Unedited & Originally Posted: 09/09/2016


Cat's Cradle


Chapter Seven


Seven First Times (& One Lucky Cat)


He hates me, Yugito realized and was left stunned by how much pain that caused her.

Well, what did she expect? Itachi didn't have any reason to like her. He only tolerated her, and it was clear now. She had been blind, had thought for a bit that he was with her less out of convenience and more for her but she had been wrong. Yugito had been covering for him for the past months, had been lying on mission reports saying what a good job he was doing and how much of a help he was to the village. Actually lying for him but he'd only been using her and she'd let him use her. All because she'd been under the impression that maybe, just a bit, he was thankful he'd ended up with her as a goddamn baby sitter.

But no, she'd only been lying to herself because of how lonely she was—and that was ironic!

She'd just been confessed to by two people, and she had the gall to say she was lonely. What had she been doing her entire life? Now it all looked so childish and silly. She'd cried over wanting someone to be there and understand her but she pushed away anyone who wanted to try—and for what? Because she was destined to die before she reached thirty?

At least she would get around to reaching it. Many died before then, it was the way of life for shinobi.

But she'd just been so blind, so shortsighted that she hadn't seen it.

Yugito wanted to cry, to sob, to threaten the world with the power that lay at the tip of her fingers, to hurt someone in the same way that she hurt. She never thought it would be so terrible, that it could be so painful for someone to turn their back on you. Everything else she'd ever endured had been so different. There had been no masks to cover what Kumo was doing to her, they'd never pretended to be on her side. This was a new kind of pain, an ache that echoed through her chest and made it very hard to think. It was like she had an unreciprocated friendship.

The thought sent her laughing because of how terribly unfunny it was.

It got her thinking—did Hatora and Matozāki feel this awful? Had she caused that by being so flippant with their feelings? Could she have handled it any differently?

She didn't know, didn't know if they hurt worse because the love was a different type or if her behavior had affected it at all. It was a sort of irony that no matter how she—the object of their apparent affection—reacted, they would still feel the same because she just couldn't reciprocate. Not in the way they wanted of her.

Yugito had spent too much time tricking herself into pretending she was okay by herself.

Itachi was the new prick who had ruined everything.

He found her later that evening, just in time for dinner, and she said nothing to him. She hurt too much to speak as if she were fine. He was a silent as ever and for the first time in a very long time, they shared a meal in silence. It was worse when she realized she wasn't doing what she should obviously be doing; sending a message to the Raikage of at least the presence of Jiraiya, even if he couldn't exactly do anything. They were at peace time, he was allowed to be in the Land of Lightning, though it would serve to keep an extra eye on Itachi.

So why wasn't she doing it already?

I need more information, she thought to herself the weak excuse, the niggling feeling of hope that she was actually wrong about all that she was thinking.

Yugito sipped her sun tea and the ache only festered, adding on the old wounds as she thought about the only real father figure in her life. He had been just another family she was tossed into and his wife hadn't cared much for her, but he had been different than all the others. He taught her things, interesting things, like the best ways to pet a cat or the many reasons why sun tea tasted so much better than boiled water.

It's natural, he had told her.

She was forced to agree as she blinked away tears and took another sweet swallow.

It's the sun's heat that makes it tastes like a bit of life, like we're drinking a bit of the warmth that breathed life into us.

The warmth that breathed life into us? She had echoed, intrigued by the weird phrase, always intrigued by the things he had to say.

Oh? He had smiled at her then, had touched the crown of her head and leaned down to meet her eyes. Didn't you know? The sun is the reason we exist at all, silly girl, and it just keeps on giving. Kind of like you.

Then he'd kissed her forehead.

Now he was gone.

Yugito had never cried on a mission before.

Itachi was also gone, asleep in his bed while she took the first watch.

She wiped the wetness from her cheeks and drank from her cup again, smiling.


Seven First Times (& One Lucky Cat)


Yugito was oddly quiet but Itachi only registered this mutely, too wrapped up in his own thoughts to fully take the time to wonder why. He suspected it had something to do with Matozāki, since the man had stopped his frequent visits and instead waited for Yugito to come to him. Surprisingly, she did. Every once in awhile, usually when Itachi drowning in his unanswerable questions, she would slip off and he could see her with Matozāki.

