Disclaimer: The characters are the property of Masashi Kishimoto and the Naruto franchise.

Author's Note: Hello again! I am back with another chapter of Dream of Winter. Now, before we start, firstly I would like to say thank you to Ser Serendipity, kasinka613, Rosebunse and Just-A-Dude for your reviews . It's lovely when readers come back and your support really does push me to try and deliver something. Secondly, thank you to Van der Ay, wellperhapsnot and BladesofRays, and welcome on board! :)

I seem to have picked up quite a number of readers since last time and I honestly don't know what to say. It took me around sixteen chapters on Spring of the Plague to gain a similar audience. I believe I have Ser Serendipity to thank for that, but anyhow, new readers, it's lovely to meet you, thank you for joining me, and I really hope I can answer to your expectations.

This chapter was painful to write - so many people with hidden interests and false interests, all tip-toeing around each other, so many surfaces and underneaths. I really do apologise for Danzo and Itachi. It is very formal, but it needed to be done. Those two were not going to be cracking any jokes. Not at all. Anyway, it was so painful it went to 15000 words, so I'm cutting it and splitting the content into two. The good news is, that means that Chapter 4 may be out much sooner than expected and Chapter 4 is a bit more fun.

Without further ado, I hope you enjoy this installment of Dream of Winter. Best, Zen :D


"'If there are any developments with my brother, let me know'? Like hell are we going to let him know! Who does he think he is?" Naruto slammed his chopsticks over his second bowl of ramen and immediately raised a finger to order a third. Teuchi took it in good humour. "If Itachi thinks he can just swan back into Konoha and start acting all like a brother again, he's got another thing coming."

"As much as I wish to agree with those sentiments, Naruto, if we have any problems with Sasuke, Uchiha Itachi will be the first person we have to inform, whether you like it or not." Kakashi set down his glass of water and adjusted his mask over his nose (and once again Naruto and Sakura inwardly chorused, Damn! How does he do it?). "After all, Itachi was the one who cast the jutsu. If we discover any flaws or complications with it, we're dependent on him to fix them."

The thought of being dependent on Uchiha Itachi of all people made Sakura's skin crawl, and Naruto's grumbling beside her made it clear that he liked the idea about as much as he liked all noodle-based catering being banned from Konoha.

"We can't trust him, Kakashi-sensei."

"I'm not saying that we should, Naruto. It's unlikely that Itachi's told Tsunade the entire truth concerning why he left the Akatsuki, but, for now we have to trust in his abilities." Kakashi rolled the ice cubes at the bottom of his glass of water. "From what little we know of Itachi, at least we know that he's a man who never does things by halves. We can rely on him having done whatever it is that he's done – I'm not even going to pretend to understand what he did - completely perfectly. The question is: Has the jutsu been cast perfectly to suit our intentions, Itachi's intentions or somebody else's even more mysterious intentions?"

"I don't know about any 'intentions'," Naruto huffed indignantly, "but if we just let Itachi do whatever he likes, Sensei, don't you think it's like we're betraying Sasuke? I'm not buying Itachi's Mr Nice Guy act. If there's anything Itachi is not, it's nice. He's definitely up to something."

"Oh, there's no doubt about that."

"Sensei," Sakura spoke up at last, setting down her chopsticks across her bowl, "don't you have some idea about why Itachi's helping us with Sasuke?"

"I can't say that I don't," Kakashi said warily, and as Sakura and Naruto both looked at him to go on, he thought of the events of the day and the events of the past three difficult weeks and simply couldn't find it in himself refuse them. "Uchiha Itachi was an ANBU officer once, and a talented one at that. He has a unique skill-set. His field experience is paralleled by few, and, if he's serious about his re-allegiance to Konoha, his mercenary experience with the Akatsuki could give the ANBU an invaluable insight into the activities of the other nations. His reputation alone could be used as a considerable psychological pressure. Itachi would be a formidable weapon if Konoha could have him on her side again."

Naruto furrowed his brow. "What's Sasuke got to do with all that?"

"I suspect that the ANBU wanted Itachi to demonstrate his loyalty in some form, so that they could speed up the process of putting him back into action and have him on standby when our guests from the Mountain are here."

Sakura's eyes widened with understanding. "The ANBU were testing Itachi, by seeing what he would do when he cast the jutsu on Sasuke."

