Chapter 25 – Wicked Eyes

Juri finished laying down the last of the tripwire and wound its end around the previously fixed kunai, then checked the explosive tag attached to it once more before standing up. She brushed the snow off her cloak and looked up at the bare branches arching above to form a dark web of their own against the pale sky. Snowflakes swirled down lazily from it, slowly adding to the already ankle-deep layer on the forest floor. She watched them for a time, let them cling to her hair and melt on her face. She could hear her own heartbeat in the silence.

Until another sound rose from the quietude. One most unexpected. Juri's head snapped around, listening to the faint echoes until she was certain it had not just been her imagination. It was, without the shadow of a doubt, the distant sound of a bamboo flute. She retraced her steps, maintaining a steady supply of chakra in her feet to keep herself above the snow without leaving any footprints. Sneaking on her way back to their camp was more out of habit than anything. Heavens knew she had never been able to catch her partner unawares, and she expected the music to stop with every step that brought her closer to him.

It did not. When Juri stepped beyond the tree line and into the small clearing, Suisen was sitting on a log, one ankle resting casually on the opposite knee. He did not even look up at her, seemingly lost in the ghostly melody his fingers were extricating from the dark flute held up against his lips. She leaned against a tree and folded her arms against her chest. Even as she rubbed at the goosebumps rising on her skin, she blamed them on the cold.

Juri could not tell for how long she stood there, listening. While she watched him play, he looked almost serene, like those few times she had ever caught glimpse of him asleep. It was only when Suisen stopped that time felt like it started flowing again, but also as if some magic had gone from the world. When he opened his eyes, however, they were as cold and guarded as ever. He had been aware of her presence, just not cared that she was there.

She had often wondered at that flute, which he carried around in a storage scroll, along with the rest of his personal items, and which he sometimes brought out, when they camped at night. Not to play it, never to play it – for as long as she had known him, he had taken it out only to admire it thoughtfully in the firelight. Juri's curiosity about the object had waned after a time, when it had become clear to her that Suisen would not indulge it. However, she could feel it stirring again now.

"You've been carrying that thing around for two years and I haven't heard you play once," Juri said.

"Fourteen years," he corrected her calmly. He had owned it for even longer than that. His thumb rubbed against the small carving of the Hyuuga clan's symbol, feeling its groove under the layers of lacquer.

"I never took you for a sentimentalist."

Suisen thought of all the times he had wanted to smash it. As a member of the branch family, who lived only to serve, he had been taught to play the flute for the entertainment of the main family members and their guests. The flute was the only thing from his past that he had taken into the future with him, on that final mission out of Konoha. As much as he resented it and what it stood for, he had not wanted his family to have it, either. He had never thought he would play it again, had sworn to himself he never would.

But today, for the first time in his life, Suisen had played for himself. The flute had felt strange in his hands after all those years, but also familiar. The song he had made up, because he could not remember any from his childhood. At least he had forgotten those. None of them would have worked out, anyway. After all, today was also probably the last time he would get to play the flute.

"Perhaps you never really knew me," he told Juri, tucking the flute into the folds of his cloak.

"Che," she scoffed. "So melodramatic." Yet part of her knew Suisen was right. She only knew as much of him as he had allowed during their two years working together. But he, like the rest of the Akatsuki, had never really judged her for fighting her way out of the system which had sought to use and then crush her; for losing herself in the thrill of taking a life, of making them see and pay for the world they sustained, although others had built it before them. The dead, unfortunately, could only be blamed, not punished. Suisen understood her drive and in return, she respected his boundaries. The mutual consideration had made their team one of the Akatsuki's least dramatic partnerships.

"How much longer do you think we'll have to wait?" she asked. "Should I gather some firewood?"

Suisen had kept an eye on the mountain temple after they had turned in the monks' purifying stone for the bounty to complete their mission. Juri's spiders had feasted on Konoha shinobi, while they waited for the Hokage to send the right ones. In the meantime, the two of them had completed other tasks from the list Konan had given them. There had been no reason to rush the whole thing. After all, drawing the ANBU in was half the fun. Their efforts had paid off, eventually.

"That won't be necessary," he said.

The previous day, they had allowed themselves to be seen by a passing border patrol. In such matters, at least, Konoha was efficient. The alarm would have been raised by now, the message, sent, and the ANBU squad, on the move. With the Inuzuka tracker on that team, the pursuit would not be taking much longer, by his calculations. No sooner had he finished mulling over that thought, however, than a familiar feeling tugged at the edge of his awareness.

Juri noticed the sudden change in Suisen's expression and saw the veins around his eyes bulge under his skin to feed the byakugan as his hand formed the activation seal. She opened her mouth, then closed it, thinking twice about interrupting him now. She could tell something had not gone according to plan, which was bound to vex the control freak in him. Instead, she was surprised to see the corners of his lips twist upwards.

