A real content warning for you guys this time. Gore, cannibalism, the fun stuff. I'm real excited for this one.


Chapter Seven
Yakiniku Q

Itachi's body surfaced in a dim cave, and marched forward. Zetsu clearly knew exactly where he was supposed to go, as he moved her into the darkness with unerring, unwavering confidence. The poor Konoha ninja over her shoulder barely stirred as her shoulder rolled, and dumped him on the ground.

Her hands flashed through hand seals - for the summoning technique. Even in the dimness of the cave, she could recognize them for what they were.

Itachi would have liked to have been able to claim that she was dealing with this situation well, and that she was cool, collected, and had a cunning and dastardly plan for escaping from Zetsu's possession. A plan possibly involving eyes implanted in crows, genjutsu hidden in her rivals' bodies, and or a clever combination of the two.

However, this was very far from the truth. She had none of these things. She had no clever trump cards, and her internal thoughts mostly consisted of panicked screaming, her plans amounted to 'wait for it to end, and then curl up into a ball and die,' and her foremost desire was to be far, far away, back home in Konoha.

Traitorously, the person she wished most for in the world was Mikoto. Her mother. As much as Itachi would have very much like to claim that she had no more desire for her mother's affections, or that her mother's rejection of her meant that she no longer had feelings for her, that was simply not true.

She wanted her mother, and she wanted this to stop, now. Unfortunately, that wasn't happening.

The Summoning Technique revealed an enormous statue, horrific-looking, with ten closed eyes, a number of spiky ridges coming off the back, and, most terrifyingly, shackled hands and feet.

It looked like it had been alive at some point, but was no longer, and it had been mummified, and preserved to come and menace horrified missing-nin who were betrayed by their plant friends.

It also looked like it was likely to come alive, at some point, and she definitely did not want that to happen.

Her body moved. It slotted over to the statue, and forced it backwards. Then, it channeled some of the strange chakra it had absorbed from the Konoha nin into the statue. It fused into the wall of the cavern behind it, where a strange, stone tree stood behind it, like a sentinel.

"Yes, yes," her body muttered, to itself. "Perfect."

And then it stepped out, threading a set of long tubes from behind the strange stone tree, and lining them up. There was something awful to it, the way it was so clinical and cold.

Her body, too, moved stiffly, like it didn't care for how she normally moved, like it was acting purposefully against its own instincts. It felt wrong, on a fundamental level. Zetsu didn't care that she wasn't in control. He wasn't gentle. He wasn't kind. He just simply didn't care about her enough to think about what she wanted.

It stood, and a long nail pierced her wrist, allowing blood to well up, as her body allowed the blood to dribble into a waiting inkpot. It leaned down, and mixed ink in, and pasted a number of arcane-looking seals onto sheets of paper. She had no idea what they were supposed to be, or how, or anything of the sort. It placed the seals around the chamber, at the four cardinal directions. It then placed a hand over magnetic north, and allowed a glowing cage of white light to surround them.

The body then, calmly, stuck out a hand, and pierced the side of the leg with a single chakra rod. It moved, slowly, over to where the unmoving Leaf chuunin sat, on a bench made of more of that pale, stone-like wood.

Then it sat down, and suddenly, all her chakra was slowly being drained, into the enormous statue.

It sat for the longest time, as her Rinnegan spluttered, her limbs went cold and clammy, and the trembling started.

Bone-deep chakra exhaustion set in, and Itachi could feel the sluggishness of her limbs as she positioned herself. Then, a peeling, and then a shadow loomed over her.

"Yes, you wait there," it said, as it loomed, golden eyes sinister in the half-light. Itachi could finally lift her arm, but it was feeble and weak. She couldn't even feel her chakra, and her hand reached up, to grasp at him.

He batted her aside, almost absently, and leaned back. She pulled herself up over the side of the bench, and vomited over the side.

"Now, we have to be sure. It will hurt, oh yes, yes it will. Oh, yes, mother, it will. But this will be enough. I hope so, at least. And if not," he huffed, laughing to himself, as she retched. "We can just try again, can we?"

He was somehow midnight-black, in the darkness, not his usual two-toned self, and his teeth glinted, oddly sharp in a way that they had never been. Itachi wondered if now, only now, was she seeing the real Zetsu, and all the rest had simply been him biding his time.

"Why?" she gasped out. Her body felt foreign, made of lead, like a rusty engine, struggling for life.

