Author's Note: I'd like to thank Akira Yaida for catching my brief Kisame slip. It sounds so much like Kisama (and acts like one), I just mentally swap the two.

* * *

How did it continue?

With my family.

How can a single person kill an entire clan in a night? The idea is ridiculous when put into words. Any skeptic automatically begins to tally up the exertion factor, traveling distances, noise and insulation factors. Weapons required. Defensive attributes, locational regions. Doubters will change the number. They will lessen my clan to reduce my achievement, minimize my work into a total well within the boundaries of human.

But it happens. With a surprising regularity among the Countries, no less. S-class criminals slaughtering half their village in a few hours armed only by a toothpick, children able to kill because they'd learned a kitchen knife before the concept of malice, or predetermination.

No, I can't say I had them in mind to idolize. I never poured over the illegals list like Sasuke's fresh-faced enthusiasm with my weapons, obsessed over their acts with an emulation approaching my brother's love of me. By this token, whichever one of us was normal--he not graduated from school by his age of eight and I already with one eye out for assassination missions--isn't up to me to judge.

So many deaths. For such a thing to occur, historians might say, a fluke must have skewed the odds. Food poisoning. Illness, perhaps. Either that, or the murder spree never happened at all, and I was a myth created to scare children late at night, just like half a dozen Bingo Book accounts united only by their mass depravities.

Even I found it hard to believe when I was standing over the bodies of the last, and then touched a toe to my mother's body to make certain she was real.

I still can't believe it now.

My father had activated the Sharingan when he sensed the danger. He could smell the gore on me and guessed the actual source; my mother had noticed, but thought I was coming back from a mission gone wrong, that I was the one wounded and bleeding. She was in the middle of getting bandages when my father tried to disarm me.

It was better to see my father's irises stained red. Firewall pinwheels. My mother had started to, brown eyes fading into ruby as she saw the kunai come up, but she hadn't made it all the way into full bloom before I brought the blade around.

Then there was red, too much of it, but it was all spouting out from her body.

I can't look at Sharingan eyes without thinking about how inhuman they are. Like someone possessed by hell. Hateful. Murderous.

Unreal.

Like the bodies of my family at my feet, getting prodded by a foot to doublecheck that I wasn't really dreaming.

I have been able to learn how to use these eyes of mine to create nightmares for others. Hypnosis, that's the Sharingan art when applied to others. I think it's the same on ourselves who wield the eye. You tell yourself that you can perform another's jutsu and it happens. Like magic.

You fool yourself into believing that you can see the life-chakra of others. Right on schedule, this becomes true. Then you order yourself to see past illusions and that barrier falls as well.

Finally, you reach the conclusion that the life itself is as transparent as genjutsu, and human beings become as unimportant as the wind or a tongue of fire. As fingers obliterating a plastic face, while their owner gives no sign of awareness that he is doing such a thing at all.

Hypnosis. You can believe anything and it becomes real. That's the power of the Sharingan eye, staring back at me from my mirror in the inn rooms late at night, the glass cracked and running a line straight across my features.

I could use my abilities on myself, but I'm already in a nightmare.

Maybe they'll write this all down as the Sharingan's fault in the end. What melodrama. Strip out my willingness to choose this path and blame another source, excuse my lack of conscience by assuming it never played a part at all. A love of power on my part led me to fall prey to another's control, or an insanity brought on by genius blossoming too young. Or simply a natural conclusion, an evolution of a hypothesis bred in my family until it manifested full in me.

Like children, learning to kill. What did it matter if we performed our skills upon our families or on the names listed on contract assignments? I don't know why villages even try to act surprised anymore when they find bodies scattered on the roads in the morning. What else did they really think would happen by raising us for such tasks?

Creative arts and crafts?

* * *

With Orochimaru.

I didn't like him.

Kisame didn't either, which showed the Mist outcast had good taste in one thing. When Kisame had a distaste of a person, he shifted his weight side to side while talking about them, gripped the hilt of his sword tighter. He ground the points of his teeth harder. Bit his own lip, worried it like a scrap of meat until blood began to flush and then seep out the oblong punctures.

I knew this behavior stemmed from Kisame fantasizing about murder.

