The Red Wind|CHAPTER TWO|Distance
"I don't get it, Itachi," Haruka grumbled, swiping a strand of black hair out of her face. Itachi looked at her intently.
"That's because you're not watching me when I do it," he concluded.
"I am watching you," Haruka grumbled. "Maybe you're not showing me right."
"I assure you, this is the right way to do it."
"How do you know?"
"I learned it in class."
"Maybe you learned it wrong."
"I don't think so."
"Maybe you weren't paying attention."
"I was paying attention, Haruka."
"Maybe the teacher didn't know what he was talking about."
"It's worked every time for me so far."
"Yeah, well, it's not working for me," Haruka huffed, crossing her tiny arms over her chest grumpily.
"Then maybe you should find someone else to teach you," Itachi sighed, running a hand through his hair. It had gotten much longer. He turned, beginning to walk away.
"No! Wait, Itachi, ok! Ok. I'll watch closer this time," Haruka yelped, running up to him. Itachi figured that would work better than reasoning. He found that sometimes Haruka had a tendency to be absurd.
"I'm only going to show you once more, ok?" Itachi asked, and Haruka nodded eagerly. She watched carefully as he took another kunai in his hand, holding it carefully with light fingers. She memorized where he placed each finger, noticing how slender his hand seemed in comparison to hers, and then with a flick of his wrist he sent the kunai sailing across the clearing, embedding deeply into the bark of a tree. Haruka frowned as he handed her a kunai. "Now you try."
Carefully she placed her fingers along the kunai in the way she remembered Itachi doing it.
"Remember to hold it lightly. Don't grip it so tightly," Itachi directed. "The kunai will do the cutting for you." Haruka nodded, but it was light and distracted. "Focus on your target," Itachi said lightly, watching Haruka as she looked hard at the tree she was aiming at. She had missed by a long way every time so far. Once she had managed to nick a tree beside it, but she wasn't able to throw straight enough that the kunai would dig deep enough into the bark. She could throw well enough. "When you throw, remember that the kunai has it's own balance, as you have yours." Haruka took a deep breath in, and then she took a shot, flicking her wrist as she remembered Itachi doing it.
She paused, surveying her work, before a grin broke out across her face.
"I did it!" She cheered, leaping into Itachi and wrapping her arms around his neck. He stiffened, but didn't push her off. She let go almost immediately, jumping around in a circle. Itachi smiled as he watched her. He was too young to realize why he felt a strange disconnect from her childish joy, and much too young to realize how much more he had see than she had. He would realize some day, but by then it would be too late.
Itachi had been trying to show her some of the things in the academy, but she was easily distracted, and he learned much faster than she did. Not that he didn't have the patience to teach her, he simply didn't have enough time.
Ever since they met, Itachi found that he spent most of his free time with her. In fact, when he wasn't spending his time watching Sasuke, he was spending it with Haruka. She had been over to his house many times, always seeming to come to distract him at the worst times. Mitoko thought it was endearing that she came over to play ninja so often, though Fugaku simply thought it was an unnecessary distraction. He was still his father though, and while he was prideful and thought his son's education was of the utmost importance, he wasn't an unreasonable man.
Haruka had since entered the academy, but she thought that they weren't moving along in the lessons fast enough for her. Ever since she found out how advanced Itachi was she decided that she needed to move as quickly as possible. The problem was, she was on to the next lesson before she had even passed the one before it.
Itachi directed her into practicing throwing kunai some more, but it was clear she was quickly becoming bored with doing the same thing over and over again. She was good at it, even showed a natural talent, but she hadn't yet perfected it. He wondered niavely how she managed to get away with that sort of attitude.
"It's getting late, Haruka," Itachi informed carefully. She looked up at him with disappointed blue eyes.
"You never have time to play," she complained. "It's always work with you." Itachi didn't really understand what that meant.
They went their separate ways into the dusk.
Hiroshi finished rolling up his sleeping bag, yawning into his hand. The sun hadn't even come up yet. The sky was barely lighter than the night before, and he could still see all of the stars clearly, but he didn't bother to complain. He figured if he did, Akane would just get annoyed, and it wouldn't really get him anywhere.
She tossed a bit of dirt over the fire pit just to be safe, and then shouldered her backpack. The thing about Akane was that she was always ready to keep moving. This was something Hiroshi had learned long ago. She glanced at him for a moment before replacing her mask over her face, and Hiroshi had to look away. He couldn't help but find it eerie. She was an ANBU officer, but she didn't have a traditional mask with her today.
She had been given a black crow mask, and the beak stuck out at a length. She had more than one mask, and this one was not to be subtle. Their mission was meant to send a message. That was the kind of thing Akane was trained to do.