"Your work on those traps has been for nothing," he said.

"Eh? Why?" she could not help but ask.

His lips pulled back to reveal his teeth in a wolfish grin. Juri felt a cold shiver run down her spine at the sight. She had never seen him so thrilled.

Hiashi stopped dead in his tracks. The gasp which slipped past his lips misted in the air and seemed to hang there for the longest time before dispersing. His heart had jumped into a frantic rhythm, the thrumming of which he could feel in his throat. He had thought himself ready, but only now realized nothing could have prepared him for this. It felt as if he were looking at a ghost. Worse still, the ghost was looking right back at him.

Behind him, the five ANBU halted as well, and only one of them walked up to stand by his side. Itachi did not need to ask, or even guess at what Hiashi's byakugan had seen. He pretended not to notice the Hyuuga's unguarded expression and gave the man a few moments to recompose himself.

"It's them," Hiashi said, at long last. "Ten miles ahead. The surrounding area is riddled with traps."

"We were expecting that to be the case," Itachi said. He had spent an entire evening discussing things with the Hyuuga: about Suisen, about Juri, about the Akatsuki. He had sworn him to secrecy and finished what Akane had started. If Hiashi were to join them in combat, he could not be kept in the dark about the enemy's methods.

"He knows I'm here," Hiashi added in a low voice, incapable of uttering his brother's name. "And it seems they've changed their plans accordingly. They're moving toward us."

Now that each team had eyes on the other, subterfuge was hardly an option anymore. The element of surprise was lost to both. Itachi could not remember ever coming face to face with an enemy like this. Moreover, the last time they had encountered Suisen and Juri, he had been the only one to actually fight one of them. Their numerical advantage did little to set his mind at ease, and as much as he would have liked to feel more confident in Hiashi's hold over Suisen, something the Hyuuga had said had rubbed him the wrong way.

They're moving toward us. If Suisen knew Hiashi was with them, he should have started running in the opposite direction instead.

Their group was on the move again, so Itachi quickened his pace to catch up with Tsume and Kuromaru, who were second in line after Hiashi. She had brought them all the way out here, tracking Suisen and Juri's scent from where they had been spotted by a Konoha patrol, until they had come close enough for Hiashi's byakugan to intercept them. Tsume looked at him as she ran, waiting for his orders.

"You are to stay back and watch over Hiashi-sama," he told her quietly. "If anything should go wrong, I need you to get him away from the fight. We'll cover your retreat."

There was a moment's hesitation before she answered, and he could tell she was displeased, but she confirmed nevertheless.

Tsume was his second-in-command, but Akane had failed to convince her to stay behind and there was no telling what would trigger her next panic attack, so Itachi judged it safer if she remained out of combat this time. However, he could not have told her to simply watch from the sidelines, and he did need someone to entrust with Hiashi's safety. Another thought lingered at the back of his mind, more prominently than ever before: Tsume was also the only parent on team Yon. If something were to happen to her, Itachi would never forgive himself.

He fell back, but matched Akane's pace instead of resuming his position within the formation. Unlike Tsume, she did not meet his gaze. "Will you be alright?" he asked.

"Yes."

There had been no hesitation from her, yet instead of reassuring him, her curt reply only unsettled him more. For all the progress Akane had made, and the fact that Ibiki had eventually cleared her for field work himself, Itachi dreaded to think of the pressure this confrontation would be putting her through. People under pressure were often volatile, and he had never been good at gauging her reactions to begin with.

"Do you trust me or not?" she asked, noticing that he was still not leaving her side.

"You know I do," he said softly. That doesn't mean I don't worry about you. But he left it at that and returned to his position. Akane was shutting him out, and Itachi had grown unused to it in light of their growing friendship. Perhaps he was projecting his own insecurities onto her because of that.

In the still air, snowflakes kept on falling. The world was reduced to the white of snow and the black of bare, dormant trees. To silence. To biting cold. There were no paths to be followed in the quiet heart of the forest, miles away from the nearest hearth. But they were shinobi. They needed none. In the end, they found one another.

Pale eyes met from opposite edges of the clearing. For the first time in fourteen years, they looked at each other without needing their byakugan to cross the distance for them. To Hiashi, it felt no less like seeing a ghost than before, and although the initial shock was wearing off, something akin to sadness was creeping in to take its place. In his mind's eye, the gaunt man's face overlapped with that of the teenager who had walked out of the compound all those years ago, never to return. The one he had thought dead all this time.

"Suisen," Hiashi said, his voice on the verge of breaking.

But Suisen did not deign to reply and his eyes only held Hiashi's for a moment before moving on to the figure standing beside him. "You play dirty, Uchiha," he said to Itachi. "I admire that."

