Chapter Twelve
When in doubt, blame Muskrat

Itachi threw herself from the couch, a strange emotionless terror seizing her muscles as she fled from the windows view. Where had it come from? Kuro was still twitching on the ground; the window pierced, shattered at a single point where the feather had come through. Itachi tried to summon her chakra. It was oddly brittle, like a scroll so old that it flaked away at even the slightest touch.

She stumbled forward, her stance low as she fumbled for a kunai beneath her pillows. She tried to summon the chakra to draw one of her fans, but a flash of light popped and both fans from her right seal popped out, sheared neatly into slices.

Itachi cursed. Her chakra was doing odd things. Had she been infected with some sort of toxin? She should be immune to such things, after Orochimaru's operation. She supposed it was possible he'd poisoned her, too, but she doubted that. It probably would have come into effect long before this, if he had. Months of incubation seemed like a stretch for any poison. Not because it would be impossible for him, but rather - what would be the point? Why wouldn't it have happened sooner, if it was going to happen? Why now, in the only moment of respite she'd had in months? The reality, she knew, was that whoever had attacked Kuro was trying to kill her. How fortunate, she thought bitterly, that she had a twin.

Either way, her mind cycled rapidly through the possibilities of that arrow. Where did it come from? Why? Would there be more? Kuro was bleeding out. She needed to do something. She staggered over to where Kuro had left Kubikiribocho, and tugged at the handle. It barely shifted. She put her weight into it: it lifted an inch.

Of course, that was half the problem. With chakra, such a big sword was easy to lift. Without it, it was much harder. She could pick it up, but it was far too unwieldy to use as a weapon. She crouched, and left it where it was.

The kunai would have to be enough.

She ducked her head, and sheltered herself away from the windows. If they were coming to confirm the kill, they'd need to come here. Best to let them draw into the trap. But first - she set a simple trap, with stop used for the sliding door, a piece of ninja wire, and the sword, rigging it to decapitate whoever walked in the door.

She slipped out, and stepped quietly into another room, across the hall. Itachi hid herself along the wall of that room, watching, listening. After a few minutes, soft footsteps tapped through the hall, a shadow concealing the beam of light beneath the door. Itachi waited with baited breath.

A door slipped open, and a whistling, and then a thunk. A clatter, solid-sounding, and then one unlucky shinobi's scream.

"A trap!" one of them muttered. "Muskrat, you idiot."

"Ahhh, fuck, my arm!" the unlucky Muskrat snapped.

"Who in the hell uses a Sword of the Mist for a trap like that?" someone asked, sour.

A commotion sounded, and Itachi tried to subtly gather sage chakra to herself, through Orochimaru's enzyme. It should have worked, even if she was sick and something was wrong with her chakra.

But clenching that muscle hurt, and Itachi had a sudden bout of nausea. She doubled over, blessedly silent, at the pain in her stomach. It hurt, and she regretted fiddling with that part at all. A cough rose, and she quickly muffled herself, desperate not to make a noise.

On her hands and knees, the blood seeping from her fingers, Itachi was still utterly silent. It stained the floor, underneath them. The pressure was too much, and she spewed out, more and more blood.

It spilled from her - she couldn't help it, couldn't help but let the gasping, retching noise out, even as the pale flesh slapped onto the soaked floor. It came, and tumbled, more and more, until it was just that - a stained-red lump of pale flesh, twisted and painful.

Itachi could feel that thing, inside of her - it was lacking something, a tautness. For whatever reason, her body had rejected Orochimaru's addition. How strange indeed.

But more importantly, someone next door had noticed her discomfort. She forced herself to stand up, mindful of the blood all down her front. She felt oddly off balance, and even worse than before - a headache was piercing her, like a nail driven into her forehead.

She could hear their quiet footsteps - there wasn't enough time to do much else than take up her kunai, before the door was slipped open, and a mask peeked through.

Itachi moved - there was no time. She tossed her first kunai straight at the mask, but they were too fast to dodge it, ducking out of line of sight.

"Shit," she muttered. There went the element of surprise - the best thing that she had going for her, without chakra. She dashed forward, venom in her nails, out of options.

A figure popped through the door, and unleashed a blast of wind. Itachi could do very little to stop him. She went tumbling through the wall behind her, feeling her skin tear and her bones crack.

