Welcome, everyone, to Hiwaya chapter 2! Sharingan is...well, definitely darker than what I had planned for it...but it's really just the first chapter. The following chapters should probably be more humorous and less dark, but what's about all the distinction there is.
Ah, in other news, I have a quick poll up on whether or not I should post a drabble I wrote, so please vote ^^ I'll be putting up the Princess poll again after I'm done with this one.
Title: Sharingan
Genre: Romance/Drama/Humor
Warnings: Dark, vampires (thankfully, they DON'T sparkle...)
Pairing: MultiSaku (Itachi, Kakashi, Sasuke, Shisui)
Disclaimer: I dream about owning Naruto...but then I wake up.
Sharingan
The night air was chillier than she had expected, making goosebumps appear all over her arms as she struggled to zip up her jacket. Late March evenings could get frigid, regardless of how muggy the afternoons were, and as she briskly trotted down the poorly lit street, Sakura severely regretted not taking a thicker jacket to class.
"But I didn't know I'd decide to hit the library up later, or that I'd be stuck there so late," she muttered under her breath, tone bordering on petulant. She had a decently even temper nowadays, something she had spend most of her high school years working to achieve, and it had gotten her through grueling classes and mind numbing exams alike. But her day had been a tiring one, and the icy cold of the evening was eroding away the little patience she had left. "Now I'm freezing, tired, and it's dark."
As if on cue, like a badly choreographed scene in a cheesy horror film, a scuffle sounded in the dark behind her.
The rose-haired twenty-one year old stiffened minutely, the hands tucked into the pockets of her zip-up hoodie clenching in reflex at the sudden adrenaline rush. "The squirrels sure are active this evening," she muttered, attempting to reassure herself as she quickened her pace.
But her blood ran cold when the scuffle sounded behind her again, closer this time. She chanced a glance over her shoulder, and it terrified her that, in the darkness, she could see no one there.
'Crap…'
It was nothing. She had to convince herself of that. True the lighting was bad, but she had pretty decent night vision. If someone had been following her, she would have seen them. She had to believe that.
The distinct sound of a footfall behind her echoed, the sound loud in her ears.
She knew there hadn't been anyone behind her two seconds ago.
With her heart hammering in her chest, she through all caution – and dignity – to the wind and sprinted down the street.
Behind her, the strangest sound of fluttering, like tattered cloth or wings filled the night.
Sakura's heart rose up to her throat. She could hear the harsh thudding of her own heartbeat over the pounding of her feet on the concrete of the sidewalk. Her breath caught, a stitch developing in her side as she ran.
A body barreled into her from behind, knocking all the breath out of her as she landed hard, scraping her palms as she tried to grab onto the shrubbery by the sidewalk to break her fall.
Powerful hands grabbed the back of her jacket, hauling her up with superhuman strength that forced a shriek from her lungs. With desperation fueling her, she struggled, kicking and flailing and finding no purchase. There wasn't enough space inside her to feel anything other than utter terror, and the emotion tore her throat with screams. But whoever it was behind her slammed her to a convenient tree, the bark rough against her cheek as she struggled.
An icy chuckle shot pure, mind numbing fear down her spine.
"Dinner."
'…Dinner??' Sakura mused, her thoughts a small blip of sanity among the storm of chaos in her mind. But it was her last coherent thought as putrid breath ghosted across her cheek, paralyzing her into stillness and silence.
"Cat got your tongue?" the strangely sibilant voice hissed in her ear. "You were shrieking so pleasantly before."
A shrill cry that was laced with shamefully hopeless tears surged to her throat, but it was cut off before it erupted as fangs sank into her throat.
Pain like nothing she had ever imagined burst into her brain, claiming her with darkness like moonless nightfall.
=*~*~*=
"Holy shit," a distinctively boyish male voice swore, adding to that phrase a number of even more vitriolic curses. "Ero-sennin, we have to do something!"
Warm hands levered up her limp body, peeling her sticky jacket off her shoulders. A whimper of pain escaped her, and her rescuer sucked in a sharp breath.
"Ero-sennin…"
"Calm down, Naruto," a deep, gravelly voice murmured, another presence coming to hover over her prone body; she could feel the tightly reined wrath flowing off the new arrival. "She's lingering on death's doorstep. She needs immortal blood to live, and even then, she'll be forever changed. Orochimaru made sure of that."
'Orochimaru.'
Even wavering on the edge of unconsciousness Sakura could feel her throat clog with bile at the name. Something inside her screamed hatred and fear.
