The first time Sasuke's brother shows up, Karin ignores him.
It's movie night, early fall, the first week of their senior year - a week full of blow-off classes, summer tans, incessant talk of college applications.
Sasuke's brother tries to join them, but he doesn't do much. Doesn't talk. Doesn't draw much attention to himself. He leans forward to push things closer to Sasuke when Sasuke reaches for them, tucks his legs back as people come in and out of the living room, and - when Naruto gets up from the couch to pop another bag of popcorn - Sasuke's brother quietly slips into the empty spot next to Sasuke.
Most of the time, it's like he's barely even there.
Karin gets that. She also makes herself scarce, nestled into a puddle of blankets next to Sakura on the floor.
Sasuke looks down at his phone and sighs. "You know, I never made it past the first fifteen minutes of this movie. Itachi would never stop trying to explain it."
Rather than take offense to that, Sasuke's brother leans back against the couch and smiles, his eyes comfortably closed. It's awkward to hear Sasuke talking about him like he isn't even there, but Karin is the only one who seems bothered by it.
Sakura offers Sasuke a slight smile. "Well, to be fair, there is a lot that doesn't make sense the first time around."
Naruto scurries back into the room with a bowl of fresh popcorn and crumbs dotting his face. "What I miss?" he asks, plopping down next to Sasuke, and right on top of Itachi.
He shivers. "Man, get me a blanket or something, it's freezing in here!"
Sakura scowls and shushes him. "Naruto, be quiet! This is the kind of movie that you of all people need to pay attention to!"
Karin says nothing. She walks a thin line as it is, not quite Sasuke's friend, not quite Naruto's cousin.
Not quite Sakura's rival in love, though she's aspiring to it.
So while she'd much rather keep an eye on Sakura as she inches closer and closer to Sasuke, Karin picks through her box of Mike and Ikes instead, sorting out all of the green ones so she has a reason not to look back at them.
A reason to look preoccupied.
She can't block out Sasuke's brother's presence entirely, but she can do her best to ignore him until the movie ends and Aunt Kushina comes to pick up her and Naruto.
It is, after all, not much different than what she'd done while he was still alive.
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.
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The weird thing about spirits is that they always seem to be in a hurry. They never stick around for long, and when they do, there's always a hyperactive air around them, like they're anxious about something. Maybe that's why they burn up so quickly.
It's exceedingly rare that she'll see the same one more than twice, especially because their existences are fixed to focal points, places of intense emotional concentration that reel them in like fish, pulling them in further and further in until they're pulled somewhere else entirely.
Maybe it's just something that carries over - after spending a lifetime chasing after time, unaware of how much of it they have left, those last few hours or days shock them into a state of urgency, a desire to finish as much of their unfinished work as they can before finally passing over.
But that's not everyone. Some people - like her mother - simply pass on without manifesting at all. No ghost, no shade, no nothing. She hasn't decided why exactly that is - whether it's a quirk that anyone manages to linger at all after death, or if it only happens for untimely deaths, when there's some extra energy to burn off.
Or whether some people just don't feel like they've got any business to look after.
Karin thinks about that a lot - whether spirits have any sort of say in whether they linger. If they can advocate for their own unfinished business, or the loved ones they've left behind.
They're already dead at that point, so it's not like it'd kill them to stick around for just a little longer, just to say their goodbyes.
In all the years Karin has been watching spirits, though, spirits have never been anything other than hurried, transitory blips in the background of her life.
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A few weeks after seeing Sasuke's dead brother for the first time, Karin and the rest of the Uzumaki family find themselves back at the Uchiha household.
"Go Bills!" Kushina cries out, brandishing two bags of scoop chips. "This is gonna be our year, I can sense it!"
Karin stumbles in the doorway after her, almost scalding herself on the boiling hot grease from the buffalo chicken dip.
Minato steadies her with a hand on her back. "Be careful, kiddo! That just came out of the oven!"
"Uh—yeah." Karin ducks her head and shuffles over to the table, where she sets down the chicken dip without once glancing up.
She wipes her hands on her leggings, staring hard at the grease stains she's leaving behind, that she already knows are going to be a bitch to get out.
It beats the alternative, though, which is looking up and gawking at Sasuke's brother. He hovers around Sasuke and watches, with private interest that can only be genuine, as Sasuke sorts through college brochures across the kitchen table.
"Hey," she says to Sasuke, shuffling awkwardly over to where he's sitting. She intentionally parks herself on the opposite end of the table, so she doesn't have to stand next to - or avoid accidental eye contact with - his busybody brother. "Anything good?"
Sasuke grunts back at her. He doesn't bother looking up from the dozen or so brochures spread out around him. "Early decision."
She sticks out her tongue. "Gross."
"Yeah."
The conversation dwindles embarrassingly fast, even for them. Sasuke's brother seems to find it amusing, if anything, but his preoccupation with the college brochures seems like enough of a distraction that she's not as uneasy being so close to him. She looks over her shoulder and watches Kushina help Mikoto make space on the counter for the half dozen or so game day appetizers Kushina's brought.
Even now, almost two months after Sasuke's brother died, Kushina still takes the time to pull Mikoto into a hug before she can step away.
At this point, most of Kushina's sympathy doesn't need to be spoken out loud - instead, she holds Mikoto close for several moments, squeezing her at the end, and smiling gently at her when they separate.
"How are you doing, Mikoto?" Kushina asks.
Sasuke's mom pushes a few escaped strands of hair back from her face, tucking them behind her ear. "Things are fine."
Kushina cocks her head. "That's… good?"
Sasuke's mom nods slowly. "Yeah, it's… it's good."
