A/N: I only recently read the manga that covered the truth about Itachi. Forgive my lateness, but, I mean, who wouldn't be inspired by that? It makes the story even sadder for Sasuke, so dastardly as he is I can never hate one of my first anime loves. I do wish Itachi was still alive, somewhere... Anyway, here you go. First installment of this miniseries. Please review afterwards.
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Little brother is somewhere there, now. That graze of footsteps against filth, it could belong to no one else. They have always been unmistakable, not unlike the glimmer of naivety in his eyes, the stifled pitch in his innocent voice, the cherubic swells in his expression that plead, Come play with me, Nii-san.
It was simple enough to let his lids descend, for a moment, to spare the tears that came. Mother and Father had fallen last, wounds so clean and precise they barely bled, not until they had collapsed on top of each other.
Mother and Father they were, no more. The strongest in their clan, the most traitorous in their village, and now they were none but a tangle of rotting limbs and moon-white bone, with just a few drops of red to prove their hearts ever existed.
Little brother should have found the others by this time. He would be a mesh of shock and fear and grief, which only intensify when he stumbles upon this, and… there. Right on cue.
The woven door is shoved aside hastily, and he imagined a gaze, stung with horror, that would be tinged with the smallest ounce of relief upon seeing him. His fingers coiled around the stem of the kunai, picturing its peak embedded in that pale, creaseless forehead.
Nii-san, I… he released the blade before he could change his mind, cutting off whatever was about to be said. His vision flooded him, slowly, to realize that the kunai had missed its mark. And despite everything, the edges of his lips lifted, slightly. Of course.
How foolish of him to think that he could do it. Even his aim, the best the Academy had seen in ages, had betrayed him.
Gears of flesh shifted and turned, undoing the ties that held his plan together, retying the knot into something quite different. It would be more painful, more grueling a journey than simply letting the next kunai find its mark.
It showed in the unmasked hurt, the outright disbelief, and the tinge of anger that sketched swiftly into the curves of that face, emotions that flitted across his oblivion eyes, the kind expected from a macabre treachery.
In the end, there were just tears and a boy, his life ripped from him. There was also a man, who massacred his kin without so much as a grimace, now wanting to cry himself when he saw that.
But there was no other way, if he could not kill his little brother.