Warnings: Cannon character death, fluffy kid-shaped things
Summary: Obito washes the blood from his clothes before he picks up his baby cousin, and this is what makes him Itachi's idol.
Kill for This
— Around Us—
Itachi is late.
The world is on fire, the sky and streets and everything in between a warm, insistent orange that drives the shadows between the buildings and under the raised walkways in thin, tangled lines to the edge of the world by the time Obito shows up, soft soles scuffed against the pavement and the rattle of the chain link fence. Obito comes to the gate. He stops and waves. He props his elbows between the bars of the fence and says, "Hey, Ta-kun!" Obito is smiling.
Itachi doesn't smile or wave back. Itachi looks up at his cousin. Itachi is tired from waiting and hungry because it's only ten minutes until his regular dinner time, but Itachi doesn't say any of this to his cousin.
Sometimes Obito leaves the country because there's a war, but usually Obito doesn't because he's just a genin. Days Obito can make it back, Obito is supposed to walk Itachi home from day school.
Obito says, "Sorry."
Itachi is sitting on a bench on the line between the school's front-walk and the playground. Hands flat beside his thighs, every finger stretched over a gap in the green lattice work. The metal is hot against the back of his legs through his blue linen pants, especially in the crease of his knees. His feet hang half a foot from the asphalt below. His school bag sits beside him.
"I know," Obito swings the gate open, "I know, I'm late. But I was on my way here from Sarutobi-sama's office and this black cat crossed my path."
Obito walks up to Itachi and lifts him up and down. He pulls the straps of Itachi's backpack over Itachi's shoulders and kneels to fasten them across his chest. The whole time, he's saying how he had to take the long way around downtown, and how the black cat followed him anyway because she had lost her owner. "And you know where her owner was?"
Itachi shakes his head no.
"The hospital."
This is the part where Obito is supposed to take Itachi's hand and walk quickly and safely back to the family compound like his mother –Itachi's and Obito's both—told him to. What Obito does is turn his back and lace his fingers together, and Itachi steps up and onto Obito's back obediently. Itachi winds his arms around Obito's neck, fragile line of his cousin's throat under the early weight of his limbs. Obito's jacket against Itachi's chest is damp.
Obito chirps, "She was really cute, too. The girl, I mean. Ready?"
Itachi nods.
Obito crosses his arms under Itachi's legs and the box lunch Itachi ate lunch from pressed sharp against the blue canvas of Itachi's bag. Obito says, "She's training to be a medic-nin, which is good. We've got lots of soldiers—"
children, Itachi remembers Obito saying, then Obito turns down a wide street with the academy just ahead and Itachi thinks about that instead.
"But no one to take care of them."
Itachi lifts his head up beside his cousin's to stare at the country emblem on the academy roof. His hair slides along Obito's jaw and the stitches under Obito's ear to his shoulder.
Obito follows the movement. He says, "Only a few more years, Ta-kun. You'll be there before you know it."
Itachi doesn't agree. He doesn't disagree, either, so Obito counts it a victory and launches into an overtly biased retelling of his latest mission: So, yeah, Kakashi saved the day, but I totally saved his ass like, three times. And Ren smiled at me.
Itachi asks, "You're not a very good ninja, are you?"
Obito pauses mid-triumph. "Huh?"
"Are you?" Itachi repeats. Just a little his hold tightens.
"Well," Obito speaks easily, confidently, "that depends."
"On?"
"On what your idea of a good ninja is!"
His chin pressed into Obito's shoulder, Itachi's eyebrows draw down. "A good ninja is a good ninja. There's no two ways about it."
Obito smiles, "There's always another way," and he can't see Itachi's scowl over his shoulder, but it's there.
Eventually, inevitably, Itachi's voice in his ear asks, "What's your idea?"
They're almost to the gates of the compound. The stream to the lake at the edge of compound is quiet slow with gilded ripples beside the path.
"Look—"
Obito stops and kneels. Itachi slides off Obito's back, his sandals in the fine gravel, and Obito turns to face him.
"—close your eyes for a moment?"
Itachi closes his eyes.
"My idea is one day you'll become a skilled ninja. You'll be strong, and quick on your feet, and handsome, too."