Kushina's prompting seems to loosen her up a little, because she starts gesturing, chattering as she circles the kitchen looking for more work.
"We, ah, finally spent some time - you know. Cleaning out some of Itachi's things. Not everything," she hastily adds, holding up both hands for emphasis. "His room is still - you know. We just took care of some of the extra papers and whatnot he had lying around."
Sasuke's brother grimaces at that, as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. He straightens up and looks over at his mother and Kushina as they talk, his brow furrowed.
He's taller than he was the last time she saw him, she realizes - taller than she ever remembers him being when he was alive, almost taller than Juugo. He looms over Sasuke, shot through with gray like an old timey photograph.
And Sasuke, along with everyone else in the kitchen, is entirely oblivious to it. Not that he's entirely unaffected by it, though. She can tell he's been losing sleep by the dark rings under his eyes, equal parts bruised purple and sickly yellow. Even his hair seems flattened, like all of him is sagging over under the weight of loss.
It hasn't been all that long since his brother died, and—well, it makes sense that Sasuke is still grieving quietly, in his own way. Karin isn't too much of an expert in psychology, but she's enough of an expert in the supernatural to know that the fact that Itachi is still hanging around probably isn't helping.
Outwardly, though, he seems harmless enough.
It's unusual and certainly not anything she's ever seen before, but maybe he died young enough that he had more unfinished business than most to attend to. No spirit remains indefinitely, and it's only a matter of time before what's left of him is used up, and he passes over onto the other side.
In that case, there's nothing wrong with continuing to ignore him.
Karin sets her hands on her hips and holds her voice steady, turning back towards Minato. "Wasn't Naruto supposed to bring in the jalapeno poppers?"
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Everything goes to hell after the ACT.
The ACT in itself is its own special kind of hell, but after five grueling hours of checking and rechecking penciled-in bubbles on a scantron, ghosts are the last thing on her mind. After she dumps her test booklet into the collection basket, she and Naruto stumble out of the school and flop into the backseat of Kushina's van.
Rather than argue over who gets shotgun, they spend the entire drive groaning about vectors and matrices until Kushina dumps them off unceremoniously onto the Uchiha family's front lawn.
"Have fun, kids!" Kushina yells before the exhaust kicks and she zooms down the residential street.
"Took you guys long enough." Sasuke is waiting at the front door, his hair sticking up in the place where - Karin can almost picture it - he'd been resting his hand as he took his exam. His eyes are red-rimmed and bruised, like he hasn't slept for weeks.
She understands the feeling perfectly.
"Dude, that sucked so bad," Naruto whines. "I heard you get twelve points just for answering every question. You think that's true?"
"Aunt Kushina will kill you," Karin mutters. She wraps her arms tightly around herself and slogs into the house, ready to collapse.
And that's exactly what they do.
Together, they form a puddle of blankets and sweatpants and tension headaches on Sasuke's living room floor. Even Sasuke, who ordinarily won't let anyone touch him, begrudgingly allows himself to be wedged in between her and Naruto. He's worn out enough that he doesn't even complain when Karin rolls over and buries her face into his back.
He smells nice and clean, like fresh laundry. It helps lull her to sleep, for as long as it's just the three of them.
Sakura already took the ACT and SAT and came away with near-perfect scores on both, but she shows up not long after on Sasuke's front porch with two dozen chocolate chip cookies and a freshly baked lecture about standardized testing.
"Honestly, it's not even that hard of an exam," she says, setting her hands on her hips as she looks down at them in disapproval. "If you'd done the practice tests like I told you to, you would have better stamina and wouldn't be so worn out!"
There's no response. Karin thinks she's the least obligated to answer, since there hadn't actually been any lecture for her, but she's still willing to punt Sakura's ire off onto Sasuke and Naruto until she's gotten a little more rest.
"Are you even listening to me right now, Naruto?" Sakura stomps one of her clunky boots. "You had better hope you did okay this time around, because if your scores aren't good, you won't have enough time to retake it!"
Naruto lets out something like a sob. "Wanna die," he whines. "Wanna sleep and never wake up."
Sasuke grunts in a rough approximation of agreement.
The air suddenly turns cold. Naruto shivers and starts grabbing for the quilt lying over top of them. "Is your dad gonna be pissed if we mess with the thermostat, cause I'm freezing!"
Karin sighs and opens her eyes again to find Sasuke's goddamn dead brother looming over them like a shitty vampire.
This time, she can say for certain that he's gotten worse.
She is, thankfully, so exhausted that her reaction is delayed for several seconds. Instead of screaming, she forces herself to roll off of Sasuke and feigns stretching out her arms. "You got anything around here to eat?" she asks, poking him between his shoulder blades. "Or can we go halfsies on a pizza?"
"Fourthsies," Sakura corrects. "I'm not paying for Naruto's share this time, and neither is anyone else."
Naruto sputters. "I have my own money, you know!"
"Then why are you always borrowing it off other people?"
"Because I forget sometimes!" Naruto starts writhing under Sasuke, scooting backwards on the carpet to get free from the pile of blankets. He shoves his hand under the blankets, digging somewhere in between his legs. "Let me just look for it…"
"That's disgusting, Naruto!" Sakura cries. "You're not alone right now, you know!"
Naruto immediately raises his hands over his head in a show of innocence. "My pockets, I swear! I was looking in my pockets!"
By the time Naruto finds his wallet, Sasuke is already shuffling back into the room, waving his phone.
"Forty minutes," Sasuke says. "I ordered two."
Naruto lets out a high pitched whine. "That's so long." He flops over onto his back and begins to tug at the strings to his hoodie, until his face almost disappears. "You got anything else to eat while we wait?" he asks, his voice partially muffled.
