Breakneck speed, bodies, and nobody's good
Opening lyrics: Warm Me Up by The Audition
notes at the end
XI.
Come closer to me, baby,
I've got everything you need
to fill your hunger pains for tonight
.
.
.
Two inmates watch Uchiha Itachi linger near a fence at the perimeter of the yard.
Always with his discomforting duality: A knife's edge of menace dovetailed with some unarticulated vulnerability. How difficult it can be to believe, as he tilts his head to observe the bird chirping and bobbing on his hand acting as makeshift tree branch, that he's a murderer and mastermind, orchestrator of extensive criminal networks.
The rumors stretch and transform, each tall tale more convoluted and torrid than the last. The man himself does nothing to dissuade them; there's hardly anyone he speaks to except his towering friend, a man whose so obviously wandered straight out of the ocean, onto land, and into prison with how closely his square skull resembles a shark's.
Frankly, Itachi looks more like a man sick and exhausted, gone dim.
"Fuckin' small," one inmate grunts. Folding thick barrel arms across his broad chest, they're difficult to fit together easily. Exercise, one of the last havens and habits of committed system prisoners. "And he's talkin' to birds; fruitcake."
"You haven't been here long," his companion says. "For a man like that to make it through, his reputation has to be enough. No one bothers him. Murdering your parents is standard for here. It's not his crime — it's him."
"Don' believe it," the other snorts. "The wind'd blow him over."
"Don't get close to him." He gives the first a significant look, expression plain. Serious. "He's a dangerous man."
"Oh c'mon. You afraid of a scrawny punk?" Punches his closed fist into the other hand in a careless display of bravado, winding up. The pop! of knuckles on skin draws Itachi's attention from the bird and he levels his gaze at them across the drab yard, hard eyes skimming the cracked concrete and neglected brown grass.
Itachi and the seasoned inmate share the tiniest incline of the head, a firm nod. Once.
The latter yanks the newcomer prisoner by the upper arm and pulls him close.
"If the wrong person in this place wants you to disappear, you will. A guard will choke you a little too hard, let someone stab you in the mess hall. Turn deaf to yer screams. Plant something during bedtoss and throw you in SHU." His companion's visibly wilting now, wary. "How many ways you think men can make weapons in here?"
A beast of a man with an odd undersea tinge to the skin strides across the yard toward Itachi. It distracts the initiate for a moment, but his superior's eyes demand understanding. Acknowledgement of the pecking order, the hazards of his new life.
It stretches before him, the horrifying prospect of forever.
Releasing him roughly, space between them again, his tone is inflexible, leaves no room for riposte.
"Don't fuck around. He's never put his hands on another man in this prison, and he doesn't have to."
.
.
"Fresh fish?" Kisame asks. Small, pointy teeth bared in a grin that he brandishes at the two men across the yard, relishing in the way one of them looks like he might just lose his lunch in fear.
Itachi doesn't answer, just waves the small bird off his finger with a quiet sigh.
"Is that your new thing?" Kisame has a way, gruffly, of sounding concerned in throwaway. Gives a shit, if only a little. Everyone needs someone to watch your back when staring down the barrel of a life sentence. "No response from your little brother, so you're channeling the birds now?"
Knowing one another as they do, years of being oddly-paired and somehow suited, he ignores Itachi's deafening silence — a manner of exclusion as if they're floating in the airless vacuity of outer space. After all, who's quite normal in a high-security prison population? Though Kisame, at least, manages to maintain a certain violent, jolly charm, his opposite is mute in his best times and on another planet at worst.
"And if you wonder how I know," Kisame continues, "the man in the mailroom finds me interesting. Spills more in an afternoon than you have in years."
This earns him a brief raise of the eyebrows, a glance at the sky. From Itachi it's the equivalent of a flashing neon sign. Sensing a crack in his façade, his friend continues.
"There's more."
Despite himself, Itachi's eyes flicker. Kisame's grin stretches wide.
"Pretty people really do get all the attention. He's heading here. What's his name? Sasuke?"
"I see."
Kisame startles dramatically at the response. "It speaks."
"You're tiring."
"You're tiring; look at your awful mug. Ever think about getting checked out? Prisoners' rights," he says sardonically.
Interpreting Itachi's offended silence correctly, he skirts the topic and continues.
