Author's Notes: Uchiha Mikoto drabble. (Sasuke's Mom, FYI) I'm sure it's chock full of spoilers.

The Queen of Pentacles

There was a time when she was oblivious. When her world centered around rising with the sun, frying white noodles until the house smelled like cooking, watching her sons walk together out to the practice field - one tall, the other small. She would do laundry in the afternoons and come to the dinner table smelling like fresh soap. Her husband would smile that small, contained smile and she would glow like a blossom in spring, welcoming him into her arms after twilight, bars of moonbeams over their bed.

Then she heard the rumor and those times faded along with the veil that had kept her from seeing.

Itachi had always been the perfect son. Sasuke was young still, soft with a child's gentleness, his inner strength yet to be tested. He was her baby. Itachi, though, was a young man and more like his father every day. That same streak of cold steel hidden inside his body, visible only when she looked at him sideways. She feared for him, sometimes, when she was alone. It seemed to her he walked a lonely path, one he often took with Sasuke at his side who didn't seem to see whose footsteps he was following.

The days passed and she turned the hourglass over, watching those precious moments drop away one by one. Soon Itachi was more distant than ever, and Fugaku would barely touch her when they were alone, his thoughts spinning into some far away place she couldn't reach. He would speak to her, though, about their youngest and she'd smile as if the sun would rise in the morning and she would fry noodles in the kitchen while their sons went out to practice. Instead, she treated Sasuke's burns with salve and pressed kisses into his smooth forehead as he wriggled away from her.

The rumor haunted her, most of all because Fugaku seemed to believe it. That Itachi would kill his best friend was like some horror without a name, a sin as black as her son's raven-wing hair. He would hardly speak to her now and only when his father wasn't present. His words were low and steady and revealed nothing of what he really thought. He was keeping a secret, she thought, one that would destroy them. She felt it everytime he entered a room, and everytime the string of tension grew a little tighter, the pitch higher. Soon she would be able to play a dirge with all those painful moments, a hymn to her small family of silent warriors.

Then came a night when the moon shone with a blood-red halo. Itachi stepped into the room and all the strings broke, one long, off-key note ripping the silence.

Mikoto's hourglass ran out.

But elsewhere, another one turned over.

The End.