Red 20: Fate

Bitterly, bitterly cold. I had always heard rumours but I never really believed them. I would have thought I'd learned my lesson a long time ago about always believing what you hear – especially if it's exactly what you don't want to hear – but I suppose I will never quite kill off the optimist in my heart.

The cold might.

It is our sixth week in Cloud. I don't know what day it is; the dawns and dusks have started to look the same and blur into a single white line. I haven't seen a green thing since the shabby train pulled us away from Konoha and piled us up on the white line. The only other colours I can remember seeing while I have been here are blue and red.

We are devastatingly short-supplied. Each of us have been issued a thick coat but it does nothing to keep out the cold. I've never known anything like it; it is invasive, like water, and soaks into your bones and festers there. We each have a rifle but the quality is poor. Otherwise I suppose we're expected to fight with sticks or any other objects stiff enough we may come across in the snow.

Shikamaru is not bearing up well. He is very thin and I think the cold freezes his thoughts. He should not be on the battlefield. His mind is good – very good – but his body cannot continue in this ice. He showed me his feet last night. I have given him my last pair of socks.

The Allies are well-equipped. They are efficient. They seem at home in the chill of the white line. They have been here much longer than we have, defending their land, learning the tips of survival you can only learn through living in a place for hundreds of years. They seem stronger, and fitter, and more colourful than the soldiers on my left and right. I can hardly bear a grudge against them. We all do what we have to.

We have launched three offensives during our time here and none have been successful. Each has ended in a hasty, bloody retreat, and every time we leave bright trails for our enemies to follow in the snow. They find us. We move, like rats in terror scurrying from an exterminator.

Now I know how the Reds felt. Now I can really, truly understand. They may not have been clouded in thick white ice like we are but the hate of a thousand people stings just as cold. Skitting from rat hole to rat hole. It is no sort of life.

Another major offensive tomorrow. Shikamaru and I analysed the plans earlier and we know it will fail. Each of us just has to hope we can keep each other alive. We're taking it one day at a time, and while we still have food rations and a blanket to look forward to in the bunkers, we have a reason to stay standing, I suppose. That's what it comes down to. I always thought it would be Hinata (her face, her soft hands, her plum lips) guiding me like a beam. But I can't even bring myself to picture her out here. If I do I mostly see her lying in the snow, black hair spilled out like blood, sinking. And that is worse than anything I have to face.

I should probably sleep. We are up early tomorrow for our mission briefing. I suppose it—

Naruto wakes. He is in his warm bed in Konoha. The heat feels almost imaginative. It was a nightmare. A hellish prophecy. He looks at his hand, counts the fingers.

There are only three, so he pinches himself.

Naruto really wakes. He is standing on a field of snow and corpses. They are casketed in hard, venomous white, patterned with hypnotic scarlet polka dots. There is no movement. Not even the smoke from bullet shells.

Nothing.

He doesn't know where he just was, or where the time went, or indeed how much of it slipped away from him, or how he is standing.

Currently, he knows only one thing.

This is my reality.

'What was it like for you?'

Kakashi and Yamato stood in the basement. It was warm and a little clammy.

Since returning

(since kissing his daughter a fond good night, since quietly, quietly making love to his long-limbed, passionate wife, since greeting the guest with a smile and a treat of eggs - so hard to come by - for breakfast), Kakashi wanted nothing more than to hide down here and breathe in the smell of guilt like he used to. He supposed that there were some things about himself that would never change: stupid kindness in the face of adversity, an abysmal unawareness of time and its movements, and the propensity to sink deep into the mistakes of the past, all too willing to drown in their unforgiving waters. The basement almost made him feel comfortable. It was a place he associated with abused responsibility and bad decisions, and he was happy to admit that bad decisions and life-shattering errors were what he'd built his life on. Guilt felt comfortingly felt like home.

He'd been wary about bringing Yamato down to the basement - not because he was worried about any potential snitchery, heavens no! - no, it was more to do with that feeling of looking into a watercolour from the outside. He was very conscious that Yamato was still grieving (coping extraordinarily well to be frank about it) and didn't want to do anything to make him feel excluded or omitted. If Yamato could gaze in at this once happy secret - a mothering, beautiful middle-aged woman, a bright eyed, merry young nurse, a pale-looking shadow with a bounty on his head and an ageing man finally allowing himself to clutch at the ribboned ends of absolution - but never really be a part of it, then it might just strike him a little too close to the bone. Who was Kakashi to interfere with the well-wrought channels of grief?

