Reiki still refused to sleep during the Amani festival. "The last night is always the worst," he said to us between enormous bites of the dinner Nini made for us at her house. We stayed with her that night so as to be closer to Tomonoura in case Reiki or I needed anything during our recovery from the poison she gave us. We urged him to rest, but he stubbornly insisted that he was not going to sleep that night. "I've been beaten, starved, and poisoned. I ain't taken any chances tonight with those jini out there."

I tried to use logic against his superstition to persuade him, "If you've been through all of that, you should be able to survive a jini in your dreams one night."

"Those things can start wars!" he firmly clung to his decision. "They can get people to kill each other and do all kinds of crazy shit. I am not gonna let them get me tonight! 'Sides, all I did in that cave was sleep. No wonder I was having those crazy dreams. I didn't even know it was the Amani festival. By the way, one of you needs to fix my back. It's killing me after sleeping in a cave for almost a month!"

Reiki was half the size he was when I left him in July, and he had marks on his face and body that were even darker than his skin. Nini gave him some pills to help with the pain, but she couldn't do much for him until he ate and regained some strength. Since he didn't want to go to sleep, he opted to recover in a lounge chair in the cool breeze of the ocean on the beach.

After I helped Nini clean up, I joined him. The last time I was able to relax on the beach was right after Itachi and I had switched, and I was drunk, pretending to be someone else with some weird girl I just met. It was much more comfortable to sit with Reiki at night in the cool darkness. If I had been in my body, I would've probably had goose bumps all along my arms and legs. In Itachi's body, the salty air felt crisp and perfect. The light of Tomonoura wasn't strong enough to engulf the stars that danced on the crests of rolling waves. They tumbled onto shore, singing in low roars.

"I keep forgetting that's you in that guy's body," he said over the waves. "I told you not to fool around with Kione."

"She was the one who summoned me to the island, telling me you were dead. If it wasn't for her, you'd still be in that cave."

"If it wasn't for her, I would've never had been in that cave in the first place. By the way, what happened to her?"

"Don't know," I answered. It was better that he didn't know we killed her, for his safety and ours. He probably suspected it, though, by my nonchalant tone.

After a moment of silence, he brought up the subject I was avoiding, "You need to take care of that jutsu. It's not good to linger around in someone else's mind under an uchawi jutsu."

"I don't know anyone who knows uchawi." My thoughts from earlier that week were still at the front of my mind now that Kione and Toru were gone and Reiki was safe. I really didn't want to switch back with Itachi. He could keep my body with that horrible curse for all I cared. Those nightmares of his were nothing compared to my migraines. It might have been the jini causing them anyway.

He replied, "Well shit, I guess I gotta do it. I haven't messed with uchawi in a long time. I won't be able to do the jutsu until I recover some strength from being in that cave."

"You're trained in uchawi?" I blurted out. "Since when?"

He mumbled a sound that kind of sounded like a blurred, "I don't know."

"How come you never told me!"

"You never asked! For someone as smart as you, you ain't too curious, never asked questions. You never was interested in other people unless you wanna have sex with 'em." I huffed at him in response to his comments.

"Who taught you?" I asked him, attempting to sound interested.

"Father." He told me about it as if it was important for me to know. "My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandmother. She had nine kids. The oldest two, your great-grandmother and her twin got that Babakoto from their mama. Their younger sister, my grandmother, didn't get it, but she married a descendant of one of the original kings of Kiawa who was a master at uchawi. He taught his son and his son taught me."

I was almost falling asleep to the sound of the ocean. Still, I asked, laying back with Itachi's eyes closed, "You aren't gonna keep up the tradition?"

"You sound like I ain't got time."

I looked to him with a smirk to say, "You're 30-something now, right? You need to get on it if you're trying to keep the uchiwa tradition alive."

"Shit, I don't care if it stays around or not," he admitted. "Whatever's gonna happen to me will happen. I ain't running after something that's not supposed to be. If I'm supposed to have a kid, I'll have one."

I chuckled through Itachi's teeth, then a yawn made its way out of me. I was dangerously close to passing out. When was the last time I slept?

I asked Reiki, "How is this keeping you awake? I'm about to fall asleep right here."

"Fall asleep? I'm freezing in this breeze. Had to bring this with me." He held up a half empty bottle of rum. "I couldn't fall asleep out here if I tried."

"Really? I'm comfortable. I think the breeze feels great."

"I'm starting to think you really ain't Indri." He sounded like he did the night of the storm when I first met Kione.

"Itachi's bigger than me, and his body's probably a lot more used to the cold than mine. We're spoiled down here. I already had to start wearing pants up on the mainland. I hadn't worn pants in over a year before going back up there."

"Are you gonna stay when I switch you back?" he asked. He took a sip of rum, then looked at me for my answer. It was just as easy coming up with a lie in Itachi's head as it was in my own.