Itachi's eyes are lost somewhere in the blue, the new knowledge given his only earthly tether. Kisame never knows what he's looking for out there, searching or seeking or hoping for symbolism and signs that perhaps, once he finds them, will unlock his keys or at least cheer him up for a day. Then again, who is he to ask others to be optimistic — it's prison.
Still, who else would he incessantly bother if he loses the other half, his foil, his glue? Frowning at his own sentiment, Kisame clears his throat.
"There's more, Itachi."
"Ah, you've said that."
"He's not alone."
Single black shadow arcing against the blue, now taking on the blush of sunset colors like new bruises. A crow. Itachi focuses on it.
"There's a girl with him. Young thing working the flight gossips to the pilot, who's got friends in law, cops, prison head. How it always goes." Shrugging, he's not sure if the tidbit is of any interest and loathes himself a little for being nosy but again, prison. What else is there to look forward to?
Eyes the same glittering sable tint as the crow's, Itachi's still following its innate and instinctive whorls carried in the fabric of its biology, down to its genetic markers lighting up in complicated ancient circuits. Directed by a story much older than itself.
"What color is her hair?"
Kisame peers at him like he's gone daft in the span of their conversation.
"Why the fuck would I know that?
.
.
The thwack! of the large bird's body against the thick glass rouses a few bodies from sleep and prompts cursing from others. Sakura's expression falls as she contemplates what surely was misguided fowl, off its migratory track and discombobulated by the growl of idling jet engines and manmade structures cut through historical space. The instincts of animals far outlive the idealism of humans.
"Poor thing," she murmurs.
Miles away from the airport terminal Sasuke and Sakura are waiting in, their friends cluster behind the bar and struggle, mired in knowledge for which they've not asked. Ino and Shikamaru are bickering over the veracity of the parts of the conversation overhead last night and if they should be intervening with any of it. The latter feels a strong tug toward what he considers duty but, if the former knows anything about her childhood, it's that it's a veneer to obfuscate exactly what their parents spend their days doing in "service of the government." Ino knows Shikamaru's no idiot, and that he knows what opening this up really means.
"We don't know much of anything, really. This all happened when we were kids." Arms folded, she's resolute. Shikamaru mirrors her stance, albeit leaning with his hip on the bar and eyes casting left to right in an endless loop, turning things over in his mind. Ino can almost hear the crackle and spark of his brain working in overdrive.
Peering at him with sharp eyes, she adds, "We can't prove anything, it's all hearsay. And I trust Sakura."
Shikamaru's brows furrow. "Can't prove anything yet. But knowing what we know now, do you think them confronting a murderer and criminal is a smart move?"
Ino throws her hands up, a familiar gesture he finds obnoxious on many but doesn't quite mind on her; there's no doubt it reminds him of other women in his life, his mother too. He supposes it's simply his lot.
"No, of course not! But she's been taking care of herself for a long time. If her judgment, or her gut, or whatever is driving her brings her there, then it does. Don't knock intuition."
"It has its place," Shikamaru says with a shrug, "but I'm looking at facts, here. And don't you think they're . . ."
Wishing he could reel it back as Ino narrows her eyes at him. "What?"
A long pause. Marching up to trap him against the bar, to pressure him, she's uncomfortably close.
"What are you trying to say?"
"What will she do to Sasuke," Shikamaru asks quietly, "when she's finished with him?"
Ino's lips go thin. "I warned him, you know. I made it clear. And we're assuming the worst."
"Do you trust her to leave the people she cares about intact?"
"This happened to her, Shikamaru, not because of her." Perhaps unconsciously, she bares a bit of teeth, bark and bite in defense.
"Oi, this isn't blame," he responds, palms up to keep space between them; she looks like she might knock him out. "But he's our friend, like she's yours. And if we're all about to dig up ancient history, make a mess — we need to make a plan."
"Shikamaru," Naruto says, "quit it. Nothing's gonna happen."
Shikamaru frowns at his painful, thickheaded optimism. Still, Naruto occupies the place of a childhood friend and feels that he'll have to defer.
There's something in Naruto's eyes that gives him doubt, catching the edge of it as his friend turns away with his phone in his hand.
Down the hallway toward the back office, half in the dark. After several rings he hears Sasuke on the other end, answering in his usual tone of put-upon, lofty irritation that he's never lost.
