Without Apples
It is after midnight and Kakashi has just finished an escort mission.
He is tired, dirty, and can not feel his left hand. There is a smell in the air, and immediately Kakashi thinks of Chouza's barbeque, the spices are that strong.
But it's too late and it's all wrong, and it takes him a moment to realize.
It's the scent of burning human flesh. But far heavier than Kakashi has ever known, and all around him so strong that he will wash for days and never get it out.
Then, from the wrong horizon, red chakra hazes like sunrise.
My brother tells tales, with pain in his eye
And there is not a word in his head that mother
can hear, but I can see each word through sorrow
blood and madness—from black night 'till 'morrow.
- forgetting reason, by Taes
It began at the beginning, that was simple enough.
But Itachi's origin started not when the earth first titled sideways, drowning in red. Nor at the earliest memory his body held of staring up at his mother's soft face, her cheeks pinched and red with the labor of birth.
Red.
No. Itachi's world began when he went blind.
Kunari digging in sideways at the awkward angle as he gouges out his own eyes. Teeth gritted in determination, the effort of it all as he digs deeper. Ripping through fragile flesh, paper-thin, the optical nerve and eyelid and catching bone as he pushes further.
Blood sliding down his face and making his grip slip, the handle sliding in too far. Chipping the bone of his cheek, fragmenting and shattering the line of it.
Sasuke standing in the doorway to the bedroom, his mouth wide with shock, in silent panic, wordless screams.
Fourteen years old, and alone in his bedroom for a minute too long.
With Sasuke standing petrified in his doorway, his father tripping on the boy in his haste to get inside. Bowling over his younger brother and accidentally kicking him in the face in the rush. Sweat and panic, petrified, Fugaku grabbing Sasuke's shoulder and twisting it away, shoving him away from the room, throwing him down the hall in frantic hurry, in an afterthought.
"Why, Itachi?" His father rasps as his hands grasp at the blood. Missing for a moment the conscious decision, the knife in the other hand moving up again to the undamaged eye before it scratches through the lid.
Goes in. Just that fragment, just that millimeter, enough.
He doesn't know what to do, this man before him Itachi knows. This person who lived all his life as father to an exception son, doesn't know how to help in a moment like this. Never imagined a moment like this.
And then Fukago screams.
"Oh Itachi," his mother whispers to him from his bedside when he wakes up. The overwhelming stench of hospital in the air and uncomfortable, starched white sheets saying the unsaid.
"My dear little boy," sliding up to him, her footsteps tapping across the cold tiled floor. "Want mother to kiss your boo-boo?"
Her hand suddenly touching the side of his face, the light pressure pushing against gauze while chilled flesh reached slowly beneath the bandages and wrappings.
He jerks his head away, but has no where to go, laying blind against the pillow.
"Now now," she scolds him, in a sing-song voice. "You'll make mother cross."
And hums an old tune as she reaches again.
Uchiha Shisui grew up with tales of the great legend, Madara, as all Uchiha do. It is a legend, after all.
He fell asleep to his mother's words whispering about the great ancestor who stood against the other prominent clans, fearless and mighty. Like a poltergeist. Like a god.
By five years old, he looked for this fabled figure in everyone he met. Eyes sweeping faces for a tell-tale twitch, some sign of prominence.
Are you Madara? He dares to utter, staring up at adults towering so high over him they look like steeples. Madara? Whispering to those with hardened faces. Those who laugh at him. The silent stares he gets in response.
The sharp replies, saying 'Go back to your mother kid'. Again and again, 'No.' Every time, receiving in kind, only a 'stop dreaming' and often worse even, nothing at all.
When he was four years old. And then seven. Nine, and twelve years old. Again and again.
Until one quiet Sunday morning, with his mother still asleep in bed, when he is in the Baker's shop to buy rolls. Leaning on the counter to look at a man barely older than him, one who used to play with him when he was in diapers, he asks.
The Baker looks down at the boy, at the wide innocent eyes, and says 'Yes.'
"Yes." The madness lifting the edges of the words from his voice until they teeter too at the brink he is standing on in his own mind. "I am Uchiha Madara."