They continued to travel, had been attacked once—something Yugito had single-handedly put a stop to. She'd been relentless as she incapacitated the enemy, tied them up, and left them with the police in the nearest village. The servants and all of the other add-ons to the journey were still crowing over how cool she had looked, like some sort of figure out of a book.

Itachi had to admit that he thought she looked pretty cool in action too, but would never say it to her face.

Not that he said anything to her. Not that he wanted to say anything to her. He wouldn't even know what to say if he did. He liked their relationship as it was, liked the easy way she let him be, liked that she never pressured him to do anything more than be her constant companion.

I'm betraying that.

He was too consumed in the thought that he was betraying her, in a way he had never been so bothered before. Not even with family, strangely enough, did he feel this awful when the orders were given. Killing he was used to, it was an act he knew well, something that he had grown accustomed to dealing with over the years. Taking a life and watching it bleed away, watching the end of everything and realizing that it was something he'd meet soon enough.

Spying was also something he was good at—he hasn't been an ANBU Captain for no reason. He'd excelled at covert operations, knew all the best ways to hide in the shadows and to glean information with a skill that had only been rivaled by Jiraiya the Sannin himself. There was a reason the village had used him against his own family, a reason they counted on him and a reason his clan had too.

In many ways, he hated spying more than killing.

At least death was natural. Spying was not, it was the distinctive act of deceit and was never anything less than a betrayal. Itachi had done it easily throughout the years and when his father had approached him with the hopes of him doing it against the village, he hadn't thought it would be so awful. He'd truly thought it would be like all of those other successful missions that he had run in the past—a way for him to try and understand the village and his clan's matters more personally, to try and discover a means of putting a stop to that awful, awful gut feeling.

Then the Hokage himself had scouted him once the rumors of a coup started surfacing.

That was when things changed, the moment Itachi truly grasped his role and learned to hate it.

Now, in a different situation entirely, he was realizing more and more that nothing had changed. Not really. The idea that it had was only an illusion that had been too painful to ruin. A genjutsu of the worst kind, one that was instigated by the mind and not by any other outside forces.

Itachi felt disgusted with himself, and it wasn't for the first time.

"What are you so down for?" Matozāki asked, sliding up next to him. He was sweating from the harsh heat of the sun. With a vague sort of realization, Itachi recalled that it was now July and his birthday had passed right under his nose without him even knowing. He was fourteen now and he hadn't changed at all. Only the number.

"Do you think I can be redeemed?" Itachi asked, and he hadn't even noticed that the words passed his lips at all. He'd just been thinking it, reminded by Matozāki's presence of an old man that had once been the killer that had been shunned by his village. How similar to his own situation, Itachi noted with a muted sort of wonder.

The sun's heat was affecting his brain.

Matozāki was blinking and Itachi didn't know why.

"I think everyone can be," he said.

It was Itachi's turn to blink.

"Oh," he said, realizing that he had, in fact, spoke the question out loud.

"Hey, we're actually getting close to the temple," Matozāki informed him, looking worried, "it's actually in Chiasakigakure, you know. You should visit Tānība-san while we're there..."

Itachi hummed in agreement, "Maybe I will."

He did.

They drew up to the village hours later and Yugito had gone off to check with the others, still eerily quiet and it was beginning to worry him, beginning to make him feel anxious. He felt ill again, back to feeling like dirt and not at all like the unfeeling mask he had been under the heat of the sun.

Now he was standing over stone, staring up at the stairs and feeling a sense of awful foreboding that something terrible would happen to him. The people that met him were all relatively friendly, smiling at him with warm, kind eyes as they asked him how his journey had been. He'd been honest, he told them it could have gone better.

Then they led him to a man, sitting in a chair with a cup of steaming tea in his hand. He smiled upon Itachi's entrance and grey eyes met his. He looked every bit what Itachi had imagined. A large frame, one that hadn't seemed to deteriorate despite the age of his weathered, dark skin. He had a mustache, styled with a goatee and it was grey with flecks of black like someone had peppered it for him. The closer Itachi neared him, the more he picked up on the smell of ink and rock that matched the chipped, black nails of man that had never managed to get the ink stain out of his skin.

A writer, it looked like, because he'd seen hands like those on Jiraiya.

