no one mourns the wicked, or so itachi thinks. itachi, sasuke, the end and everything in between.
(spoilers for 386 beyond)
Today is the day Itachi dies. Perhaps if Sasuke repeats this a thousand times then he can bring himself to believe it.
It is dawn. A single black feather falls from the pastel pink bright blue sky, straight to his palm, and Sasuke knows all too well whom it is from. It is not so much of a taunt as it is a warning, yet this feather places an even heavier burden on his shoulders, and this day becomes gloomier than it already is. It will be over soon, the feather seems to say. It will be done. Are you ready, Sasuke?
More than I will ever be, he tells himself. The ghosts of the Uchiha haunt him constantly, as it had been doing for the past decade, demanding Itachi's head with stern, strict tones he has never been able to wipe out of his mind. It will be over when it is over. Right. Sasuke is not so childish as to make empty promises of endless torture and neverending pain. Not anymore.
It would be enough to kill him with his own two hands. It would be enough to watch him die, breathing his last, holding on to the faintest threads of life, knowing it was him who caused this, who brought down the mighty Uchiha Itachi to the cold hard ground and made him pay for his crimes. He wants to be the last thing that man sees, his smug face imprinted in his cursed eyes before they finally slide shut. Forever.
The thought drives his fingers to spark bright blue, and he watches, bemused, as the feather burns to a crisp, crumbling to pieces to the forest floor. He makes sure to step on the ashes for good measure.
Watching him die is enough.
Sasuke faces the dawn with dark eyes, eyes blazing with hatred and grim resolve.
By sundown, his vengeance will be complete.
Today is the day Itachi dies. Perhaps if Sasuke repeats this a thousand times then he can bring himself to move and get it done.
Sasuke drips sweat all over the forest floor. It is warm today, in the jungle. Worse, it is also excessively humid. The sun beats down relentlessly on his bare skin (he had shrugged his heavy top off earlier, in a futile attempt to cool down) and the trees provide too little shade to be comfortable. He can almost feel the sunlight tan his skin another shade darker.
It does not come as a surprise to him, then, when he starts seeing things. There have been times wherein fragments of his recurring nightmares seep into his daily life. Once, he had woken up to find himself drenched in blood, in a dream where he, possessed by Orochimaru, attacked Konoha and killed everyone in the village, in a manner unlike a certain someone did. Looking in the mirror he saw blood rolling down like tears from his eyes and mouth.
Another time he had been tying his boots, only to find that his shoelaces turned into slithering, slimy snakes.
Perhaps, he reasons, it might have been due to his recent overuse of the Sharingan. After all, Kakashi had once told him before that it could bring about unpleasant... side effects when utilized constantly.
These occurences, coupled with the intense heat, guarantee that his face is drawn blank when his dead father appears nary a hair's breadth away from him, but Sasuke can't restrain the faintly-breathed "Father" that escapes from his lips as his heavy, condescending gaze lands upon him.
It is as intimidating as he remembers it to be. Time has done nothing to soften the harshness in his eyes, and even as he towers over his father now, those eyes make him feel like a tiny, weak child, not good enough, never good enough.
Sasuke silently wills himself to stay still, to meet his father's gaze with eyes as empty as his soul, as empty as he wants his heart to be, because this is just another vision and another dream and no my father is dead and this man is not him, it can't be him, because all he wants to do is drop to his knees and beg for his forgiveness and father forgive me I haven't let you rest in peace just yet I haven't avenged you yet.
"Sasuke, Sasuke, Sasuke," When he speaks, it is a low, threatening growl that reminds Sasuke of just who his father is: the cruel, ruthless head of the Uchiha. He is the man who led their clan, led them to taste glory and to thirst for it, led them to cultivate deadly pride, led him to drive himself further, push himself further, become the ideal shinobi and another proud son of the Uchiha. It is the same man who led their whole clan to extinction, what with his crazed plans to take Konoha for themselves. (Sasuke is not a fool. The sheer loneliness he felt the first, painful years after the massacre left him wounded, true, but it is during this time that he discovers the truth the Uchiha had hidden from him, and that is what scars him.)