"I'll check," Karin immediately volunteers. Without waiting, she hops up and scurries out of the living room and away from Sasuke's dead brother.
Usually, spirits are so harmless that she barely even registers when they're there, or can at least ignore them with minimal effort. This has always been easier when the spirits are total strangers, and not people she sorta kinda knew while they were alive, but the same idea applies.
Even then, though, she's never seen what happens when a spirit refuses to pass on, and somehow manages to resist the entropy pulling them into the afterlife.
She isn't particularly interested in hanging around to find out.
Karin crosses her arms in front of herself and shuffles into the kitchen, her sweatpants swishing. She begins poking through cabinets but doesn't find anything other than cups and plates. A pantry, maybe?
She picks the one closet closer to the hallway and tugs at the door. It sticks, and so she tugs again, and again, until she finally props one of her fuzzy socks up against the wall to wretch it open, which it does with a loud pop.
As she stumbles away, something large, cold, and heavy collapses onto her, knocking her back several more feet.
"What the fuck!" Karin throws punches until she realizes that whatever has fallen onto her isn't fighting back. She heaves it off of her, and a plastic skeleton drops to the floor. "Oh, of all the absolute bull—"
"Karin, are you okay?" Sakura cries. She and the boys come rushing into the room, bringing Sasuke's brother with them.
"Yeah, I'm fine," Karin mutters. She hefts it up the skeleton and tosses it onto one of many tubs in the closet with a clattering of plastic bones. "I think I picked the wrong door, though."
"Yeah." Sasuke reaches past her and pulls the dangling chain hanging from the closet light. "It's just—it's a bunch of old decorations Itachi used to put for Halloween and Christmas."
"Well that would have been good to know before I opened it," she grumbles, nudging the skeleton's foot with her sock. "Should put up a sign or something."
"Hehe, are you a chicken, Karin?" Naruto snickers. "Are you a scaredy-cat?"
"I am not!" she snaps. "But even I know that it's weird to go through a dead guy's shit!"
Sasuke immediately tenses. Itachi immediately tenses too, and Karin cringes.
"I didn't—" she starts, but Sasuke cuts her off.
"It's fine," he says. "Mom probably just… didn't want to sort through any of this just yet." He stuffs his hands into his pockets and stares down. "Without him around, there isn't really anyone who'd go through all the trouble of setting this stuff up anyway."
"Well…" Sakura hesitates for a moment, before she sets her phone down on the counter and takes a step closer to Sasuke. "That's something we can help you do now, if you want? If you want, I mean. Today's a pretty nice day - we can take some of these decorations outside and kinda - you know. Make it look like it did when he was… around."
Sasuke's mouth twitches, like he's fighting off a frown. "Yeah."
"There's a lot of stuff in there," Naruto points out. "It'd take us like three hours to get through all of this."
"Yeah."
Sakura lays a gentle hand on Sasuke's arm. "Well. We could—I mean, he probably spent hours on it. We don't have to do all of that if you don't want to. Really, we don't have to do it at all." Over Sasuke's shoulder, she shoots Naruto a warning glare. "It'd still be nice, though—to do something for your first Halloween without him."
Itachi's face darkens at that.
Sakura turns to Karin, looking to her for support. "What do you think, Karin? It could be like—almost a new tradition or something!"
"Uh." It takes almost all of Karin's willpower not to look over at Sasuke's brother, who is now fully glaring at Sakura. "Sounds like a lot of work…"
"We've got time before the pizza comes," Sakura argues. She leans over Sasuke's shoulder, looking over the boxes of stored away decorations. "Maybe enough time to sort out some lights, or hang up a few spiderwebs, or—"
Against her better judgment, Karin sneaks another glance out of the corner of her eye. Sasuke's brother was never much of an emotional guy - at least, as far as she can remember him.
Right now, though, he looks absolutely livid.
It's so palpable that she can feel him, the way that anyone feels a set of eyes boring into their backs.
"Uh, you know, Sakura, maybe we should—"
There's a quick jolt of something, like pop rocks in her mouth, and Sakura's phone tips over the kitchen counter and crashes onto the floor.
The sound startles all of them, save Karin. Sakura lets out an angry growl. "Naruto!"
"It wasn't me! I was all the way over here!" Naruto scrunches up his face before he crosses his arms behind his head. "Maybe you should be more careful with where you put your stuff, Sakura."
Sakura throws a glare at him before she bends over to pick up her phone.
"Aw, man." She pouts, tapping the screen with her thumb. "The screen shattered…"
"I know a guy who can fix that for like, thirty bucks," Karin offers. She scoots over, looking over Sakura's broken phone screen.
Through the cracked glass, she's just barely able to see Sasuke's brother's satisfied smirk before he vanishes again.
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Three weeks before the dance, Sasuke decides to skip homecoming.
"What the hell would I do at some stupid dance?" he mutters, leaving the junior who'd had the audacity to hit him with a promposal scurrying away with the rest of her barbershop quartet.
Unsurprisingly, this results in everyone - that is, everyone who matters - also deciding to skip the dance. Instead, they disperse into their own individual gangs for the evening - Sakura with her group of female friends, Naruto with his dirtbag friends.
And Sasuke, with her and Juugo and Suigetsu.
They vote to spend the night at Suigetsu's house, since his brother could care less if they get loud or rowdy in the basement, and Sasuke's parents have a bad habit of checking up on them throughout the night.
And, of course, the fucking ghost that's haunting his house.
They've barely finished their first bottle of drugstore wine before Sasuke lays down, rolls over, and falls asleep. He's familiar enough with Suigetsu's propensity for drawing hyper realistic dicks that he should know better, but he's still got an immunity, of sorts, that protects him from the worst of their bullshit.
