Chapter Forty-Nine: The Devil's Moth
AN: Temizuya is a Shinto water-ablution pavilion and Komainu are lion-like pairs of guardian statues that guard the shrine; Izumi is a traditional crib for a child and Torii is a gate found at the Shinto shrines.
Yes, I'm also aware that these Devil's Moths exist, and they don't share the characteristics of the 'fictional' moths in my fiction; furthermore, the 'Devil' is more of a thematic title rather than a strictly theological reference. Keep that in mind.
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A windy night—birds were flying over a big watermill that slowly creaked, unable to move completely. Birds would swoop down, bounce, glide into the air currents and then land back again on the flume. He could only see a trickle come down from its mouth. The water had gone dry up in the stream. If it rained, the mill would move tonight.
The birds, of plumage snowy, flew up to start the game again, trilling and chirping nosily now. These were Night Birds. It had been a while since he saw one. He had not been in this part of the Land of Rivers in so long. It was a village that served as a resting place for travellers—the only one he knew of that lay close to the caves near the Hidden Valleys Village.
Wind chimes knocked together noisily at a shop's door. Many people were out on the rough streets tonight: it was a local religious festival. Countless lanterns, big and round, hung from the ropes stretched from one roof to another. They bobbed in the wind. One fell down and nearly landed on a passerby's head. He yelled at the shop owner who muttered out an apology, grabbed the lantern, disappeared into the shop.
Women and children wore colourful kimonos, a chaos of bright lights and colours; they broke night's deep presence that hovered over the whole festival. He breathed in softly and got a whiff of something familiar, and his hesitant lips seemed so nearly to smile outright: Dangos!
Fresh and round and colourful dangos; and a vendor was selling them just a couple of feet from the restaurant. Sweets—he had always been fond of them. If it was between something spicy and his favourite sweet, he always chose the latter. He did not know why, but the taste of sugar on his tongue made him happy. It was light; it lifted his spirits; it was a boyhood pleasure that he still cherished—fleeting pleasures of innocence, possibly the only one he had managed to protect over the years as a Shinobi.
He looked at the vendor again, indecisive. His fingers and legs slightly twitched as though he wanted to move forward, a smile threatening his lips; but he stifled it. Serizawa and Karin appeared from behind the large sacred-stone. Serizawa looked a little whimsical and out of it, more than usual. There was a scroll in his left hand. Karin was a little chirpy. The festival and colours excited her. She spun around once and then twice to look everywhere, nearly bumping into people. There was a wide smile on her pink face.
Serizawa stopped by the guardian deity statue, which stood amid shivering shrubs, and held out the scroll. "Itachi-Sama, it's from the Hokage," he said and watched Itachi as he took it from his hand and read the message. A deep breath escaped Itachi's lips, but he said nothing. He burnt the scroll with an exhalation of Katon and looked back at him.
"Take Karin and survey the area up in the mountains and meet me at the temple on the hill in an hour," he spoke, directing his gaze to her face now. A frown was beginning to form on her features; she opened and closed her mouth several times as if she wanted to protest, but in the end, she chose silence and strode off with Serizawa to the gates on the east-side.
Dull sounds from a bell came throbbing through the trees down the hill. He gazed up, and, at that moment, a streak of red cut across his vision, and, reflexively, his hand shot out to grab it out of the air. It was a pinwheel—its straw was slightly crooked. The wheel still spun to the left in the wind. He raised his eyes and gazed upon a wee girl, no older than five, who buried her face into the material of her mother's kimono.
She knelt down and urged her to go forward with a little encouraging pat on the back. The girl-child's cheeks were red, and her big round eyes dressed in tears that sparkled. She approached him with small fearful steps till she was standing close to him. Her head tipped back to look up at his face—her wavy hair left in a wild disarray. Two tiny combs threatened to fall out of her hair.
