Pairing(s): MikotoxItachi ? , MikotoxFugaku
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
A/N: An Uchiha story that I wrote purely from inspiration, which means "Yay!" I had this one line pulsing through my head for like three minutes straight, so I forced myself to whip out the laptop at 2am and pull up Word. This came tumbling out of my head... 0.0 . Makes me wonder what else is in there....
Warnings: It's a little dark.
It was the kind of thing that made her want to glare at him. The undeniable fact that she was his mother, for ninja's sakes, was the only thing that halted that feeble intention and forced her to smile sweetly at him instead, hints of lies and secrets and sickness behind her perfect lips, behind her eyes, eyes that he shared.
It was also the kind of thing that made her want to throw the half-washed kettle at him and laugh hysterically at the look on his face when it struck between his eyebrows, and he would stare, shocked, at his mother, as she laughed, and thought instantly that it would all turn out to be a dream. Then a blush would spin into her cheeks as she kicked that thought away, blaming it on a typical woman's occasional bout of invisible insanity, and would proceed to mentally slapping herself for wanting to do such a thing to her son. How sick and strange could you get?, she would think. On the outside, her son would only see a twitch in the shoulder, as if shrugging in reply, and then a casual blush as she turned back to dish duties.
Mikoto had not given in to insanity (as her mother had, so easily and so early on in life), and she refused to at any point in her living years. She didn't know what she would do if her mind was plagued with the outlandish -- out of place, how dare you think to think those things -- thoughts of glares and gritty kettles and the look on her offspring's face, to find that the thought had been thought out of pure delusional enjoyment. It made her sick to imagine those things in the first place, for it was like tainting the image of her stoic boy and her own loving nature, and it made her even more sick to imagine imagining those things for the rest of her life.
This is why she fooled her own mind into thinking that she was innocent, that she had never been a ninja in her life, and that she loved her family and needed them like she needed breathing and oxygen. Truth screamed that she had endured too many a freezing, blistering night in the pool of her comrade's blood to be innocent, the memory too real for her to not have experienced it with a hitai-ate knotted firmly around her forehead. Truth tried to tell her that she did not love as much as a mother should -- how could she? Her boys would grow up to die in battle and her husband already had his funeral plotted out perfectly -- and that if they suddenly ceased to exist, she could keep living, much unlike her relationship with oxygen; it was not a matter of how much she needed them, it was simply a matter of reality and it's encompassing psychology.
Fooling herself made it easier to prepare for moments like this, when it was only her beautiful son and her alone in the kitchen, he sitting at the table with a bowl of miso soup, she at the sink, bowls clanking under a relentless stream of water.
"Mother?" said Itachi to gain her attention -- attention he already had too much of -- in such a way that made her eyebrow twitch. She would have liked it much better if he just called her 'mom', like his little brother did.
"Yes, Itachi-kun?" She knew he didn't much like honorifics -- it was her mouth's unconscious way of getting revenge.
"Why is the Academy so easy for me?"
It was this type of questioning his own abilities that made her mind flip in snaps of insanity, the type of thing that made her want to glare at him. She smiled sweetly at him, her own way of lying to protect him -- from what, not even she would ever know. "Because, dear, you're different. I have told you this before. You will surpass all of us. It would be silly not to grasp that happily and run with it…."
When he nodded, her shoulder twitched and she turned back to the sink.
She could have easily translated her own words into this: Because you're a freak of nature, something that's going to end up making the rest of Uchiha cringe in humility and jealousy and it will be the downfall of us all. I'm glad you are what you are, for this clan needs a reality check, but truly listen for once, Itachi, and stop questioning your gifts! It's sickening -- you have abilities that none of us do, and yet you ask 'why?'! Just take them and be happy! Damn you and that I am so jealous and proud. But it was a translation nested in the back of her head, the part that she had replaced with a false personality of loving, giving, and kindness. Reality said she was every bit as outgoing and fun and sarcastic and flawed beyond pure recognition as her husband used to be. But that personality had to be cast aside when they entered the real ninja world, and even more locked up in the back of their minds when they entered post-nin parenting, when they entered real Uchiha politics.
It's because of that locked-up, cast aside personality that Mikoto thinks she will eventually give in to it, and she will name it insanity, and that's what her family -- namely, her prodigy son and his successor -- will tell everyone who asks why she is acting the way she is. It makes her cry often, and the crying makes it (sickeningly) easier to soften her expression every day and care for her offspring. She cries because she is scared of the revelation that came with parenting age -- that when you cast away who you are, your feelings and your dreams and your mindset, whether it be to enter the ninja world or the world of umbilical cords, it does not leave you and it never will, and it will return to kick you in the lowest cheek and infest its way back into your brain. She doesn't want it to happen. It frightens her where nothing else does.
When her prodigy son, the one born with perfection, learns of the coup d'etat planned by his own blood and becomes a double agent, and when he holds the blade to Mikoto's throat with a miserably shaking grasp, she is relieved.
She smiles at him in the way she always does, but this time, there are no hints of lies and secrets and sickness beneath and it is merely real, and Itachi would rather have watched her bawl for him and beg him to spare her. This was the type of smile that sent him into bouts of insanity later on, and made him throw up often in tiny moments of depression, much akin to the way she cried often and used it to perfect her façade. This was the moment that put the final nail in the wall and gave Itachi the ill strength to live in order to die, wearing a façade congruent to his mother's and never letting anyone know how much of a perfect hero he was.
When the blade bites into her jugular, she is staring into her own eyes, only -- and this is the first and last time she will notice this -- whereas her eyes were the kind of Uchiha black that seemed poured into molds and forever swimming in a pool of a feeling she cannot remember at her last moment, her son's eyes, Itachi's eyes, are burnt. They are charred, and they are made of fire and earth, a blackened magma steaming and yearning to bleed; they are an Uchiha black of aging coal combined with steel, which is black metal but it does not match him.
He is a burning man.
His eyes are burnt, and it is with this thought that her mind pours into her soul, which gives her the last thought of an image of her family, and then her soul pours (seeps) into the tatami mats and she is dead.
Itachi watches her eyes fade, realizing that her empty orbs had been molds for over-heated coal -- or a kind of black steel that had already stopped burning and had settled for melting into her irises, surrounding her pupils with a color familiar to them. He watches as the past-burnt Uchiha black pours out of her eyes, and life leaves her, and he wonders where her liquid soul will rest. Something tells him she didn't mind dying by his hand, but when his stomach lurches at the thought, he turns the blade on his father, who starts to ask, with an Uchiha air of arrogance, "Why?"
It's the kind of thing that made him want to glare at him.