Fugaku had told his son that family is all that mattered. Itachi heard, "Heirs are all that matter. My bloodline is all that matters.
And there was truth to that. When Itachi was seven, Mikoto began to slide along the walls, looking over her shoulder. His beautiful mother looked so weary, her eyes almost always red. She was waiting for something to attack, something Itachi could not fully sense. There was only father in the halls, watching her.
"Would you like a brother?" Fugaku asked his son. "Someone, to test your power against?"
"I would like a sister more," Itachi said. "Brothers always fight."
Fugaku had laughed as if Itachi knew nothing. "Women are the weaker sex. But they give us what we need... sons."
Mikoto continued to blend with shadows, her eyes becoming deep. She seemed to be flickering out and Itachi worried she was sick. He should have known it was his father who was ill, his father who kept trying to extinguish the flame.
Fugaku had always told Itachi, "Your mother makes beautiful sons. But she is not always willing to listen."
One day Mikoto did not slide down the hall to wake Itachi. She was not in the kitchen or training. Instead, Fugaku said she was on a mission for the clan. She would be gone for a long time. Itachi would be sent to get private tutoring from a friend of the family. Itachi knew it would mean months were gone, months training, months without seeing the one person he loved-his mother.
When he returned to the house, he saw his mother through a chakra laced window. She was sitting in a training dojo, her face so gaunt she was a grimgoil, a creature of the forest. A child's story. Still, it seemed so real right then. He thought she was a specter.
He rushed to her, but was turned away at the door. His father was watching him from beyond the bars of light. A clanswoman, ready for war, gave him a tight-lipped grimace.
"Your mother is with child," she said.
"I want to see her."
"You will see her when the child is born. She is... reluctant."
He was sent to train harder. Itachi went on mission, after mission, wondering if this was the way it would always be? Did his mother stay in a room for nine months with him? He had nightmares about her, locked away, wilting. She makes beautiful sons. Were there others?
Fugaku told Itachi to mind his business. Children often died if the mother was stressed, so Fugaku was preserving the seed. The child. The tree of power that would grow. It would take years for Itachi to understand what Fugaku meant. Mikoto didn't want more beautiful sons, she wanted her body to be her own.
When sickness gripped Itachi, when he was nearly blind from his own blood-power... he understood the look his mother had. She had glanced through the window and seen him. There had been a forced love for the child he was, and the child inside her. He had loved Sasuke the same way, with a fierce protective energy that burdened him.
Fugaku had made it clean to Itachi, Sasuke was wanted... by him alone.
When Itachi managed to find his way to the window, to the prison his mother slept and trained in, she looked so different. Mikoto would be sitting on her futon, looking at nothing through long bangs. Fugaku made sure she was taken care of, by other more obedient women.
She had her long hair brushed, her teeth tended to. She trained, she did yoga, she had friends visit. But there was a hopeless loss in her shoulders. She would have the child. She wouldn't leave until the baby was born. Part of Itachi knew his mother was broken by these walls. She had always been a runner.
Itachi had seen the darkness inside her and he wondered, even after she had passed if Sasuke inherited that anger? He had been such a spoiled, rotten child. He had never seen what people did for him or how he suffered.
She makes beautiful sons. But beauty is subjective and easily spoiled.