"Like my dad?" Itachi asks. There's the sound of rustling cloth and Itachi thinks maybe Obito moves closer.
"Better. Everyone will admire your skill. Your name will be known all over the world. And despite it all, you'll be a good ninja."
Something warms touches Itachi's forehead. Itachi think it's a kiss, but it doesn't leave, so Itachi raises his hand and searches with his fingers and hits warm steel.
He opens his eyes.
Obito is leaning over him, arms stretched behind Itachi's head to tie the headband in place. When he's done, soft cloth pressed under and over Itachi's hair in an unfamiliar way, Obito rocks back on his heels and looks at him. The path around them at dusk and the lull between children rushing home and adults rushing to work is silently still, and Itachi stands attentively still but eventually he says, "Ok." He fingers the etched spiral on the metal plate of the headband.
"Ok," Obito repeats. He turns back around and Itachi climbs back up.
Obito fills the last few minutes of the walk home talking while Itachi puts his head down and dozes. The stretch of skin between Obito's collar and jaw smells like new dirt and the trees in summer and the soap his own mother uses on the clothes, sometimes. Itachi leans close and kisses his cousin's neck. He doesn't remember getting home.
"You're leaving again."
Obito opens his eyes. His baby cousin peeking around the edge of the rock is upside down, but his frown still looks like a frown. Chest heaving and sprawled in a rather undignified manner, Obito only manages a breathy, "Oh…yeah."
Itachi is behind the rock. He's been sitting on the target painted on the other side all morning long.
"Itachi." Obito realizes his gaze is drifting off with a lazy white cloud, so he sets his attention on a distant tree-top and the red-and-white target in its branches. There's a kunai set just in its edge. Obito says, "It's my job, Itachi."
Itachi returns to his field of vision, his Uchiha shirt and developing scowl and hair dark under the canopy of the forest. He's holding one of Obito's kunai.
"I don't even like Kakashi. You think I'm looking forward to a month with him?"
"I don't care," Itachi replies immediately, then snaps his mouth closed. He blinks, hands fumbling the kunai into a more appropriate hold. "You should stay on his side." Now Itachi is looking at the kunai. His fingers barely meet around the weapons' handle. "He's strong. Smart. Valuable."
"A jerk." Obito pouts up at Itachi, looking utterly affronted. "You sound like your father."
Itachi's attention shifts to Obito. Itachi doesn't say anything. Obito wonders how long it will be before Itachi stands over a man with a kunai and thinks something about it. Itachi right now is just waiting for Obito to sit up, so Obito does. "It's not forever," he promises.
"I'm not going to live forever," Itachi informs him, eyes pinched at the corners and mouth turned down.
Obito smiles hard and quick before his body decides on any other reaction. Itachi is four –almost five, almost—he's old enough to know, but he doesn't sound like he even wants it any other way. Obito reaches out and lays his hand on Itachi's head. He says, "Good ninja never die."
And because he's four, Itachi says, "You're not that good."
"Our condolences," Fugaku and Mikoto harmonize, bowing low before Obito's parents. Itachi doesn't bow, which everyone ignores maybe because he is shorter than his parents' humility, but he is the one holding their money envelope. He meets their eyes levelly as he hands the folded cream paper to them. On the front, it says how much money's inside, but Itachi can't read yet.
Two long hours after his family arrived at the Uchiha compound's main shrine, Itachi has tired of his family's scripted chatter. At the first lapse in their attention, he sneaks off to the garden.
The maze hedges tower over him, dark green walls laced with purple and red petals that block half the sky. Itachi is wearing his formal kimono, with the family mon on his breast in identification in case anyone misses the curve of his jaw under the cushion of infancy. The kimono has large sleeves he doesn't associate with much anything, yet, other than Mother at festivals and civilian celebration, dango and rare breezes in the summer closer to his skin than t-shirts. It's not his first time in a kimono, and Father's instruction had been precise, so he doesn't trip over the hem.
Standing under a tree in the heart of the labyrinth is Kakashi. He looks up as Itachi approaches. Everything from Kakashi's nose down is concealed by a navy mask. His only visible eye is a hard, pale grey. The other is beneath the starched white bandages that wrap around his head at an awkward tilt.
Itachi doesn't know, yet, what's under the bandages.
Kakashi doesn't say a word, so Itachi likewise remains silent.