Suigetsu grumbles about Sasuke getting to play the damn dead brother card again while Juugo goes in search of a blanket.
They finish another bottle of wine and end the night sprawled out across the cold concrete floor, counting the spiders that skitter across the ceiling like they're stars.
The first nine weeks ends, and the second kicks off to an inglorious, ghost-free start.
Karin stumbles through Halloween with a last minute mermaid costume she throws together with a purple crop top and green leggings. It's convincing enough that when Suigetsu and Juugo pull up to Kushina's house, it only takes a block and a half for Suigetsu to find something else to make fun of.
Sasuke stays home sick with the flu, so when the sun sets and the younger kids begin to clear out, Suigetsu drives them over to Sasuke's house and parks right under his window.
"Show us your tits!" he yells, pelting Sasuke's window with acorns and broken Lifesavers, until Sasuke's dad kicks open the front door and they peel out of the driveway.
He drops her off on Kushina's porch with a pillow cover full of candy that she's able to keep hidden from Naruto right up until their week-long Thanksgiving vacation hits at the end of November. Kushina lets her sleep off her turkey and mashed potato coma for an hour before she's dragged out to the garage to load up the van with foldable lawn chairs and binders full of coupon inserts.
"The doorbusters will be the real problem," Kushina tells her, looking over her clipboard of Black Friday ads, "but once we've cleared those, we can hit the department stores no problem."
The hardest part of Black Friday is dressing for it: at least half the night is just spent waiting, either outside in the windy cold, or inside packed tightly between hundreds of other sweaty, overdressed shoppers. They've been lucky enough to avoid snow so far this year, but it's gotten cold enough that the tips of her fingers have started to prickle if she's outside too long.
Minato crushes her puffed up coat and scarf into a hug on her way to the driveway, where Kushina is starting to pound her horn.
"Don't be afraid to call me," he yells over the blaring horn, "if Kushi is too much this year." He sends her out the front door with a hearty pat on the back. "Have fun, girls!"
They spend the rest of the night huddled outside of Walmarts and Best Buys and Sephoras, warming their hands with thermoses full of almond milk and espresso shots and elbowing other suburban moms over flatscreen TVs.
All in all, they do fairly well for themselves.
Thursday night becomes Friday morning, becomes Friday afternoon. The next actual meal she gets is biscuits and gravy at an IHOP, where Kushina drowns a tower of pancakes with coffee and raspberry syrup before they finally scuttle back home.
December. College applications, ACT scores, midterm exams. More bullshit. Time blurs, classes drag, days fly by. She and Naruto turn their pajamas inside out and stash spoons under their pillows to manifest a snow day, with no such luck.
Winter break.
Finally, Karin gets a chance to breathe. On the last day of classes, she pulls several blankets and sleeping bags out of the hallway closet and sets herself up on the couch with an infinite loop of Law & Order: SVU lulling her to sleep.
The next morning, she's woken by the sound of suitcases thudding down the hardwood stairs.
It's one of their most enduring family traditions that, whenever the actual Uzumaki family plans a vacation, Karin finds an excuse to get out of it. This year, she tells a half-truth about chasing down a few last-minute letters of recommendation and manages to escape the worst of Kushina and Minato's prying.
When she finally rolls off the couch and drags a blanket into the living room, Minato leans away from the Keurig to wave an itinerary at her. "You can change your mind whenever you want," he reminds her, but they don't speak of it again.
They drive off to the airport a few hours later, leaving her home alone for the next week and a half to do nothing but watch Hell's Kitchen reruns and blow her early Christmas money on DoorDash sushi.
Well. That, and checking up on the ghost situation. It's been long enough - and winter break is uneventful enough - that she finds herself gravitating back towards it like the leftovers that don't look good until her third or fourth pass through the fridge.
Sasuke catches another bad cold before the end of exam week, and he spends the rest of winter break sweating it off, making him an unusually easy guy to get a hold of.
With Sasuke stuck at home, and with no adults around to supervise her, Karin hops on her bike and zips over with takeout from a nearby Italian restaurant - one of the only kinds of shitty food Sasuke will actually eat. She finds Sasuke in bed, ornery and drowning in a sea of blankets and pillows that have been piled on top of him.
Thankfully, though, him being bedridden seems to keep his brother in a complacent mood.
He's sitting in a chair by the bed, but he's still polite enough to move onto the edge of the bed when he sees Karin approach, presumably to make room for her.
Karin lifts up the bag she brought with her. "Eggplant parmesan?"
Sasuke's not in a talkative mood, and while normally she'd be fine sitting in silence with him, she begins to recite - at length - the most recent Bachelorette season finale, just to keep herself preoccupied.
Sasuke's brother is significantly more interested in it than he is, which makes it difficult to carry on the conversation like a normal person. She keeps directing her eyes towards the window instead, if only because it's too hard to concentrate on Sasuke alone with his brother sitting so close to him.
She wonders if that ever gets to him - being roped into conversations he can never be a part of. Having the world carry on around him while he's stuck in the middle of it, observing it all without the ability to interact.
It's hard. She doesn't have to imagine it to know that it's hard.
She's in the middle summarizing the spectacular falling out between one of the prospective men and the Bachelorette's mother when she realizes Sasuke has let her go on for almost five straight minutes without so much as a grunt. She looks back over to find him fast asleep in his bed, still sitting upright, with his head resting against the wooden headboard.
"Um." Once upon a time, she would have jumped at the opportunity to slide in next to Sasuke and "accidentally" fall asleep next to him. She still would, but now she can't confidently say she could fall asleep in Sasuke's bed knowing his dead brother was in bed with them.