The thought distracted Itachi, sent him rolling back into those dark thoughts and now he stood before a man he was beginning to wish he'd never met.

"And your name is?" Tānība asked, his voice soft and not unkind. He was a touch surprised—he had been expecting something harsher, something to match this man's history.

"My name is Itachi Uchiha," he said honestly, without thinking and watched their faces morph, watched recognition cross their eyes and watched Tānība jerk back like he had been stung. Itachi's stomach dropped and he dipped his head in shame. This was the perfect reaction to his name for everything he had done in his life.

He remembered now, of course—Konoha-nin had been responsible for the death of Chiasaki, the backbone of an entire village. This village.

"You may claim to be a Kumo-nin now," the old man said in a rasping growl, "but Konoha-nin will never be accepted at this temple. You need to leave."

Itachi hadn't known what he should have expected but it hadn't been this.

He's never turned anyone away, Matozāki had said but there was always a first time for everything and it was so fitting that it would be him.

Something stirred in him then, making him begin to shake and there he stood with the weight of all of their eyes on him, with the weight of his choices and of all those names etched into his bloodied hands. He looked at them now, noted the way they looked so immaculately pale. The red he felt there was not seen but it was there, it was there.

It was all so wrong, everything he'd done in his life, everything he'd tried to stop but just couldn't. He didn't know what to say, what he could do to take it all back or to pay for the fact that he had killed so many.

"Please," Itachi begged and it had been for the first time in his life, first time he'd ever dared say the word. It was less like he was speaking to Tānība and more like he was speaking to them all. His father, the Hokage, his mother, his brother, Shisui. "Don't make me."

None of them were even there to hear it.

He hadn't even realized he had started to cry until Tānība reached over and used rough fingers to wipe them away. By that point it was like something had been broken inside him. He was trying to fix it, he was. He was trying to stop the tears that were beginning to soak the front of his shirt, but he couldn't and now he was being led away from the sharp, hateful gazes that reminded him so much of what he knew he could expect if he ever returned home.

Itachi struggled to breathe, desperately wiped at his eyes and his face like a kid who had lost their favorite toy. Like how Sasuke had been when he'd lost his.

He'd never done this before, never cried so much and in front of strangers.

He was not at all acting like a fourteen year old ANBU Captain. Instead he was behaving like Sasuke, like the boy Itachi had used to desperately try to cheer up just so he could get back to his reading. Now he understood why it took so long for Sasuke to stop—tears were messy business and they didn't just stop.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to Tānība as they both came to a spot somewhere outdoors. Itachi wasn't afraid for his life though he supposed he should be—one way to stop someone from crying was to end them so there was that thought.

Itachi laughed, despite himself but it sounded more like a sob.

Everything coming out of him sounded like a sob.

"No," Tānība said and it made him take pause as he looked up to the old man through blurred vision, "I should be the one apologizing. I should have never tried to turn you away. Chiasaki would never have done it and though I hate Konoha with a living passion, she always did tell me how much of an idiot I was for it. People aren't the villages they come from, they're much more than that, she'd always say, and that it was something I should learn to respect. Then she'd slap me, usually because that was her favorite hobby."

"Oh," was all Itachi could say, still working on getting his body to listen to him.

Sasuke's speed at getting his tears to stop now seemed to be made more impressive by Itachi's new found experience with them.

"Forgive me?" Tānība asked.

Itachi blinked then nodded slowly, "I-I don't know what came over me. I don't usually..."

Then he began to blush quite furiously because another thing Matozāki had said came back to him, clear as day.

They say he can make the most hardened criminals weep for hours.

It, clearly, was not an unfounded rumor—and Tānība had done it just by presence alone. It was a terrifying and awe-inspiring talent.

"Water under the bridge as they say," Tānība rubbed at the back of his neck, looking sheepish, "I won't tell on you if you don't tell on me?"

"Okay..." Itachi said and then he was hiccuping.

At first, he was confused because he never hiccuped. For a second he hadn't even known what his body was doing, just that he was doing it and feeling oddly uncomfortable by the point it happened the third time. Then, when realization hit him, he cursed inwardly.

He'd been feeling more distracted lately, sure, but that made no excuse for him not knowing what hiccups were. It was...shameful.

Tānība left for a second and returned with a glass of water.