"It's the plan. It's always been the plan. From the beginning. Why do you think I bothered with that self-important fool, Madara?" He laughed to himself, chuckling with teeth chattering like a bear trap. "He had the Rinnegan, of course. Now, I can just do away with all these messy shinobi and all their feelings. You - you're perfect! You have so very few feelings. So close already. If only that fool Obito had agreed to a full-body transplant, it might even be done already. So I have to, uh, fill in the," he licked his lips, with a dark red tongue, "fill in the gaps."

He put a hand on her leg, and a dark tendril of something that only vaguely resembled the roots from his other form slithered out, from his hand. His palm made a funny kind of sensation on her thigh, the muscle there flattened by the pressure.

And then he made a motion with his hand, like he was swatting a fly, and then the tendril was scraping against her bone.

Her thigh was bleeding, she was gasping, and he was scolding himself, "Shit! Shit! Too early! They're too strong!"

He sliced around the bone, instead, the tendril like a whip of razor-sharp pain.

Someone was screaming, and it was probably her. He reached up with a bloody hand, and the tendril widened and thinned into a matte black cleaver as he wielded it high like a butcher's blade. His other hand held her down, as she tried to struggle. But she had no chakra - she was weak beyond belief. She could do nothing more than lift her arms in some sort of feeble protest.

The cleaver slammed down, and shattered through the bone like an oak tree through a house. The pain was like nothing Itachi had felt in her life. She would take cutting and cauterising herself a thousand times over the feeling of having her bone smashed in half, over the sight of seeing her feet still twitching as Zetsu threw the leg aside like a butcher discarding the still gaping fish head.

She was breathing hard, but she felt like nothing was working, like she didn't even have the strength to draw breath. But Itachi was screaming. She could hear her guttural howls from far away, as if someone else was shouting, a ways down the cave.

He muttered, "It'll fix itself," like he was promising himself, or her, or someone. Itachi wanted to vomit again, but it hurt too much to move. It was the most painful thing she'd ever felt in her life. She wanted to die, even as he went to slice apart her second leg. She tried her best, here, to reach into a pouch and grab a kunai, anything, but she could barely lift it out of the pouch. It was too weak, too feeble. She thought it stank of rusty old kunai until she realised that was the blood pouring from her stump leg, making the air sickly with iron.

She was too weak, too feeble. She never should have trusted Zetsu. She never should have trusted Obito. Hell, she should have thrown herself on the Hokage's mercy like a good Leaf Shinobi, and begged that he didn't cut her head off for killing Danzo.

By the Sage, she was such an idiot.

He didn't bother with the little tool this time, just straight for the cleaver. It was, in its own way, a good thing, instead of an awful one, because it was a cleaner cut, and it was over more quickly. She vomited, again, instead of screaming.

There was nothing to vomit up but bile now. She hadn't eaten food in a while, because of her changed biology. Where her legs should have been kicking and thrashing with the rest of her, there was nothing now.

She wanted to pass out, but something in her kept her from it. How was she this weak? She thought she was strong, that her hair, that her nails meant that she'd grown resistant to anything and everything, but she was nothing without chakra.

Nothing at all. She was there, legless, in intense pain. She'd been screaming, but there was something awful about the way he took her legs, leaving her bleeding on the bench, next to a Leaf chuunin who somehow still hadn't woken up - was he dead?

Was she going to die?

She had no idea.

The next minutes were strange, and disorienting, and she lost track of Zetsu as the world spun, and then he was leaning over her, but it wasn't him - it was the chuunin, and half his face was swathed in black, like hers had been. Zetsu was wearing him like a meatsuit. He lit a fire jutsu, under her stumps, and burned them black.

It was the second time she had smelled that acrid iron tang, the off-meat smell of cooked human skin.

She passed out for a few minutes, then, and then when she came to, he was leaning over her, attaching a strangely organic tube, on her side, near her back, under her breasts. It was awful, it felt like being impaled all over again. She was sick, for the third time, and, knew, clinically, that she was going into shock. Hell, she probably had been in shock, since he'd first sliced into her.

Itachi kept breathing, somehow, quick, panting gasps, and he leaned over her.

"Okay, Itachi-chan, you want it to stop, don't you? You're going to live, of course. The tree won't let you die. But you'll feel better if you eat something," he hissed, out of the foreign mouth. His voice through the strange chuunin was deeper than it should have been.

"All you have to do is eat him. No, no, you don't need to shovel rice down your mouth like a human." He hissed the last word like it was dirty. "You need to eat. It's all your chakra. Just… take it back."

He slid out of the chuunin like she abandoned clothes on the floor, and he slumped over, onto her. His weight pinned her down; his face pressed hard against her shoulder.

"What?" she asked. Her tongue was dry and caked with bile. "H-how?"