Fugaku distances himself from Sasuke, just enough so that he could place a rough, calloused hand on his shoulder, just enough so he could study him closely, appraising him from head to toe. "You carry yourself well, Sasuke... as expected of my son," he says, and his eyes turn kind, almost gentle.
Sasuke is speechless. This must be a dream, right? How else can it know the words he had been yearning to hear for years? There's something strange, different about this Fugaku in front of him. The hand on his shoulder feels much too warm, much too heavy to not be real, and if he just listened hard enough he could almost hear him breathing like a normal, regular, living human, which he is most definitely not—but before he could give more consideration to these thoughts, Fugaku changes. His jaw softens, his eyes grow larger, his skin many shades whiter and in the blink of an eye, Fugaku is gone and wide-eyed worried Mikoto stands in his place.
She cocks her head to the side, her dark eyes locking into his, as if looking into his soul. She had always made him feel uneasy like that. It was much too hard for him to hide things from her, and she knew it. "Is there something wrong, Sasuke-kun? You look sad." And before Sasuke could say anything to her, she pulls him close, wrapping an arm tightly around his shoulders and another around his waist, and holds him so tightly he can barely breathe. It is only when she loosens her grip around him that she speaks.
"Is it your father again?" even if Sasuke cannot see it, he knows she pauses to smile. "Cheer up—you shouldn't waste your precious days worrying about that!"
"Mom, I..." he starts, but she promptly puts a narrow finger to his lips and tells him, "Shh, Sauske-kun. Let me finish!"
She glares at him hotly, trying to intimidate him like she did when he was younger, and now that he is eighteen and much much taller than her, he finds it very hard to stifle the laughter that is threatening to burst from his throat.
"...Where was I, again?"
He opens his mouth to speak, or as much as her finger allows him to, at least. "About Dad..."
She makes it a point to squeeze him even tighter. "Oh, yes. Your father loves you very much, make no mistake about that. He talks about you a lot, when he's with me, when it's just the two of us." And how you're nothing like your brother, he finishes, in his mind, and it hurts like a scab being scraped off an old, gaping wound.
Mikoto never lied, Sasuke knows, but fed him half-truths and whole battered, tattered truths. She didn't lie when she told him his father talked about him often, but she does not know that in the middle of the night Sasuke made sure to stay awake, and he knows everything else she left out and didn't say. He knows that yes, Fugaku talked about him much, but not in the way she made it sound. Fugaku did not praise him to the high heavens or comment about how cute he was when eating his tomato salad or ask Mikoto what his activities were tomorrow so he could take him out for a treat or things like that.
Fugaku worried about him, worried for his future, because he wasn't as skilled as or as smart as Itachi. How would people look at him, growing up? He would ask. Would they look down on him? Would they compare him to that Hyuuga boy, because people say he is a prodigy almost-to-the-level-of-Itachi but not really? Fugaku cares very much about these things, about the image his sons project to everyone else, because they are Uchiha and they are supposed to be better than everyone else. It would not look well upon them if a mere Hyuuga upstaged one of their own.
Sasuke looks at Mikoto once more, but her childish pout is gone and her big bright eyes suddenly feel more like his brother's, blank and unassuming but laced with hidden intentions. He knows that gaze is analyzing him to the bone, studying his weaknesses and formulating plan A and plan B and plan C based on that. There is definitely something different about this Mikoto, much like that Fugaku, but he does not comment on it, because he cannot quite trust himself enough to speak anymore.
His suspicions are confirmed when she finally lets go of him, dropping her hands to her side, and yet again she morphs, except this time it is to a figure he once loved and grew up to hate beyond measure. Sasuke watches him carefully, red against red, brother against brother, killer against survivor, waiting for him to make his move. So it was you all along, he says in his mind, the words seeming awfully familiar, I should've known.
In Itachi's eyes (beautiful like their mother's. She had always told them, when they were children, Itachi has my eyes, you have my hair, and you both have my hands!), he can see that night, crystal clear.
