You of course don't know he's made this discovery. You two keep walking, the eerie silence holding any kind of uplifting feeling at bay within you. He seems totally at peace, totally familiar with it. But you couldn't help but remember the forest that you had known once as happy, but after the slaughter and the betrayal it had been a silent place, just like this. Silent in comparison to what it had once been.
FLASHBACK "Ayako! Ayako!" you cried, running after her. She was your identical twin, your clone, only she wasn't related to you. She was your personal diary, your confidant, your very best friend.
She turned and looked at you. Just watched you come.
"Huh? Kokoroyoi? What do you want? Father said I couldn't play with you today, but..." she grinned at you happily. "You can walk with me to the house if you want!" You grin and run after her. The two of you laugh and giggle over various things on your way to her home.
The next day you awake to hear a scream. Ayako doesn't live very far away, hers is the manor style house in the center of the large land plot her father inherited, contiguous to your own. You recognize the voice instantly as hers.
At her manor house, Ayako is watching the team of shinobi put a knife to her father's throat, forcing him to tell them where and how to find you and your family. (You aren't there, so you don't know this yet.) She backs into a corner with tears in her eyes as one of them puts a kunai to her mother's throat. She covers her ears and squeezes her eyes tightly shut when the kunais start to puncture the skin on her parent's necks. Then her parents admit that since your family moved their home to a different place on the same land plot, they no longer know how to wind through the forest surrounding it, but they assure the shinobi that with such a skilled team, it will be a breeze to find the house. The ninjas tighten their grips on the kunai, and trickles of blood run down into the shirt collars. The kunais keep digging into the wounds until finnaly Ayako's mother yelps loudly in pain, tears showing on her face.
Ayako cries out with tears streaming down her face, saying desparately that she'll show the shinobi where to find you if only they will swear to leave her family alone. The shinobi agree, and those who are not at her parents' throats gather behind her as she swiftly sets the pace into the forest, sobbing all the while that she is about to help these monsters murder her very best friend, her not-blood-sister. But she leads them onward, and then she hears both a male and a female scream. Her parents. She stops, but it is too late. The shinobi have already spotted your house, and her family is being killed. She drops to her knees and sobs louder and harder than ever before, feeling so terribly hurt and alone and empty and angry. The shinobi advance on your house.
Meanwhile, you are sitting there against a tree, hearing your family scream even as they try to fight off the enemy. When it is done you are all alone, every one of your relatives was in that house and now every one of them is dead. One shinobi spots you sitting there, paralyzed in fear and sadness and emptiness, sobbing your heart out quietly there alone. He casually throws a kunai guaranteed to strike and kill you, but just as you look up and see the kunai someone else's body blocks it, and you see the tip protrude from her back.
It's Ayako. She hunches over, drops of blood and tears falling from her face. She grips her stomach and falls to her knees, shoulders shaking in emotion, pain and tears. Her forehead buries itself in the pine needles on the ground. You crawl forward desparately, reaching for her, but all of your pain and tears and willpower cannot save her. She is already dead, even as she says,
"For you, Kokoro. They lied to me... They said they would spare them... This...is...all...my...fault"
END FLASHBACK
After the battle and the death of your friend, you swore to avenge her, to someday find out who did it and why. Later you pieced together all that had happened in Ayako's home, and now as you finished remembering it was so incredibly hard to fight off tears. Itachi just kept walking and you just kept following, feeling hard for the cure to your sudden rush of guilt. The same guilt you felt every time you thought back to that painful day.
'I should have known back then...I could have helped her...I could have kept her from dying, I should have known. I should have read the manuscripts as father had instructed, should have memorized how to use the technique... But it's too late now. She's way too far away.' you thought.
You look up at the sky through the treetops and Itachi does the same. It's lunch time. He goes out to find something to eat, but this time you kneel and place two fingers on the ground, focusing your chakra to the nerve endings in your fingers making them super sensitive. You can feel every single vibration in the earth, from the footsteps of an ant to the tunneling of worms. You search for the vibrations of water or game, and you feel a stream to the west of you and a flock of pheasant in the bush nearby.
"There's a stream to the west. And.." you say, throwing a carefully aimed kunai into the proper bush. The pheasants thunder up out of the shrubbery, but one lays dead. Itachi fetches it, then he sets about preparing it. You help him, doing the plucking while he gathers fire wood. Then you gut it and cut out the parts you won't use, head and feet and such. When the two of you are finished eating, you're on the trail again.
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