Her pink mouth trembled, round cheeks turned deep red, and she raised both her hands in the air, an innocent challenge in her eyes: it was her pinwheel, and she wanted it back! The little one amused him. He turned it one last time between his fingers and lowered his hand. She took it from him, a big and beautiful smile spreading across her face, and ran off to her mother. The woman hugged her close and smiled at him before she took her daughter's hand in hers and walked off to a shrine on the left.
It was as though something flashed right before his eyes. In that moment, all scents and noises in the air forgot their mechanisms. There was nothing but stillness for him now. The languid sounds of voices and the sluggish movement of the watermill . . . everything vanished in the sharp sounds of wind, shattered like glass—many pieces . . . he could not collect them all (even his Sharingan-eye failed him).
The smile was gone, and his eyes stared at the woman and the girl child as though he knew them from another life, another time. The scene, like the ink-wash painting which grew, seemed familiar, soft and real. She still held the straw in her tiny hand, and the paper pin-wheel spun and spun in the wind, making his thoughts whirl with it. His mouth was dry; his tongue, thick and pulpy—he was a thirsty traveler who had not tasted water for days. He did not know when he moved to the stone-stairs, and the rain came pouring down after a rumbling call from the sky.
Itachi heard the girl's soft cry behind him, but it was forgotten in the midst of his memory's storm. He climbed the stairs, steps firm. They never faltered. He had never known them to falter ever since he left the grasp of childhood behind. He was as sure of foot as the devout monks who had climbed these stairs a thousand times. Few gusts of wind hit him and sent shivers down his spine, but his thoughts were too strong for such distractions.
He passed through the torii that had borne the lashes of Time and Nature and came across a dilapidated temple. The stay that supported the heavy bell had rotted away and fallen down into what were the final remnants of the sanctuary: it was nothing more than a heap of rubble and stones. The bell lay on its side by a set of stairs. When the wind went at it, its clapper collided against the inside to produce sounds. They would never be able to repair it.
Itachi looked through the drizzle and mist at the temizuya. Its roof was still intact—everything below it was broken. His steps were slow, deliberate, almost cautious; and his ears were filled with lovely and pretty sounds from her lips.
"Itachi, you can offer something at the shrine. It'll bring you luck," she said and looked at him, peering into the deeps of his eyes as he looked up to gaze upon her white face, sun shining behind her . . . he stopped at the shrine. It was broken. Entranced by her presence in his visions, he reached into his pocket and took out a coin.
The head of the child deity had fallen off, its smile broken and crooked. He could not even tell if it really was a child or not. He sat down on one knee and placed the coin before it into the stone basin, his fingers touching the rough and wet stone there.
He could hear her, an encroachment of his kingdom, whisper unto him in soft, loving tones: "you're a good boy, Itachi—you're such a good boy!" Her fingers swept his cheek's curve. She bent down, and her lips, as delicate as they were red, pressed against his right cheek and then the left; and he could feel them leave a pleasurable sensation upon his skin, could smell the fleeting sandalwood scent in her hair that he blinked once and closed his eyes and gave a slight shake of his head.
"Okā-San . . . " he whispered, bent his head down, looked at the water pour out of the basin.
Itachi had not thought of her in so long. He left her behind the heavy veils of distance and Time. When the massacre happened and her lips were moistened with a bit of water, he did not know what he felt. Anger? Relief? Sorrow . . . loneliness? Sasuke was too young, only six, and he was but a boy himself: the burden was too great for a child's heart to bear. She was gone just like that, and he did not know what to do, did not know how to comfort a child . . .
Slowly, he raised himself up to his feet, and his senses focused on that single woman in his scattered memories. The rain was louder up here, pattering on the bell and what was left of the roof. Thunder would shriek and rumble right after lightning's flashes. His skin was cold and so was his heart; even after many years, he was still distant and aloof to her death.
