(AN: Challenge: Divergences)
Itachi was five years old. It was war, still, again, he wasn't sure. There always seemed to be a war. His father came home, bloody, his mother was broken with childbirth and the infant brother who cried all through the night. Yondaime stood in the doorway.
"Are you sure?" he had asked Fugaku. Itachi remembered this well.
"It's for the good of the village," his father had said. And with that he had been sent with the Hokage, while his mother cried and screamed and begged them to change their minds. But there was no time for alternatives.
Itachi remembers being naked in front of Yondaime, remembers the wind, remembers staring into the eyes of the kyuubi. He remembers the pain. He also remembers coming to, his stomach burning, wrapped in his discarded clothing by an Anbu member wearing a mask resembling a dog. After that the people of the village began to avoid him, all previous praise and approval evaporated regardless of how quickly he progressed and how skilled he became.
"How did you get that?" Sasuke asks him one hot evening, as they lie side by side on the porch, looking at the pattern on his eleven-year-old brother's stomach.
"It was for the good of the village," he replies bitterly, staring into the sky.