Really, it just kinda sours the appeal of the whole thing.
"I guess I'll go home now," she says out loud, as if it were normal for people to announce their intentions to an empty room.
She forces herself up and out of the chair and ambles mechanically to the door. As she shuts the door behind her, she sees, just out of the teeny crack in the door, Sasuke's brother tug the edge of the blanket up to Sasuke's chin and smooth down his hair.
It's the little things, sometimes, that freak you out the most.
Karin makes it a point to pop in once or twice a day after that, just for brief visits - check ups on Sasuke, on his brother. Looking at them does nothing for her, but she gets a creeping anxiety the longer she spends away, as if something really, really bad is going to happen if she isn't there to keep an eye on them.
Sakura starts to give her questioning looks, though Karin tries to downplay it by saying she's only interested in talking about scholarships.
It'd be nice, maybe, if she could focus on those, but Sasuke's brother makes it hard for her to focus on anything, even when she isn't there. He's done something she had never seen a spirit do before - he's grown. Spirits fade and weaken and diminish over time. They're nothing more than the residual energy a person leaves behind when they die.
They shouldn't be getting stronger as time passes, and yet somehow Sasuke's brother is. She doesn't need to be an expert to know that's really not good.
And she doesn't think it's good for Sasuke, either. In fact, if the bruises under his eyes are anything to go by, maybe Sakura would be more relieved to hear that she's ghost hunting.
On New Year's Eve, she's halfway back to Sasuke's house when she receives a text from Sakura - On our way to the hospital. Sasuke collapsed :(
She spends the rest of the night sipping orange juice and sprite out of a martini glass while she waits for her phone to light up with updates from Sakura. At a minute to midnight, Minato calls her and puts her on speakerphone while they watch the ball drop on TV.
"We miss you, Karin!" Kushina cries out in the background. "Did you know that the margaritas here are bottomless!"
Karin ends the call there, and no one calls her back.
Sasuke's discharged about a week later, though his mom confesses to Kushina over the phone that it doesn't make her feel any less worried.
"Well if the tests didn't show anything," Kushina says, "isn't that a good thing?"
There's a long delay, either a pause, or a lengthy response from Sasuke's mom.
Kushina grimaces. "Maybe he's just overworking himself," she offers. "It's gotta be hard for him, being—you know. Trying to live up to Itachi's example. A lot of kids start to feel burned out their senior year, maybe it's due to that?"
Another pause.
"No, I know, I know…" Kuashina bites her lip as she thinks. "It's just, if they ran the tests and they came back negative, then it has to be something different…"
Sakura is out of town for some kind of Model UN event, so it's just her, Naruto, and Sasuke to piss away their last week before school starts back.
Sasuke's still looking pale, though he's always been paler than most of the guys in their grade.
Instinctively, she chalks it up to stress, though in the back of her mind she can't help but wonder whether it's something more. His brother seems more relaxed today - instead of sitting with them around Sasuke's room, he's standing by the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
"Read it and weep!" Naruto shouts before slapping his acceptance letter down on the table and nearly spilling over his cup of hot chocolate. "The University of Rochester says they'd be pleased to have me this fall!"
Karin shifts beside him. "I got in too."
Sasuke looks the letter over with a shrug. "At least you got in somewhere."
"Somewhere?!" Naruto smacks his hands down on the coffee table and leans forward, until his nose and Sasuke's nose are almost touching. "Of course I got in! Do you know how many letters of recommendation Dad made me chase down?! I spent four weeks just sending emails!"
"I'm surprised there are that many people willing to recommend you for anything."
Naruto squints back at him. "Well, since you're so smart and cool, why don't you show us your acceptance letters?"
Sasuke smirks before walking over to his desk and pulling out a three ringed binder stuffed so full of shit that he needs both hands to lift it. "Feel free to flip through them yourself," he says, before dropping the entire thing on the table with a loud thump.
For a moment, both she and Naruto are equally speechless.
"W-wha—how are there so many!" The table rocks under Naruto as he leans forward, scrambling to look inside. "Did you include those booklets in there, you bastard?!"
He didn't.
Karin sorts through the envelopes as Naruto sputters, trying to call Sasuke's bluff. She flips through a series of regional colleges until one in particular catches her eye. "You got into Cornell?"
"I heard back from them a few weeks ago." Sasuke shrugs like it's no big deal, but there's a certain glimmer in his eye when he looks over at Naruto. "Haven't heard back anything about scholarships yet, though."
"You—what! When! Why didn't you tell us!"
Sasuke scowls. "It just happened, idiot. This probably isn't even the last of it."
"Course it isn't." Naruto makes a face. "Cornell, huh." He rubs the back of his neck. "Are you sure you wanna deal with all the obnoxious rich kids there?"
"Itachi went to Cornell," Sasuke says. "He never—it wasn't really Itachi's thing to say anything upfront, but I think he always wanted me to go there as well."
"Oh." For a moment, Naruto seems cowed. "Guess that'd make sense."
From the look on Itachi's face, Sasuke is probably right. He smiles softly from beside the window, only half-visible in the bright light from the snowfall. She thinks of a poem one of her teachers had them read in AP Lit, which she half-slept through: I am being eaten away by light.
Naruto grins. "Well, it's not Cornell, but Rochester's got a good economics program, and a good journalism program! More importantly, we both got in there!"
"Yeah." Sasuke turns over a letter in his hand, as if the answer is written on the back of it. "I still have to think about it," he eventually says.
"I get it. He meant a lot to you, but—" Naruto crosses his arms, shifting uncomfortably. "But if you only do stuff 'cause of him, I think you're gonna start to hate him for that, especially if it's something you don't want to do. And if that means the three of us split up" —and Karin cringes, because she knows instinctively that she's not the third he's counting— "then maybe, you know, consider giving Rochester a shot."