The noises of the shrine carry over the garden, but neither pays much attention. Finally Kakashi moves, shifting in place, and snorts.
"You're not even mourning him," Kakashi says and Itachi staring up, up, up Kakashi's pants and collared shirt to Kakashi's head tilted against the tree branches and the blue sky, only that thin triangle of all Kakashi's face visible, Itachi is surprised by Kakashi's voice. Kakashi's voice is young and high and full of poison.
Itachi says, "There's no body."
Kakashi cants his head down, watching Itachi through his trappings. "What?"
"There's no body. There's a funeral, and there's a grave, but there's no body." Itachi feeling a lot smaller under Kakashi's black on black on navy on white against the red and white flush of the tree's canopy, Itachi says, "I will not mourn him."
Kakashi doesn't blink. Kakashi doesn't seem to notice, one hand shoved in his pocket, except he reaches out faster than Itachi can follow and grabs both Itachi's hands in one of his.
"Generally," Kakashi is saying, forcing Itachi's hands together and palm up, "when someone dies, he is mourned with an intensity indirectly proportionate to the intensity with which he was detested in life." Kakashi curls Itachi's hand around the crisp folds of bright paper. Kakashi bows down to Itachi's height, drops his gaze to the ground under Itachi's geta. Kakashi says, "My condolences," in a heavy, hollow voice, then he straightens and walks away.
Itachi doesn't see any reason he should stick around. Careful, both hands still palms up before him, Itachi walks back through the maze and returns to the shrine.
Nothing has changed.
Itachi goes close to the altar, with the heavy incense spilling choking grey fog in the summer air just over his head, and finds Shisui kneeling there, close to the dry wood. Just as he'd expected.
"Shisui," Itachi calls, ducking into Shisui's space. Other relatives are around, but far away. The parts of Shisui's name slides back and forth between Itachi's primary teeth. He calls again, "Shisui," and Shisui slowly, slowly turns. On his knees, with his back curved, his head comes to the same height as Itachi's. "Give me your hands," Itachi tells Shisui.
Shisui holds outs his hands quietly, and Itachi corrects, "No, open them, I'm going to give you something."
Shisui's fingers curl back from his palms.
"You're going to drop it," Itachi declares and frowns at the loose bowl Shisui has provided.
Shisui finally speaks, but his voice sounds wrong. Cracked and dry, like the incense. "What?"
Itachi lifts the small fortune closer to Shisui's eyes.
Shisui licks his lips. "What?" he repeats. But he extracts a twisted bill from Itach's collection. Blank before, Shisui's face turns down everywhere, eyebrows and lips especially. He lifts the bill as Itachi did, closer to the altar. He holds it the incense, the point of contact glowing orange, and then the bill falls apart, breaking into little pieces from the tip of the incense down to Shisui's fingers. Its many pieces flutter to the ground.
Itachi watches and doesn't say anything. Shisui's expression is surrounded by the smoke.
"Give me the rest," Shisui orders. Itachi hands it to him. Shisui drops it all on the ground, then organizes it by color, presses out the folded in lines and folds in his own until they all lie nestled inside each other. Shisui wraps his free hands around the back of Itachi's neck, strokes the line of his heartbeat.
"Who?" Shisui asks.
Itachi answers, "Kakashi."
Shisui snorts. "And that's all he gave you?"
Shisui is not Obito, but neither is Itachi.
The first three months after Obito's funeral, Itachi sees Shisui only once when he and his mother go for tea.
Obito was wrong. Itachi enters the academy before the vigil at Obito's grave is over. The war pushes on beyond the walls of Konoha, but inside is safe; the Uchiha are busy dressing in their mourning clothes and not talking about what happened. Who will take Itachi to school is not discussed.
The morning of Itachi's first day at the academy, his mother sits beside him at the table, patting his hair as he picks at the breakfast she made. Five minutes after he was supposed to have left if he wants to arrive on time, she hands him his backpack. When he takes it, there's the sound of metal sliding against metal.
Kakashi is waiting for him on the other side of the front door that first morning, and again at the end of the day at the academy. Kakashi doesn't say anything to Itachi while they walk. He holds his head down toward the ground as they thread through the morning and afternoon crowds, maybe to ensure he matches Itachi's pace exactly two paces ahead of him. Maybe so he doesn't have to look at Itachi. His hands sway by his side, curled around the air as if it held weapons.