"What, Naruto? We're boarding soon."
"Yeah, I know."
A skip, a half-second pause.
"Did she tell you—"
"We're friends too, yaknow," Naruto says. "You're not the only one she cares about." Trying to lighten the mood, he adds, "You can't be great conversation!"
Sasuke doesn't respond. There's noise in the background, names called over intercoms and the shuffle of bodies in motion, calls from the agents at gates, murmurs of humanity. A moment in which Naruto hears Sakura's voice lilting, rising at the end of what sounds like a question, and the way his tone changes when he responds to her and her alone gives him insight he couldn't identify as such, but it seems to feel right, make sense.
"Listen," Naruto says, "I'll only ask you this stuff one time. Do you know anything about my parents dying that you never told me?"
The seconds in between from anyone else would be hesitation. Knowing his measured mannerism as he does, he waits for his words.
"No. There's nothing I know. It's something I—"
"Don't say shit you don't know for sure, then!"
"It's a feeling. What if—"
"Nah, we talked about 'what if's. We don't do those." And Naruto's right, they don't, part of the pacts they agreed upon in the beginning and as they left the past behind vowing to look only into the sun, never back into the dark. "I don't want to hear it. I've moved on and don't want to know."
A loud sound, heavy, causing muffled cries and curses to come down the line.
Sakura's voice again, quiet. Probably sitting right next to him in the terminal.
"What was that?"
"A bird hitting the window."
"What kind?"
Naruto can hear Sasuke rolling his eyes. "And how would I know that?"
Shrugging in the hallway in the dark, as if he can see him. As if he's there.
"Are you sure she's what you want, Sasuke?"
"Naruto."
Saying his name is a warning shot across the gulf, the no man's land of an unwritten future.
"And are you gonna be okay if . . . she doesn't stay?"
Naruto's unable to channel those poetics, the words to express what he's worried about: That they've lost so much already and often only have one another to lean on and he's seen it, he's lived Sasuke's low points and they're much more destructive and wild than his own. Manic fury paired with a coldness, an aloofness, a tandem friendship that somehow works but when his friend's chains come off unchecked, it's a toss-up between anger and despair.
His friends are his everything.
We'll be back soon, Naruto! Sakura's voice makes his chest burn as it comes through the receiver; he imagines her, green eyes bright and smile radiant and his heart slips a little at the thought of her departing somewhere in the wind, leaving a void.
The words come out and he knows they're too much as they leave his mouth:
"You love her, don't you?"
Sasuke's response to this, of course, is to simply disconnect the call.
.
.
Settling in the roomy business class seat, Sakura folds her arms and determinedly stares out the window in the ineffectual way of hiding a pout.
"What did I say about this?"
"This is not a gift. This is how people fly, Sakura."
"This isn't how average people fly," she whispers. Giving him a significant expression, her eyes flicker to the two attendants still making kind and perfunctory greetings to each embarking passenger and party.
She grumbles something that sounds like ostentatious; smirking at her so specific choice of word, he catches the eye of one of them to seemingly, easily, summon service. Sakura continues to face away from him and watch the tarmac, the sky beyond, until Sasuke extends a steaming cup of coffee to her, hovering under her nose.
"Real china, but it tastes terrible. Now you can feel like everyone else."
Pursing her lips, she takes the proffered drink anyway and struggles not to smile.
"Uchiha Sasuke, I think you're teasing me."
Burying the dread at what they're departing to do, Sasuke gently brushes hair behind her ear, watching her sparkling eyes track planes and birds and endless sky. She hums with caffeine and the clean, bright gloss of novelty —
while he turns something over and over in his mind, unbidden and morbid in the context of this.
Thinking of the way it sounds, Uchiha Sakura,
while two attendants communicate in the hushed tones of people who have long perfected the art of passing information in disguised ciphers among charmed circles, always directly under the noses of those they serve.