She landed in a broken heap, in the wreck of bamboo behind the inn. Her legs twitched with pain, and she could feel something digging into her spine. A rock, likely.

This was it. She was going to die to a fucking Konoha kill team, because she'd gotten sick and it had fucked with her chakra.

Fucking hell. She pushed herself up, her hands smarting with those painful, pavement-skinning wounds. If only she had her chakra - a team of ANBU would be nothing for her, not as she was now. The figures stepped forward, more quickly now, filing out of the ruins of the building. The wind jutsu had done so much damage already.

Itachi could feel something, bubbling beneath her skin, like a liquid seeping into her system. It pulsed, through her veins, like ice. She didn't know what was happening to her. This wasn't just a normal flu, was it? She had not been ill since her transformations. How likely was it that it happened now? That she had gotten sick, and then her body had rejected a foreign implant? How convenient was that?

It wasn't. She was a fool. The ice thickened, and she had the exquisite sensation of something foreign trying to claw its way out of her chest. She tried to push herself up, but that didn't work, either. Her bones felt like they were melting, her muscles like they were soft and useless.

Itachi flopped over, onto her stomach. A burning sensation surged through her, surfacing like a whale breaking through the frigidity of her blood. A burning steam erupted from her back, a monster's head, surfacing. It was like her humanity had suddenly ceased, leaving a strange madness in its wake. Her normal, human form had apparently broken down, like the normal rules of sanity no longer applied to her.

And the madness - the madness, it hungered.


ANBU Crab did not believe in ghosts, or demons. He couldn't afford to entertain those delusions, not in his line of work. He had a very important mission, in Konoha's ANBU. He was head of a black-ops unit that specialized in retrieval of kekkei genkai. Retrieval, of course, was a euphemism - though, there was that one time where Team Yon rescued a girl with very powerful yin chakra from Kumo-nin.

The majority of his job was tracking down the corpses of Konoha shinobi lost, during combat, and making sure that none of the enemies of Konoha got those secrets out, whether by recovering them or destroying them.

Of course, occasionally, he got jobs like this - someone had defected with a bloodline, and, well, it was better they were dead than selling it to the highest bidder. Uchiha Itachi, by all accounts, seemed to have a working womb, and thus, it would be better for Konoha if she wasn't using that womb to pop out any babies for any foreign powers.

Thus, Team Yon was summoned, and set on the path of a girl who was spotted in Hot Water. Crab thought, privately, that it was a shame that someone so talented was apparently so deranged, but she was a girl, and a girl in the shinobi forces too young. That was a recipe for hysterical psychopathy if he'd ever heard it.

What else could drive a girl to murder half her family, and a village elder before fleeing the village? Crab couldn't help but think that if he had a daughter, he wouldn't allow her to join ANBU, under any circumstances, and that she wasn't going to be a shinobi unless she was a medic-nin, and thus, far away from the front lines.

But she wasn't his kid. He wasn't lucky enough to have a bloodline, so he was chasing other people's kids. This operation had gone well - excessively so, at first, when Gecko got a confirmed kill on what they thought was the target.

An investigation to confirm the kill revealed that this wasn't the case, but they received surprisingly little resistance, so far.

That was, until they hit the target with a wind jutsu, and then, things got weird…

Crab watched, as Uchiha Itachi writhed on the ground, in something that looked like agony. The strange pale flesh twisted, and suddenly, something was bursting out of her back. It was the head of a huge monster.

It roared, and steam churned out of its mouth, and the flesh twisted and contorted around her.

The girl's face contorted in horror, and her eyes widened - all three of them, as her body stisted into a massive, twisted pile of flesh. Clothes ripped, and tore, and the two-headed mass lifted into the air.

The girl no longer looked human - was she a girl at all?

"Captain," Gecko said slowly, "What the fuck is happening?"

The monster roared. The original head had that strange, ringed sharingan, horns rising above it, but the maw had been twisted into a fanged grin. The other head looked reptilian, or oddly amphibian, but he couldn't tell.

"Whatever it is, we have to kill it," Crab declared, not letting any thoughts of demons, ghosts, or retribution torment him. "Formation Red Seven."

The team, like a well-oiled machine, sprung into action. Gecko readied his bow, infused with his trademark lightning chakra, Whale dipped into fire jutsu, and Crab supported him with a wind follow-up.

Muskrat, of course, could do very little. He only had one arm, at the moment.