Kakashi is there again the next day, and the day after that, and the week after that, though by the end of the first month he only appears at the academy to walk Itachi home. By the second month, he is consistently fifteen minutes late. Itachi waits for him in the shade under the tree across the street from the academy's front door. Fifteen minutes become twenty-five, but that is nothing compared to the weeks Itachi has waited for the image of Obito's smiling face to vanish the way his name has already gone at home.
"Itachi-kun," Kakashi calls in greeting when he finally melts out of thin air right beside Itachi in the tree's shadow. His head band lately has been falling further down the white line of bandages over his eye even though the bandages have been growing smaller.
Itachi wonders if Kakashi is getting sloppier because he is sad, because if he is, then he's stupid and will probably die next. Sloppy ninja get killed. Itachi's teacher had said so the first day of class and then made everyone reorganize their school things, but Itachi had already known that.
Kakashi holds out his hand to help Itachi up from the ground. "Sorry I'm late," Kakashi tells him, visible eyebrow lifting slightly in shame. "I was held up."
Itachi takes his hand. It's the last day of class before summer break. He doesn't see the point in telling Kakashi he doesn't want him walking him home anymore.
"You know," Kakashi begins, lightly, "I thought making jounin would be the end of pointless grunt work. Er," Kakashi turns and tilts his head down to Itachi, "you know what grunt work is?"
"Yes."
Kakashi sighs somewhat dramatically. "Well. But I guess you don't want to hear about that."
Itachi shakes his head 'no.'
"So?" Kakashi prompts.
Itachi's fingers tighten around Kakashi's hand. "What happened to –" Obito "—your eye?"
Kakashi drops Itachi's hand so he can unwind the bandages. Then he shows him.
Itachi and his mother visit Shisui's family in the middle of Itachi's break. Shisui's mother and father sit at one edge of the table and Itachi's mother sits across from them, so Shisui and Itachi sit across from each other. Itachi wishes it were winter, so he could stick his legs under the table and touch Shisui and no one would see, but the more he thinks about it, the less he's sure he wouldn't press his feet to the heater instead, or that he could even reach the other side. So Itachi keeps his legs folded under himself. He wraps his hands around his mug, and drinks the tea he doesn't like. Itachi tries not to stare at Shisui staring at the table with eyes red in a way that's not Sharingan.
Shisui's mother murmurs about how big Itachi is getting, how he'll be able to enter the academy soon. Shisui tells her that Itachi already has.
When they leave Shisui offers Itachi's mother a hand up from the low table. Itachi's mom takes Shisui's hand around the space of her round belly, even though Itachi still sees her get up on her own at home.
Five days later, Itachi's mother goes to the hospital to have the baby.
His father takes him to visit. "Would you like to say hello to your brother?" Itachi's mother asks when his father leads him into her room. Itachi's mother looks the way she always does, only dressed in hospital blues. She smiles when she sees Itachi. Itachi follows her beckon and goes up to the bed. He's short, though, so his father lifts him up into the sheets.
The baby is half asleep, scrunched inside red and white blanks on his mother's lap. Itachi's fingers sink into the fabric like it's covered in feathers.
"He doesn't have a name, yet," Itachi's mother tells him softly. She strokes Itachi's hair with her free hand and leans close. "He needs a good one."
He replies almost without thinking about it. "Itachi."
His mother laughs. The baby opens and closes his mouth a few times. "We already gave the one to you," Itachi's mother says, and her voice is scratchy.
Itachi's father mutters something about juice and leaves the room.
Itachi's mother pulls his hair behind his ears. She tells him, "Itachi-chan, he will help you."
The baby sticks out his tongue.
"He'll help you be strong and brave. He will make you great," she promises. Itachi puts his hand on the baby's head.
Itachi's mother tempers him, "But not yet. You have to help him first. You have to make him great first. That's what brothers do."
Itachi is growing (slowly), but Shisui's already one of the greatest ninja in the village, and Obito died anyway, and Itachi—he still needs both hands to throw a kunai. He can only hold half his brother's skull.
The only advantage Itachi has over Shisui is five years instead of one.