"You should already know how. You remember, right? It felt so good, eating those little Konoha dogs. You had such a delightful little reaction. I wondered if Mother ever did… still, you know what I did. All you have to do is do it yourself," he urged, his eyes shining gold pools of pitiless, inhuman madness.

"Eat him?" She tried to shove him off, again, but she was too weak. She needed chakra. The strange tubes were doing something - keeping her alive, perhaps - but it wasn't giving her chakra. At least, not in the way she needed it.

And she knew that she could suck the chakra right from the living and the dead. The chakra didn't leave a person's corpse, not right away, at least. She didn't know how to explain it, but even the recently dead were like a sweet ball of dango, tangy in all the right ways.

It had felt so nice, when Zetsu had used her body to eat the other members of the poor Konoha chuunin's team. Like that time when she'd consumed the Mokuton. It happened only with living things. If she ate them, consumed their chakra, it did strengthen her. She could consume jutsu, but those were not the same.

It wasn't one-to-one, she couldn't turn around and use that chakra in a jutsu, but it was there. And it felt so very good. She needed it now. Right now.

So, she did. She placed one thin, trembling hand on his side, and let the floodgates inside of her open.

Instantly, all her terrible feelings vanished. She knew that it wouldn't last, that the pain where her legs should have been would come back, that the bone-deep chakra exhaustion she felt wouldn't be enough, but it was nice. Nice enough that she forgot, for a second, that she was trapped by a deranged plant who thought that she was his mother.

The power slid into her, slick, filling up her veins and her core, in the belly, warm and gentle and forgiving. It was like coming home, after a long trip away, like holding lightning, like quicksilver, liquid flame. It was everything she wanted and more, and, for a brief, glorious second, she could only focus on the pleasure.

And then the moment was gone, and the painful throbbing in her stumps returned, and the shakes, and the shivers, and the feeling of goosebumps riding on her arms and legs. The man was shriveled, like a fruit left too long in the sun, and she had the strength to push him off of her.

Zetsu was eyeing her, gnawing on her severed leg like a hunk of barbeque. It was a piece of meat, but to see it so plain was too much. He picked, hungrily at the calf, loose, stringy bits of muscle and tendon hanging free. His mouth was smeared with blood, looking black in the poor light.

He knew what he was doing, and he wanted her to know.

She leaned over, and vomited again. There was nothing left in her mind, for the horror. She had been through too much, and she would not allow herself to be beaten by this. It was just meat, she reminded herself. She could watch him eat meat.

It was just raw, uncooked, unskinned meat, that was conveniently clothed in cute thigh-highs and ninja sandals. The socks had been split, and peeled back, like the wrapping on a skewer of beef. The thigh dangled uselessly, the knee bent, and she could see every detail of how awful the hack job he had performed on her leg was.

She pushed through, that, too, until she felt herself reach some core of hidden, iron-hard strength. She was Uchiha Itachi. She would survive this.

Defiantly, she pushed herself up, and glared at Zetsu. "Happy?" she asked, purposefully ignoring the sight of him chewing on pieces that came from her. She did feel a little better, physically. She was in a lot of pain, but she no longer felt as if she was dying.

"Yes," he grunted. "Once I'm finished with my snack, I'll bring you another."

"I thought you wanted to bring back your mother?" she asked, desperately.

He rolled golden eyes, wide and insane. "'Course. You'll be an excellent vessel."

"And I have to eat these people, and that'll… make it happen?"

"Duh."

"You don't need to eat my legs," she informed him, smiling, wide and just as deranged as his fanged grin. "That's not necessary for your little plan. You're giving it away, you know. The sadism. I know, because I'm just like you. I know, because I do this all the time. You just want to see me squirm. You have a plan, yeah, but you'll get to it in due time, once you've had your fun."

He slowly put down the leg. "No, I'm not."

"You're going to lose," she taunted. "You forgot something. All this planning, all these deliberate attempts at making me powerless, and you forgot something."

He stood up, and stalked closer.

"What's that, then?"

She just grinned, and allowed him to step even closer. "You made it for me, stupid." And then she relaxed the muscle, around Orochimaru's other added organ. The one that synthesized an enzyme, to gather senjutsu.

The power rushed in, and, maybe, if she hadn't been already at the end of her tether, she might have been taken away by it, might have succumbed to blind rage. But she was there, the place where she was only kept together by pure willpower. She had been through too much, today.

Itachi was full of mad rage, but it was all focused on Zetsu. She could feel her muscles bulging, her arms elongating, long and spindly and strong, for it.