"Not quite, Sakura, but close. Many were curious as to how Itachi would behave when presented with Sasuke and the reminder of his most notorious crime, but the main question was whether Itachi would seize the opportunity the jutsu-casting gave him to capture the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki and take him back to the Akatsuki."

Naruto spewed soup all over the counter. "What!?"

Sakura pursed her lips and turned over some ideas. "I guess if the ANBU were testing Itachi, today would have been a good day for it. He had his first aspergilloma operation in the morning, so he should have been feeling weaker than usual, and if he really did try to capture Naruto, he wouldn't have been able to get very far."

"Even post-invasive surgery, Sakura, I think it's highly doubtful that Uchiha Itachi would have been taken down so easily. The ANBU took a considerable gamble today. They're obviously in a hurry about something."

"But if Itachi's going to be working for the ANBU again, then that means he isn't going to answer for his crimes! That's just plain wrong," Naruto said indignantly, full of righteous fury. "Itachi killed the whole of Sasuke's family - his own family! There's no way he should be allowed to get away with that."

"Some say, Naruto, that being conscripted into certain factions of the ANBU is a fate worse than death, so Itachi might not be getting away with anything at all, but this is all opinion and speculation," said Kakashi firmly, looking both his students in the eye so that Naruto and Sakura both understood that nothing of what they were discussing was to go any further than the hangings on the front of Ichiraku's shop. "For now, we'll just have to wait and see. It's a pity that Morino Ibiki and Yamanaka Inoichi are out of action still. It would have been useful to hear what they made of Uchiha Itachi."

"Tsunade-sama said that the ANBU interrogation unit gave Itachi the all clear," Sakura pointed out.

"Much of ANBU is a law unto itself. It'll do as it sees fit so long as the ends justify the means, and Shimura Danzo's power on the council has ensured for many years that there are just enough legal loopholes that allow the ANBU to do so." There was the usual subtle drop in temperature, irrespective of the cold weather, that accompanied any mention of the murkier levels of Konoha that nobody ever really wanted to talk about. It was like acknowledging the sewage that was flowing under the roads. "Politics, children - try not to get involved if possible."

Konoha's weapon of mass destruction, confined in the body of a teenager, and the young apprentice of Konoha's supreme leader, both failed to see the irony in Kakashi's advice, and so they continued to suck up noodles, gnaw char siu, and sip their cups of water, lapsing into a minute of quiet contemplation and contented lunching.

"Hey, Sakura-chan?" Naruto spoke up, when the silence was starting to drag. "Didn't you go to see Ino yesterday? How is she doing?"

"I didn't stay for long, but I think she's doing fine," Sakura answered with more conviction than she felt. "Apparently comas aren't unusual for the Yamanakas when something goes wrong with their jutsus, so she seemed optimistic, but Ino's always been tough."

Naruto scratched the back of his head and grimaced. "I still feel bad about what happened to her dad."

"It was Hokage's orders, Naruto. Nobody is to blame, and besides, both Inoichi and Ibiki have interrogated minds far more dangerous and gone than Sasuke's and remained relatively sane enough to tell to tale." Kakashi tried to assure him. "They will be back on their feet any day soon."

"Yeah, but…still…" Naruto trailed off, then suddenly he swivelled round on his stool and turned to Sakura with wide, questioning eyes. "So what's up with you, Sakura-chan?"

Sakura started with a jolt and her elbow slipped off the table. "What are you talking about, Naruto?"

"You've been really quiet the whole time," Naruto noted, with an emphatic jab of his chopsticks. "Like, this whole day! The whole time we were with Sasuke! You hardly said anything, so I figured maybe you were angry at something, so I thought maybe you'd had an argument with Ino again…hey, Kakashi-sensei, back me up on this! Don't you think she's been weirdly quiet today?"

"Hmm, well, usually I would say, 'Don't drag me into this', but, since I'm the one who scraped the together the money, up from the goodly pockets of my heart, for that bowl of untouched ramen," Kakashi's eye flicked down to the ramen cooling in front of Sakura with its stretched noodles and barely picked at toppings, "I'm inclined to say that Naruto has a point."