Of course, these very strong attacks pierced very deep into the monster's flesh, but it didn't seem intimidated by that at all. Instead, it roared, and then pulsed, and sprouted long tendrils, white, thin grasping hands. It had gone from vaguely spherical, if two-headed, to looking like one of those spiky bacteria.

The hands grasped for them, and Crab made the logical choice. "Don't let them touch you. Scatter."

Of course, that was when the tendrils increased their pace, like the tentacles of an octopus. He dropped into a quick shunshin, pausing only to see that the monster no longer really looked like a blob - instead, it was a writing mass of tentacles, reaching further and further.

"Run!" he urged, dodging onto the roof of the hotel, and dashing as quickly as he could, away.

An instinct had him diving to the side, and he caught a glimpse of a white shape, flashing by where he'd been. On the other side of the roof, he saw Gecko make a running leap, over another tendril, twisting in midair to fire an arrow into it, below him, charged with more lightning chakra. Whatever they were, it was clear that touching them was going to be bad.

The arrow smashed down onto the tentacle, pinning it to the roof. Crab watched as it rotted away, instantly.

What was this thing? What kind of strange power had Uchiha Itachi acquired? Or was this some sort of insane sealing attempt, a monster designed to be a trap? Was Uchiha Itachi here at all - were there only monstrous copies of her, roaming the hotel like ghosts?

He ran, watching as a white tendril wrapped around one of the civilians, in the street below, an old man. The man seemed to age twenty years in a heartbeat, until his hair was falling out, and he slumped to the ground, dead.

That tendril, interestingly, retracted, then, but Crab had no time to dwell on that. He was too busy using kawarimi to get out of the way of another one, putting him on the ground.

Muskrat pulled up next to him. "Captain!" he called. "What do we do?"

"Run," he urged his teammate. "The tendrils are not invincible. If one gets close-" he speared one with a kunai, mid stride - "kill it."

Muskrat nodded. He was a good kid - unlucky with that trap, but that was it.

Another tendril grabbed Muskrat's ankle, hoisting him up. Crab moved, slashing at it with one of his long knives. It neatly sliced it in half, and Muskrat fell, ungainly, to the ground.

He hopped up, and then they were running again -

Straight into another tendril. It grabbed him by the neck, and he dropped his knife.

Crab gurgled out, "H-help…!"

Muskrat shot him a look - Crab couldn't see underneath his mask, but he saw the fright in his gaze. The tentacle tightened, and then -

And then he knew no more.


Itachi could not accurately describe the length of time she'd spent as a strange, tentacle monster. She could also not explain even a little bit where the fuck that had come from.

This was a hell of a flu, was all she was saying. Some shit, seriously.

It hadn't felt like she might have imagined being a bijuu felt like. Instead, it was something cruder and more savage. It felt as if she was a feral animal, backed against the wall, striking out because she felt cornered. Struggling, to survive. A monstrous fear for a monstrous form.

The period of time ended quite mundanely, actually. Part of the weird monster-her simply… reformed, into the normal her. A tendril - which she could feel, but sort of not - had apparently decided that the normal rules of person suddenly applied to her again, and reformed a body, the one that she'd had before, and the rest of her had been vacuumed into it.

It was absolutely bizarre.

Even more bizarre was the fact that she was most certainly not in the nameless town, anymore. The sky had turned a sickly shade of yellow, and the lowlands, and bamboo forests were replaced by rough, jagged mountains, ridges. They had a cross-section of different rocks - the mountains were striped, as if some massive being had brushed a selection of colors across them, heedless of the actual elevation.

And nothing within the range of her sight was living - no ruins, no vegetation, no nothing. It was empty.

Itachi sighed, and allowed herself to relax. There was an advantage, to being here - nothing here was an immediate danger to her, and nothing was in immediate danger from her, either.

And, there was an odd, comforting strength in her limbs. She felt far better now than she'd had during any part of her and Kuro's impromptu vacation.

She relished the use of her body again, hands eagerly running themselves up and down herself, feeling her head, her chest, her legs. Oddly, she didn't reform naked - as one might expect, having burst out of her clothes during the initial transformation. She was wearing a midnight-black kimono, which had to have at least four layers of fine, silken material. Like what a princess would wear - this would cost an entire fortune. A quick examination of it, and indeed - the obi was tied very tight, and around her back, in dark red.