Fifteen years old, Shisui stands with his best friend, Itachi, on the bridge connecting the apple orchard and garden to the rest of the clanstead.
Madara. Madara. The words a chant in his mind, over and over again. Madara.
Shisui turns to his old friend, tilts his head to the side on a sharp awkward angle, and smiles. Eyes wide, black black pupils leaking out of their bindings. Like oil spilling over the frosted snow. Worming it's way through.
"Hello," he greets. "I am Uchiha Madara."
Part II
Kakashi is circling the Kyuubi from below, trying to get a better position on it, when he ends up at the back. At the ass-end of the thing and he sees the gender and has to wonder. How in the world could anything have birthed this?
This malevolent monstrosity with the tainted chakra so warped his soul feels like it's being twisted about, being torn asunder just from standing in the vicinity of the abomination.
There is no beginning, there is no end.
There is just red, red chakra. Blood as far as he can see.
No end.
You are standing in the kitchen, too small to reach the table, too young to take care of yourself, with the worn faded counter so far away that it seems to grow further by the mile the longer you stare.
The hunger tearing a bloody pit in your stomach as something with fangs and teeth sharp as nails rips through your insides.
And it's all you ever wanted in this moment, but you can't have it.
And you're too young, too short, and so hungry all on your own wondering why did they leave why did they leave me alone. And you'll wonder for hours, for years, but never find the answer.
The offending smell of dust burnt by the sunshine wafting through the air from the kitchen, so vile just because it is not food that your chest cramps with the pain of it all. Your stomach knotted so tight you can't remember how to breath.
Hungry. Gasping because of it.
Naruto isn't too sure of his own origins.
He knows he has to have been born, because that's what people do and that's how people come into being. But on some nights when he is sitting on the rooftop looking up, his head leaning so far back it cramps his neck, he looses himself.
The faded black and white lights merging and mingling until all his head is a distant roar and everywhere around him is energy. Lights and sensations, for one moment.
And he feels, somewhere deep in his gut that still cramps up at the mere thought of being hungry, that this is the way it's supposed to be. Just energy. Chakra and spirits and the immaterial, with nothing physical at all.
But that's not how people are born. Is it?
He isn't sure either way, and has no one to ask of this, so he just lets the stunted ideas fester in the back of his thoughts, not yet grown enough to make sense.
Not big enough to reach the counter.
"She can't hear you, Harry," Snape said quietly. "She's not really there."
- Better Be Slytherin!, by jharad17
She used to steal her mother's fine china from the silverware drawer when she was just a toddling little girl, all grubby sweaty hands and red pudgy cheeks. Sneaking the forks and knives and spoons into her sleeves, up under her dress, down in her socks, wherever she could hid it.
Dressed in a cute little frock, with ruffles and lace, when everyone knew her name. Sweet little Mikoto. Cute little Mikoto.
Mikoto, hiding under the back porch, sucking on the silver as if she was still a baby. Paperclips, nail files, the silverware, scissors. Anything metal, anything she could fit in her mouth.
Sometimes swallowing by accident.
Coughing, choking as the red wells up, as the paperclips tear through her stomach, etch jagged lines down her throat. Tear their way through her as if her insides are made of the same thin material as her grandfather's doors.
Paper-thin, their only use looking stable.
Her father holding her hand as the medic-nins strapped her to the table and extracted the metal from her stomach, to sew her back up again, tense and terrified, as if her seams might fall apart at any moment. As if she is a poorly made doll, with frayed stiching.
It's been too many years since she last saw her parents, the memory of their faces long gone like her grandfather's doors, with not even the inflections of their individual voices to remain.
Only left the piecemeal image of her mother's hand, so much larger than her own, petting her hair. Handing her a cold silver spoon to shut her up when she cried and cried and cried.
Her awareness of things always a dull, vaguely colored fog, Mikoto smiles.
When she wipes her nose with her sleeve and sniffles the mucus back up to where it came from. Where it belongs. Grinning, when she bites the fork, pushing her tongue against the tongs as she sucks. Grinning at Itachi, sitting on the bed, blind.
When she was a little girl, she cornered the boy with knobby too big limbs who was still growing, just like she was still growing, and said to him "I will marry you, one day."