Itachi repeats his mother's words, not quite believing. "He's going to help me?"
His mother kisses the edge of his hair, just in front of his ear.
Itachi curls his hands into the blanket and says, "His name is Sasuke."
In an underground cavern at the end of a system of mountain corridors behind the Hokage faces on the edge of the village not pressed against burning, bleeding forest, Itachi presses his baby brother further into his chest and wonders what's going on.
Not out there—he knows what's out there.
Out there is a leviathan, teeth and claws and blood red that stains the sky and the trees and the ground and his eyes.
Not that Itachi can see this.
It's one of the few things he can't.
One of the adults herding the group crouched piss-scared and trembling kneels before Itachi. "Are you alright?"
Itachi is eye-level with her chest. He can see the stretch of the words in her throat.
"Itachi-kun?" She reaches out to him. Itachi flinches backwards, away from the rush of blood up each finger and the slow squeeze back down. Itachi is thinking about the well of red down a kunai when Obito was clumsy, thin and fast like water from a faucet, only now Itachi knows it's not like that at all, it is a crawl-pause-climb under the skin, people who die bleeding out die slow.
Sasuke's eyelashes flutter in his sleep. It's very pretty. Like a leaf fan on a hot day. Gentle press of the air, and his baby brother inhales, deep. Exhales. Deep in sleep, Sasuke breathes slow and even the way Itachi recognizes he isn't, so he stops.
To his left, an old man does the same.
The woman kneeling in front of Itachi, one of the stretched beats in her throat falls out of the pattern. Her shoulder tense in, her eyes with the pupils blown near all the way through the brown iris, her eyes jump right, only Itachi's not sure if he just imagined that, she's staring so intently.
She says, "If you need any help, Itachi-kun—"
She leaves.
Itachi is the baby of the clan after Sasuke, then Obito, then Shisui; and Shisui is eighteen, and a good ninja, and out in the forest right now with his parents and Itachi's parents and Itachi's aunt and uncles and cousins who run the police station and are ANBU. Itachi doesn't know any of their names, but he wishes one of them were here.
Inside the caverns isn't quiet. The women and men pulled tight into themselves or spread thin over wailing children, they aren't shinobi. They waste movement, finding a place to settle. Staring at the walls. Trembling.
Half of them are looking the wrong direction if they're looking for the monster outside, even the academy kids.
Sasuke sleeps on. Outside, it had been dark and loud. Itachi had still been asleep until his father set him on his feet before a stocky genin patting shaky shoulders and nudging a line up the slope into the mountain. The whole time, this genin telling civilians don't panic but move quickly, he's breathing too hard and too quick. Itachi's father gives the boy a disapproving look as he bundles Itachi's jacket over Itachi's pajamas and does the buttons.
The genin straightens his posture.
Itachi's mother kisses his forehead. She presses his brother into Itachi's arms by way of blankets in a sling she passes over his head. The blankets are red with white lattice windmills, like Itachi's pajamas.
They'd pushed him away after the line, then they'd disappeared. Right under the Hokage heads, the path had led back out along the cliff face, and Itachi had looked up and out across the village, and he'd seen the end of the world.
The people around Itachi are screaming. He knows it's the people around him and not the people outside because it's all fear and no pain, and anyway they're too far back in the mountains. Supposed to be, he thinks, as the cavern splits around a howl and the people around Itachi go silent. Everywhere Itachi looks are broken hearts, too slow or too fast or too many to one person, or in the wrong place.
The walls ripple. He's not imagining it this time, he knows, because the other people shake and jerk away. Eyes roll, searching for it, but they're all looking in the wrong direction again. Itachi watches the tug of movement from shoulder to biceps to wrist to finger in forty-seven variations until he feels sick. The ripples move in waves of dizzy heat, and maybe they would scare him if he couldn't see it. Instead, Itachi feels light-headed and a little sweaty and a lot like throwing-up, so he closes his eyes and pushes his chin into his chest and moans.
Finally, the sound stops, everything quiet but suffocating silent so Itachi can't hear his own life bumping through him. The waves keep going.
Sasuke stirs in his arms. He bumps one little fist against Itachi's lips and inhales so Itachi can feel the expansion of blanket and body, exhales, inhales deep like before when he was asleep, and then Sasuke screams.