It was even more strange to realize that this very fine, expensive kimono was just apparently part of the strange transformation. It was oddly smooth, and silky, and she imagined it would be tough, against most mundane weapons.

Even that wasn't a huge problem, because it wasn't made of any material she knew of - most kimonos forced the wearer into an awkward shuffle, completely stopping any kind of running, but this one was loose, revealing her legs, and the material was flexible, not hindering her movement nearly as much as she'd expected.

What kind of power was this supposed to be?

She felt odd, patting herself down, noting that somehow she still had her forehead protector, and her sealing scrolls, full of things. The oddness of the situation struck her, then, that somehow the transformation kept her possessions, but changed her clothing.

She felt the loose, limber feeling settle, and rummaged through her pack. She wasn't in that much of a hurry, right now. More than anything, she wanted a moment, just to settle, to spin things over in her mind.

She hadn't done all that much different, in the last few weeks, except go on vacation...

Unless…

She unsealed her camping equipment - not much more than a bedroll, and blanket. She cast around for wood, for a fire, but she couldn't find much.

She could only remember the hunger, the endless hunger, and satiating that hunger. If she had to guess, it was looking very likely that she'd eaten that entire town, before ending up wherever she was. It wasn't a good look on her - Itachi might not have been the most moral person, or someone who had a clear conscience and always did the right thing, but slaughtering an entire town was a bit much, even for her.

That was like, genuine murderhobo lunatic territory. This wasn't good. This kind of mass murder wasn't easy to come back from, unless you were the leader of a dictatorship, or the relative of a daimyo.

It was entirely possible that eating people was the issue. If she'd gone all monstrous and eaten a bunch of people, and that had led to her regaining her form, it stood to reason that there was a correlation between the eating and the form.

And on vacation, it had been the first time since her encounter with Zetsu that she had gone for a while without eating anyone - she had spent lots of time doing so to missing-nin without even a hint of tentacles, culminating in eating the Akatsuki members right before Obito had gone.

This wasn't good. Her best hypothesis was that eating people was necessary to prevent a reappearance of the monster. She had been really missing it, quite frankly, but she'd not wanted to become dependent on the idea of killing other people, so she'd gone out of her way to avoid eating anyone on vacation. It wasn't easy to find people who genuinely deserved to be eaten, surprisingly. She thought bitterly of Konoha; she would have happily eaten a few people there.

But perhaps being careful had been a mistake. Better to eat missing-nin than civilians. Civilians didn't have much chakra, anyway. They were like those little bite-size sweets - not really very filling. Plus, there was the guilt.

She settled into that, for a while. Maybe it was better, for once, that she didn't have to look that sort of thing in the face.


Itachi ran from one side of the canyon, to the other. Miles and miles, until even she was tired. The mountains extended, for miles, and miles, until she'd run all day. And still, she didn't even feel winded.

As a shinobi in the ANBU black ops, Itachi had experience running all day. But she wasn't the kind of powerhouse that could do that without breaking a sweat.

And yet, in this strange place, she could. At the end of her run, the canyon around her was the same landscape. Some of the particulars were different, as if some giant had moved piles of dirt around, but otherwise, it could have been the same place.

She stopped, and looked around. She wasn't in the Land of Hot Water anymore, was she? The sky was a plenty big clue. And the fact that there was no life in this place, another. Like it had been scraped clean.

Like whatever ought to have lived here had been purged, from the earth.

She let that thought chill her, as she rested in the fading light of the hazy sun.


A day later, and she was ready to try leaving this place through other means.

She raised a hand, concentrating chakra into her third eye.

"Yomotsu Hirasaka." The portal unfolded, slowly. Normally, it felt like lifting something heavy - not impossible, but doable.

This felt like lifting many times her body weight, like straining against that threshold of too heavy - like no matter how much she struggled, her body would not cooperate. The gate shuddered, and closed again. Itachi slumped, breathing hard. Sweat poured down her face.

Her eye throbbed, and she could feel the blood trickle down her face. A hand came up, and felt for it.

It came away red. She'd never bled before, not from that eye. She settled down, in the heat of the alien sun, and re-thought her approach.

A portal didn't work, then.

Was she not strong enough to return that way? If that was true, how did she get here? She glanced around. What was it about this place?

She concentrated more chakra to her eye, flooding it with power. It pulsed, and the feeling of ice trickled down her spine.