Sakura felt a twinge of guilt as Kakashi spoke. It seemed as though she wasn't going to get away with the avoiding the subject any longer, so she gathered together her thoughts and tried to make sense of them. "I…" she started, then stopped, waited for the right words to spring to mind.

In the end, she kept it simple. She turned on the stool until she was facing both Kakashi and Naruto along the counter, and said bluntly, "I don't like what we're doing to him."

"Who?" Kakashi rolled his eye and cuffed Naruto on the back of the head. "Ow! Sensei!"

"That's only natural, Sakura," said Kakashi, ignoring Naruto's scowling, "and it's not a feeling to be ashamed of. It's understandable that you're uncomfortable with how things have turned out, especially with Naruto's…complication of the situation."

"I just can't help thinking: What if we've done something really bad to Sasuke-kun with that jutsu?" The worried words tumbled from Sakura in a barely controlled rush and she clenched her hands. "What if we've only made things worse? What if what we've done stops him from ever coming back to us at all? And, then...look at what we're doing to him now. We're hiding so much, we're…we're basically lying to him!"

"Sakura-chan." She felt strong hands seize her shoulders and looked up into Naruto's fiercely determined face. "We're not lying to Sasuke."

"But – "

"Think about it. Yeah, I know, it's kind of complicated, and I get where you're coming from, but, Sakura-chan, wasn't it amazing when he woke up? You seemed so happy! It was the happiest I'd seen you in the whole of these three weeks!"

"I was happy, Naruto," she admitted reluctantly. "Believe me. I was, but the reality of all this hadn't sunken in then. It's a bit different now – "

"Sakura-chan, it's okay. Relax. You're taking all this way too seriously. The time-travelling stuff – think of it as a bit of fun. It's only going to be temporary anyway." Naruto sat back on his stool and pulled Sakura's unfinished bowl of ramen towards him. When she didn't make any move to snatch it back, he snapped apart a fresh pair of chopsticks and gave her a reassuring smile. "Once they work out how to really fix Sasuke's head, it'll be like none of this weird stuff with Itachi and that crazy jutsu ever happened. We might as well have a laugh with it while we can."

"So, you're not going to forget about him are you?" Sakura demanded, watching Naruto closely. " 'Sixteen year old Sasuke'. Our Sasuke, Naruto. Right here and right now, he's the real problem. He's the one we need to deal with."

Naruto stopped muttering under his breath about how Sakura had let the noodles go soggy just long enough to say, "I know that," then dug into the bowl.

Kakashi gestured over the counter. "Could we have the bill please?"

Teuchi handed it over the counter on a blue plastic tray. After scanning the items, Kakashi opened his mouth to point out the clear discrepancy between the number of bowls stacked at Naruto's elbow and the number on the bill, but when he looked up, the old man smiled at him and winked. "On the house."

It had been a while since Teuchi had seen Team Seven look anything as lively as he had seen them today. For the past three weeks, he might as well have been serving sleepwalkers.

Kakashi gave him a grateful nod, and left a couple of notes on the tray with no intention of collecting the change.

Naruto left Ichiraku's at a run, racing ahead to tell Tsunade the 'Good News', as he called it, whirling round only to shout down the street for Sakura and Kakashi to hurry up before leaping to the rooftops.

"Sakura. I was pleased to hear that the current situation doesn't sit well with you." Sakura looked round from Naruto waving at them from the top of a billboard, and found Kakashi standing beside her. He had his eye trained on Naruto's distant shape. "I was, in fact, a little relieved. Keep hold of those thoughts. We might come to need them, one of these days."

In case our grip on the here and now, and the reality of our situation, starts to slide.

Sakura nodded, smiled, more than a little reassured now that she knew her concerns weren't a sign that she was getting cold feet and failing her teammates. "Understood, Sensei."

Although for some, it might already be sliding.


Rumours flying here, rumours flying there, flittering and clinging to the ears their found with tiny hooked claws, like bats, and in the criminal underground they flew like bats in caves. Their echoes bounced and rebounded in the dark, until the first utterings of the rumour had all but faded to a ghostly image and a formless whisper.

The chill of the wind is formless. It lingers as an impression on the skin, and by the time Konoha ninjas first came to hear of the goings on at Sound, the rumour had already lost its definition and become just that: An impression, a gut feeling, a strong sense that something had happened in the Sound.

Team Eight were on a mission when they first got wind of the rumour.