Sasuke could see the ghosts of the Uchiha swimming in his eyes the same way they did in his own. He could see the two of them making a visit to Father at the local police station, and being treated to ice cream afterwards. He can see them receiving clan elders into their home when they were younger, bowing deeply (submissively) as they were taught to, exchanging polite greetings and how-do-you-do's, and the tension between them and Itachi was so thick he could cut it with a knife.
It is too much, too much. Memories of their dead family flood into his mind with a vengeance, drowning him in a sea of nostalgia, and it is only when Itachi finally speaks that he snaps back to reality to listen to him (hanging on to his every word like a dog, as Orochimaru would say.)
"Is there anything you'd like to tell me, Sasuke?"
Yes there are, yes there are, and there are so much that he could feel his eyes burn with the sheer force of them, and Sasuke would like so very much to scream it in his face but his words are choking his throat and before he can voice out a word, let alone respond, he disappears in a cascade of feathers.
And Sasuke is left alone yet again.
Sasuke has to clench and unclench his fingers, clench them into a fist and punch the nearest tree he could find, clench them in pain as blood dribbles down his hand just to convince himself that he is not dreaming, not anymore, and he still has a goal to accomplish, a vengeance to complete, and he cannot rest before that happens.
So he forces himself to drag one foot forward, one after the other, none too elegantly against the muddy ground. His heart is heavy, his mind blank, and he walks with the sombre gait of a man about to walk to his death.
It is with infinite patience that Itachi waits for Sasuke, as he had done so for most of his life.
It has been ten years since he killed them, since he gave them both wings to fly. Ten years since he freed himself from the ties that bound him to his clan, in the most gruesome of ways. Time had done nothing to ease the guilt he felt for what he had done, and today he would make his penance. He has waited ten years for this day, this death, this final release, and although he is certain Sasuke is ready for this battle, the brother in him wants to remind Sasuke what exactly he is fighting for, and by the look of sheer hatred consuming his face as he left, he assumes that he did a good job of doing so.
Or maybe Itachi simply wished to make things harder for Sasuke. He has always been a sadist like that.
The crows circle around the old Uchiha hideout, croaking a loud, wailing, mournful song for him to hear, and it only grows louder as he nears the dark, desolate area. This is where it happens.
Today is the day Itachi dies. Perhaps if Sasuke repeats this a thousand times then he can bring himself to have enough courage to enter the building—but he does so, nevertheless. It doesn't matter if he's scared or not. This is something he needs to do and he won't let anything get in his way, not even himself.
It begins at three in the afternoon, with a smirk, with the words, "Chin up, little brother. Let me see how you've grown."
Sasuke is not a fool, as most people assume. He is a child trapped in a man's body, given a man's vengeance and a man's hatred. He is still a boy wishing to be the best Uchiha there ever was, who wants to make his parents proud. He is still the younger brother who wants (desperately) to be acknowledged. It is this child that speaks out to him, for eighteen-year-old Sasuke is a quiet, calm boy-man who thinks before he acts, who watches his words with the intensity of a hawk, and he is never one who acts on impulse, yet somehow these words are still said, tinged with bitterness and years of repressed emotions.
"You'll be disappointed, Itachi. I'm not anything like you."
It is true. Sasuke looks nothing like Itachi, and Itachi looks nothing like Sasuke.
Sasuke's skin is bronzed, a healthy brown complexion like most of Konoha's residents, who spend endless summers going about their daily lives under the sun, while Itachi's is a pale, milky, almost inhuman white, as if evading hunters on an almost daily basis wasn't enough to let him break a sweat, much less earn a tan. Sasuke's hair is unapologetically unruly, a mess of black on top perched precariously on top of his head, going out in haphazard spikes, while his is just as unmanagable, but with patience and countless strokes of a brush he is able to tie his long hair neatly to an acceptable ponytail, and Itachi wonders why Sasuke can't do the same.