Itachi's sharingan was blazing red, having already taken in all there was. What he could see strengthened the doubt which had taken root within him earlier, upon Hiashi's mentioning that the enemy would be meeting them head on. Suisen was leaning against a tree, arms folded against his chest. Standing by his side, Juri looked almost bored. He did not take his eyes off either of them as he addressed Hiashi. "Something's not right," he whispered. "He's too at ease."

Hiashi understood what the Uchiha was suggesting, but it was impossible. The juinjutsu branded on the branch family members' foreheads could not be removed. "He's bluffing. I thought it would take an ANBU to know one, but I seem to have been mistaken," he replied sharply. "I'll deal with this. Stay out of it."

"Hiashi-sama, we've talked about this before," Itachi said, "and in light of the current situation, I cannot let you-"

"Let me?" Hiashi repeated through gritted teeth. "You misunderstand my position here, Uchiha. I am not one of your cronies. Suisen is mine to deal with."

The heated exchange appeared to amuse its subject. "I see you took father's lectures on responsibility to heart," Suisen said, pushing himself off the tree. "Come then, settle this. Put me back in my place, like he did back then. You remember how it's done, don't you… nii-san?"

Hiashi's jaw clenched and guilt coiled in his belly like a venomous snake. The image of a brown-haired child writhing in pain on the ground, screaming from the pain caused by the juinjutsu's activation, flashed in his mind. He did not remember how old they were when kindness and curiosity had prompted him to challenge his youngest brother to a sparring match after watching him train on his own. He had not expected Suisen to land a single hit, let alone a juuken strike to his kidney. Their father, who had witnessed the whole scene, had punished Suisen for that by giving him a taste of the cursed seal's power. Hiashi had only pissed blood for a week.

The memory had been burned into his mind. It had surfaced when he had been forced to activate Hizashi's seal, all those years ago, and it was haunting him again now. "I remember," he said. "I don't want to use it, Suisen, so don't make me. Surrender, and you will not be harmed."

Suisen's eyes moved to the shortest of the six shinobi standing before him. He could not currently see behind the painted kitsune mask, and most of her body was wrapped in a white cloak, but the effect of his gaze on her was still noticeable in the way she shifted, as if to remove herself from it. "That one wants to see me suffer," he said with a smirk. "I'd hate to disappoint."

Juri noticed the current focus of her partner's attention and realization washed over her in a heated wave of wrath. "You let her live?!" she asked. Her voice cracked like a whip in the silence. "You're dumber than a snot-nosed genin!"

Suisen glowered at her over his shoulder, his eyes narrowing to dangerous slits. "Be quiet," he said under his breath. The tone alone was enough to subdue her, and Juri flattened herself against the tree with a quiet scoff and a spiteful glare. Suisen turned his attention back to the Konoha shinobi. "I will not bend to your will," he told Hiashi.

"Then you will break," Hiashi replied, steeling himself for the inevitable. He stepped forward and brought up his hand to form the required seal before Suisen had a chance to move out of its range. He saw his little brother tense and felt his own chakra connect to the seal hidden behind Suisen's slashed hitai-ate. The Uchiha had been wrong, he thought.

But instead of screaming in pain, Suisen sneered.

Hiashi stared in disbelief as his little brother's hands rose to undo the knot of his hitai-ate. He then pulled it from his head with a single, fluid move, revealing the cursed mark on his forehead. Instead of green, however, it was black.

"Orochimaru took care of it a long time ago," he said. The Sannin had been unable to remove it, but he had managed to inactivate it. He had explained it would no longer react to chakra, like it was supposed to, although Suisen had not entirely trusted his word. Only a fool would trust that snake. Still, he had been itching to test it all this time. It pleased him to know the cursed seal did not work, but more than anything, he reveled in the look of utter bewilderment on his brother's face.

Hiashi's hand dropped at his side and clenched into a fist. "I gave you a chance," he said. "But I see I must put you down like the rabid dog you have become."

Itachi gritted his teeth. Sometimes he hated being right. "Hiashi-sama, please stand down," he said. "We'll take it from here."

"This doesn't concern you, Uchiha," Hiashi told him, stepping away from the five ANBU behind him. He thought about it for a moment, then cast a look at Itachi over his shoulder. "I thought you of all people would understand: I must do whatever I have to."

Itachi expelled a long breath through his nose and nodded. At the same time, his hand went behind his back and formed a signal for his team, letting them know of the change in plan. Hiashi may well be a stubborn, proud fool, but he was a skilled shinobi, head of the Hyuuga clan, and years older than Suisen. Whatever advantage he could buy them, Itachi would accept.

Suisen picked up his discarded hitai-ate from the snow and tied it around his head as Hiashi stopped a few feet away from him. A faint breeze sighed through the trees, roiling the swarms of snowflakes coming down from the sky. Their byakugans clashed almost simultaneously, laying each other bare down to the core. A moment later, their juuken strikes connected in a draw, sending a pulse of energy around them halfway through the clearing.