Sakura had convinced him to stop listening to his own thoughts and just pay a little attention. Yamato had already asked about Sasuke. He'd asked about Sakura's job, her friends; he'd asked about Anko's distant family and favourite recipes. Once he opened his eyes and really took a good look at him, Kakashi realised that Yamato was healing himself with their life; the fabric of their memories he applied as a tourniquet to the gaping, gawping wound left by the eradication of his own.

So he consented, after a little daughterly encouragement, to give Yamato the tour of the basement. And he could see Yamato greedily clawing at every detail with his owlish eyes. He'd marvelled at the secret sleeping chamber, untouched since it was last slept in; he'd expressed such fine admiration at the small copper swan family arranged tenderly on the pillow. He'd fallen respectfully, miserably silent when he'd seen the window through which it had all shattered so desperately apart.

And Kakashi felt he couldn't much longer cope with the look of understanding pity being directed at him, so he changed the direction of events.

'Well, Yamato? You never really did explain your arrangements. Your Red in your basement. What was it like?'

Yamato stared up at the tiny, horrific window. 'To be honest,' he said with that tone of frankness Kakashi had come to recognise as only Yamato, 'it was easy. Nothing as complicated and risky as this. Our basement was in complete disrepair. There was an old bed down there from when relatives used to stay; we didn't make them stay in the basement, of course, but we kept the bed down there when it wasn't in use.' He chuckled at what Kakashi imagined to be the face of a dead relative hearing that their sleeping chambers would be a dank, dingy basement. 'We just popped him in a corner and kept him warm and fed.'

'Sounds like you're talking about a pet,' said Kakashi with a slight smirk. Yamato nodded earnestly.

'Yeah, except you dont go to prison for keeping a pet in the basement.'

The two men nodded slowly, each thinking their own secrets and wrapping up in memory coats. They would have stayed like that forever had Sakura not come down to interrupt.

'If you'll excuse me, gentlemen,' she smiled prettily, 'I have studying to do.'

But Kakashi had seen it. Seen through her snowy white lie.

He'd seen the diary, well-used and well-loved, in the corner of her writing table. He'd seen the way her eyes had touched it in tender desire.

And he saw, clear as rain, that he would be reading through it before the week was done.

What do you think he will see in there?

Naruto on the front, skin finally starting to lose its sunshine?

Sasuke, bent double in the November rain like an old, diseased man?

Himself? His little street, his book shop, his life?

His daughter?

What do yousee in a book filled with love and heartbreak? Apart from history, of course. That's all it is, and all you, and me, and we are.

Ancient history.

The seventeenth day is the day that Sasuke finally starts to question himself. He wonders if everything is to do with his leg - sick people see things, he knows that, but he wouldn't say he's a sick person because sick people lie coughing in beds and sip remedies and pray. He has done none of those things, not for want of trying but because he can't lie in bed, he's not coughing, he's limping, he has no remedies and he is quite, quite certain by now that nobody - NOBODY - is listening to the longings of his heart.

He had decided to follow his brother to the end, and, soggy trilby in hand (a desperate, disbelieving token of remembrance), he had volunteered for construction detail. The commanding Fang had looked through him completely, offering him little more than a twitch before stepping to the side and allowing Sasuke to join the ranks. All of this stemmed from a heated, ravenous conversation with Konan about role allocation for new arrivals (the hat, after all, had been found in a fresh batch of work readies' belongings, which allowed Sasuke to formulate two hopeful theories: that his brother had been deemed 'fit enough to work' which meant that he was unlikely to be dead or close to dying at the time of camp entry: that the camp could kill quickly, but thanks to Konan's speed Sasuke was probably not too late).

'Too late'? Too late for what? What does he possibly think he can do in the face of all this... all this...

All this?

Konan had informed him that all new male arrivals were being allocated three weeks of construction detail; a new structure was being erected in the south west of the male camp and Fang seemed to want it up in a hurry. Perhaps they were due an inspection, Sasuke couldn't guess. But, knowing the spot his brother was likely to be placed in, he instantly resolved to find him. He could bring him into their little operation - surely the greedy Fang guard who sold their pots and daggers would appreciate the skill of Sasuke's older brother - the one who taught him everything - and allow him into the fold. The very next day he'd hobbled (againt the advice of both Konan and Nagato) discreetly to the guard he believed to run construction detail and offered his services.