While Itachi can still consider Sasuke's face and hair tolerable, he finds his clothes utterly ridiculous. He takes one look and it is enough to make his nose crinkle in distaste. That rope-like purple sash tied around his waist is probably more appropriate for braiding a young girl's hair, rather than keeping a man's clothes in place. Moreover, it reminds him too much of Orochimaru for comfort.
That sannin had been a thorn on his side since he joined the Akatsuki, and looking back at it now, he figures he made a terrible mistake in not eliminating him all those years ago, thus preventing him from pursuing his impossible goals. He had underestimated Orochimaru's greed for the Sharingan. Apparently, subjecting him to the Mangekyou's torture wasn't enough to deter him from his quest, and five years later he chased down Sasuke to Konoha and offered him a deal he couldn't refuse. It often made him wonder how differently would things have happened if he had just held his sword a little bit higher, and aimed for his neck instead of his hand, killing him right there and then.
So many things have not gone the way he had intended them to, just because of his one oversight. It would have been an exaggeration to say that he wasn't expecting Sasuke's defection from Konoha, considering they had accidentally met under the least pleasant circumstances, while he was on an assignment to chase the Jinchuuriki (their personal exchange was something he did not want others to see, most especially Kisame and Naruto), but he did not think he would do it only to hunt Orochimaru down. And to see him all grown up and looking at him like this, staring him down with that Cursed Seal gleaming over his shoulder... He could almost feel the volatile chakra brimming underneath it, like a dam waiting to burst.
But Itachi is not a man who dwells on such trivial frivolities, and no matter how flawed his carefully crafted plan turned out to be, it nevertheless came to this end, to this final conclusion, and that was what mattered.
He has given Sasuke his wings, and it is time to see how high he has flown. How much hatred did Sasuke well up in himself, was it enough to kill the brother he once was? (and still is, a part of him begs to reconsider) How deeply had resentment flown through his veins? How tightly did he cling on to the life he gave him, the life with Konoha that could've been his but gifted to Sasuke instead? Would he still have something to come home to after all this was over? Would there be someone waiting for his return?
Would Sasuke, the last Uchiha, be given a hero's welcome, for killing Konoha's most infamous defector as well as its bad seed, the much-loved, much-adored scion of that clan who just one day broke down and killed all eighty-seven members of his family, save for one?
He can't help but wonder.
Sasuke.
Sasuke.
Sasuke.
It has always been about him.
"Make them proud," Itachi says. It does not take a genius to know whom he is referring to, as Sasuke's eyes glow like a demon's in the low light and he pulls his sword out of its shoddy scabbard.
Itachi wonders how he will do it. Sasuke likes his things special, and Itachi knows he won't settle for something as simple as a slit of the throat or a Chidori to the chest. Besides, he is Itachi the heartless murderer and Sasuke is the righteous avenger and villains like him don't die so easily.
Perhaps he would want a long, drawn out battle, neither of them giving up until the other was well and truly defeated—the kind of battle that becomes a legend in itself, like Kyuubi and the Yondaime, Uchiha and Senju at the Valley of the End, except theirs was definitely more tragic and more dramatic and more depressing. And when he dies (because that is the only way it can end), he would leave him with a profound message, teaching him lessons in life he won't forget, and let him go—free him from the chains of his past to move on with his life lived happily ever after in Konoha.
Yes, he would want something like that.
Itachi's eyes are closed to the world, and he is lost in his thoughts, but he can sense the very moment Sasuke moves, feel the slightest distortion in the wind that signals his actions. He lies back on the cold surface of his throne, waiting for the inevitable.
Now he chokes on his own blood, the warm red liquid running up his throat and squeezing the life out of him inside out, slowly, painfully, and he is not surprised to see the gleaming white steel of the Kusanagi stained with red, protruding from his chest, staining his clothes. Sasuke is fast, he muses, like lightning. He is crouching behind the old highback chair Itachi is reclining on, his body tense, as jumpy as a live wire. Itachi can feel the hatred burning like a blazing fire inside his heart, he can hear him thinking this is for father and for mother and for all those whom you killed they didn't even deserve it but how could you how could you.
