Chain

Prologue

AGONY AND SCREAMING---

Dim light rushing at him with a strangling force, the night's starred face heaving on him and blinding him with the magnitude of the white patches, pain howling all around like a roaring hurricane furling, wafting, tearing apart, plucking at the chain, the chain holding him down, attaching him to something heavy and aching, something unwanted, something he wanted to get rid of because these chains filled him with a maddening sorrow, a wretchedness he was so eager to leave behind; but he was the one still holding onto this chain, a shaky fear screaming at the thought of letting go again and to meet—

While the sky of dark grey faded into black and he felt a strong twitch, he heard a bubbling whimper, and the lungs ached beyond all because air refused to reach the throat that was filled with warm fluid, so he hacked and something rolled him over, and he hawked up the blood that diffused under the chin, nose, eyelashes, sticking all these to messy mops of hair.

He heard labored breaths and felt their cold wetness bump back from the ground, and as it started to dawn on him that this was his face, his voice, his very own agony, the sorrow became unbearable, and he felt and heard his own voice yowl in a desperate tone he never knew, and his throat hurt and his blind eyes stung, and the bitter loneliness of hopes lost burst out of him in hiccoughing sobs.

After a moment or an eternity, when the thousandth wave of pain flashed through his trembling lungs, while the pain, the sensation of feeling itself seemed to soothe the ungraspable dread inside, his right arm moved slowly, sliding along the uneven, slippery-sticky ground, unsure what to do first but then finding a hold somewhere close to his chest, and he pushed.

Several centimeters later he was heaving and stinging everywhere, his forehead still pressed to the ground, blood firmly throbbing in his temple, and he thought there was no further. But then he pushed again, he did not decide it beforehand, it reached his senses dimly that he was pushing, wrist trembling, lungs hurting from the heavy breaths, mind recognizing more and more parts of his body as they were forced to move one after the other. While his left elbow helped his upper body lift from the ground, flames and chill fighting over domination around him, he felt lukewarm and cold, half dried drops run along his face downwards, like pearls rolling over his lips, eyebrows, nose, chin. It flashed through his aching mind that it was life leaving him in thousands of tiny pieces and stroking him as a farewell, but it was a mere glimpse without a base, and he found his knees meanwhile, left leg trembling in agony as he attempted to pull it under the machinery supposedly called human body.

Or zombie.

But mostly murderer.

Yeah; where he got it from that it was called that, he was not sure, but it seemed it reached his consciousness – if he had any left – several times.

His muscles jumped at the foreign touch coming from the nowhere, and they gave up all the volatile balance they gained so far at once then, and he fell but there was no into, there was nothing at all any more, only falling and the slimy grasp crawled onto his neck and holding it now maliciously, tickling and slightly squeezing and falling along with him towards something that was not seen, did not even exist, but it was there and it was heavy and it was coming closer with an unthinkable speed.

There was silence, dark – he had been used to dark almost since he got entirely blind – and a smell. As he took a soundless breath, he realized that nothing supported his figure; as he stirred, he found himself in a sitting position, something soft under his lower body, something thin and warm in the grasp of his throbbing fingers.

"Yo."

The soft sound took its time reaching his ears, then his mind. Goosebumps on the back of his neck were somewhat quicker.

He closed his eyes, sensing the world slowly turning around, and he was not in the exact centre. He looked up again before he could have fallen down the bed, and it made everything fly back to its place in an instant, including gravity, silent murmurs coming from outside, the scent he could not yet describe, and the one presence in the room. Chakra was throbbing in his organs as if it did not belong there.

"I'd suggest not using that for too long at first. Not that you wouldn't know better, of course."

Untouched by the shiver caused by this long not heard tone, the sharingan groped around the room, sensing the slight difference of chakra waves in the furniture, the wavering around the window and the door, the concentration of surpassed energy nearby. Sooner than he thought, he had to blink and the magical field of vision faded away by itself. It puzzled him in the unknown surroundings, even if his companion, the person, the abilities, the possible reactions were known to him.

Itachi thought it over; it took some time to grasp what to think over at all, his brain was numb, perhaps number than the rest of his body; even the fact that he woke up to be sitting proved this.

"Am I a hostage?" he asked, but the voice that left his dry and stiff lips was not his own; it was dull, hoarse, close to some exhausted whimper.

"Yes." Kakashi pointed out, his voice not stronger than before; it still cut into the roaring silence in the Uchiha's head. "This is the prison hospital. You won't go out of here anymore, probably."

This meant that Itachi did not have an opportunity to escape at the moment. They would probably let him recover, thus the following period becoming the time in which he could think about escaping.

Why his brain refused to produce further thoughts, he was not sure; it might have been restrained from doing so for a while. It must have been restrained from doing anything much, because noticing he was falling backwards was a task it refused to fulfill until an arm caught up his shoulders and let him lean onto the pillows softly.

"You've been sleeping for some weeks, so I guess it will take time until it's worth for you to sit up. While you're awake, that is."

Itachi felt like a helpless child, and it felt the most awful among all the stomach-irking taste in his mouth, the nauseating swirl behind his temple, the sickening numbness of his limbs, the unsettling rush of blood towards his respiratory organs.

"I'm…" he breathed but shut his lips tight immediately, not only because his voice shook a thousand times during this short phrase but also to make that everything stop attempting to leave his miserable corpse through his throat.

"You've got nothing to throw up." he heard the misty voice echo around in his head. "Take deep breaths and sleep some more."

His consciousness did not wait for him to decide whether to obey or not; it lost contact with reality at a whim.

TBC