The guard clearly wasn't picky. Sasuke's 'discreet' limp was painfully obvious.

Still, he was allowed in. There were various smaller 'task squads' assigned to all sorts of duties: hod carrying, brick setting, mixing, cleaning, sweeping. For the first two days Sasuke (ignoring the nagging, logical voice at the back of his mind that tried to convince him that he must have a death wish) was placed on sweeping and cleaning in alternating shifts and from the third to the sixth days he was allocated the task of setting the brickwork around the eastern cornerstone of the structure. The thing was huge, and the foundations had not been laid correctly (he only knew because of the grumbling of another Red, tasked, like him, with setting, who was an architect by trade and could tell the timber foundations had been installed hurriedly and wrongly by unprofessional hands).

Sasuke resisted the urge to ask him what he expected. Not everyone was a camp veteran like himself. Let the architect hope for sense.

Knowing the unsteady foundations could collapse any time did not reassure Sasuke however and he found himself looking around skittishly, glaring at his surroundings, his world, angry that it wouldn't cough up his brother quickly enough. His hands blistered in the biting weather and his heart wept whenever he reminded himself (dully, resigned) that bricks would not set in the rain no matter how hard the Fang screamed. Time, somehow, seemed to be running out.

This all continued, until the late hours of the sixth day.

He was wiping a slathom of gungy, thick mortar onto a sodden brick when he looked up and used his forearm to wipe the mixture of rain and sweat from his eyes. His hair still hung low and heavy and he'd noticed that only some of the newcomers were shaved bald upon entry these days. Either Fang resources were running thin, or they were just getting lazy.

Sasuke wiped his eyes and, squinting into the drowning sunset, saw him.

Hairless, thin and as tall as ever.

Itachi.

'How?!' I can hear you. 'How is he alive?! I watched him die, in the thunderclap, a bullet to the head, staring at the murderer of a dying blonde girl and betrayed by the one man he thought he could trust!'

You mourned him. I watched you. I let you.

He is there. Limping across Sasuke's field of vision like a scandalous dream that refuses to fade away in the morning.

He is alive.

Not for long.

Who knows what you can believe any more?

Sasuke choked. He didn't know what on. And he spent a moment calmly telling himself to check it was real; to make sure it wasn't a labour-induced delusion, the ravings of a starving man, the fantasy of a freedom-starved mind.

He counted his fingers. Five. Not three, not four. Five.

By the time he'd focused himself and taken a deep breath, Itachi was gone.

And so here Sasuke finds himself, on the seventeenth day. The day when the questions really start to yell. He is carrying spindly, long beams of timber from the wood-drop a quarter of a mile away to the construction site, shivering in rain that seems to only ever get colder, wondering when the foggy haze will turn to frost and bind up his toes. The load is surprisingly light but after the empty, wet hell of the past eleven days since the sighting he wonders if he has just become unable to feel it anymore.

Every day he had waited. And every second he waits. He is searching, forever scraping the hair (long, like his brother's) out of his eyes, hoping for a repeat event, hoping for another glimpse to catch.

Eleven days with nothing. Hundreds of unfamiliar faces. A few dead on the side of the paths. He has learned to look at them as quickly as possible, to only stare for as long as it takes to establish that they are not his brother. Then he bites down the sick in his throat and gets on with it.

It has been long enough now for him to genuinely wonder whether it was a hallucination. At the time he had been sure, but Time has chipped away at his confidence and he is almost convinced that it had simply been an illusion. The clever, wonderful result of life here. Can he call it life? Is that what this has become?

He thinks about Nagato. Konan. Warm in the makeshift smithy, trying to hold things together, or thieving and sorting, keeping her eyes peeled graciously for anything that can help her boys survive the winter.

He is killing himself. Construction results in nothing but absolute and indiscriminate exhaustion. He is too tired to eat at night. His bed is a stone that he just curls around while the rain continues to slaughter the land. Nagato keeps vigil, forcing food through chapped lips and mending a black, black burn as well as he can.

