Itachi was dancing.
Blood dripped from his chin, spattered up one half of his face as his eyes span, skittering over the battlefield. With hideous grace he turned in an arc far slower than his gaze, cutting down the girl leaping at him from the sycamores.
Still turning, he tossed his wet hair back, trailing blood from the hem of his stained cloak. He was a god, a demon, transcending the petty laws of space and time as he butchered and maimed with vicious swipes of his knives.
A simple technique could rend his enemies cleanly in two, but Itachi didn't want cleanliness, or quickness. He wanted blood, blood to caress his skin, intoxicating him, baptising him. Blood, more blood, and still more after that.
He sliced keenly through a misguided neck, the dark liquid he craved oozing out over the blade of his knife, down the handle and onto his angled hand. A girl ran at him in zigzags, but his eyes dismissed her attempt at deception. He swooped around her desperate punch, driving both of his knives up under her ribcage and wrenching out what he found there. She fell, and that was it. No more. For now.
Itachi sank to his knees, embracing himself, dipping his head to rub his clean cheek against his sodden shoulder, hair bleeding onto the churned earth. He smiled, fingers fluttering against his shoulder-blades, cradling himself in a way his family had never been able to.
His pulse roared in his ears, laughing spitefully at its weak relations spilled with the barest of effort. Itachi listened to it with his eyes closed, serene as his sins dried on his skin.
People had once delighted in it – so pale, so beautiful - but they had long since decided that it could only be a mere mask, sculpted wax to hide a monster that just couldn't be made of the same flesh and blood as they were.
He opened his eyes slowly, savouring the feelings blazing in his cold mind, and got to his feet. Satisfied for a little while, but he knew he would feel that urge again soon, that all-consuming desire to rip the world to pieces and drown in the blood it left behind.
He set off in search of more fuel to feed his burning need, crusted blood flaking off his hands and settling in the crushed grass as he swept past.
