"Kyrie,eleison"
"Lord, have mercy"
And he would always cherish her for what she was.
His mother.
His protector.
And he would forever hate himself for what he had done.
A traitor.
A murderer.
And their family's web would always be one that was so delicately spun, ensnaring not only the innocent but the weavers of this cursed silk as well.
The damned.
The hopeless.
While other children had dreamed that their parents had come from the war, he had made himself sick with fantasies of a clan lost to that everlasting flame of hatred. A battlefield clad in only their bodies;
Their corpses painted slick and red with their sin of envy.
Their rotted faces sallow with their greed.
Their strong, talented hands forever laid still by their gluttony.
Their mutilated bodies a macabre image of their wrath.
Their quick, pathetic demise an evidence of their sloth.
And their clan- their fallen clan, their forever tainted heritage and their cursed family an eternal reminder of the consequence for the sin of pride and the sin of lust.
As children mourned the unnecessary loss of their blessed parents- their savoiurs, their care-givers- he cradled his younger brother close and murmured strange alternate lives in which the Uchiha clan never returned. He sang lullabies where the gods killed them in the glory of war and not one being but him knew their devilish thoughts and mutilated intentions. He would think of stories to tell to the townspeople so that they thought the clan an unfortunate tragedy of war and a reason to bring upon a lasting, peace-filled era.
How he wished that life had happened just so. How he prayed that Inari would spare Sasuke the awful truth. How he knew that real life was never that pretty. How he swore his own tainted brand of revenge.
Oh, what twisted webs they had weaved...
But yet...
He would still always love his mother.
For the loved way she would brush his hair from his face. For the humble way she brought his darling otouto into this world. For the protective way she shielded Sasuke from the oppressive words of his father. For the way her beautiful full lips had parted the night that he killed her to say
"I'm so sorry."
And how her eyes had watered just so when she whispered, her words garbled from the thick blood filling her throat.
"My dear baby, how could we have done this to you?"
His father had been the last on his hit list but his mother…
His darling mother had been the first.
He had killed her with a soft blow, a quick blow, before he went to tear down everything that had been all she had ever known. In his first and last act of mercy, he spared his mother the full display of her failing as a parent and a decent human being.
But that had always been his weakness- but he forgave himself because it was never a sin- just a horrible, crippling weakness that would be his burden to bear for the rest of his life. She was precious. She was life-giving and maternal and soft and everything that he had adored when he still held the bright, round eyes of a child.
Never mind that it had been all for naught- that the second his hand came upon her- she had understood his intentions and grieved them immensely during those few, long seconds she had awaited her death.
And she had forgiven him- because she had understood. And as her body grew cold, laid next to the corpse of his father, to his aunts, his uncles, his cousins, his townspeople, to everything he had ever known- there were no corpses slick with envy, faces rotted with greed, hands petrified by gluttony; no mutilation symbolic of wrath, or any one left to see their quick death was a product of their sloth. And the village was gone- his people demolished, the clan destroyed, the heritage cursed and the family decimated.
But nobody blamed it on their sin of pride or lust.
They blamed it on a small, thin raven haired boy- who never had a say in the grand scheme.
A boy whose life had been scorned by Inari and ignored by the fates and adorned by the gods with the blood of his family, the hatred of his beloved kin, and the dying apology of his mother who was the only one in the entire world that had known that…
It was not his fault.
It was his own people that had done this to him.
Because where everyone had seen a majestic clan worthy of fighting the most bloody wars-
His mother had seen the small, birdlike boy cradling his newborn brother and praying wholeheartedly to whatever deity that listened to him that they take pity on these sinful mortals and let them die honorably and undeservedly in the battlefield; so that he would not have to take his tiny, malnourished hands- hands that had yet to reach puberty- to a katana and slice the flesh of his own people.
But instead their bodies lay in puddles of their mixed, curdled blood on the floors of their great, honoured homes. Their faces weren't streaked with the glory of the battlefield or the honour of a noble death. Their faces weren't even marred with the evidence of their disgrace and sin.
No…
No …They were streaked with the wounds inflicted by a young, hopeless boy. A boy that had held his brother so close all those years ago because he knew that he would one day be forced to take the blame for all those that were out on the battlefield playing hero.
A boy that had seen his fate the moment the gods had written it,
A boy who had prayed to Inari and been cursed with her response-
"A child must always pay for the sins of their forefathers."
And if he should ever reach the gates of nirvana, let his tragedy be redeemed with one single phrase.
"There is but one mortal on earth who hears the name of Uchiha Itachi and knows that that man is but, the most innocent sinner known to the world."
Let that be his revenge. Let that be his redemption. Let that be his salvation.
Let that be his legacy- a legacy worthy of the gods.
In die illa tremenda
Libera me Domine!
In te, Domine, speravi
Non confundar in aeternum!
Ante diem rationis
Nil inultum remanebit
Kyrie Eleison!
(On that terrible day
Free me Lord!
In You, Lord I have trusted.
Let me not be damned for eternity
Before the day of reckoning
Nothing shall remain Unpunished.
Lord, Have Mercy!)