now, his days were consumed by pain and weakness and the missions that he had to carry out lest his "companions" become suspicious of him. He never allowed that accursed weakness to show, but he knew that the others could tell that something was wrong.

A full year after he confronted his little brother after an exam, he had pushed his disease into remission through the use of the drugs and sheer willpower. The two years after that were spent hunting down jinchuuriki and extracting what bijuu they could from them. Three months before his twenty-first birthday, he saved the life of a kunoichi from his home village. The woman had gotten in the way of an attack that was coming at him during one of his missions. He had just acted after that, pushing her out of the way. A second later, his left arm was in a great deal of pain, and his eyes were burning bright and his vision was spinning as he took out his opponent. Then he turned to the woman, furious, to find that she had taken out another enemy who had been sneaking up on him from behind.

She had nothing left to live for, she told him when he roughly demanded why she hadn't moved out of the way of the attack. Her eyes, a dark violet color, were sad and blank. He had noticed that the pupil of her left eye did not dilate or contract, meaning that she was likely blind in that eye. She told him that her clan was dead and that she had killed her best friend and adoptive mother. She wouldn't tell him why. The only further information she would give him was that she was a fully-trained medic, and about three years younger than he was, and that she had been a nuke-nin since she was fifteen.

Something strange had twisted his heart, then, and at first he thought that it was the strange sense of kinship that he was feeling towards the woman. Then he realized that his heartbeat was arrhythmic, and that the pain he was feeling in his chest was growing agonizing. He had collapsed. She had watched with wide eyes as he had gripped his shirt, his eyes clenching shut with the pain. A second later, he had begun coughing, deep, wet coughs that were torn from the innermost parts of his lungs.

By the time she laid her cool hands on his back and chest, glowing with healing chakra, his free hand had been splattered with his own blood. When she finally stopped and then restarted his heartbeat to allow it to reestablish its normal rhythm, he was sure he was going to die. And when she placed her palms on his chest, brushing aside his cloak with nonchalant ease, he knew that if he died, it would, at least, be a fairly quick death. But then, soothing coolness seeped into his burning lungs, allowing him to breathe a little more freely once again. Blackness had taken him, then.

When he had awoken, it had been to unfamiliar surroundings. The woman had been sitting in a chair beside his bed, reading what looked suspiciously like a medical journal. There was a whole shelf of them lining one of the walls.

He asked her why she had saved him. She replied that she knew who he was, and why he was the way he was. It was then that she had told him her name.

Hana.

It meant flower, and for a long moment, he was lost in the past, his thoughts on a little girl he had briefly known with eyes just like hers who had had no parents and only an older sister to keep her grounded. His voice had rasped terribly as he had mused out loud that he remembered her as being somewhat temperamental.

She had simply half-smiled and told him that time changed all things.

He was silently grateful that she did not say that 'time healed all things', as that would have been a slap in the face.

When he went back to the organization hideout, she had accompanied him, stubbornly insisting that she was intrigued by his illness and wished to keep him under observation. He had not argued terribly much, knowing that, at the very least, her skills as a medic might come in handy and, possibly, allow her to gain the knowledge to aid future victims of the same disease he had.

The next three months had passed in slow agony as he relapsed. The coughing of blood became a regular occurrence. His eyesight began to deteriorate at an exponential rate until he could only see vague, dark blurs when his clan technique was not activated. When he told her that he had noticed his urine becoming darker, Hana nonchalantly informed him that his kidneys were beginning to fail him. He lost weight. His stamina decreased further.

Instead of spending his twenty-first birthday at a bar with a friend or two as most people would have done, he spent it bedridden, struggling to breathe as Hana read to him out of his favorite book.

It was on that day that he made the decision to challenge his brother to a final duel.

Three weeks later, he had beaten the disease into submission sufficiently that he was able to send a message to the Kyuubi jinchuuriki, and to his little brother. He agreed to meet his brother at the old clan hideout to hold their final battle.

He snuck out of the compound in the middle of the night, heading for the secret location of the clan hideout. He was halfway there when he realized that he was being followed. Disguising himself and hiding himself alongside the path, he was not surprised to discover that it was his partner in crime who had been following him. Revealing himself, he told his partner not to allow any of his brother's team to interfere with their battle. Then, upon securing his partner's agreement, they continued on their way.

Neither of them noticed the woman tracking them from three miles back.

When he and his partner parted ways, he found that the waiting was the most difficult part of all. Without Hana there to suppress the pain and distract him from his fate, all he could do was dwell on all of his regrets and on what was to come while he tried to conserve his strength.

Finally, finally, his brother arrived. The conversation that ensued was exchanged while trading genjutsu. Needless to say, he had a lot to get off his ever-tightening chest. Still, when his brother escaped his most gruesome genjutsu, he knew that the time for talk was over; the time for true battle had begun. Back and forth they went, exchanging blows, fire, and weapons. It seemed like hours before it got to the point where he could have ended his brother's life in a single blow.

But he refrained. He lost his cloak in the process, but the technique of both his eyes saved him. When the great snakes burst forth from his brother's body, he wasted no time in killing them all, destroying their controller. He sealed the man away and removed the seal from his brother's body, saving the boy's life, even if said boy did not realize it at the time.

It was at that moment that his body decided that it could take no more. His lungs seized, his heart went into cardiac arrest. He clutched his chest, stumbled, fell, coughing up blood by the lungful.

It was time.

Protected by his ultimate technique from his brother's last-ditch efforts to defeat him, he lurched to his feet and stumbled forward. Every step was a mile, his limbs weakened, body barely able to support him. His clan's technique failed him as he lost his strength. Nearly blind, it took him a moment to realize through the haze of agony that the blur in front of him was his brother. A shaking hand lifted itself, aiming for his brother's head.

The boy flinched back, expecting excruciating agony.

Instead, two fingers landed on the middle of his forehead, just like they often had when the boy was still small, still innocent. A small smile quirked his lips as his vision went dark.

"Sorry, S-Sasuke… It ends… with t-this."

And then everything stopped. The pain faded. Sound vanished. His summon dissipated. His body went numb. Breath, the source of life, left him. The heart in his chest, far too kind and giving for its own good, gave one last, painful lurch, and then ceased to beat.

Uchiha Itachi died.

Disclaimer: And the lawfirms spake, "Thou shalt not own Naruto." And it was so. Unfortunately.

Okay, I feel a bit of explanation is in order. This is the PROLOGUE of a story that I'm rewriting using some of the basic plot and OCs from a story I began six years ago back in 2005. I seem to be doing that a lot, lately, but this started as a break from writing my Assassins' Creed fics, and grew from there. I suppose that this would make more sense if my other Naruto story was posted, but it isn't, as because of today, it is not yet complete, and I have no idea when it WILL BE complete.

A note on Hana: I created Hana before I even knew about Kiba's sister. This is NOT the same Hana, but the name fits my character so well (I feel) that I have no desire to change it. You will learn more about my Hana as the story goes on.

Updates will probably be sporadic. Things are chaotic right now, and I can barely get my head together to write one AC story, let alone a new Naruto one. I have more chapters written for this one, but they might not be posted for a while. Don't expect this to be a long story, either.

Information about Itachi's illness can be found here if you Google the phrase "Itachi's Mysterious Illness". It'll be on the LiveJournal page of 0mega19x.

Next chapter should hopefully be posted soon. Any questions? Send me a PM or leave a review.

-Portrait of a Scribe