"If you drink for ten seconds without taking a breath, it should take those away," Tānība explained to him and Itachi felt downright silly being treated like a kid. Then he reminded himself that he hadn't even remembered what hiccups were, so he really had no room to talk. He hadn't been behaving much like an adult lately anyway.

Itachi accepted the water with a mumbled thanks and did as told.

The strange tip worked and he was beginning to feel more himself, more sure, and less...whatever that had been.

"So, what is it that you came here for anyway?" Tānība asked and Itachi shrugged.

"I was on a mission for the Daimyo's son, Ranzāki-san, and his brother, Matozāki-san, mentioned you," Itachi met the man's gaze, "I presume you've already heard of me."

"Yeah," Tānība was back to scratching at his head, looking about as awkward as Itachi felt, "that you sort of snapped and killed half your clan and that you defected to Kumo soon afterwards."

He nodded, having expected nothing less, then he took another sip of the cool water. He was quiet for a second, still attempting to gather his thoughts in something that was more than the panicked mess they had become.

Somehow, he felt better now—a bit of the weight had shifted on him, still there but not as painful.

Tānība, who had gone off somewhere while Itachi had gone silent, returned with a shamisen in one hand and a bag of breadcrumbs in another.

"Matozāki-san is one of my biggest fans," Tānība said conversationally before gesturing for Itachi to follow him, "so I'm not surprised he mentioned me to you."

"He suggested I come see you," Itachi said softly, trailing after the monk before they both came to a bench by a large—man-made by the look of it—pond. It was filled to the gills with koi fish, happily splashing around as they crowded together with open expectation as soon as they noticed their visitors.

"Can I ask one question?" Tānība asked and Itachi didn't bother trying to be an asshole about it though the option was clearly presented to him.

"Sure," he said instead.

"Did you do it because you really snapped or because you wanted to do it?"

"Neither," Itachi whispered and then more fiercer, his spirit blazing inside of him, "neither."

It wasn't the full truth but it had been the closest to it that he had ever gotten to and it felt good to say, felt good to admit that he'd wanted nothing to do with any of what he'd been trapped into. He'd been too much of a coward to betray them both, of course, so he had made the "easy" choice, the one with the most lives attached.

It was odd and strange but in the presence of a man who had defied expectations laid onto him and had redeemed himself so fully, Itachi wanted to believe that he could do that too.

That there was a chance for him, that he could somehow repay the world for the lives he'd taken from it.

"Do you believe I can be redeemed?" Itachi asked, this time on purpose as he gazed at a man who had done what he had once thought impossible.

Tānība shrugged, "Depends on how hard you work for it. Even now I have much to do, so that I can repay a little girl who's not around to see it anymore. I can't answer that question definitively because, ultimately, it's a question for you to answer. Chiasaki always liked to say that the first step to redemption was realizing that there was something you needed to pay back. So I'd say you're well on your way towards it."

Itachi nodded, then considered his words, "What are the other steps?"

Tānība grinned then, "Depends on you. To quote that marvelous woman once again, she always said that if you wanted to repay others, it must be through hard work, true dedication, and a recognition that there is something in the world that you can help improve. The meaning for your existance, the reason for which you do anything at all. She believed everyone had one, the point of life was to find it and there wasn't a single person in this world without worth."

"Chiasaki-san," Itachi started, smiling despite himself, "believed the best in people."

"That girl," Tānība started, setting his shamisen aside and opening up the bag of crumbs, "believed in humanity until the day she died. I doubt she even blamed the Konoha-nin that killed her. She'd just be glad that her daughter survived the attack at all."

Oh, Itachi thought, recalling the fact that Chiasaki had died protecting a girl. Her daughter then. It made everything so much sadder then.

"What makes a bad person bad?" Itachi finally asked, settling on a question he'd always wondered but had never voiced. He'd never felt comfortable enough to.

Tānība didn't ridicule him for a question he probably received a lot in his line of work. Instead, he settled onto the bench more heavily, the air around him turning thoughtful.