"Your blood-,"
"No. I was mortal once, Naruto, remember? My immortality was a gift of years of hermitage. I can't pass that on to her through my blood. It has to be you."
"Will it work?" the younger voice – 'Naruto…the one named Naruto,' Sakura's mind filed the information away on autopilot – asked warily. "Blood transference isn't always…safe. What if I make her…worse?"
"There isn't any other way at the moment," the older voice admonished sternly. "If we do nothing, she dies."
Naruto made a noise of frustration that, to Sakura's ears, sounded akin to an animal's snarl. But his touch was infinitely gentle when he shifted an arm around her shoulders and brought a wrist to her lips.
"I'm sorry if…if this isn't what you want," he muttered, his words fluttering across her lips with his breath.
'He…feels like fire,' Sakura's befuddled mind mused.
"Drink."
Warm flesh was pressed to her mouth, and for a second Sakura didn't understand what was happening to her, but then a warm liquid dribbled across her lips and down her throat…and then she didn't think at all.
Hunger gripped her, hunger like she had never known it. And in a flash of movement startling in someone who had lost so much blood, she bit down on the proffered vein and drank.
As the wrist's owner hissed in pain, Sakura felt heat blossom in her stomach, like she had just taken a huge swallow of hot chocolate after running around out in the snow, and her eyelids fluttered.
Strangely warm, blue eyes were all she saw before succumbing to darkness once more.
=*~*~*=
"Cat got your tongue?"
The sibilant voice was strikingly familiar. Orochimaru. She had a name to go with it now, the name of the one who had hunted her.
"You were shrieking so pleasantly before."
Pain erupted, streaking all the way down her spine, as fangs dug into her flesh.
"NO!"
Sakura surged upright, flailing in terror's iron grip.
Strong hands pressed her shoulders, forcing her back onto the pillows.
"Stop. You will hurt yourself otherwise," a soft, yet commanding, female voice ordered her.
Suddenly drained of the will to resist, Sakura felt her body relax into the pillows behind her, without her conscious consent, barely managing to turn her head to get a better look at her observer as she slumped back into the softness at her back.
A beautiful woman in a lovely, navy kimono embroidered with a bellflower pattern in silver and palest sapphire sat on a high-backed chair beside the bed. Her raven-black hair was pinned back with a set of amber-inlaid combs that gleamed in the silken coil of her dark tresses. Her pale skin seemed almost white against the darkness of her hair and kimono. But her eyes radiated concern and warmth, and Sakura found herself more at ease in a strange bed than she had felt in the weeks since her semester had started.
"How are you feeling? The woman asked, her obsidian eyes trained on Sakura's pale face.
"Disoriented," Sakura admitted, far more candidly than she had intended. "Disoriented and feeling like a house fell on me. What," she swallowed, a little surprised to find a lump rising in her throat, "What happened to me?"
The woman's eyes turned grave.
The answer was obviously nothing good, but Sakura had been expecting that. She didn't usually get mugged at night, only to somehow be rescued by two individuals whose conversation hadn't felt entirely…real, and wake up in a strange bed in a strange room in a high-quality yukata that was not what she had worn earlier.
"You were…attacked," she said at last, when the silence had stretched out too long to be comfortable. "By a man my family should have put down long ago. Orochimaru."
A shiver ran through the viridian-eyed girl at the name. 'Am I ever going to stop that?' she wondered vaguely as her hands clenched in the silken material of the duvet covering her.
"What do you mean by that?" Sakura asked when the minute trembling in her hands finally stopped.
For the first time, the woman looked uncomfortable, her dark eyes flickering from Sakura's face to the door at the far side of the gloomy room and back. Sakura could barely make the door's outline from the single lamp that illuminated the two of them, but there was a distinct feeling that they were not as alone as she'd thought they were, and the notion made her frown.
"That man is the responsibility of my clan, the Uchiha," the woman responded, distracting Sakura from her previous line of thought. "Had we been able to destroy him when he murdered my cousin, Obito, years ago, this might never have happened."
"I'm sorry…" Sakura murmured, feeling a sudden kinship with this woman. They were linked by the man who had attacked her, and killed the woman's family member; "He-,"
"Is she alright?!" a voice asked, the tone bordering on frantic. The boyish timbre was familiar to Sakura; it was the younger of the two who had rescued her.