Sasuke cannot stop. He knows he imagined it. He knows.

But Sasuke cannot stop.

On the seventeenth day, at about two in the afternoon, his body finally quits. The beam of wood on his back, he is sure, is not a problem; he can't feel a thing. The rain, well, he is used to it by now. Just another feature of his life. The hot, stinging burn in his leg is nothing more than an old friend, always with him, always waving for his attention. Hunger is his sight and thirst is breath.

He collapses.

The logical part of his mind is piping up again. Typical. He's flat on the floor with a great plank of wood leaning spitefully onto his right arm and he finally decides to let himself know that what he is doing is folly. He will die here, now. Nagato will not have to bandage his burn tonight. Konan will only have one extra mouth to feed.

He will never, ever set eyes upon a set of eyes, locked away from this place, green as a water bottle in summer and bright as the sky.

He'll either lie here until he starves or he'll be shot until he is dead. It is reassuringly simple.

'Oy,' he hears, insistent and hissed. 'Come on! Get up!'

The architect? No. He died on day twelve. Sasuke had side-stepped his corpse silently and gotten on with things.

Nagato? Konan? They shouldn't be here, and he'll give them a good telling off if they are because he is determined to keep them out of it and safe and warm.

'Sasuke! Get up!'

It is his brother. Sasuke cracks his eyes open for a moment and sees him. Itachi.

Funny. He waited all this time to try and see the ghost again, and it finally decides to show up now, on his wet, muddy death bed. Only more proof that it is a hallucination, a product of delusion, a last-ditch effort at a memory.

'They're coming. You have got to get up!'

It surprises Sasuke that hallucinatons can touch. Can pull.

Can feel.

He forces his eyes open. He is being shoved to his useless feet by pale arms. The plank of wood is clankered to the side. Very short, very black hair. Eyes that belong to his own reflection.

Impossible.

'You can't be real...' Sasuke manages to get out as he is steadied on feet he still can't feel. 'It really can't be you.'

'It is me!' a very real looking Itachi growls out with a huff of exertion. 'But it won't be me for long if you keep flopping about on me. They're going to notice us if we're not quick.'

Thoughts still crashing in confusion, Sasuke falls silent a moment while the maybe-real-maybe-not-real Itachi mutters something to a shadow nearby. Then suddenly they are moving. Sasuke isn't sure how much of the moving he can claim as his own. He watches the support beside him, wondering at how short the hair on the head is. It is spiking in little tufts, still as thick and shiny as ever.

They have reached somewhere. Sasuke knows because the moving stops. The phantom brother is speaking again, not to him, and fidgeting with something that sounds like cardboard.

'Here,' comes his voice, annoyed, desperate. 'Take the whole pack. Let us in and keep watch.'

And then the rain is off his back and he is in somewhere he wouldn't describe as 'warm' but certainly not freezing and away from the shouts of the Fang and the dying men and the wet, ridiculous bricks. For a second he can feel the woody, slightly scented air filtering in his lungs like a glove slipping onto a cold hand. He forces his eyes open hard and fast as he feels himself drop into a sitting position on something comfortable.

Itachi.

Itachi is sitting with him on the bed.

Ponytail savaged into a choppy shadow of itself. Face thin and tired and pale. Eyes condescending, disapproving, worried and loving simultaneously.

It is undeniably, unbelievably, his brother.

And he is staring.

'You might be a bag of bones,' Itachi is panting, clearly wasted by his recent movements, 'but you've still grown a bit. You're all arms and legs.'

There are little cuts and bruises on his skin. Rips in the lips that move and grey, dirty patches across his arms.

Sasuke realises. If he were to imagine his brother he would imagine him prime; full of life, clean, skillful and strong. Not nearly as emaciated as he is.

Not quite as awful.

It hits him, and without any other feasible options, he pulls his brother into an embrace. Hard. Tight.

'I've been trying to find you,' he muffles to his brother's back. 'Should have known you'd find me first.'

There is something akin to a bubble of laughter clammering in his chest. He still can't feel his legs but he doesn't care; he can feal the real Itachi, tangible, beneath his fingers.

'You've always been so bad at looking after yourself that I didn't really have a choice, did I?' Itachi returns softly. 'Just dropping like that - you scared me half to death, Sasuke.'