She was young when she died—only thirty-five—but he could remember her clearly: her heaving breast whilst she laughed; her vibrating, long, beautiful white throat; her twinkling black eyes. She used to press her fingers delicately to her bosom and tip her head back to let out a trill of musical laughter. Then she would press her hand over her mouth to suppress it. It was a habit. He had noted over the years that her lips turned so red and her cheeks so pink when she was happy, which gave a rosy hue to her skin. What he did not remember, did not know, his Sharingan did—the memory keeper . . .
The rain slowed to a lighter drizzle and moonlight tore past the last flimsy sheet of clouds. Shadows climbed over the naked rocks and the cracked and destroyed komainu; their jaws were missing and one of them had no arm. He could not tell which one was supposed to have its mouth open. Itachi turned his head away and took a few steps to stand under temizuya's roof. His mind was still lost. Why, after all this time, was he remembering her now?
The oldest vivid memory he had of her was when she was carrying Sasuke in her belly. It was only slightly round, and he asked of her that when he could have his little brother, she told him that he would come when summer would be at an end. She roamed around in the garden, picking up leaves from the ground. Like fireflies in night, sun was in her hair, and she turned around and smiled at him. It was still early spring and flowers bloomed fresh everywhere.
He leant back against the wooden pillar and peered at the apertures in the shrine's wall. He tried to distract himself, but the smell of her was still in his nose. Fresh. Beautiful. Soft. After all these years, he was forced to ask himself: what did he really feel about her? He still did not know. Underneath the darkness upon his mind, there on the delicate gossamer cobwebs, were but a few recollections he could feel something about—feel something sweet move his heart just a bit.
Mikoto was a lovely one. When she birthed Sasuke, he noticed that her breasts grew rounder, larger. (He observed, too curious as a little boy.) She used to slip her hand under the collar there that it would slip off her shoulder to reveal her breast. Then she would direct Sasuke's eager mouth to her woodsy-coloured nipple, with a warm blush. She was happy that she had had another son. He was happy, too—perhaps even happier than she!
Did he . . . love her? Itachi inhaled a hissing breath. Cool droplets glided a path down his neck, and his shirt's collar fluttered. Small disturbances. Tonight, the memory of her was too strong, palpable. It was as though he could sense her fingertips upon his cheek and forehead leave new sensations and feelings for him to mull over. Innocent touches, lovely touches, they were full of love and warmth.
"I love you, Itachi," she whispered in his ear and kissed that cheek with a fondness hungry. "Don't you forget. You're my boy—my precious boy. Kami gifted you to me, and I'll always be grateful." Then she walked off into the garden and stood under the lightest rain. The sounds from her lips, still hanging there from a single web in his memories, trembled and moved like insects that had no escape: the web was their eternal grave. He thought it strange how her voice, and the sweet scent of her, struck his senses simultaneously that he could actually see the memory: he was there, and she was standing in the moonlight, wet and laughing like a wee girl.
The long skirt she wore stuck to her skin, and her nipples peaked in the cold—the material dark, interspersed with beautiful edges of gloomy whites; his eyes followed their ghostly shimmer, and he could see her, all of her: the gleam of her young flesh, and the soft roundness of her breasts and buttocks; and she laughed and laughed with her head tipped back, moving her hands over her bosom and face in futile attempts to rid herself of the rain, which beaded on her white face, supple bosom, the rich fringe of her lashes.
She looked over to him, and he could only stare at the light shining in her eyes, and then the veins in her neck and face pumped a pink hue to her skin, and she was blushing again—so girl-like and young. Her wet hair whipped across her face, some clove to her ruddy cheeks, black strokes upon white; she put her hands over her mouth, and the laughter shook that delicate body.
Her hands reached out to him, and her voice echoed like the whispers of the dead in the disquieting space: "come to me, Itachi—come! Don't you want to play in the rain? It's the first rain of autumn. It's lovely. Come—come!" She gestured to him again, flicking her hand.