"Shut up, dobe," a new and unfamiliar voice countered sharply. "Mother is-,"
A scuffle erupted outside abruptly, and just as Sakura, finally disobeying the raven-haired woman's command, struggled to a sitting position, the door banged open and several people spilled into the room.
"Rose-girl!"
A strangely animalistic looking blond with three whisker marks on each cheek bounded to Sakura's bedside, his blue eyes filled with concern. "Rose-girl! Are you okay?"
Staring blankly at the blond boy, Sakura found herself tickled by a feeling she hadn't thought she would experience for a while. Giggles bubbled to her lips and overflowed. "M-my name is…S-Sakura, not…Rose-girl," she managed between bursts of mirth. "I feel…a little weak, but a lot better than I would have expected."
"I'm Naruto!" the blond told her bluntly, grinning as her laughter subsided. "I'm so glad you aren't dead!"
"Shut up, dobe," the other voice from earlier spoke up, and Sakura switched her attention to the other people who had spilled into the room.
Three dark-haired individuals, 'Part of the Uchiha clan?' Sakura wondered to herself, and one silver-haired one made up the rest of the crowd that filled her room along with Naruto. Unlike the blond, their faces were much less open; the emotions she could feel rolling off of them a mixture of tightly coiled anger and frustration. 'That's…unsettling…'
"Sakura-san," the woman beside her said softly, capturing the girl's attention once more, "these are other members of my clan, my sons, Uchiha Itachi and Sasuke, my nephew, Uchiha Shisui, and our family friend, Hatake Kakashi. They, my husband who could not be here now, and I, Uchiha Mikoto, are responsible for Orochimaru. Please, stay with us until we have dealt with him."
"I…I'd feel more comfortable just going home," Sakura said, trying to smile.
"You cannot."
Sakura's aspen-leaf eyes flew to the one who had spoken, surprise and irritation mingling in their depths as she focused on the one Mikoto had introduced as Itachi.
"And why is that?" Sakura asked cautiously, trying not to give voice to her sudden flare of anger at the male's imperious manner of speech.
"Orochimaru is a calculating individual," Itachi replied smoothly, making no sign that he had seen the flash of annoyance in her eyes. "If he has attacked you, he most likely also knows where you live. Your residence is no longer safe."
A reasonable answer.
Unable to argue against the logic of his statement, Sakura quieted a second, then turned on Naruto. "What if…what if I stay at his place?" she asked the room in general. But the answer to that question was clear to her even before her question was all out, the apologetic denial all over Naruto's boyish face.
But his words, when he spoke, were not directed at her.
"You haven't told her yet, Mikoto-san?" he asked, cerulean eyes fixed on the woman still seated at Sakura's side.
"Tell me what?" Sakura asked, feeling an iciness spreading from the back of her neck to inch down her spine. "Tell me what?"
"You have to stay here in the Uchiha compound for now," Naruto replied, his blue-eyed gaze apologetic. "They are best equipped to help you for the next few months because…the man who attacked you, Orochimaru, was a vampire. And now you are too."
=*~*~*=
"I'm…what?"
To Itachi's fine-tuned hearing, the rosy-headed girl – 'Sakura. She called herself Sakura.' – sounded more upset than incredulous, as if everything Naruto had said had to be a twisted prank they had all decided to pull on her and she wanted them to stop. In spite of the way he had spoken to her just minutes ago, he wasn't without feeling, and a tendril of sympathy unfurled in his gut at the sound of her voice.
"That…that's ri-ridiculous," Sakura said, forcing a laugh. "Vampires don't exist. I was mugged. Oro-That man…attacked me. But I'm not a vampire. Be-because…because vampires don't exist…"
She was falling into hysterics. Itachi could smell the salty tang of tears as they filled her eyes, all of them could.
"Here."
Moving in his unassuming way, Kakashi had pulled a small, round object from one of the pockets of his navy pants, slipping beside the rose-haired girl. "Look."
Gentle hands tilted Sakura's face, and Itachi stifled a hiss of shock and anger at the brutal puncture marks that marred the girl's slender throat. Orochimaru had been particularly sadistic; the wounds no longer bled, but the flesh was torn and jagged around the bite, and Sakura whimpered in pain as the silver-haired male put the marking on display.
"He really…"
"Stop that, Kakashi," Mikoto admonished, breaking the grim air that had surrounded the room for the first time that evening as she smacked the man who had usurped her place by Sakura's bedside upside the head. "You have no right to bring our guest to tears. Now get out, all of you. I will talk to Sakura-san alone."