His voice. It is so soft. Just as he remembers.

'Sorry,' he mumbles. 'But I couldn't just stop looking for you. I saw you nearly two weeks ago and since then all I've been able to think about is finding you.'

He pulls away from the embrace, close enough still to his brother that he is confident he won't just disappear.

'You're better than I am at taking care of things. It was always you making the last minute deals that put food on our table for another week. You've got a knack for surviving. So how did you end up here? Did they catch you? Where have you been hiding all these years?'

Itachi gives a mirthless sort of chuckle. 'If I've got a knack for surviving, you've got a knack for getting into trouble. I'll happily tell you where I've been, but first I need to fix you up. Look at the state you're in. You're a real mess.'

Sasuke bristles half-heartedly beneath his long black hair. 'You're hardly a picture yourself. Although...' he reaches into the thin cloth shirt draping his skinny shoulders. There is another shirt underneath (Konan; reliable as always) and another piece of cloth beneath that. He pulls at it.

'This might help.'

He doesn't mind the slightly cold sensation left behind by its parting. And once the hat is on his brother's shorn scalp, Sasuke almost feels like the whole world has suddenly been put right. Itachi is amazed at the sight of it.

The grey, floppy trilby.

'I don't know how you got this hat,' he adjusts it on his head, smiling in disbelief, 'but you clearly have your own story to tell too. This bunker is safe but not for long. I have eyes at the door but the guard who stays here is due back shortly. Do you know anywhere we can hide?'

Sasuke can feel awareness feeding back into his body. He is exhausted and exhilarated all at once. The burning in his leg is being replaced with the overwhelming desire to survive.

'Yes,' he says resolutely. 'I have a place. I might need you to help me walk.'

'How far?'

'A mile – maybe a little less.'

Itachi stands. Sasuke can see that the camp has already started taking a real toll on his body; after the initial shock of recognising his brother without his long hair, he is taking in the other changes more acutely. Limbs skinny, not slender. Face hollow, not strong.

Eyes that are sunken, but still alive. Still quick and sharp. That much has not changed.

Sasuke takes the mucky hand that is being stretched out and pulls himself, still wobbly, to his feet. He breathes out slowly, fully, forcing himself into 'ignorance' mode ('My leg burns!' Ignore it 'I'm so hungry!' Ignore it 'There are dead faces at my feet.' Ignore it) and noticing as he does so that he is the same height as his brother.

'Did you shrink?' he asks a little breathlessly as his feet find their place on the cold ground. Itachi laughs, the hat on his head making him look like himself.

'Foolish little brother.'

When sunset came, Naruto decided to dig in and write to Hinata. Shikamaru looked so horribly tired after the day's unsuccessful offensive that Naruto doubted he'd stay awake past meal time. Even that was a struggle sometimes; the thought of cold, strong onion soup and a chunk of hard, unbuttered bread wasn't one to relish. They only ate now because they knew their bodies needed sustenance. All pleasure had been eradicated.

Even the dugout was spitefully cold. Meals would be distributed by running officers (kids, conscripted out of desperation) in about half an hour and so Naruto knew he had some time to make a reasonable amount of progress in his letter while Shikamaru did what he always did: lay down straight on his icy matress and tried to remember what his body felt like beneath his freezing skin. Naruto could confidently speak on both of their behalves by saying they had never experienced cold like this. It wasn't wet, or blustery; the cold here was simply all you could really think about. An icy rain dried out, or a chapping gale paused momentarily to allow you your breath back.

Not this cold.

It was constant. Inside or outside, it was always the same. It created a sort of white glow behind your eyes that lingered while you slept and greeted you when you woke up. Naruto couldn't even imagine what warm weather felt like anymore; the arctic climate was snapping into his memories and even demolishing the warmth there. It was beyond comprehension, beyond time and beyond anything Naruto had ever known.

His one distraction was Hinata. Not that she was untouchable or immune to the effects of the landscape; rather, whenever Naruto picked up his pen to write to her, he saw her clearly in one of two scenarios. The first, and most common, he supposed, was her body, hewn across the eternal snow, hair spilling into a puddle of blood. Eyes open a crack but entirely dead, colder even than the world around them. Naruto imagined this was due to the amount of bloodshed that had become his reality. He still hadn't actually shot anybody but that was irrelevant. It wasn't so much what you did out there as what you saw. Carnage was everywhere, unrestricted and frozen in unhappy symmetry. Here a limb, there a limb. So Naruto wasn't really worried that he was imagining some prophecy or somehow glimpsing the future; he knew it was his mind, attempting to work out the trauma of the day.