A sharp lance of pain spiked through it. Yomotsu Hirasaka was a space-time technique, of incredible versatility. It had been the first technique she'd grasped, through this eye. But she hadn't spent enough time experimenting, lately, had she?

She funneled chakra, to her third eye. Mostly, it pulsed like a sharingan - it had that same quality, where it was tight, like a sapling pulled into a trap, without an available target. It had nothing to latch onto. She could feel, too the coalescing planes of space-time, points upon which Yomotsu Hirasaka could be anchored.

There didn't feel like much else there. Maybe if she pushed more chakra into it - more and more, until it felt like it was going to burst.

It was like a switch was flicked, and suddenly, reality was sliding apart. It felt, for a second, like a genjutsu, and then she was back in that nameless town, surrounded by dead bodies. Strange, that the transportation technique felt like she hadn't moved at all.

The sunlight was high, in the morning sky, and she glanced around. The closest body was shriveled, wrinkled, despite the fact that it was the corpse of a young man. He had an expression of agony, and Itachi could feel the pang.

So, it was true, then. The monster had killed them all.

She spent some time poking through the ruins. Most of the buildings were flattened, shattered, roofs torn asunder.

It was as she had suspected. She was truly something that should be feared. The entire town was dead, wiped from the map, because she hadn't kept a careful watch on her chakra. Something to change, in the future.

She flexed her chakra, carefully. It was still secure, even after using it, although her third eye throbbed, painfully. It was safe enough.

She summoned Kuro and sent her off, to find Obito, and settled in to wait.


Obito popped into existence, among the ruined pieces of building. Itachi sat, watching the crows feast on the corpses - they always started with the eyes. It had been a few hours, long enough for the scavengers to come. And the crows had come. It was almost like she'd called them, as they flocked to her, in droves. There was something that attracted them, today. It was oddly coincidental, somehow.

Maybe she'd gotten in touch with her inner crow, or something.

Kuro fluttered, and flapped to her side, a crow once again but with the same mischievous sheen in her eyes. "My bad, Itachi. Didn't see that coming."

Itachi shrugged. "It's fine. As you can see, I'm very alright." She picked up the Kubikiribocho, and tossed it forward, a little bit. She felt a surge of resentment, that her fans hadn't survived, and it had.

Kuro flapped out of the way of the blade. "Watch it!"

Itachi shrugged again. "Turns out vacation didn't go so well," she explained to Obito. "Ended with the whole town dead." She smiled bitterly. "A new record, no?"

Obito spread his arms. "Can I help?"

She snorted. "As you can see, everything is taken care of. Fucking Konoha hunter-nin team."

He glanced around. "I see an awful lot of civilians." His mouth twisted, in distaste. "I don't suppose you can bring them back?"

Itachi shrugged. "Not really." She knew he wasn't going to like it, but it wasn't like she had a ton of choice in the matter. Trying to bring back anyone in this state was a one-way trip to tentacle town.

And tentacle town was not a fun place to be, for everyone who wasn't her. She couldn't even really say she enjoyed it, for all that the sensations were more pleasant than not, when things got going.

Obito folded his arms. "No? No remorse for the dozen innocent people I can see from here?"

"No," Itachi said, finally. "If that's going to be a dealbreaker for you, now's the time to speak up. One of the things I've learned since we've been apart is that this new body of mine comes with certain… limitations. Ones that mean that I have to be careful about my chakra use.

"I didn't mean to kill these people, mind you. But make no mistake, it was my error that led to their deaths. I drained them all, and resurrecting them takes chakra, in a way that using jutsu doesn't. It's not the easy fix we thought it was."

"I…" Obito rubbed his face. "I'm not sure what to say, Itachi. I think I know you well enough to trust your word on this sort of thing, but I can't say I'm comfortable with the idea. I'd be, as you'd imagine, a hell of a lot more comfortable if you could bring these people back."

Itachi nodded, slowly. "If I could, I would. I can't say I feel that much remorse about them, but we've talked about that before."

Obito sighed. "Then I suppose that's it, isn't it? I trust you, Itachi. You aren't the kind of person who'd slaughter an entire town for no reason, but I still can't help but wonder if you should care about this more. You've probably made a few orphans today."