"Goodbye," Sasuke says, and Uchiha Itachi is dead.
There are many things Sasuke would have told Itachi, if he had the chance to. Many things he'd like to call him (expletives harsh enough to make his own ears bleed), and most definitely he had many questions to ask. Did you ever regret what you've done? he would say. (even if you did I'll never ever be able to forgive you) Have you ever realized just how much you've ruined my life? (because you were the center of my universe and when you left the world crashed down on me). He would demand explanations for every single bad thing that happened in his life, because if not for him and what he did, then his life would have turned out so much better and so much happier because he was loved. He could still wake up every morning to his mother scolding him for drooling on his bed, and his father baiting him to the kitchen with the promise of fresh tomatoes.
And he would ask Itachi if he ever did love him, because he still stays up late at night pondering that mystery, wondering why he was the only one left alive and why Itachi had looked upon him with something akin to pity that night, and the only possible reason for his actions scares him beyond the shadow of a doubt.
But Itachi is dead and Itachi is gone and now Sasuke finds himself grateful that he hadn't asked all these questions, because now he has to learn what it means to be truly alone, and he doesn't need a lifetime's worth of what-if's to stop himself from doing so.
But life is not as easy as it seems, and Sasuke knows Itachi won't let himself die just like that.
"Missed me, brother?"
Itachi blinks.
That must've hurt at least a bit, and he pauses for the slightest moment to look for the phantom pain that was supposed to be choking him, piercing through his chest, breathing a faint sigh of relief as he finds nothing. He wasn't expecting Sasuke to break out of the Tsukuyomi so easily, to turn his own illusion against him without much difficulty.
He is alive, and he knows better than to look down and check for injuries, instead he meets Sasuke's gaze with his own, even, blank one. There is arrogance in his eyes that piques Itachi's curiosity. He is intimitely familiar with that feeling of confidence; with the knowledge that he has an ace up his sleeve, and there was no way he could lose. He knows Sasuke like the back of his hand, and understands very well that his childish nature still puts him, his once role model, on a very high pedestal, one that didn't fade away with time.
There are only so many things that can make Sasuke think he has an advantage over himself.
Sasuke can hear Itachi come closer to him, the quiet, almost graceful way he steps on the cold, hard stone, every step taken confidently, purposefully, as if trying to intimidate him with his walk alone. He still carries himself like a noble, he notices, like the way an Uchiha should, and belatedly he scoffs at his shamelessness. He doesn't even deserve to be called one, after how he killed them all, much less act like one.
Sasuke bites his lip hard, almost bruising it, willing himself not to punch Itachi's smug face and watch him bleed. Itachi finally comes to a stop before him, and true to his heritage there is something in his aura that just forces him to look, and for the first time, they can see each other eye to eye.
It has taken Sasuke eighteen years and many months of growing to reach his brother's impressive height, and as he tries to digest the fact that he can be as tall as and possibly maybe in just a few moments he'd be able to prove that he could be as good as him, if not better, Sasuke fails to notice Itachi's hand slowly pulling a kunai from his own pouch and raise it up to his neck. The tip is deadly sharp, and it only takes Itachi the slightest amount of pressure to draw out a thin bead of blood that trickles down his skin gently. The sensation makes his skin crawl, and Sasuke swipes away the blood with a finger.
"Today, it ends." he says, and in the blink of an eye Sasuke is gone.
It has begun, and this is a battle Sasuke will win, even if it kills him.
Sasuke stiffens. There is something ominous about the way Itachi walks toward him this time, the way he is definitely staggering and not striding, the way his feet are dragging on the ground instead of eating it up as they usually did, the way his eyes looked dazed and drugged. Even if he walks a shell of a man as he was a few, deadly moments ago, Itachi is still able to elicit the same bonechilling, mindbending spine tingling fear that he feels when he lays eyes on him. If, when perfectly healthy he is able to single-handedly eliminate one of Konoha's most prized families, Sasuke wonders just what more Itachi could do to him when he is like this: desperate, lingering at Death's door, with his Sharingan spinning wildly underneath his lids.