In Orochimaru's case, I couldn't blame him.

Not really.

* * *

With Kisame.

Kisame never understood why I liked to watch the clouds roll by. I suppose he didn't have much need for weather-watching in the Mist, in the land of water itself.

"Do you think it'll rain today?"

I asked this, back on the ground and one leg propped up on the other knee. Hands crossed and underneath my head. Sun strong on my face. The grass smelled fresh and clean, and the unaccountable craving for noodles crawled up to my mouth from my stomach.

The Mist-nin gave one arbitrary glance up at the sky. "Doesn't look like snow," he grunted. "I don't care."

Sentimentalism was a thing alien to Kisame, or at least when it came to my tastes. What mattered was that he left me alone until I got up and dusted stray shreds of green off my pants. For all his lack of interest in subtlety, Kisame sensed right off that rushing me wasn't a wise thing to do.

I respected that, so I also respected the few times he did remind me to move along. Such observation of personal quirks managed to keep the both of us obedient to working as a team.

Sentimentalism. I guess I'm prone to it. It's not a secret either, so I shouldn't have been surprised to be partnered with a ninja whose greatest daydream involved beating everyone in the Akatsuki at shogi and then forcing them to buy him drinks.

Kisame smelled like fish all the time. I told him it was because he ate too much soba.

"Don't be so stupid," he growled back to me, huffing the weight of his sword on his shoulder as he always did whenever someone struck a nerve. I kept waiting for the stick of his hilt to snap right off, the blade to go plummeting to the ground and maybe impale someone else's foot.

Compensation was fine. To a point. A sword that was heavier than two small children stuck together was overdoing it. I told him that, too, but he didn't seem to appreciate it.

"You've been looking at the sky too long, Itachi."

Maybe that was true. When I closed my eyes, the afterburns of the sun were blazoned into my lids, fat spots of grease floating in the red water of my flesh.

"Itachi, are you even listening to me?" Grass crunched underneath Kisame's weight. I heard him walking over, mentally reminding myself to be careful sweeping our tracks away later. Reason again why that man's sword was extreme, for all that he swung it around as if the metal was nothing greater than tin.

Darkness blotted out the theater play of pain. Closing your eyes at high noon doesn't protect you entirely from getting burned, not if your face is directly pointed at the sun, and my lids were beginning to wince tighter shut in an attempt to protect themselves. By the sheer width of the shadow's coolness, I guessed that Kisame was standing over me. Nice of him to do so.

Then I got a boot shoving into my ribs. "Hey. Sleepyass."

I ignored him.

Again, the prod. "Itachi, you bum."

After waiting to see if Kisame's irritation would get any worse, I eventually cracked open an eye, and promptly had to squint against the brilliance surrounding the man's silhouette. "Yes?"

"Get up before I carry you like the sad sack of onions that you are."

The sun made me sleepy as a cat. I yawned, languid, taking my own time in blinking myself back to full alertness. Kisame gave me a hand up, and then promptly pretended that he hadn't, turning his hip in a swagger. "What were you thinking about, dozing off like that?"

"Arts and crafts."

"What?" One beady eye narrowed at me, incredulous at what he thought he'd just heard.

I found myself wondering if sharks could make the same befuddled expression. Pearl divers should beware. Then I only shook my head, lifting fingers and finding another piece of grass stuck in my hair when I raked my fingers through it. "Only thinking about the job."

Reminder of our task brought Kisame's attention full-ahead, turning the man towards the direction of Konoha's skyline in the distance. The buildings didn't look any different from here, knitted amidst the trees like a particularly strange piece of ribbon in someone's embroidery. "We've got some time to do our search," he commented. "And lunchtime's going to be over at this rate. I hope there're still good places to eat, unless that attack destroyed them all…" And here he stopped, giving me a look back over the edge of his shoulder as if equally hungry for a reaction on my part as he was to see a lack of one.

I gave him the latter. "I don't think it matters." Afternoon warmth had squirmed inside my mouth like a disease, forcing me to yawn again, long. "This is the Leaf. Even when their members are killed, nothing really changes."

"No?"

"No," I repeated back, finishing with one final stretch, "and none of it makes a difference in the end. Not at all."