Itachi is perfect.
He is the perfect son, the perfect ninja, the perfect brother, and in the future he will be the perfect father and the perfect husband because he knows in what order those should occur.
Kakashi exhales through his nose in a derisive snort. "Of course you're perfect. Didn't you know?"
Itachi chooses to clean the blood from his shuriken instead of answering the other. It's his first mission in his new assignment, he wants to do this right, and that means complete attention.
"You're the youngest to ever graduate from the academy in peace times," Kakashi continues, his tone indicating he's more than aware Itachi had been told as much, much too often before.
"You're the prodigious son of the prodigious clan to which you also just happen to be next in line for the patriarchal seat."
Itachi keeps ignoring Kakashi in favor of cleaning the blood from his katana blade.
Kakashi keeps going. "You're Uchiha. Pride of the Leaf. Don't get me wrong, you're no Hokage," Kakashi says into his cloth mask. He's caught his ANBU mask under the chin by his ring finger. It's the only part of his uniform he's taken off so far, but the blood was probably going to set anyway. Some of it's even Kakashi's. His face is still pale, but he just keeps sitting there, talking to Itachi.
"When your father finally croaks, when you finally come of age, this village is yours."
Itachi re-sheaths his knife, checks his mask for damage.
"Everyone knows," Kakashi tells him, head bowed. "Shisui knows," Kakashi expounds, tilting his chin toward the shinobi.
Shisui's not wearing pants, just his chest armour as he sits bandaging a half-healed hole in his calf.
"Don't you, Shisui?"
Shisui grimaces, "Fuck off, Kakashi. Leave the kid alone." To Itachi he says, "It's getting pretty late, huh?" although the whole time he's looking at his own torn muscles.
Itachi leaves in the un-cleaned clothes from his mission, so when he arrives at home, he sneaks in through his own bedroom window. The moon is waning toward new, and Itachi's window anyway faces the wrong direction, so his room is dark. Still, he can see Sasuke curled up in the middle of his bed. His brother is awake, but only barely, face turned into the dark covers he lies on top of. He doesn't have his stuffed dinosaur.
Itachi kneels at the edge of his own bed and whispers, "Sasuke, you should sleep."
"I'm not tired," Sasuke slurs, and pushes himself up to hands and knees. He's entirely too far gone to remember if Itachi is home early or late. "I was waiting."
Itachi says, "At least get in the bed properly."
"I'm not sleepy," Sasuke insists again, his thin arms locked with all the stubbornness of a five-year old. "I told you, I was waiting."
Itachi replies, "I am back now."
Sasuke reaches out for him, and Itachi grabs his wrist, stopping him. "I am bloody."
"And you stink," Sasuke agrees, nose wrinkling.
"Then let me wash," Itachi suggests. He drops Sasuke's hand and starts to stand, but Sasuke lunges, capturing Itachi's wrist this time, and tugs.
"No, no, you just got back," Sasuke hisses, eyes wide in the dark despite his lethargy. "You can't leave again already."
"Just to the bathroom," Itachi tells him.
Sasuke clambers up to the edge of the bed and hops down beside him, one hand still clenched tight around Itachi's wrist. "Just the bathroom," Sasuke commands, expression tight.
They tiptoe down the hall, past their parents' bedroom. In the bathroom, Itachi navigates Sasuke to a small square of the floor because he doesn't want to turn on the light, and says, "Sit right here."
"It's dark," Sasuke complains, but he sits and doesn't move.
"My clothes are very messy." Itachi starts to pull off his armour and set it in a pile near the tub.
"Are you hurt?" Sasuke asks, worry bright.
"I'm not hurt," Itachi denies.
Sasuke yawns and tries to hide it seven times while Itachi cleans away the dirt and blood and redresses in sleeping clothes. When he's done setting weapons in his pajamas, he lifts Sasuke up by the armpits. "You really should sleep," he chides his baby brother as Sasuke wraps arms and legs around his torso. "If you want to be a good ninja one day, you need lots of rest. Being a good ninja is hard work."
Sasuke sticks his nose in the space between Itachi's neck and Itachi's shoulder. "You'll help me."
"We will help each other," Itachi corrects him, and carries Sasuke chest to chest back to his room.