He takes the tiniest step back, still trying to put on a brave face. If he could reduce Itachi to this state, then surely he was so weak there was nothing he could do to harm him. Not anymore, at least. But he takes another step back, and another, and another, and it is only a matter of time before he finds the jagged edges of rock biting into his skin, and there is nowhere left to run.
Sasuke is out of chakra, out of energy, out of anger and there are only seconds left until Itachi finally corners him. His frantic heartbeat mirrors the heavy whiny sounds that escape from his lungs. His cold sweat mingles with the caked blood on his brow. There is nothing more he could do if Itachi decided to kill him right there and then, and grimly Sasuke likens the situation to a delirious, half-mad predator stalking his weak (defenseless, powerless, hopeless) prey and resigns himself to the worst. He has never felt more terrified in his life.
Itachi hopes he's doing it right. His lips are awkwardly pulled upwards, as if held by a rope, and his eyes crinkle in a strange-sort-of-amused way, to form some semblance of a smile. Even such a simple task can turn impossibly difficult when doing so feeling life leave your body one cell at a time, and as much as Itachi wants Sasuke to see him, this pathetic, dying version of him as his once-beloved brother, he does realize that with the smile plastered on his face, he looks more like an insane madman than a loving, self-sacrificing brother, but he still hopes.
There are so many things he wants to tell Sasuke, so many explanations and apologies and wishes for the future, but now is neither the time nor place to say them, and he is not quite sure if he is the right person to tell him all of these things, especially because Sasuke does not consider him his brother, and to him he is a crazy clan-killing traitor murderer, so Itachi does not bother believing Sasuke would actually listen to him. So instead, he drains all the remaining chakra fuelling his Sharingan and focusing it on a finger, one dripping with blood, and uses it to flick Sasuke's forehead.
Don't forget me, is what he would like to say, but such silly hopes are for silly men, and Itachi is the farthest thing from silly.
"Forgive me, Sasuke," he says, "but this will be the last time."
The look on Sasuke's face is almost comical as he says this. His eyes are as wide and round as saucers, and his mouth hangs open as though in surprise. Itachi smiles to himself. He looks at Sasuke and sees a little boy with big bright eyes, bigger dreams, and an even bigger heart (one without any trace of him, hopefully) and in that single moment, he knows Sasuke will soar.
The drizzle pouring down earlier has escalated into harsh rain, and today Sasuke learns how to appreciate bitter irony.
He winces at the pain that erupts from his body, the almost-physical pain that has his chest tightening and his stomach turning into knots, and blinks back the tears threatening to overwhelm his eyes as he sees his brother lying on the ground face up, dead, rain washing away the grime on his face. Itachi looks almost peaceful like this, he muses, without worries lining his face, without blood staining his hands.
Sasuke crumples to the charred barren land, all that remains of the mountain they fought on, andcloses his eyes, hoping the rain hides his tears (that runs down his cheeks and chin and heart). This should be enough, seeing his brother die with his own two eyes, by his own two hands, hear his last words with his own two ears.
Yes, it is enough.
It should be, because it can't not be. It can't.
It is all over and he has won, yet he feels so hollow and empty and why isn't he as happy as he should be?
It is dusk. A crow as dark as night flies to him slowly, and Sasuke knows all too well whom it is from. He feels the strangest urge to crush it with hands and watch life draining out of its eerily familiar eyes, eyes as red as blood.
It flies away without him doing as much as run his fingers through its smooth feathers, before vanishing in a cloud of smoke.
Today is the day Itachi died. Perhaps if Sasuke repeats this a thousand times then he can come to terms that he actually did it, that the Itachi in front of him is dead and gone and now he is alone— blissfully dreadfully alone.
He can't tell how much of him died along with Itachi, though.
a/n: my two-year overdue story. i've been meaning to write genfic for quite some time, but i was always distracted by my itasaku wips. luckily i still got around to finishing this. lol. i hope you liked it, justine. (though your icarus theme was sooo not present)
tell me what you think. review!