And she did, smiling. Turned from Cute little Mikoto to Mikoto, Fugaku's new wife. Slipped from one title into the other, like trying on a new pair of shoes, until when they looked at her, they only saw Fugaku.
Looked at her swelling belly, that stretched so far in front her she got lost behind it all, and only saw Fugaku.
Only saw the baby.
And became Itachi's mother. No Mikoto anywhere to be found.
You used to smile all the time.
You still do, really, but does anyone see anymore? Still, you think, that's alright.
Oh, there was a time when everyone knew your name. Now they still do, but your name has changed.
You said to Fugaku, "I will be your wife." Because it seemed like a fun thing to do.
And when you walk home from the hospital, sucking the gore of mutilated optical nerves off the tips of the fingers in your mouth as you smile at your neighbors, you can hear them whisper to each other.
"There she is. Itachi's mother."
It's who you are. What you're defined by, and what you define yourself with. You're a wife, a mother. You were born a girl.
And now, when people look at you, they won't see Mikoto anymore.
The labels shifting so easily off you like the plates you stacked in the cabinets in the kitchen, high up on the top shelf, so Itachi - and then Sasuke - wouldn't reach to pull down on themselves in a shards of white china. Hurt themselves with the fragments. Rip into each other.
No, they'll see Itachi's mother. Whose little boy blinded himself.
Smiling, you suckle until the taste is far gone, and only wet sweaty flesh, wrinkled and red from the pressure, remains. The tang of gore and dried blood long past. Thinking of the splatters against Itachi's floor, on your boys' clothes, Fugaku's clothes, the walls.
Happy, you head home.
The blood remains. Blood always finds a way home. It'll be there by the time you get back, seeping deep into the cracks so far down that no one will ever know it's there until the moment it wakes up again and lunges back for where it belongs.
Under the skin.
Part III
The only way Kakashi can tell where Sarutobi ends and this wailing, screeching, infant begins is by the color - they are both that wrinkled and covered with blood.
Sarutobi is weary, so tired he stumbles as he walks, and an ANBU with half a mask left catches the remaining Hokage's arm before he falls.
Their only Hokage now.
"This.. " Sandaime lifts the thing - boy - above his head so all see, "is our Savior."
.. with tendrils of malevolent red red chakra still circling around the babe's stomach.
Kakashi can only think, Are you mad, old man?
A poisoned mouse who still alive is asking what have I done that you wouldn't have.
- 73 Poems, by E. E. Cummings
There are worms in the soil, buried just under the surface and out of sight.
There's power in the pain. There's strength in blood. Truth in the lies truth in the blood.
Itachi can hear them burrowing down under the skin (just like his momma taught him) from his temporary bed against the far wall in Konoha's ward where his father is outside trying to negotiate with the medic-nins his brother is still crying still crying and his mother is nowhere to be found.
His ears still work, he can hear them talking, either the sound carries well through wood and walls or the door is open. "His eyes are lost," they say. His eyes are long gone (like so many things). He can hear what he can't see, see what he can't understand.
Itachi, you're blind.
His eyes, they can't be replaced. He damaged the optic nerve too well, the blood's not right not right, it won't work it won't work it won't work.
Irreplaceable. Irreparable.
Uchiha blood just isn't enough, he can hear them say. "If he ever wants to see again, he needs something else. Something stronger."
But what's stronger than blood?
Sasuke goes to school, but he is not alone, never alone. His cousins and blood relatives stain the edges of the classroom - two here, one there - until the boy tries to imagine what school would be like without them, without the whispers, and just can't imagine it.
Not like he imagined those cherry blossom trees raining their shower of petals upwards into the sky while all around him the ground was bleak and desolate and the earth wasted to the bone and he reached up and said Come back! Come back, don't leave! But the petals kept falling further away, and he woke up short of breath and still crying.
He sits in the back of the classroom, at the top tier where he could lean his chair back against the wall if he wanted to, but he doesn't, and writes.
He starts by taking all of Itachi's old notebooks from when he went to school - Itachi's in the hospital, he won't notice he won't mind. Not blind, he won't.