"Cornell isn't just something you say no to," Karin grumbles. "Especially compared to a school no one's heard of outside of the Midwest."
"Plenty of people have heard of Rochester!"
"Compared to Cornell?" she challenges. It attracts the wrong sort of attention - Itachi perks up and stares directly at her, as if willing her to fight harder. "I'm just saying—you gotta weigh your options and all before deciding. Pros and cons."
Itachi sighs. Audibly. He must have expected a more enthusiastic defense from her.
"I'll have to think about it." Sasuke scrunches his nose. "It'd be nice to go into grad school without crippling debt."
"And Rochester threw a ton of money at you, I bet, huh!"
Sasuke rolls his eyes. "Of course they did, moron. I'm in the top 5% of our graduating class."
"Yeah, well your personality sucks, so maybe they didn't! I wouldn't give your miserable ass a dime!" Naruto is grinning again, like he's just caught his second wind. "Just think about how cool it would be if we could all go to the same place and graduate together again! Plus it'll be nice to move away for a little while, right? Strike out on our own?"
That immediately gets Itachi's attention. He reaches for Sasuke's arm, but it immediately phases through. He tries again without success, his face very quickly becoming more and more panicked.
He looks to her desperately, almost as if he were willing her to speak up and change Sasuke's mind.
"Is anyone else kinda getting hungry?" Karin asks, trying to clear the air. She shoots Naruto a glare. "How about you go find us some food?"
Naruto grunts but dutifully clambers to his feet, shoving his hands into his pockets. "Don't think this is the end of the conversation, though! It might seem like it's far away, but you gotta start planning now unless you wanna be living off the streets!"
"Tch." Sasuke leans back casually, resting his back against the wall. "If anyone is gonna struggle living on their own, it's you."
"Says you." Naruto shuffles out into the hallway. "I already told Sakura that the three of us could get our own house to share. She could even cook for us and stuff! I figure, if the three of us split the rent and utilities, we could easily manage a place on our own for four years?"
Rather than stay with Sasuke, Itachi stands and follows Naruto out into the hallway.
"Uh—" Something about the way he moves has her on edge. "Hey, Naruto—"
Itachi places his hand against Naruto's back. Naruto stiffens for a second, as if he can feel it.
And then he falls. It's a slight stumble at first, but with Itachi's hand at his back, pushing him farther. Naruto fails to reach the handrail and tumbles down, until the back of his neck strikes the landing wall.
Sasuke is up in a flash. "Naruto!"
Itachi watches, indifferently, as Sasuke chases down the stairs after Naruto.
Karin watches too. Her body is stuck there, as if the entire world is moving several times faster than she is.
She turns and stares at him. For the first time, their eyes meet. It's accidental, a brief acknowledgment, but she can tell by the way his eyes widen in response that he knows she can see him.
That's all it takes for her to get snapped back into reality. "You're gonna regret that," she warns him, before hurrying down the stairs after Sasuke and Naruto.
.
.
.
And he is going to regret it, she promises herself.
She just needs to figure out a way to make it happen.
Naruto breaks two ribs and an arm in the fall. The EMTs who come to pick him up won't let them ride in the ambulance with him, so they have to follow behind while Sasuke's dad drives them white-knuckled, his lips set in a grim, thin line in his overhead mirror.
Sasuke is pale, not in the sickly way he's been lately, but as if all color had been drained from his face. He isn't the nervous type, but he fidgets the entire way, tugging irritably at the collar of his shirt and tugging his sleeves down to make himself comfortable.
"It'll be okay," she murmurs, if only because she has something of an intuition about these things. "Naruto is gonna be okay."
There isn't much to do when they get there besides wait. Sasuke slouches further and further into an uncomfortable chair in the lobby until his chin is almost level with his knees. Karin kicks around a vending machine for a while before fishing around for enough quarters to buy a Dr. Pepper, just to give herself something to hold.
She's always hated hospitals. It's less because of the lingering dead there - though there's more than enough of them - and more because it's where she spent three months of her childhood watching her mom die slowly. It was almost like living there: coming home each day to sit by her mom's bed, taking naps on the miniature couch, and doing her homework on the tray table while her mom slept in the background.
And then, at the end, she'd been alone.
Kushina and Minato are there within the hour, bringing changes of clothes and a pizza that's more sauce than dough. They all spend the night until Naruto is released the next day. They work in shifts, going through flashcards and trivia questions to keep Naruto awake and alert.
(It's not that I'm concussed, he tells a nurse sheepishly, I just really wasn't paying attention when you said your name.)
It gives her a lot of time to stew and try to cobble together some kind of plan.
There's no lore for her to refer to, no secrets passed down from her mother, who seems to have been entirely unaffected by any of the weirdness that's apparently plentiful in their family.
Karin isn't even sure it's something her mother understood herself, because she can't remember having any conversations with her about it that were any more sophisticated than her mother's nosy inquiries into what the spirits around them were doing. And Kushina—
Kushina has her own weirdness that they've never really discussed, that Karin's never quite grasped. She knows enough to know prying further into it is probably a bad idea.
She makes a few half-assed Google searches while she listens to Naruto snore in his hospital bed, but reliable information about the paranormal isn't as easy to find as Twilight made it seem.
With nothing to show for her few hours of research, and the next nine weeks quickly approaching, Karin decides it's time to use her nuclear option. After Naruto's discharged, she shakes a couple dollar bills out of the piggy bank his grandma had gotten her for her birthday one year, and she drives her bike all the way to the nearest bus stop which - since they're deep in the suburbs - is nearly half a mile away.