They had been investigating a commune developing on the Land of Iron border. Outwardly it was doing nothing more deadly than growing mulberry and breeding silkworms with an eye for entering the silk trade, but Konoha had reason to suspect that not all was as it seemed. Initial reports suggested that it was growing 'medicinal herbs' for the black market on the side and, perhaps more worryingly, a team of Konoha jutsu researchers had recently disappeared without a trace nearby.

Between Kiba's nose, Hinata's eyes and Shino's a thousand ears of his clouds of insects, an impression even as vague as the one they caught from the black market was more than enough for Team Eight to track it back to its source.

Once they had the startled a former Sound ninja out of his sleep from beneath the floorboards of a civilian house, the impression began to take on definition.

Once Kiba had set Akamaru at the Sound ninja's throat, squatted down in front of the trembling man, and started, casually, asking some leading questions, with Akamaru squeezing and relaxing his jaws on the Sound ninja's windpipe (never quite sinking in his teeth, but never leaving any room to doubt that the dog could do it faster than the man could say, 'Snap!'), the impression became useful information at last.

The Sound ninja told them (wheezed at them, from between Akamaru's teeth) that one of Orochimaru's test subjects had gone berserk in a laboratory complex, and that Orochimaru himself had vanished, most likely dead in the rampage. Eventually somebody blew up the laboratory entrance to stop the thing getting out, and now leaderless the few ninjas there had been at the Sound had scattered.

He didn't know what had happened to Sasuke. He didn't know what had happened to Kabuto either. Kabuto, however, had long made an art out of being the forgettable face in the crowd and coming and going unnoticed, so it was more than likely that he was alive somewhere and lying low.

That the Sound ninja didn't know what had happened to Sasuke, even if he had little to do with the boy was worrying. Sasuke was no Kabuto. He was not forgettable, and he certainly didn't go unnoticed in the way that Kabuto did. Oh, Sasuke could melt out of existence in a blink of an eye like any other ninja, but everything he did – his vanishing, his attacking, his moving - carried a very assured sense of I AM ME that Kabuto didn't have. Call it flavour, if you will. If Kabuto was air then Sasuke was smoke.

People noticed smoke. If it suddenly appeared, something had happened, and if it suddenly disappeared, something had happened as well. It was no win either way.

Team Eight returned to Konoha, and Team Seven left before anybody could stop them.

More accurately, Naruto left first as soon as Kiba blurted the news in his face; Sakura went chasing after Naruto fifteen minutes later after; and then it was an impressive domino chain of Kakashi, Sai, and Yamato all insisting that they were setting out to stop Naruto and Sakura, because of collective responsibility, looking out for teammates, etcetera, etcetera, until they were all, rather conveniently, too far from the walls of Konoha for anybody to think that stopping them was seriously an option anymore.

They found the sealed up laboratory complex using the landmarks that Kiba and Akamaru had shaken, by the throat, out of the Sound ninja, spent time they dared not think they didn't have pulling away blasted rocks and twisted metal from its front until they had broken through and their hands and knuckles were cut and bloody.

Deep inside, they found a body.

It wasn't Itachi, however much it looked like him.

Deeper inside, they found Sasuke.

But it wasn't Sasuke, however much it…to be honest, it didn't really look much like him either, and as for finding him, it was probably a more accurate description to say that Sasuke found them.

Sai had a feeling they only managed to bring Sasuke down because one week underground with little food and a depleting air supply tended to have that effect on people.

The way Naruto saw things they had found Sasuke. Sasuke was in there somewhere. If you found a cup noodle, you found the noodles in the cup. At least, that's what he hoped, and told himself over and over again in the nights that came after.

The way Sakura saw things they had found Sasuke, but not brought him back.

The way Kakashi saw things they had found and brought back a massive headache, but leaving that headache behind or letting it go or putting it down had never been an option in the first place.

The way Yamato and Sai saw things, the rest of the team were suffering from being too stubborn for their own good, to know when it might be time to give up, but without that streak of bloody-minded pig-headedness, Team Seven would, quite simply, not be Team Seven.


The story Itachi was going with went something like this.

Itachi had left the Akatsuki when they discovered that he was ill – terminally so, if he did not receive treatment. It certainly would have been terminal if Itachi had stuck around the Akatsuki any longer. The Akatsuki would have tried to kill him before he became a liability.