She thrust herself off of the bench, arms grasping for Zetsu, like a wild, flailing human missile. She had to kill him, now, before he could do anything else to her. Before he could chop off of her limbs and eat them in front of her.

He ducked her first swing, but she caught him in the second, and he buckled, with the force of her hit.

The substance of this him, the true him, was shadow made flesh. But shadow made flesh was still shadow, so her hand passed right through him. It had worked, though - he was hurt, but she had landed painfully on the floor, caught on the end of the tubes still attached to her side, with no jutsu to work with, nothing but this strange, senjutsu-forced transformation.

Zetsu twisted, and sledgehammered his hands together, smashing her backwards with such force that Itachi was sent flying.

She was stronger than she had been, but it seemed like this form only worked a certain way - she was angry, so angry that hand seals were a thing of the past. She couldn't mold chakra enough to activate her abilities. Drawbacks, definitely.

Her body hit the statue with a wet thump. It dug into her back, pain blossomed, but she was used to pain. She even could position herself better - the angle at which he had cut off her legs was too severe for her to balance herself, but the stumps were looking longer, more healthy - they were re-growing. It was a relief. Minor regeneration - she would have to give Orochimaru a big kiss when this was done. This form was useful.

She pushed herself up, touching the statue itself. It was cold, icy, like liquid ice, if that wasn't an impossible thing to be. She reached out, and touched it. He wanted her to eat? She could eat. All of her chakra was in there, wasn't it? And while she couldn't use any jutsu, or unseal anything, or use her eyes, the ability that allowed her to absorb chakra from living things was as simple as raising a finger.

She laid one long, clawed hand on the leg of the statue, and let herself go.

Itachi could no longer discern anything about the chakra that was contained in the statue, only that it was. And it was delicious - she was sure that food would never hold the same appeal for her again, not when she could reach out with a touch and just feel this. She drank, greedily, from the statue, until she could drink no more. The tubes had been feeding her, in their own way, but that was a slow drip, compared to this. This chakra was hot, wet, full of fire and life, like sucking down a spicy, candied pepper that was somehow dipped in pure power.

She could feel her body shaking, twitching, but that was secondary to the pleasure of taking her chakra back. She imbibed until she was drunk with power, drunk with everything she was, and could have been, and would be.

She was a goddess, for a moment.

And then it was over, but she was strong, strong enough to do anything, to rend Black Zetsu in half, and scatter his ashes on the ground.

But he wasn't there. She was alone, legless, at the foot of an enormous statue, alone in the cave.

Itachi wanted to weep.


Had she been someone else, she might have been stuck, trapped in that cave, legless and immobile. Itachi was not someone else: she was Uchiha Itachi of the Leaf, genius of the Uchiha, wielder of the Rinnegan. She could have left if she'd wanted to, but she didn't want that. She didn't want to hide. She wanted to fight.

So she waited. He had to come back, because whatever twisted desire he had, it wasn't done yet. It was unfulfilled. She did not need food, or water, she needed nothing. She just sat, as her legs re-grew, in the darkness of the cave. The whiteness was unsurprising, but she realized that it might not have been a lack of sun, after all. Whoever Zetsu had tried to turn her into must have been the source of the paleness.

Once she could walk again, she stood, ripped the twisted, organic tubes from herself, and walked calmly around, and around the cage of light. There was something wonderful about free movement. Something beautiful, invigorating, about being able to go where she pleased. She had not been missing legs for long, but it was enough.

She quietly buried her extra body parts with Shinra Tensei, and the Leaf chuunin, too, with something that twisted in her gut that felt uncomfortably like guilt. She wasn't really aware that she could feel guilty, so it came as a bit of a shock. She had never really truly been guilty about hurting all those people that didn't deserve it, so it seemed like fate, that she would feel guilty for this thing, that she had so little choice in.

Itachi lingered with that thought for a moment, and tried to shut that thought away. It wasn't useful.

Instead, she walked over to the inkpot and paper that he'd left. Her own blood was more useful, anyway, as she drew enormous seals on the ground, and then settled in to wait.

Hours later, Zetsu finally popped out of the ground, sneering, wearing the body of a tall man, wearing an elaborate set of samurai armor, red and intimidating in the bad lighting.

He paused, stuck in the middle of the floor, bound by the paralysis seal. Then he made a hand sign, and the seal was fried, torched with pure chakra. Itachi watched, interested.

There was no subtlety, as he stared at her. "Close," he whispered. "Close."

"There's no need," she told him. She knew what it was, when he stared at her with those horrible, empty eyes. "You... want me to eat that guy, right?"