Don't wait up, she writes to Minato and Kushina. Finishing up winter break homework at the library.
The bus ride is long - over thirty minutes of standing as passengers filter on and off, until gradually the crowd begins to thin as the bus heads further away from the suburbs and climbs higher up the hills on the edge of town. With four stops left to go, Karin is the only passenger left on the bus.
By the time they reach the end of the bus route, the driver turns around in his seat and waits expectantly as she quietly walks her bike to the front of the bus and hops down to the pavement.
The bus leaves her at the bottom of another hill.
"And the bus couldn't go just a little further?" Karin grumbles as she slowly begins to walk her bike up towards Grandmama's house, which - of course - is the last house at the end of the street, at the very top of the hill.
The roof of her house crests slowly over the top of the hill as Karin climbs, bright white like a rising moon against the grey sky. It's so perfect it almost looks menacing, like a modern day version of the candy house from Hansel and Gretel.
"Grandmama?" Karin calls out. She leans her bike against the inside of her picket fence and walks up to the front door. "You here?"
There's no answer. The door is unlocked, though, which is good enough of an invitation for her. Karin pushes the door open and peeks into the living room. It's the least welcoming house she's ever had the misfortune of visiting, even though it's still one of the cleanest. A little army of white and gold porcelain angel figurines line her walls, offset by her bright pink carpet.
Grandmama's house has always an antiquated sort of feel, like it's somehow resisted the flow of time. She isn't sure whether this is literally true, or if it's only the way that it feels.
Finally, a voice calls out to her. "I'm in the kitchen, child."
Karin quickly kicks her shoes off by the door and follows the sound of her voice. "Grandmama," she says, nodding to her in greeting. "What's up."
"Karin," Grandmama says brusquely, with a quick nod in her direction. "It's been quite some time."
Grandmama though she may be, Mito doesn't exactly fit the part. Karin could only guess her actual age - on paper, she ought to be pushing eighty, if not more, but physically, she doesn't look older than fifty, if that.
Realistically, her age is likely two or three times that. Just thinking about the numbers makes her head spin.
They aren't related - at least, not in a way she could trace without investing in a mouth swab - but there's some kind of familial bond between them that's kept Grandmama involved in her life, albeit at a distance, in the same way that Kushina had stepped up to take her in when her mother died.
For better or for worse, Grandmama is invested enough in them both that she keeps tabs on them, though seldom ever in the comfortable, normal ways most old ladies do - it's always instilling a sense of legacy and adhering to centuries' worth of tradition, instead of like, cookies or birthday cards.
There's a neat table set out in front of her. Two sets of plates and cups filled with steaming tea orbit a small platter of perfectly cut triangular tea sandwiches, as if she was already expecting Karin to show.
For now, though, Karin has bigger things to think about. She drops her bag by the table and takes the seat opposite Grandmama.
Karin reaches for one of the sandwiches. "So, there's this—"
Grandmama whacks the back of Karin's hand with her teaspoon before she can finish.
"Ow!" Karin yelps. "What the hell was that for!"
"Manners, child." Grandmama gives her a dry look as she returns her hands to her cup of tea. "Someone at least ought to be teaching them to you."
Karin grumbles but dutifully sits back until Grandmama says otherwise. Manners are something of a nebulous concept for her, at least where Grandmama is concerned, but she's learned that she can at least get by if she just sits and waits for Grandmama to tell her what to do.
"Is it boys again?" Grandmama asks. She looks Karin over with her storm-cloud eyes. Her mouth twists into a sour look, like she's already decided Karin's there to waste her time. "I seem to recall that last time, it was boys."
Karin winces. "It was only one boy…" And - what she doesn't say - Grandmama hadn't been any help with him at all. "There's—I think I need your help."
Grandmama snorts. "Mhm. Of course you do."
"It's not a boy exactly this time," she tries, trying to find the best way of putting it. "Um. I mean, it technically is, but it's… it's not the living kind?"
"Hm?" Grandmama lifts her head up and, slowly, her thin lips curl up into a smile. "Then please," she says, picking up the kettle and pouring Karin a cup of tea. "Please, do go on."
.
.
.
It's almost a month before Karin has an opening.
Really, she's lucky - with Naruto's hospital stay and the lingering misery over his and Sasuke's health problems, there isn't much leftover enthusiasm for the holidays. Still, after some haggling with the admissions department, and a little shameless pleading on Minato's behalf, the Uchiha and Uzumaki families are able to schedule a weekend visit with one of the deans at Northern New York to discuss admissions and tour the campus.
"You should come too, Karin!" Kushina prods. "Since you got in too. Minato was - well, yanno. He's been a little anxious about you lately, being all by yourself so much. I know you know you're always invited to come along with us, but I think sometimes he worries that isn't enough."
Which is just like Minato - to have given her a whole new home but still feel inadequate. Ordinarily, the possibility of hurting his feelings would be enough to get Karin to relent, but she shakes her head. "Grandmama invited me to spend a few days helping her around the house."
It's a good lie, because it makes Kushina's smile immediately plummet.
Karin continues. "She said she'd look through FAFSA stuff with me if I did, so I said yes."
"Oh! Thank god." Kushina visibly relaxes. She sets her hands on her hips, but a thought slowly seems to occur to her. "Do you… should I come too, then?" she asks hesitantly. "Do you think she'll, uh…expect me?"
"Uh…" Both of them know that neither really ever wants to see Mito, but that never stops them from pretending they do. "Do you… really need to?"
Kushina grimaces. "Um…"
"I can… pass along your regards."
Kushina claps her hands together. "Perfect!"
.
.
.