The first image, as much as he understood it, repelled him. The second blessed his heart.

It was as though he'd just turned around from staring at the blinding snow for too long and there was a funny spotting in his vision. And when it calmed a little, he could make out her silhouette, standing quite calmly in the snow. She was wrapped in the furs and coats of the enemy: deep, natural browns and minks. Her long, straight hair fell right down her back from beneath a fur hat and her hands, tiny and pale as he knew, were wrapped in rabbit-fur mittens. It was beautiful even in the patchy fuzz of his returning eyesight but Naruto favoured the moment he truly got his focus back most of all. Then he saw the flush of cold on her cheeks, the way it made her lips dark and bold. Then he saw her eyes, so pale and wide, laced with black lashes that caught the snow as it fell around her.

She looked like she belonged in the snow.

Naruto had always imagined Hinata to belong to the night. Her pale complexion and dark hair gave her an affiliation with shadows in the glow of the moon. But never, decided Naruto, never had she looked more at home than in the snow, wrapped in thick layers and giving him that expectant, patient look he loved.

It wasn't often he got to see it. He usually saw her dead. But when he saw it, he clutched at it, consciously making an effort to committ every detail to memory.

It was the image he forced himself to fold into when the cold and the bodies and the mess were too much. It was the image he used to comfort himself, like a baby nuzzling into the arms of its mother.

It was this image he decided to draw on this occasion. To send home to her. To let her know he was thinking about her.

The letter paper was thin and unsuitable. The pencil was half blunt.

It didn't matter.

We will not even allow him this little piece of sanctuary. Not even this little bit. We are cruel to him and want to push him to the very limits of his endurance. All for our own entertainment.

How much cold can the sun take before it melts into itself?

You don't know?

Ask the vulture. He's an expert on these sorts of issues.

Just as Naruto picked up his sheet of ragged paper the pumping, echoing clangs of shells falling bled into his ears. There was a long, almost electonic pause, in which Naruto heard the most delicately produced creaks and groans, like distant tunes through a window. Then, as Naruto made an instinctive dive toward the sleeping Shikamaru, the whole world seemed to shatter in an instant, morphing into dust and rock and crush. Then all were rushing for the exit to the bunker, flimsy and frail.

Not many people could survive the collapse of a building, especially those inside. Naruto and Shikamaru stumbled to safety, amazed at their luck and tottering on dizzy limbs while the dugout imploded. Shells still fell about them and they ran for cover, crawling under the shelter of all they could find: a bare tree, leaves long evacuated. They huddled together at the base, knowing their protection was as pitiful and skeletal as they were. They watched this world - yet another - shattering into pieces while they shivered, powerless, and so bitterly, bitterly cold.

They survived the night. Somehow. But neither Naruto's optimistic upward glances nor Shikamaru's frighteningly keen sixth sense noticed the red eyed Time vulture perched on the branches above them, silhouetted in ghastly rainbows and eyes as bright as ever.

As morning came, dark and not warm, the bird took off into the chilly sky.

He, as always, had somewhere he needed to be.

Kakashi read with vigour. Enthusiasm. Horror and excitement and pride and embarassment.

It was all in the diary.

Her love. Her sadness. Her shame and her loneliness and her successes and achievements and doubts and fantasies and memories and visions.

Sakura's soul was laid bare before his ageing fingers.

Whoever said 'a picture paints a thousand words' was wrong, decided Kakashi. They'd never seen the landscapes his daughter could ease onto the canvas with her words. They'd never seen the way her desires and hopes could forge a turbulent dawn; her sorrows a undular sea. No image could strike at his heart the way her words did. No colours could transport him so deep in her soul.

He wasn't surprised when she caught him at it. He couldn't put the thing down. He felt so strangely full of pride that a gift he and Anko had given had been put to such glorified use. He was so pleased that she shared his love of words; their lies, their truths and their maelstrom.

'What are you doing?'