Itachi did not move, but he saw a specter, a little boy, move to her in his place. She took his hand in hers and sat down and drew him into her lap; and she pressed the boy's head against her breast and smoothed his hair. Her heart's thumps resounded in the boy's ears and his as she wrapped her arms about him to pull him close. The soft side of her red mouth trembled in a smile, and she bent her head down to kiss him on the wet brow and blushing cheeks. She raised her startled face to Sasuke's cries from the izumi, placed under the roof where she could see him. He was crying with hunger . . .
There was a slow expansion of his lungs and a deep sigh. Then the air was slowly exhaled, and he leant his head back against the pillar, thinking: what did he feel about her? And still he had no answer. He forgot her and her memories. It was not deliberate. He thought it was for the best. Slowly, very slowly, she faded from his memories and was pushed back under the pile of many. She was just a haze in others . . . a shadow that talked and walked across his past.
When he looked back now, after experiencing the first ooze from his ripe genitals that told him he had turned into a man, he would say that she was . . . beautiful, like red sasanqua in early winter, blooming and dropping its petals. She had delicate, lovely curves and perfect white skin that must have been the envy of many women. Her features were set in a soft, lovely mould. She always looked innocent to him—young, pure, naïve.
There was not much to think of her. They called her Mikoto and she was lovely. She loved him, and she blushed and laughed in the rain. There was not anything else about her that would startle him, make him think of her twice. If it was not for the scent, he would not have remembered her at all.
Itachi looked up and saw an Autumn Mouth, its wings silent black, crawling on the cracked wood, fluttering its wings above his head. He raised his hand, and it climbed onto his finger. They called it the Devil's Moth, too: it poisoned its mate, a common pink one, and was attracted to strong chakra. Perhaps it had followed him here from the festival. He did not know. It so loved the Purple Lilies.
And then his mind floated elsewhere. Did he ever love anyone? Mikoto loved him so much, and he did not think he ever felt the same—ever returned her love. Perhaps he appreciated her love, her kindness. As a child, she would dote on him, stroke his hair, and read him folktales of the Uchiha from a distant past. It always used to pique his curiosity, and he would ask that was it possible to make Sharingan Genjutsus more powerful to fell the enemies?
At his question, her eyes would see him with an unspeaking wariness as if she was seeing him for the first time, and the silence between them would hang like a discarded little thing. All she could manage then was a shy smile and few words that he was too young and innocent to talk of Kinjutsu and battlefield and war. He felt that Mikoto always treated him like a silly child that was so fragile that he needed her to protect him. It used to draw that unneeded ire and indifference from him, but he ignored it for they all called her his mother, and she loved him: it's natural for mothers to be foolish, he had reasoned then.
Love made Men fools. His heart trembled at the thought, and a shiver entered his body. Even the moth felt it, and it began fluttering with a kind of uneasiness. It did not want to go out into the rain. Wind would rip apart its fragile wings and rain would ruin them. It wanted to stay on his hand and feed upon a little of his chakra. How foolish was he?
Her softening lips came to Itachi's mind, and he saw her tempting ghost again in the vast gossamer, his memories, kissing little Sasuke in her arms. The child used to look at him and let out a startled little laugh as though something about him made his little heart so happy. His plump cheeks would grow red and warm. Then Itachi would move his finger playfully above his face, and he would reach out eagerly to grab it and emit a lovely, innocent laugh as though he had conquered something so big.
He never had had any urge to pick up children, but he found himself drawing Sasuke to himself and steadying him in his arms and looking back at the eyes that had seen but few rooms, streets, faces. They were pure. There was a new innocence contained inside that tiny body and the smell of it was so like his own!
Sasuke was a part, a piece of himself and his heart. He did not know why he thought that way as a child, but he did. He used to rock him to sleep in the meadow whilst he sat amongst the lilies. The sun was a bit warm in the first weeks of autumn and Sasuke liked it. He always drifted to sleep in his arms; and when Itachi would slide his eyes down the clean—and such soft—lines of Sasuke's round cheeks, he would see nothing but purity, love, wonder there.