That night, after the Uzumaki and Uchiha families leave, Karin bikes over to the Uchiha household with a box of Morton salt and lets herself in.
That's her own little secret. She's had her own key for several years now, for reasons she will never explain, because she never intends to get caught with it. Up until now, it was more of a keepsake than anything - just knowing she had the option had been enough to satisfy her.
There's no one there when she opens the door. Still, knowing that Sasuke's brother is aware of her now, she tries to sneak through the house as quietly as possible, until she's in the living room.
She rips the tab off of the box of salt and begins pouring it around her, until it's formed a complete circle. Or something like a circle, at least. It's round.
Karin steps into it. The feeling hits her like a Walmart in summer - all of the air around her becomes cool and crisp, like it's been stripped of everything in it.
She digs in her pocket for an empty bottle of perfume she brought with her, and she sets it in the rough center of the circle before straightening back up. "Come out wherever you are!" She shakes out more salt from the box and scatters it around. "It's just you and me right now, so there's no sense in hiding!"
For a moment, all she hears is the low thrum of Sasuke's dad's fish tank. Upstairs, a lock clicks, and a door slowly creaks open.
Karin steadies her nerves with a long breath before she tries again. "I'm gonna give you two choices," she calls out into the empty house. "The first is that you move on peacefully and get the fuck out of here. The second is that I trap you in this bottle and keep you on my nightstand until you fade away."
The hair on the back of her neck rises. Karin swallows a lump in her throat.
His voice comes from behind her. "Do you believe that you could?"
Karin turns slowly to see Sasuke's brother standing at the edge of the circle watching her, his head cocked at an angle that seems just a little too exaggerated. She has to tilt her head back all the way just to meet his eyes.
"Yeah," she breathes. She musters as much faux confidence as she can manage. "I do."
Sasuke's brother takes a step forward and attempts to cross the threshold, but the circle of salt prevents him from entering.
"Interesting," he says. He tries to stick his hand into her space, but it hangs in the air, unable to go further. "It's impermeable."
"It can be if I want it to be."
Seeing no easy way to approach her, he changes tactics. "You are able to see me." After a moment, he amends his answer. "You have been able to see me, likely for some time now."
"Yeah, and I've been able to see all the fucked up shit you've been doing. Let's start there."
He lifts an eyebrow at that, as if he doesn't find what she said to be particularly compelling.
It is, she realizes, the first conversation she's ever truly had with Sasuke's brother. She has no idea how to navigate it.
"You're not going to be able to keep following him forever," she tries. She waits a moment, just to let it sink in. "One day Sasuke is going to leave for college, and you're going to be stuck here alone. You'll see him two or three times a year at best, and that's assuming your parents even stay in the area after he graduates high school."
"Perhaps." He seems to consider it for a moment. "But there is nothing to say I will not be able to follow him."
"And if you aren't? If you're stuck here even after Sasuke leaves?"
"That's enough," Itachi responds immediately. "I would be satisfied with that."
"But you wouldn't. Not really."
"Do you presume to answer for me?"
Karin grits her teeth. "I know that I know more about this than you do. You're killing Sasuke."
Itachi's spine snaps ramrod straight, and he narrows his eyes at her. "I would never hurt Sasuke."
"But you are. Even if you don't want to be." She gives him a second to consider it, but his expression doesn't change. "You're dead," she says. It's stating the obvious, but part of her thinks he's forgotten. "Why do you think you're still here?"
He frowns, like the answer is clear. "It's too soon for me to go."
"It's not." It never is - people go exactly when they're meant to. "You're already dead - what do you think is keeping you here? You don't have a body anymore. You can't eat. What do you think you're feeding off of?"
The fight leaves his eyes the moment the realization strikes him. She can see him adding it all up mentally - Sasuke's weakness, his illness. His recent hospitalizations.
"I don't want to go yet," he says. It comes out simply, an admission. "Not without—" For the first time, she sees something desperate in his eyes. "Someone needs to watch over Sasuke."
"Sasuke can watch over himself." And though it makes something awful twist in her gut, she adds, "Sasuke has friends who are always going to watch over him. Myself included."
Itachi nods slowly, as if digesting it all. "How do I make it happen, then?"
"You'll do it?"
"If it is best for Sasuke, then yes." The sound of resignation in his voice is enough to cow her, if just for the moment.
It's a part of him that even death can't corrupt, she supposes - some part of him that is self-abnegating, always willing to put Sasuke's needs first, to his own detriment.
She thinks maybe she can understand that, if only just a little bit.
"I meant what I said before. About keeping you on my nightstand." In the back of her mind, she can hear Grandmama groaning, half memory, half habit - You're such a stupid girl that I should know better than to explain this to you…
"I understood that to be a threat." He shifts. "I would rather not have the process dragged out, if it is possible for me to leave quickly."
"It was a threat." And a good one, even though now she just feels silly about it. "Um. But it doesn't have to be, if you're not ready to go."
"I—" He shakes his head. "If I cannot continue to exist without putting Sasuke in harm's way, I accept that. I will not live parasitically off of my brother."
"There's—there are other ways to keep you… here. Ones that won't hurt anyone. If you—if you want to stay a little while longer."
He frowns. "Is that an offer?"
"It might be." Grandmama's echoing voice is irate, descending into an accent even Karin can't parse. You half-witted, absolutely foolish child who only wastes what you've been given… "I can keep you around until you're ready. If you want to stay." She wiggles her fingers as if to demonstrate. "I'm a little sturdier than Sasuke is, where all this is concerned."
Itachi's expression is impossible for her to interpret. He lowers his hand and steps away from the circle. For a moment, he appears much smaller, much more normal. Almost human again.
"I believe that I do," he eventually says. "If you would not mind the company."