At 30,000 feet:
Sakura naps, head dropping onto Sasuke's shoulder as he tries in vain to shake off the thoughts that have taken ahold of his mind and it's all Naruto's fault, isn't it always him and his irritating sunny optimism giving him wayward and indulgent ideas but now it's difficult to pretend he wouldn't give this girl anything she wanted and slip a ring on her finger to take his name but gods he's fucking cursed, isn't he, what a ridiculous notion to entertain;
thousands of miles away Itachi is informed of an unexpected visitor that, when he's told the name, he immediately refuses with a snarl so unlike him that Kisame watches him closely in hope of glimpsing the darkness, the rumors that have always shrouded him and the stories and make it difficult to parse the villain from the man;
in the city recently departed a phone call is made to the chief of police arriving by way of a terrified young woman on the waitstaff of the venue which recently held a grand event, shaking in terror as she relayed it to her supervisor and it made its way up to the office of the hotel's owner, who carefully reports the body located and crushed into a fourth floor dumbwaiter;
on a balcony that has to be shaking with their laughter and jubilance of what, exactly, they don't know, simply being in company better than they thought possible, Naruto kisses Ino in a fumbling and graceless way that probably feels desperate to a gorgeous girl like her and he knows he's absolutely fucked this up until her tongue meets his and this is fire, this is what melting is and if this is even a fraction of what love is, he can see just how easy it is to drown in something transient and divine — he can understand Sasuke more than he ever thought possible.
Somewhere else, wheels touch tarmac, and Sasuke and Sakura disembark.
There's one internet blogger tailing them when they reach the rental car counter, three by the time they get on the road, and a gaggle of them plus a few "respectable" individuals ones who'd consider themselves actual journalists as they arrive at the hotel valet.
Forced to make a choice a couple hours later, because they're not quite sure who's more interesting lately: The wayward sibling of a murderer estranged from the rest of the Uchiha, or the seemingly unexceptional woman increasingly seen at his side.
Sasuke begins the drive to the urban outskirts toward the prison.
Sakura wanders unfamiliar sidewalks in search for a better cup of coffee.
.
.
Sasuke's brought into the visiting area first, led across a frigid floor flanked by enormous men with hard faces to a tiny table in a garden of many, small metal caps arrayed as patterns and locked resolutely into the floor. It's mostly because of his late father's prestige that he's able to face his brother without a sheet of glass in between — any reasonable visit to a familial murderer with so many desert years in between should really warrant maximum security.
He feels eyes on him, glances. Even, incredulously, a low whistle.
"No raised voices," one of the guards says, indicating a cold plastic seat. Sasuke hesitates before obliging, adopting a rigid posture because everything is exactly as cold as it looks. "And no touching."
He reflects on the absurdity of that, but a pang of guilt rests under his rib as he takes surreptitious glances at the small groups around him, at other tables. Mothers with trembles in their voices face sons with long sentences and little chances; a young woman carefully grasps the tiny fingers across the table of who by the looks of it could only be her infant on her visitor's lap, eyeing the guard sidelong to avoid a reprimand.
But, thinking of Sakura, the truth of it slides home as a key to a heavy lock. The only touching he can imagine here is beating him black and blue.
At the music of chains he looks up and how does he know it's him, and for a moment his nervous system scatters searching for emotions and reactions that make sense. A jolt dancing down his spine twisting and snuffing into a numbness that washes out the feeling of the dank air, the cold plastic seat beneath him, the existence of his own body in this space.
Even in an ugly, garish jumpsuit he turns heads. There's something handsome about him in a different way, a delicate thing. Perhaps they've lapsed on enforcing close-cut hair, because second to himself, Uchiha Itachi glides through life after homicide with clean locks and long eyelashes and a fragility to him like the bones of birds, but still utterly and absurdly handsome.
And alive.
What horrors do the deep lines under his eyes hold? Sasuke swears his brother's had them his whole life. He meets his eyes and it almost overwhelms him as time slows in the guards' approach: The stitch in his chest, the pain in the memories.
And rage. Glorious, clean rage like the honed edge of a knife.
Always with a cool affect — it's never left Itachi, placid as a pond, even as he's steered to the seat across from Sasuke and his ankles are locked into place underneath the table, his hands left free with a warning glance and small incline of the head that Itachi returns to the guard in kind.
A ripple of heat, and it manifests as a sneer, the notion that he has a cordial relationship with his keepers.
A pause. Sasuke's trying to figure out how to speak without spitting or cursing when Itachi asks,
"So what have you been doing with my letters?"
Eyes wide, Sasuke imagines slamming his face into the metal table. It's so like him to be detached, everything beneath his notice.