Three weeks after Team Seven brought Sasuke back to Konoha the night watch were startled by the a sudden appearance of a murder of crows at midnight.

They looked down from the watch-tower – saw a man, knocking at the gates, back to face his crimes.


His ANBU guards were silent as they escorted Itachi back to their headquarters, but he didn't need them to speak to know what they were thinking.

By rights he should have been blindfolded, but it was the ANBU interrogation unit that had cleared Itachi of suspected malicious intent and it would have proclaimed lack of confidence in their own practices if the ANBU had then insisted his eyes be covered, and the ANBU couldn't have that.

The guards were young, mostly. That didn't mean much in the ANBU. Field experience was what mattered and if you started young so much the better.

Out in the field, it was all about who you were when you were up to your knees in mud and your comrades were lying still, and your enemies were creeping ever closer with their blades held between their teeth and their teeth bared white. Age didn't make much of a difference.

Still, they were young, and likely they had grown up hearing about Itachi from Chuunins and Jounins and, even within the ANBU itself, as something of a cautionary tale: Listen well, juniors, we're going to tell you a story today. We're going to tell you about Those Ninjas That Went Bad.

They walked either self-consciously stiffly or with long strides of false bravado, and their hands, when they swung them, ventured involuntarily close to their weapons pouches, as though they were resisting the urge to stretch and touch and take comfort from their presence. He could almost smell the fear oozing from their pores.

Itachi almost pitied them. They were afraid because he had once been one of them. The young officers were terrified that they were looking at a vision of their own future, or, worse still, the future of somebody they cared for. What if one day they got too good at what they did and simply couldn't stop when they went home? What would they do if a friend suddenly snapped and went on a bloody killing spree? What if, with all those missions they did, the ones they couldn't talk about, the ones nobody talked about, they were all slowly turning into somebody like him?

That was a lot of 'what ifs'.

One hour after his arrival, Danzo had appeared at the holding cell, demanding an explanation for Itachi's return. Itachi had been working to protect Konoha from within the Akatsuki, sending information as to their movements and directing it away from Konoha whenever possible. If that Itachi had returned, then perhaps there was some great threat was on its way that Danzo needed to prepare for.

It worked to both their advantage that Danzo knew of Itachi's mission. Danzo could give Itachi the freedom to move in the shadows, and in return, he would receive the results of Itachi's investigation. As much as Itachi disliked the man, he wasn't one to let personal likes and dislikes get in the way of what he needed to do to achieve what he wanted, and Danzo was much the same. They would get along if that was what was required of them.

"Leave us," said Danzo, looking up from his documents at last. Once all of the ANBU, except the one in the round blank mask, code-named Mu, who went to stand behind Danzo's shoulder, had left the office, Danzo gestured to the chair in front of him. "Normally I would have men stand in my presence, but since Mu tells me you had surgery this morning, you may sit."

"Thank you."

"You don't seem as pleased as I thought you would be, Itachi."

"I am as pleased as I can be."

"But I heard it all went well. Isn't that so, Sai?" Danzo suddenly addressed the fourth person in the room, a white-faced young man with a face so blank it might have been painted onto wood.

Sai bowed and stood to attention. "Yes, sir."

"I sent Sai to observe your brother in the moments after he awoke." Danzo gestured for Sai to stand down and the boy stepped back into the shadows. "His report was very positive. You should be pleased with what you accomplished, Itachi. The jutsu was a success, and yet, I feel as though there is something in you that resists me."

"Unless you are referring to some inborn family tendency to resist or rebel - in which case, as you well know, I will not refute you on that matter - I can't imagine what you mean."

Danzo's eyebrow twitched. His hand quivered on the desk. Itachi glanced down at the hand and then up to Danzo's bandaged face.

That was the hand that tore out one of Shisui's eyes. That was the socket in which he stored that stolen eye.

Itachi was no stranger to the temptation of revenge. He understood it intimately enough to know that that was how it needed to remain, a mere temptation, or else any small chance for peace would be lost to the storms.

Sometimes it occurred to him that driving Sasuke onto the path of revenge contradicted his ideals, but the thought did not trouble him, because Itachi knew that, however much he desired peace, after all he had done he was the last person in the world who deserved it.