"I owe them for helping me out," I replied, referring to Kisame and Itachi, "so, yeah. I don't know when I'll be back."

"Well, you gonna come visit me if you gotta stay up there for too long." That was an order, not a suggestion. "These businesses of mine are getting out of control. We get more and more tourists every year. I was gonna give Kione responsibility for some of them."

"By the way, I'm selling them if you ever die again. I don't do well with responsibility."

"Bitch, I don't care what you do with them after I'm dead. I'll be dead."

"Don't die too soon, then. Tomonoura will fall apart without you. Then, where am I gonna get free rum?" He raised an eyebrow at me, but I laughed softly, smiling at him.

"Get your ass in bed before you give me a reason to give them to your sister instead."

I laughed even louder at him, and then stood up, folding up my chair.

"Go ahead and give them to her. I don't need them." When I started to leave, I called out to him, "Night, Reiki! Don't let the jini get you!"

The jini got me instead that night. They got me bad.

Images of the Sasuke boy and Shisui and some of those old Konoha people and the third hokage flooded Itachi's dreams. It was the first time I was able to sleep so deeply, which made the nightmares longer and clearer than they ever were. I was so scared and sad throughout the whole thing.

I saw Shisui. His eyes were bleeding and there was an eye with the Sharingan in his hand. He was giving it to me. Then, he jumped off the edge of a cliff over and over again. An awful feeling came over me every time, emerging from the pit of Itachi's stomach. It was so vivid that eventually it woke me up. I wanted to throw up, I felt so awful.

I went to the bathroom and sat with Itachi's head over the toilet in case I had to puke. It was a much different feeling than getting sick from alcohol. I always felt so much better after throwing up whenever I had too much to drink. This time, when I finally hurled, I just felt worse. As I was falling asleep again over the toilet, I couldn't stop myself from thinking about Itachi's dreams. He was so sad and scared. And the way I felt when Shisui jumped off that cliff kept making me even sicker.

My thoughts wandered through Itachi's memories, trying to make sense of his feelings. I could see them almost as clear as my own memories without the Babakoto. I could see Shisui and the same old people from his dreams, and the hokage and Sasuke. Whenever I saw Shisui's and Sasuke's faces, I felt warm and whole, but terribly sad. But, shouldn't I have felt hatred?

Once my stomach started feeling better, it was easier to think without Itachi's overwhelming emotions. He didn't hate his cousin or the little child named Sasuke who I kept seeing in his head. Actually, I think he might have loved them. So, why would he have killed them if he loved them?

That's when it dawned on me that Itachi must have never wanted to do what he did.

He was not a psychopath.

It made total sense. That's why he always gave excuses when it came to fighting and killing people. He always acted like it was his powers bothering him, but now I realized that he purposefully wasted his powers on simple tasks to wear himself out, forcing Kisame and me to wait on him to recover.

That's why I never noticed a sense of hatred about him despite how he acted and talked about it, and how he scolded me for my spectrum of emotions that didn't necessarily include any kind of deep hatred. He was actually full of emotions that I had never experienced in my life. I could feel them inside him whenever I tried to think about his memories.

I searched his memories for an explanation as I flushed the commode and washed his hands. I didn't lie back down when I got back to bed. I just sat there, thinking about Itachi's sadness.

The hokage and older people from Konoha kept popping up in his head again. I was finally able to find his specific memories of them. I felt angry towards one of them that wore bandages over his arms and one of his eyes, but deep respect for him at the same time. There was so much respect for all four of them in Itachi's mind. They were saying things, just like in his dreams. Unlike his dreams, I tried to focus on what they were saying. I couldn't recall the actual words like I would have been able to in my memory, but I could still feel his emotions about what they were saying.

One memory in particular was incased in despair about Shisui and his family, even though I saw the man with the bandages. It was him. The man with the bandages was the one who was responsible for the massacre. I could just feel it. I was so angry and sad and completely hopeless thinking about him.

It just made sense. Without some type of trigger, Itachi would have never killed off his entire family simply to prove himself all on his own, even if he was a psychopath. And, there's no way a thirteen-year-old could take on the entire Uchiha clan. It all made much more sense.

Figuring out the truth from Itachi's memories made me feel so bad, I had to stand up and walk around to force myself to think of other things. It would be really bad if he ever knew I knew about his past. There were no guarantees that he wouldn't find out if we switched back, especially if I could easily investigate his memories like I just did.

There was another problem that I realized as well. If Itachi was ordered to kill his clan by Konoha, and he actually did it, that meant he was deeply loyal to his village. So, for him to have joined the Akatsuki, either something must have happened that changed him, or he was a spy.

I immediately rushed to Nini's room and almost woke her up, but I stopped. Itachi's dreams and feelings were knowledge that could've put her in serious danger if Itachi, or anyone ever found out she knew. I didn't want to get her into any more trouble than I already had.


Check back on November 10th 2014 for the last chapter!