Juri sneered, more interested in the fight than in the eyes she could feel watching her warily from the other end of the clearing. Like them, she had been ordered not to interfere, and for the first time, she preferred it this way. There was some enjoyment to be found in watching Suisen lose himself in a fight, for a change.

Hiashi's strikes packed more chakra, but Suisen was nimbler and utterly relentless. For all his patience and finesse, Hiashi found himself quickly losing ground to his little brother's barrage of juuken strikes. He had expected anything but this. Suisen owned up to having been likened to a rabid dog earlier – he was fighting like a madman. He had not landed a hit yet, but then again neither had Hiashi, because he was too busy parrying to strike back himself. If he did not change his approach, his little brother would soon be gaining the upper hand.

"Is this the Hyuuga clan's great legacy?" Suisen taunted, only narrowly avoiding an attempt at the tenketsu in his shoulder.

His disregard for the danger of Hiashi's strikes was an insult in itself, but Hiashi could not afford to lose focus over something as trivial as that. The past fourteen years spent away from the clan had denatured Suisen's Gentle Fist to something still familiar, but wild and wholly unpredictable, tainted by outside influences over his taijutsu style.

"Are you the heir father wanted or the one he deserved?"

Hiashi leapt backwards with surprising grace and eased into the right position for the Eight Trigrams, his eyes trained on Suisen's tenketsu. He prepared to deliver the first set of strikes, but before he could close the small distance between the two of them, his brother slammed his hands into the ground and raised a wall of earth and snow. An Earth-style technique would not be an impediment for long against the secret taijutsu technique passed down from one clan leader to the next, so Hiashi used the first four sets to carve his way through.

Suisen managed to parry only fourteen strikes of the fifth set. The last two connected. Hiashi was about to continue with the final set, when a sharp pain shot through his arm all the way up to his shoulder. It caused him to gasp in surprise, rather than from the pain itself, which quickly devolved into a tingling numbness. His eyes fell on the grip Suisen had on his wrist, and the two fingers jabbing into his now unfeeling flesh.

"I see nothing has changed," Suisen said. "You're as slow as ever."

Hiashi understood then. Suisen had allowed those last strikes to land so that he could gain a hold on him and deliver one strike of his own. It had had sufficient chakra in it to damage one of the main pathways in his arm, and all the tenketsu along it. He had been fast enough to take advantage of the slight pause between two sets of the Eight Trigrams.

"All this time, I've been training and fighting, while you were beating up little girls."

Hiashi yanked his arm free from Suisen's grip and pushed his uninjured one forward to emit a powerful wave of chakra through the tenketsu in his palm. "Hakke Hasangeki!"

Through the light of his own chakra, Hiashi saw Suisen begin to rotate. No, he thought, that can't be right. But his eyes were not deceiving him, because he next felt the whiplash of his own attack as it bounced off the Hakkeshou Kaiten. When his body hit the ground, he did not feel it. The crippling pain caused by his own, backfired jutsu had been enough to overpower the impact. He stared at the sky, and thought it to be similar in color to his byakugan. To Suisen's, too. His little brother, who knew two things he should not have. How many more? Hiashi wondered as that same sky darkened, along with the rest of the world.

Suisen stopped spinning the moment Hiashi's body flew backwards to slam against the ground like one of Sasori's broken puppets. He dashed forward, already molding chakra in his hands to finish what he had started, when a wooden wall suddenly rose between them and his movement was brought to an abrupt halt by a shadow on the ground. Pain finally bloomed in his solar plex, sending lingering echoes upwards throughout his entire chest from Hiashi's two strikes. He detected a metallic taste on his tongue and his lips tilted upwards, into a smile.

"Get him out of here, now," Itachi commanded under his breath.

Tsume and Kuromaru were quick to respond, darting to collect Hiashi before sprinting away into the woods with him slung over the ninken's back. As Itachi and Tenzo barred Suisen's path, Akane released him from the shadow jutsu and spun on her heel to catch up with Tsume.

Juri stepped forward to join the impending fray when the third remaining ANBU mirrored her movement.

"There: an Uchiha for you, and one for me," Suisen said.

She took the hint and immediately redirected her gaze to her opponent's feet, not wanting to repeat last time's mistake. She did notice that he was not the one from back then, however. After a moment's thought, Juri decided that she did not really mind. Any Uchiha would do.

I just pulled an all nighter on this because I couldn't get it out of my head and I realized after posting the chapter that I forgot to leave a note. This is that note: to thank you for taking part in the challenge - it was great reading your thoughts. I am grateful to see so many of you are invested in this story. I hope I don't disappoint. As for the romance... it'll make it's way through all the drama at some point, I promise.