And with all the force of a whirlwind, or an overprotective mother hen, the Uchiha matriarch chased the males out of the bedroom and shut the door behind them, the door lock falling in place with a solid click.
"Good job, old man," Naruto growled, making a face at the one responsible for their exile from Sakura's bedroom. "Mikoto-san will probably never let us near her again."
"Speak for yourself, Naruto," the only wavy-haired Uchiha, Itachi's cousin, Shisui, spoke up with a small smirk, though the expression didn't reach his eyes. "If Sakura-san is a vampire, it is our duty to oversee her transition while we hunt for Orochimaru."
"Yeah, at a distance," Naruto shot back with a challenging grin, his whisker marks deepening. "You know-,"
"Okaa-san can be overprotective," Sasuke, the last member of the group to have evacuated the bedroom, finished. "Naruto is, unbelievably, correct. We should have handled that better."
"Enough, otouto," Itachi interjected, effectively silencing the others with his soft-spoken words. "We will rectify the situation. Orochimaru has been flying under our radar for long enough, but he slipped up when he attacked the girl. He will be dealt with."
The two Uchiha siblings locked gazes, both pairs of obsidian-hard eyes grim with anger, but then Sasuke turned away with a curt nod, followed by Naruto and Kakashi, leaving the two elder Uchiha members a quiet moment to themselves.
"Mikoto-san will tell her everything," Shisui said softly into the still corridor in general. "She will know the truth and we can worry about her reaction to it later. It's something she would have had to come to grips with anyway."
"I do not worry for her," Itachi replied curtly, obsidian eyes narrowing as his ears caught the telltale sounds of a nose being blown along with the scent of salt again. "Only that her apprehension of us will slow down our hunt for Orochimaru."
"Itachi, Sakura already knows she's a vampire. You know how rare it is for someone to live through a changing, even if they've been given immortal blood; only those with the strongest wills survive. Sakura will not let the fact that we, also, are vampires, and her keepers, keep up from our task."
Wishing he could dispel the scent of the girl's unhappiness seeping through the heavy, oaken door, Itachi turned abruptly and strode away, flashing his cousin one last look. "She had better be strong. Our life is not an easy one."
TBC
Uchiha Household, Dawn
"Sakura!"
She turned away from the window, startled by the cry, just in time to see the flash of darkness before Itachi snatched her away from the sill and dawn shot over the horizon.
Feet thumped loudly over the hardwood floors as Shisui, the one whom she could vaguely remember yelling her name, snatched the window curtains, hauling them shut with what Sakura would have labeled unnecessary force. But Shisui and his harsh behavior towards window accessories was the last thing on Sakura's mind as she tried her hardest just to breathe within the circle of Itachi's arms.
The hard, unyielding warmth of him soaked into her back through the two layers of their respective shirts, his long, raven-wing hair tickling her neck as his breath did the same to the shell of her ear. Frozen in place like some prey animal in the eyes of a predator, Sakura struggled to reassert control over her own body.
"I-Ita-,"
"Idiot."
The word was whispered, harsh and ragged, as though he hadn't meant for her to hear it, something she was certain of when his next words were delivered in his usual, silky, even-toned tenor.
"Sakura, we are vampires. Do not most legends enumerate that one of the easiest way to kill a vampire is to subject it to sunlight?"
"B-but, Shisui…"
The arm around her waist tightened minutely, as if displeased by her assumption, but then the pressure disappeared abruptly as Itachi released her, and she wondered if she had only imagined it.
"Shisui is over half a millennia old, Sakura," Itachi admonished, turning her with surprising gentleness to face him. "He can withstand some sunlight. You, on the other hand, went through your changing two days ago." For a second, Sakura distinctly saw the Uchiha's eyes bleed a startling crimson that made her breath catch in her throat, and then it was gone, though the trembling it had started in her fingers still remained. "Do not presume that sunlight is safe for you anymore."
ItaSaku is my weakness! So of course the extra scene had to be an ItaSaku one XD
Fear not, if this gets written the pairings will be more spread out. This scene just happens to be ItaSaku because they're easy to write for me ^^ In other news, I'm weirded out that I seem to be able to get into Itachi's head pretty easily nowadays, and I will be changing my pen name to Aria Illusine on April Fools Day (yeah...bad choice, I know. at least I have an excuse if I forget to change it...I can be all "April Fools...hehehe...sorry.")
Please remember to vote on my quick poll! And feed the poor muse, she desires cookies and reviews! She's working overtime during finals week for some reason...
Aria, out.