"Yes," he said, grinning toothily. "That'll fix you right up."

"Okay." She nodded. "Come on, then."

He smiled, stepping with the man's long legs over to her. When nothing happened, as he stepped within arm's reach, he smiled, even wider.

"Maybe you'll still even be you, deep down."

She brushed that aside, and held up a hand, touching his cheek. There was something odd about the man's chakra, but she couldn't focus on that right now. It was happening again: the chakra that made up him - his self, the delicious, essential part of him was humming under her fingertips like an electric fence. That was all she could think about, for a second.

"Are you going to leave, or am I going to consume you too?" she asked, smiling back.

"Oh," he said, grinning. "No, I think I'll stay. You can't eat me anyway, not like that."

She didn't respond to that, sitting on the statue's knee.

He stepped closer, close enough that they were face-to-face, and Itachi asked, cocking her head, "Who is this guy, anyway?"

"You'll see," he said, amused. "Go on, then."

She raised a hand, and braced herself for the rush of chakra. It came, more copious and thicker than she'd felt before, all rushing, searing heat, not warm, hot, but hot in a nice way, like a shower that was steaming and scalding on sore muscles.

Then, the essence changed, and it was something else, like going from store-bought sweets to the homemade kind. It was still chakra, but it was full of rich, decadent loveliness, thick and warm and gooey, and she knew she was shuddering, clenching her body against the pleasure.

This was so, very, very nice. Sinfully nice. She could get attached to this feeling. And the best part? It wasn't even over in an instant. No, it took a nice long time to run its course. Zetsu was shouting something, but she didn't care. She laughed at him, giddy with joy and the sensation of absorbing it. She didn't know how long she sat there, enjoying the swell of delicious, thick, oozing chakra.

Until it was finally over, and she collapsed, out of breath, laughing hysterically.

"You treacherous bitch," Zetsu warned, howling from his prison. "Who do you think you are? I gave you that body. I gave you that very self! I made you."

"It still didn't work," she told him, jittery and hot with that fantastic chakra. She felt confident. Alive. Like she could take on anyone, anything. "You're delusional. You think I didn't figure out your plan? You think I didn't put you under a genjutsu the second you popped back into this chamber? This was a fucking trap, you moron!"

He noticed, finally, that he was two pitiless eyes in a small disk, painted onto a long strip of scroll, on the floor in front of the statue. "Mother will consume you, worthless whore!"

"No, she won't," Itachi promised, a delighted smile quirking her lips. Zetsu was writhing, and she had never felt more alive. The feeling alone was invigorating, but seeing the man who had cleaved her legs off grovelling was beyond words. If she could bottle up and sell this feeling, she would be rich beyond her wildest dreams. "She's dead, she has been for years, and no amount of fucked-up things you can do will bring her back," Itachi promised.

"You know nothing," he snarled back, his voice more desperate and furious than he'd ever heard. Every inch of his playful persona was gone. "We are eternal! We were here long before your shinobi world started, and we will be long after!"

"You're dead, too, and you just don't know it yet." She smirked, lazily, stretching out. Consuming people's chakra entirely was tough work. "Or did you not remember that I am a prodigy with genjutsu?"

If he was stood upright, he might have been thrashing and screaming at her: but he was trapped. He stared up at her, and Itachi realised this might have been the first time she had seen him genuinely scared for his life.

"How did you capture me?" he asked, and Itachi saw that he was stalling. But she had quite enjoyed this, so she wasn't above a bit of bragging.

"You're an evil spirit, made of chakra and hate," she said. "And shinobi have been capturing chakra in seals for a very long time. And I might not be skilled enough to capture a bijuu in my seals, but you are far less than that."

"I can't die," he told her, fervently, desperately.

"But if I absorb you, will you truly be alive?" she asked, shrugging. "We should find out."

He didn't cry or beg, and she respected that. Itachi slid off the statue's knee, and stepped lightly over to his prison.

She leaned down, and pressed one place finger to his prison. He tasted like frozen chocolate ice cream, with a hint of mint, just how she liked it. It was delicious, maybe the most delicious chakra she'd consumed, since she gained this power.

But he was so little - there was so little of him, it was over too quickly, done in an instant.

She straightened up, smiling to herself, feeling triumphant. Power hummed through her, a vibrating current.

The flood in her veins was overwhelming, icy, like winter's cold bite. It traveled up from her toes, through her body, up to the crown of her head.

And, in the dim light of the cave, two thin, sinister horns raised from her head, and a third eye opened on her forehead, blood red, with the rings of the Rinnegan and nine tomoe.