It had struck his heart then, the slow trembling of the babe's lashes and the growing smile upon the softest mouth he would ever see, as Sasuke looked upon him . . . and all was forgotten. Everything was wondrous and love and pure. Itachi had asked himself many times over the years: why did he love him so much? And just like his mind failed him to weave a reason for her, he had none for him, too. He did. It was easy. It was simple.
Somewhere in the past, when he was but a boy who saw Mikoto's belly grow with Sasuke, he had felt something inside his heart: a raw anticipation, thrill, adoration. Sometimes, he used to sit beside her and look at her growing belly, and she would touch it tenderly and tell him that he would be Sasuke's brother and that he would have to protect him and that Sasuke was a part of him the way he was of her, and that they were brothers, and they would always find strength and love in this eternal bond of flesh and blood. His mind spoke when his tongue did not . . .
Silly girl—Itachi believed all this before she had spoken the words. He still did—he always did. For all her girlish charms and naivety, her words were true. He grew to love the child over the years. Little by little, as he inevitably lost his own innocence to the vulgarities, Sasuke became his innocence. He was that ethereal part of himself that he so cherished. His smile lightened his burdens when hers never did; and he . . . did not understand. Sasuke was to him what he was to Mikoto: pure and innocent, needing love from the deepest temporal hearts; hearts, soiled by fault, error, lust's parts.
And, oh, she had loved him the way he had always loved Sasuke. No—no, his love was greater, deeper, sweeter than hers. It always had been. She had never tasted the madness of love's obsession the way he had. It was divine—Kami's Curse! Every waking hour—every sleeping flower: he felt it in his breast, nurtured it in his spirit's nest. She never knew adoration—he lived it! Kami—O', Kami, he was blest! She lived a woman and died a girl—naïve, always naïve. She knew nothing of the rains and worlds she danced in . . . Itachi could still remember her bloody hands trembling upon his cheeks, eyes filling with an aching hurt which would never leave. Lips smeared with so much blood as she reached up to plant a kiss on the side of his mouth. She could not do it. Death had her body in its grasp. It was dragging the spirit which struggled from her skin, and her very bones shook with the paroxysm of the final bits and pieces of life that struggled to hold on—to tell him that she loved him still, that he was her precious boy; and then she fell back into his arms, lifeless, her eyes staring into his as though they were a blank-canvas that needed life's blacks to fill their bleeding depths.
Mikoto was dead. She was gone, and he felt rain trace the soft lines of his expression-less face. Did he weep? He did not remember. He had set her down gently and sat there, smoothing her hair and wiping away the blood from her face as if it marred her innocence. When winter's rain fell, he looked down at her again to see that she was staring up, and he felt that she was about to smile, laugh a little for the rain made her happy. It made her blush; but her skin was growing whiter, and she began to look more and more like a child's throwaway wooden-doll, and he wanted to look away.
Someone threw a white cloth over her body, and instantly, red soaked through, making it appear spotty and unclean—red sasanqua-petals in snow. He did not lift it then, and he did not raise it at the funeral. He wanted to remember her and the smile she wore upon her pretty face and her laughter's tinkle, ringing like the chimes at the garden's door. That was how he chose to remember her and her loveliness and her soft naivety; so when she was buried, he forgot it all, too—forgot the red, that haunting and ugly stillness in her face, and the hardening body in the rain.
Itachi turned his head to the sounds of steps, and the moth flew away from the tip of his fingers. The wind was soft and the rain had stopped. His mind was whole again. Serizawa appeared, with Karin in his wake. Itachi walked to the cliff and peered down over the edge at the darkness below. He peered for a long time, looking at the valley below that was full of shadows.
His mind was cleared of all confusion, and he was cold again. Then he jumped down into the dark, and she was left behind amongst the broken stones of the shrine like a forgotten memory—never to be remembered so fondly again . . .
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