"I know that, alright? But I'm glad you trust me that much, at least," Itachi said, wryly. Her chest twisted. It was easier to understand when Obito put it like that. A few Sasukes of different shapes and sizes would mourn for their parents in the next few days. Something stirred in her, and she shook it away. "But I think - I think this happened because I wasn't eating anyone, on vacation. So my chakra acted up… and then, well, stuff happened. It got weird, for a bit, and I ate everyone in what seems like a half-mile radius. So I think whether I'm ready for it or not, it's time to go back to work. I can't let this happen again."

Obito rolled his neck, and nodded, looking uncertain but resigned to it. "Sure."

"So what's the plan, bossman?"

"The plan is, quite frankly, not really a plan."

"Itachi," Kuro said, slowly, surveying the carrion crows pecking at the bodies. "What happened?"

"It turns out I should be regularly eating people - draining their chakra. If I don't, mine gets… unstable." Itachi smiled, painfully. "And things get messy, which doesn't end so well for anyone even remotely near me. You should probably be glad you died first." She met Obito's eyes, through his mask. "If it happens again, and I tell you to run, run. Through Kamui."

"I don't want this to happen again," Obito said. "I'm very willing to help you with that, if need be."

"I don't want it either, Obito," Itachi replied, terse. "I have every intention of stopping it from happening again."

"Good. We're in agreement, then." He sighed. "I'd prefer if you didn't have to kill anyone."

Itachi sighed. "It would help if there was a guide for this sort of thing."

"A guide?" Obito asked, cocking his head. "What do you mean?"

"Well, like…" she paused, considering it. "In Konoha, I wasn't supposed to kill civilians, or those who had broken no laws, until I was ordered to do so. And I wasn't allowed to torture the shinobi I killed, on missions, but when I did so working for T&I, it was acceptable. That made sense - I wasn't supposed to kill, or hurt, until I was told to. That's obvious. But now, I don't know what you want - what I should be doing and what I shouldn't be."

Obito made an inarticulate noise of frustration. "What I want? What do you mean?"

"Where is the line between what I should do and what I shouldn't?" Itachi asked, feeling stupid. She didn't like asking things like this in the first place, but this entire thing sometimes felt like a big joke she'd never been let in on. "I thought the missing-nin we've been killing were people we could kill. Acceptable targets. But then you say that."

"Acceptable targets?" Obito asked, like she was speaking another language.

"Yes," she explained, patiently. "What's wrong with killing missing-nin? It seems a necessary thing, a function of the way of life that a shinobi living outside the village must embrace."

"Why do you have to kill anyone? Why can't missing-nin go out into the country, and become farmers or fishermen or something?"

Itachi wrinkled her brow. "Farmers? Why would they do that?"

"So they don't have to kill people!"

She considered it for half a second. "Can you see me fishing for a living? Looking like this? I mean, hell, I stayed in a hot springs for three weeks and some hunter-nin showed up. My fishing career would last probably that long before there was someone trying to murder me."

"Ugh!" he groaned. "Fine, that might not work - but my point is - missing-nin are people too. They all have lives, families, all sorts of things. You're taking something, when killing them. All lives have purpose."

"You're naive, for a criminal mastermind," Itachi retorted. "I'm outside of the protection of a village. So are you. We only have ourselves to rely on. In this world, it's kill or be killed."

"I can't accept that," Obito vowed.

"Well," she smirked, conciliatory. "I agreed to help you change it, didn't I?"

"Why?" he asked. "You could go your own way, live your life the way you want to."

"You helped me, when you didn't have to," she replied, evenly. A splash of pink was entering the sky, above them, as the sun started to set. The village they were in was ruined, but there was a sort of beauty to it.

"And that's it?"

She frowned, struggling with herself, a little. It was hard to put into words.

"I suppose I do agree," she said, finally. "I'm not stupid. I know I'm…" She paused, unsure. "I know I'm… lacking, certain things." She pointed to her chest, to illustrate. "Here. Things that other people have. And while I was well-suited for a life of killing, maybe most people aren't."

"There's nothing wrong with your breasts," Kuro cut in.

Obito let out a startled laugh.

"You're a bird," Itachi replied. "What do you know about human standards of beauty?"

"Only what I've seen from spending time as your clone," Kuro retorted. "So it's more likely to say that you like your own chest."

"That doesn't make any sense," Obito pointed out, reasonably. "Plus, let's face it, you've not got a lot going on up there."