Sasuke was supposed to have been his punishment. Where had it all gone wrong?

Danzo jerked his chin at the ANBU behind him and over to the corner where Sai was still standing to attention. "Sai, Mu, leave."

They bowed and left the room. As the sounds of their footsteps had faded down the corridor, Danzo began to talk. "Uchiha Itachi, who do you think you are, at this very moment?"

"I would say I am a Konoha shinobi playing an Akatsuki member, playing an ex-Akatsuki member trying to play a Konoha shinobi. It's complicated but manageable."

"In this room, yes, but beyond these walls in Konoha, no," said Danzo shortly. "You, Itachi, are the young man who killed his clan, in a fit of insanity the likes of which had never been seen before. Your photograph is an insert in every ninja, criminal and child psychology textbook along with a case study on psychopathy. Your name appears in debates on the nature of evil, and, although the jury is still out as to whether you are subhuman or superhuman, the general consensus is that you are inhuman and most definitely a monster."

"That is quite understandable," said Itachi sincerely. "I certainly wouldn't disagree."

"Would you agree with me then that, as this is what everybody believes, and what everybody believes is the truth, for the sake of all those enjoying what peace it is that we have bought them, that this must remain as the truth?"

"I would agree, yes."

Danzo's eye bored into him, sharp as a hawk's, hard as flint. "In that case, Itachi, you do not threaten me by dropping hints, however subtle they may be, as to the truth of the Massacre in front of my subordinates or anybody in Konoha for that matter. Is that clear?"

"Clear, yes," replied Itachi lightly, "but, I hope it is also clear that my brother Sasuke is to be left well alone."

Danzo pressed his lips together into a thin, flat line. "Need I remind you, Itachi, that your brother is only alive because I gave you an option that allowed him to be spared?"

"And for that option, I am eternally grateful, of course."

"And yet, when I ordered you to use that jutsu to save your brother, you resisted the idea." Danzo stopped drumming his fingers on the pommel of his cane and peered into Itachi's carefully blank face, "and I can see that you resist it still, even though the deed has been done and it was your suggestion to begin with, and you have only gained from the exercise. You must know this."

Itachi did know this. The Akatsuki were watching him and his actions in Konoha and if Konoha didn't try to test his loyalty they would have been suspicious. Casting the jutsu had reunited Itachi with Sasuke and presented with the Kyuubi Jinchuuriki.

"It was a fair initial test of my credibility," he decided to say.

Danzo nodded in agreement. "Indeed, it was. If the Akatsuki are expecting you to make a concerted effort to at appear as though you've returned repentant, they ought to be satisfied with that as a beginning."

"Largely satisfied, yes, however – "

"However, it won't be enough," Danzo cut in, and Itachi fought the urge to grit his teeth with some amusement. It had been a while since anybody had dared to interrupt him. "You will need more opportunities in which to show that you are trustworthy. I have told the Hokage that the ANBU interrogation unit has assessed you as such, but words are not enough. Konoha demands actions, which is only to be expected. We are ninjas, after all, not priests. We will have to find something for you to do here. I am correct in assuming that you will be returning to the Akatsuki, of course? After all this finished?"

"I know that my place is beyond Konoha's walls, and that that is where the people here need me. I will make no insistence to stay."

The thought that Itachi wasn't going to be sticking around longer than necessary seemed to put Danzo at ease. He nodded, pulled out a sheet of paper from his desk drawer, followed by a brush, a seal, and a pot of red paste.

He talked as he wrote out a letter. "A rogue ninja of your reputation would not usually be accepted back into the ninja ranks at all, but with your background and potential"- and my political influence, it went unsaid, but Itachi could read silences like books – "it will not be difficult to justify you as a special case. I shall tell Tsunade that I want you in my personal guard, where you'll be under surveillance by the finest ANBU in the village and away from the main running of the town. She will see the sense in this. Better to keep a falcon in an eyrie than a dovecote. The officers will ensure that you don't see more than what is relevant to your mission."

And in event of Itachi returning to the Akatsuki, Danzo would be able to legitimately say that Itachi had remained under suspicion and surveillance during the whole of his time in Konoha and escape any truly damaging wounds to his reputation.

"What will you tell the officers?" Itachi asked, as the letter to Tsunade took shape in front of him.