At first, it's innocent. If he can be as smart as Itachi, as good as Itachi. He takes notes in his own books like a good boy, pays attention like a good boy, reads.
And then this.
He doesn't know what to make of it, his mind loops around it loops it around over and over again until every day he finds himself standing again in Itachi's doorway, come to call him for dinner, with his brother's fingers in his own eyes and blood everywhere like Itachi is a fountain that burst.
Over and over again, it's all his mind can see so vivid nothing else fits in there.
Why, Itachi? So he takes the books, the notebooks, the schoolbooks, working frantically to replace those images, to push them away with something stronger, something heavier and darker.
But what's darker than blood?
Sitting in the back of the classroom, over and over again writing through the pages through the paper, Uchiha Mikoto Fugaku Itachi. Every name he can think of, every name he can imagine but his own name, until bit by bit, he begins to forget that too. Until the words come like a mantra to him, seeping into his dreams like a prayer.
His fingers tracing the characters on every surface they touch, scratching through the desk, into the wood.
He sits in the back of the classroom, near the corner where he could rest if he wanted to but doesn't, with a window on his left and an empty seat on his right, and writes.
His hand cramps, the notebook is plain and black but nothing special, and had he been anyone else, had it been anything else, it might have been enough. But it isn't.
His brother is blind, his father is yelling, his mother is singing.
And he still doesn't understand.
"Your eyes can deceive you; don't trust them."
-Obi Wan to Luke, A New Hope
He doesn't stand out as much as he would have. As he should have. He has his clan with him, his cousins and family and blood relatives. And Sasuke is not alone.
But he is afraid. He has seen what madness has done to Itachi, done to his mother. He doesn't want it.
Sasuke is too young to know for certain, but he draws the line between the Sharingan eyes and madness. Draws the conclusion that maybe Insanity is really the Uchiha's bloodline.
His hands itch to tear out his own eyes to grab his own wrist, and he's so repulsed and confused he spends an hour in the bathroom throwing up before going back to class.
Because he's tired of it all and he's too weary to care and he just doesn't understand. Was this what Itachi came to? Or is Sasuke just falling into his own personal brand of madness? One that comes with blood black as tar, and bones in the dirt, and cries that sound like screams.
You've been mad for a long time now. The world is only just now catching up.
But it can't be, it isn't. He's normal, he's just a little boy. He's a Uchiha.
And Naruto is sitting on the topmost branch of the tree, at the edge of the orchard near the bordering wall where he can look out into the village and see the rush of people moving about, far more than usual.
The leaves weaving through his hair as he reaches up to tug loose a deep red apple and pull it down into his lap. The soft skin crushing easily between his fingers to reveal the underlying darkness beneath, all heavy and tart rotted innards.
Irreplaceable damage.
The apple, black underneath the thin illusion of red. Black and rotten to the core, black as tar, black as death, black as the Uchiha eyes, unformed. The real color.
Part Four
"Keep an eye on him, Kakashi." the Sandaime says. "He's already on the edge of madness. He doesn't need to go any further."
And it isn't until Kakashi is already out of the office and more than an hour late to the Academy that he realizes he never asked which boy (which boy) he was talking about.
But it should be simple enough, right? Sasuke is the one who watched his own brother tear out his skull with his bare hands, his favorite brother his cherished person ripping into it like paper.
And yet, every breath he breathes out every breath he takes in he still tastes that heavy order of burning flesh, of brimstone and chakra. He never knew chakra had a taste until that day, after midnight, arriving late and out of place.
With the Yondaime already gone - no no, he wasn't too late he was there. He was standing there at the base of the monstrosity, his fingers burning with the effort of more. Just a little bit more, hold on just a little more.
And so he decides, following Sasuke with his eyes, following Naruto with his ears.
Because he can't forget.
Bright orange like the groves, like the dying blooms of the apple trees, yellow and auburn and golden-red. Naruto is the apple orchard, is October personified.
Naruto is so tiny Itachi has to crane his own neck down just to see the boy tottling around barefoot. The boy with wide, bright blue eyes staring up unblinking and unafraid.
"It'll fall victim to you too one day, Itachi."