"I'm still thirteen," she pointed out.

"You're an Uchiha. If you're hoping for some magic to happen there, you'll be waiting a long time."

"Obito, this is getting weird. Both the extent of your commentary and the subject."

He aggressively rolled his mismatched eyes. "And here I thought you were inured to this sort of thing. Little Itachi uncomfortable?"

She folded her arms. "Yes. Please stop talking about it."

He held up his hands. "No need to get upset about it."

"I'm not," she protested. "I just don't like the way you were talking about me."

"Fine," he grunted. He sounded slightly annoyed, but he let the topic drop.

Itachi allowed that to happen.

"So what's our plan?" she asked. "I suppose I should join your boy band, no?"

"Right," he muttered, half to himself. "Another topic. Yes. You're looking very princess-like today, Itachi. I wonder if I should call you Itachi-hime, from now on."

"What?" she asked. She glanced down, and considered this ridiculous garment. "Right. Yeah. Weirdest thing? I turned into a giant tentacle monster, right? And then once I killed all the people around, I turned back into a person. And weirdly enough, I was wearing this."

"Well, it looks nice," Obito said. "Doesn't explain the eyebrows, though."

"What eyebrows?"

"You have those eyebrows, you know, the fancy ones?"

Kuro fluttered up to perch on her shoulder, and she felt a tug on her chakra. Kuro wanted to initiate the clone technique. Itachi had to concentrate to activate the technique - her chakra was still uneven, jagged and rough. It had to be handled, gently, like picking up broken glass.

"Not too much," she warned. "If you make me unstable, things will get messy."

The crowl transformed into a copy of her - identical, even down to the elaborate kimono, except for the eyebrows, which were now small dots, above where her eyebrows normally sat. Itachi considered that - well, it looked like that was another fun new thing that was a part of her now.

A fury rose in her, unexpectedly. She was so sick of it; every time she turned around, she had some new aberration growing on her body. Something new would be changed without her consent. It was exhausting, to have new things happen to her every time. She had worked hard for this body.

She barely looked like herself, anymore. She barely looked human. Of course it was miles better than the tentacles, but at this point, she couldn't even be sure that Sasuke would even recognize her.

She rubbed her forehead, feeling the hairs of her eyebrows in the wrong spots. "I'm so sick of this."

"The eyebrows?" Obito asked.

"The everything!" Itachi hissed. "I don't look normal, anymore. And things keep changing!"

"Oh," he finally said. "I guess that makes sense. Hopefully it'll stop soon?"

"Hopefully," she said, dryly, trying to inject all of the sarcasm she could. "That's very fucking reassuring, Obito."

"I can't fix it." He shrugged. "It sucks, okay? You don't need to take it out on me."

"If you don't mind," Kuro interjected. "It seems like tempers are running high, no? So let's put things on hold. Come with me to Karuizawa, Itachi. Maybe mastering some of our Sage Arts will help you keep control of your chakra, better."

"I already have two sage modes," Itachi remarked.

"You already have two artificial sage modes," Kuro corrected. "And you only have one, now."

"Only one?"

"That was what all that coughing up of blood and organs was, yeah."

Itachi made a face.

"You coughed up an organ?" Obito asked.

"It was a rejection reaction, I think," Itachi said. "My new biology didn't like whatever Orochimaru put inside me."

"And Tenjin?"

She shrugged.

Kuro was frowning. "It shouldn't be outright rejected, not like the other thing, but I can't imagine the Sage chakra interacts well with your own chakra. Have you tried it?"

"A little, but mostly during that fight in Kumo."

Kuro paused for a second, before continuing. "I see. Further experimentation is important, then. A training trip?"

Itachi shrugged. "I can do that. If Obito is okay with it?"

Obito shrugged, too. "If it means less destroyed villages, you do what you gotta do. I'll see you later, yeah?"

"Sure."

"Good luck." And he vanished into kamui.

"So how do we do this?" Itachi asked, turning to her clone, who looked overwhelmingly smug.

"You'll see. And you'll like Karuizawa, trust me. We can watch movies together! There are Liu films everyday in the cinema, but you have to eat the popcorn off the floor. It's gonna be so much fun!"

Itachi sighed.


an: Obito is Obito, Kuro is Kuro, and Itachi is a nightmarish, tentacled abomination that only thinks its a teenage girl.