Kakashi considered teasing her ('Sasuke with his shirt off, eh, Sakura...?') or consoling her ('I miss him too, sweatheart. We all do.') but in the end all he found he was capable of at that moment was offering her a warm, easy smile and the soothing words:

'You kept him alive.'

'Of course I did!' Sakura snapped as she stomped down the basement stairs to the table where he sat, clutching her treasure. 'And you read my diary! Without my permission!'

That raised a small chortle from him. 'How could I ignore him? He's been sat on this desk breathing at me ever since I got back here.'

'It's not a he, Father!' she exclaimed, seeming close to shameful tears. 'It's just a book! Pages and ink and leather, that's all.'

'Well you're definitely wrong there,' said Kakashi as he let her snatch the book from his hands churlishly. She stared at him, eyes glistening, cheeks twinged pink.

'He gave you some of his soul,' he said, all lightness replaced by genuine softness and affection. 'He gave himself to you and you put him in this book. On these pages. With this ink. And you wrapped him in this leather and watered him every day with these tears so he would grow.'

She was crying. Quietly, in a calm way that made Kakashi even prouder that he was her father.

'There's a living, breathing Sasuke in your diary, Piggy,' he said as he watched the tears roll serenely down her skin. 'One they can't take away.'

She was quick. Quicker than he'd imagined her to be. He supposed that showed how much he underestimated his daughter.

'And what about here?' she said quietly, each word difficult and lip cracking. 'In the real world - not in the fake, made-up, imaginary world of my diary. Do you think there's a living, breathing Sasuke?'

Kakashi watched her for a moment. His lips were pressed together and he felt like he looked; old. He turned his gaze to the ceiling.

'You know, there's a crack in the plaster up here. I really need to fix it. Wouldn't do to have you down here and the roof fall in on your head, would it?'

By the time he turned his sight back on her she was gone.

He hadn't even heard her leave.

The diary sat still on the edge of the table.

Nightfall. It comes early in the winter.

The edges of the sky are starting to darken by the time the two brothers make it to the secret smithy. There is still a little sunlight warring with the stars but it won't last long. The rain continues to fall insistently, blanketing the ground with darker and darker sheets.

In the instant that they open the door, Nagato looks a mixture of terrified, concerned and utterly shocked. He almost drops the small pot in his hands but manages to grasp onto it at the last while he hisses: 'Sasuke!'

The two stumble in, tingling in the heat suddenly swarming them. No introductions seem necessary as they sink before the fire.

'What happened?' Nagato fusses, running to kneel next to the exhausted pair. 'Sasuke, are you alright?'

A nod. 'Absolutely. We just need to rest a bit...'

Nagato watches as a man so similar and so different to Sasuke scowls. 'You're not alright. I want to look at your leg before we move. I've got to say, though...' He looks appreciatively around the smithy. 'You've done a good job setting this up for yourselves.'

He locks Nagato with eyes more piercing than his younger brother's. 'Can we stay here all night?'

'No.' Nagato responds instantly with a shake of his long, gingery fringe. 'The guard comes back at around five each day and we show what we have made. Then we head back to the bunkers and report for food a little later.'

'So we've got a bit of time,' Itachi muses. 'Good. I'm going to check Sasuke over while we're safe. He is apparently incapable of taking proper care of himself.'

The last is said in a manner of exasperated, forced patience, and Nagato feels obliged to chip in.

'Actually, I've been looking after his leg. You can blame me for any... uhh...'

Itachi frowns further. 'You've been forcing this poor man to tend to you, Sasuke? Even worse than I imagined!'

Sasuke, face glowing in the heat of the flames, keeps his eyes shut. 'Be quiet, Itachi. There are enough headaches here without me having to listen to you rambling on.'

'Foolish...' mutters Itachi as he shifts his limbs to allow himself to reach Sasuke's leg. Sasuke yanks his tatty trousers down to reveal Nagato's careful bandaging.

Nagato would have believed it all had Itachi not been peeling away the wraps of linen with a kind, graceful smile. Had his eyes not sparkled when they pierced.

Had he not been met with Itachi's sincere gaze while he unwrapped, and a very quiet 'Thank you.'

He nods a silent 'You're welcome' and is reminded of what achievement feels like. Success. Winning.

To Nagato, watching the brothers before the fire, victory has a sweet, mellow taste. He decides that he likes it.