"When we are born," Tānība started, tossing out crumbs to the koi in the pond, "we have done nothing wrong, aside from spitting up and making our guardians go tone deaf with our screams," a soft chuckle, "Eventually, as we grow up, we're told certain things are wrong and certain things are right. That," Tānība cued this with a cluck of his tongue, "gets pretty dang confusing after a while. Why, some will ask, are these things wrong and things things right? Who made that so? Why did they make it so? Some won't ask, they will accept. These people are often the most lucky in life," Tānība gave a roll of his eyes, "and it makes the ones who dare to ask miserable and confused, mostly the latter. Which I don't find very fair. Do you?"

"Asking is a form of questioning the lesson and the first step in going against it," Itachi murmured, watching an orange koi fish open up its mouth wide, expecting some sort of offering. "It only makes sense that the people who follow the lesson will get the better marks." Itachi wondered where he fell into the mix, if he was truly on either side.

He had often questioned many things when growing up but he had soon learned not to voice his thoughts, to hide himself from the world or else suffer for it. He followed the rules, true, but when he went against his nature to solve the puzzles presented to him—he suffered for it then too.

"Perceptive boy," Tānība commented, "but I suspect that you're one of those rare souls, aren't you?"

Itachi looked up, met those old grey eyes, and tilted his head to the side, questions on his lips but not sure how to word it.

"You exist in a grey area," he said to him by way of explanation, "you have been unfortunate to fall in the middle, and the box that has been molded for the majority will never suit you. Because of that you will suffer more than others ever will, always out of place and yet trying to change enough to fit in. People like you realize that you must follow the order of the world but the choices that it brings will always torment you because you recognize what else could be there. You will ask questions, you will keep them to yourself. You will have dreams but you will not voice them or give them life. You slip into that grey area and you slip into the cracks of what is right and wrong, there is no mold that will ever truly fit you. So my advice to you, Itachi Uchiha, is not to ask what is wrong and what is right. It is to ask what is, what isn't, and most importantly, what could be."

Itachi let this sink in and hated to know that it was the truth.

"It's not all bad for you," Tānība said, his voice soft, and his hand played a gentle tune with the strings of the shamisen, "because the rare souls that exist in the grey? They have the greatest reward of all. Unlike others, they are always the ones that can make a true difference because that's what they dare to be, different. Yet I will say, the price of that is that it becomes easier for them to fall, to bring evil into the world instead. The struggle for you will be using your grey thoughts and using them to make a change that will help us all. Like Chiasaki. She was the greyest soul I've ever met and look at what she's done with the world."

"She saved you," Itachi said, sticking his hand into the pond and smiling a little when a koi went up to rub against his skin, "and she saved her village."

"Yes," Tānība agreed, "and she taught me to think, to reflect, and to learn not just from others but from myself too. Then she taught me to teach and I have been told that I've gotten pretty okay at it."

Itachi hummed his agreement, yet unsure of what to say.

Then, with a smile, he looked up, "I've met someone a lot like Chiasaki-san recently. She saved me too."

Tānība's eyes twinkled but his lips pulled up into a pained smile, "Then cherish her and hope that one day whatever you do will one day be enough to repay her."

He nodded, still confused about what he was going to do about the spying situation but feeling oddly hopeful.

"Can I come again?" Itachi asked after moment of thoughtful silence.

"Of course," the full force of Tānība's grin returned, "anyone is welcome here."


Seven First Times (& One Lucky Cat)


The rest of their mission was uneventful, not really deserving of the B-rank that it got. The money was good for it's trouble though, Yugito noted with a dead sort of feeling as she accepted her pay and left the Raikage's Tower. Her strides didn't match with Itachi's like they used to and it was a bitter reminder of her stupidity.

They made their way to her apartment in silence and it wasn't a comfortable one.

At least Itachi actually looked guilty—he knew something was coming for him the moment the door shut behind them and he followed her wordlessly—of course—to the living room. It looked alien to her, filled with books that she would never had read herself, all his taste and none of hers. She was silent as she got to work sorting through the novels on the coffee table, stacking them by what was hers and his.

She wasn't feeling angry anymore—the feeling had been there at first but now she just felt sad and she was working her way towards acceptance. To accept the fact that Itachi would never be her friend and acknowledge that it was a silly thing to want that in a thirteen year old boy.

He shifted awkwardly behind her and she realized in dawning horror that she, after having held back for the remainder for the mission, was crying. Yugito didn't turn around to face him, embarrassed and ashamed of her weakness. Instead, she focused more on the books and attempted to play it cool.