"That I do not trust the Hokage's soft methods and I want you under my surveillance, but that I intend to make full use of you in the meantime," Danzo spelled out, the tip of his brush trailing down the paper. "A few of rumours spread here and there that your loyalties to the Akatsuki might not have been entirely cut should keep the men on their toes around you. I'm sure they will help you keep focused on your investigation, and if those rumours remain in circulation nobody will be at all surprised when you leave."

Reasonable enough, however – Itachi steepled his fingers in front of him. "If I were the Hokage I might suspect that you were recruiting me for your own purposes."

"You mean to arm myself with tools with which I could undermine her. She will, of course, suspect, but that is nothing unusual," said Danzo dismissively, as though having the Hokage suspect that he was up to something dark and dastardly was all part of a day's work. "My purposes are Konoha's wellbeing and future, and I am fully within my rights to demand the tools fit to meet them. With the arrival of our interesting guests from the Mountain, I'm sure even she will understand that it will be good to have you in the wings."

He finished the final symbol on his letter with a flourish and stamped his seal on the bottom left corner. "You can work for me on investigating the Koujins, and, although I realise I ordered you to keep your distance from your brother, when I call for it, Itachi, you will help us with controlling him as well. There, that should satisfy your Akatsuki agenda, as well as mine. Are there any problems?"

"None," he hesitated, and the 'however' that he had wanted to speak out earlier resurfaced from the back of his mind, "however, I do not think including Sasuke in any plans concerning Konoha's security is a wise decision. He would only be a liability. He shouldn't – "

"The plans concerning Konoha's security are not for you to question. As it is, your brother's predicament is what brought those savages down from their godforsaken mountain in the first place." Danzo laid a knife across the letter and folded the paper using the blade's edge. There was a low zip! "It is impossible to exclude him. Now that you've made him manageable, I see no excuse for him not to make himself useful when the time comes."

Wood creaked before Itachi realised that he had tightened his grip on his arm-rests. Danzo's eye flicked up at the sound.

Itachi slowly uncurled and flexed his fingers. He took another deep breath.

"I thought it might be something like that – your insistence that I use that jutsu, the efficiency with which you made the arrangements," Itachi listed, and he was astonished at the bitter inflection in his own voice, even though his face remained blank. "That was why you were so pleased that it worked, but, no, I can't pretend that I am surprised. I knew what you were hoping, and I went ahead and cast the jutsu anyway."

"When the need arises to fight fire with fire, you will see that what you did was undoubtedly the right thing for this town."

"You seem already certain that Koujins are a threat," Itachi noted with amusement.

"Anything novel is a threat, and that is a certainty of mine that has saved this village time and time again." Danzo slowly smoothed the creases out of the folded paper with a thumb until the letter was flattened to perfection. "The fact that nobody knows this is a testament to how successful I've been. Now, I shall have Mu deliver this to the Hokage later. I have nothing more to say to you, so you may leave."

Itachi had not been so abruptly dismissed for eight years. Now a part of him wanted to lean back in the chair, stretch out his legs, and remind Danzo just who exactly the old man was trying to throw out from his office like a common Konoha officer - a psychopath, a lost cause, and a monster in human skin.

He could kill him in the blink of an eye.

"Do you have anything more you wish to say to me?" Danzo asked when Itachi hadn't moved from the chair.

Better than that. He could make Danzo kill himself in the blink of an eye.

But he wouldn't. Those were the instincts of Akatsuki-Itachi, the empty man, the easiest mask for Itachi to put on and the hardest to put away, and for this mission investigating the Koujins, he needed to set that mask temporarily aside and go back, however briefly, to being a Konoha man.

"Nothing comes to mind."

It was like trying to slip back into clothes he had already grown out of.

Perhaps that was a sign that he had been growing only too comfortable in his Akatsuki cloak.


More pieces of the puzzle. Have you got the corners yet? If you are confused, more confused, still confused, less confused, found something intriguing, or if you can imagine Itachi checking his nails and pining for his Akatsuki manicurist as Danzo drones on over him...Well, maybe not the last one, drop me a review and let me know. I love reader speculation. ;)

Next time: Team Seven relocate, Kakashi is late, the Koujins aren't amused and Sasuke's problems get worse.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon!

Zen :D

Best, Zen :D