"Are you ready?" Akane asked quietly. Hiroshi nodded, pulling on his own mask. She stared at him, her blue eyes piercing through the darkness of the mask, and he shivered as he looked away. He brushed it off as he leapt into the tree's, Akane following closely behind before over taking him. She was the leader of this mission, after all.
They leapt swiftly through the trees, and Akane remained silent as they moved. Hiroshi wondered about the information that she had given him the night before. She would always be Akane to him; that was how they were introduced. His name wasn't Hiroshi, either, but he had been given the new name upon joining the Black Operations team. He was also instructed to never reveal his real name to anyone, not even his closest allies. It was bordering treason.
Then again, so was their mission.
Hiroshi glanced at Akane almost nervously. He had known her for longer than they had been teammates, but he had never known very much about her. There were rumors, of course, but he was not one to pay much heed to rumors.
He knew, though, that Akane intended to risk everything for the completion of this mission. He wasn't sure if she even intended to return to Konoha with him after it was all said and done.
Hiroshi began to wonder what he would do if she didn't.
Kimiko stood silently before the small grave stone, a troubled expression on her face, gripping a bouquet of flowers in her hand. She wore a black dress, and Haruka stood beside her, clothed similarly. She had thought she looked lovely in the small black dress and little black shoes, but it seemed wasted, somehow.
She was confused, but even though she didn't understand why she was in a graveyard, she understood that she needed to be quiet this once. She didn't make a sound, simply reading the headstone for what felt like the hundredth time.
Here lies Nobu Takenaka. He will be missed.
There were numbers underneath that, but they didn't seem important to her. She glanced up at her mother somewhat impatiently, but Kimiko only gripped her daughters hand a little tighter. Haruka knew when her mother was trying not to cry. She didn't cry very often, and when she did it always seemed to be something she hated doing. Crying wasn't an ok thing to do, Haruka knew that. It was more important to keep the emotions inside so nobody could see them and use them against her.
She wouldn't be able to put that into words, at least not for a long time yet, but that would be what she would learn. Keep it all inside. Don't let her real emotions show. Emotions were a weakness.
Off in the distance she could still see the hundreds of people that had attended the Hokage's funeral. They were all dressed in black, some holding umbrella's tightly in their hands, thought it hadn't begun to rain quite yet. The sky still threatened to let it out, though, and Haruka felt it was more necessary to get inside or underneath something that it was to stare at the gravestone of a guy with the same last name as her and her mother. She had never bet a Nobu in her entire life, at least, as far as she could remember. It had no meaning to her.
She kept quiet all the same.
Haruka glanced over and saw Itachi standing beside his father, who was talking to someone who was dressed like the Hokage. She figured it must be the new Hokage, which was actually the old one. Haruka didn't really understand how that worked yet, either. She thought there was supposed to be a new Hokage after Minato-sama died, and that the old one was done already. It didn't seem as though that was the case.
Beside them stood Miroko. She looked as though she had been crying an awful lot. They had already talked to them, and Kimiko had given Miroko her condolences, but Haruka still didn't understand what they were talking about. She wondered whether or not Kushina would be at the funeral, too, but when she asked Kimiko just gave her this strange look as though she stepped on a sharp rock and told her that they would talk about Kushina another time.
Now they just stood in front of Nobu Takenaka's grave and her mother tried to wipe away her tears before they ran too far down her face and ruined her makeup.
Haruka waved when she caught Itachi's eye, and he stared at her for a moment before nodding back to her minutely, the smallest of false smiles tilting up the corners of his lips. Then his father must have decided it was time to go home because they turned and walked away, Itachi glancing back only once before they disappeared amongst the people.
"Momma, can we go home now?" Haruka asked after several more minutes of silence. Kimiko snapped out of her thought, dazed for a moment, before looking down at her tiny daughter. For a moment it seemed as though she were looking at someone else, before she recognized the familiar traits that made Haruka her little girl, and not anyone else.
"Sure, baby. Let's go home."
A/U: I genuinely hope that everything makes sense here. If it doesn't, it will be clarified in a later chapter more than likely, when Haruka is old enough to understand what happened. She's still very young, here.
Ah, just to insert, this story is most certainly not canon. I wont be following the exact plot, and it's almost AU in the fact that Itachi will probably never contract that life-threatening disease because I think it was a total cop-out on Masashi Kishimoto's part. Honestly, based on what Kishimoto-san wrote, Itachi is the most powerful character in the Naruto universe without the illness, which seems unlikely to me.
Tl;dr Haruka is niave, and I will be taking artistic liberties with this story.