It wasn't working. Her tears spilt over soon enough and dripped onto the pages.

He poked her shoulder and she instantly forgot herself, forgot about the book she was clutching in her hands. She reached out for him, her hands coming into contact first with his arms, and then she was pulling him into a hug even as she continued to sit on the couch.

Itachi awkwardly patted her head and it only made things worse because the last person to do that had left her too.

Screw acceptance, she wanted to stop him.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, crying with her face pressed into his stomach, her arms around his slight frame as she shook from barely contained sobs, "but just don't leave me. You're my sign, Itachi, that things can change..."

I don't want to die, she thought and it was her most common one. He'd made her believe that there was a chance that she didn't have to. Now he wanted to go back to Konoha and then nothing, nothing would be different.

"Leave you?" he asked, and she hadn't even realized he was actually speaking to her and she was hearing his voice for the first time. It felt too natural, too much like she'd been hearing it the whole time anyway.

"I saw you with that Sannin," she admitted, holding onto him tighter, "and I know you don't like it here in Kumo. I've been trying to make things better, can't you see? I know you want to go home, Itachi, but I can't let you. You're my cat," she declared fiercely but it was all muffled by her mouth against his clothes.

He shifted away, understandably so.

"I'm not leaving," he said to her and she stilled just as he came to wrap his arms around her head, "I-I'm sorry. He was there to get me to..." he trailed off, his voice taking on a pained edge.

Yugito frowned, suddenly angry again but this time at that damnable pervert, "To spy? Oh. Well, I don't care about you spying—Kumo would never let you get close to sensitive information," she gave him a look, "It's very common for shinobi to join Kumo and attempt to play a double spy but it never works out because everyone works under a need to know basis. Necessity above the superfluous." It was a totalitarian government after all. She blinked at him then, before feeling her face screw up in disgust, "But I'm curious. Why does everyone treat you like this? Like you're an object to be used whenever they want to? Why do you have to do all of the dirty jobs?"

"My loyalty," he whispered, then, his expression looking unsure, "you're really not mad at me?"

She shook her head, suddenly very tired now that she had found a reason to calm down and stop crying. She sighed into him, feeling very glad for his warmth—very much like how she imagined a cat's would be like.

"At first," she explained herself softly, "I was angry at myself for being stupid. I thought you hated me, that I was just some silly mama cat that tried to get away with kidnapping you from the bad world. I thought that it was all one-sided, how much I love you." Then she frowned because, "It's not, is it?"

He didn't answer, making her stiffen, worried. Then his body started shaking in her arms and his were leaving her head. She blinked, wondering what was happening and if she'd just broken him—if he timed out now that he had finally said so much.

"I was scared," he suddenly said, and she looked up at him just in time to see him wipe tears away from his face, "I was afraid you would h-hate me."

"No," she vowed, taking his fears very seriously—they matched her own. Yugito pressed him even closer to her, squeezing him even tighter, "You're family now."

"Hn," he said and she understood the feeling. There wasn't really anything else to say to that sort of blunt statement.

"I want you to have everything I don't get to have," she told him, promised him. Even if she died, had to die, she wanted him to be safe and happy, with a big happy family in a united shinobi world. That would be enough, she thought, if she could just save one person from a sad ending. Her life would be worth that.

"Let's not fight anymore," she mumbled, yawning, "fighting makes me sleepy..."

Then he was laying on her, wrapped up in her arms and he was listening to her heartbeat. It was calm, a constant thump in his ears and he found himself matching his breaths to hers, found himself smiling despite everything, found that he felt safe, certain of himself in her world.

Yugito had fallen asleep, her nose and eyes still red and puffy but Itachi couldn't think of her face as anything less than beautiful. Not when behind her closed lips was a smile with two sharp teeth that he couldn't think of as anything less than the most heartwarming thing he had ever seen. She was still confusing to him, still an oddity in her ability to care so deeply for him, but it wasn't one-sided. An entire month of anxiety was so easily erased by her, feeling insignificant in the moment of a new realization for him.

Itachi, much to his continued shock and amazement, had been pretty dang lucky to meet her.


Seven First Times (& One Lucky Cat) - End


To Be Updated: 09/14/2016