"I didn't read them. Not a single one," he says through gritted teeth.
Itachi nods, folding his arms across his chest.
"Did you burn them?"
— how does he ?! —
"Oh, Sasuke, you always were so dramatic."
Irritated, taken aback, Sasuke marshals his thoughts because he has to take control of this conversation, except everything's tipping sideways and he's scrambling to pick up his own pieces because he's depressingly out of his league.
"How did you find out where to write me? My phone number?" Sasuke demands.
"Prisoners and police alike are familiar with the name Uchiha. I'm not so unlikeable to others, in a place like this. People are willing to do favors."
Sasuke glowers at him: His hair, his rings, the polish on his nails.
"You've ended up looking much more like our mother—"
"Shut up," Sasuke hisses. "Shut the fuck up."
"It's likely better that way. Perhaps the people you meet don't easily connect you and I."
Steepling his fingers, a ring catches the stripped and blue-tone lights above. The perks of good behavior in a life sentence. "Mother was the least culpable."
"Don't — don't talk about her!"
Itachi studies his nails, black-painted. His knuckles. Fixes his little brother with a piercing stare.
"Then what are you here to discuss, after so many years of ignoring me?"
"All of it," Sasuke says. His voice sounds far away, an echo from another layered void in space. "I want the truth. Why you killed them, why you ran and then turned yourself in, why you—" he loses the thread for a moment, swallowing, throat dry, "—left me alive."
Itachi's expression doesn't change. "That's all?"
"What do you mean that's all?" Sasuke hears his voice, he's snarling, he's emotional. This isn't how he wanted to handle this. "That's not enough for you? The fact that I'm here in front of you, speaking to you at all after what you've done — monster. You—"
"Tell me, little brother, where is she?"
Sasuke's yanking Itachi by the neck of his jumpsuit and the rebuke crackles in the space, swift and harsh. "No touching!"
Sasuke's head whips 'round to stare at the guard; Itachi lets himself be handled, impassive.
He throws his brother back across the table.
"You don't get to say her name. Those are my questions; I deserve that."
"You don't own her, Sasuke. I'm sure you can barely handle her."
The truth of that cuts deeply, earning no response. Sasuke parries:
"I want to know why." Sasuke grips the sides of his chair to hide his shaking hands. Focus. Control. "You ruined our lives and the least," his hands and knuckles sparkle with pain, "you can do is explain yourself after all these years."
Itachi inhales, exhales slowly. "We could start over from this moment, little brother. The narrative could go forward from this, unencumbered by our family's sins."
The only response Sasuke has for this is another angry curse.
"Ah, you have no grace. No pretense."
There's a moment, a flicker of something Sasuke finds impossible in the expression of a man like this.
It might have been a glimmer of regret.
"You're quite brash, for a little girl. No sense of self-preservation, no pretense."
She raises her chin and in a moment, her eyes have the steely glint and shadow of something alien, something sanctified, terrifying.
"Don't you call me a little girl."
"Was this her idea?" Itachi's voice is quiet, serious.
Sasuke leans forward, elbows on the cold table, shaking with rage. Patrician slope of his nose millimeters away from a regal one of the same, the bloodline curse close and crackling between the two of them.
"Mine. All mine," Sasuke says, teeth bared. "Now talk."
Settling back into his chair, he swallows hard and folds his arms, waiting.
"The details aren't important," Itachi says slowly. Sasuke opens his mouth, and Itachi raises a hand to bring him to silence. Chafing but interested, he obeys. "By the time it all came to that point, it was the only solution to so many years of the—" Itachi's lips go thin, and his eyes flash while the rest comes out in staccato bursts that seem to alter the composition of his face, make him ugly, "the illegality, the killing, the secrets. The only method by which we could stop this curse, generations of machinations."
Scraping his nails against the metal table between them, he manages to speak without moving his lips: "A tree diseased needs to be taken out by the roots."
"Don't lie," Sasuke sneers. "You were brought into the fold young, you were such a good son, so smart."
"You can't think I wanted any of it. And I took all that knowledge on to protect you, hoping to find a way to maneuver you out of the spotlight, away from the hands of our family members. This goes beyond our parents, little brother. This is a family of lies, a dark deck of cards."
"So they, what, had some sketchy financial deals? Legal issues? Was it really so bad you had to kill them in cold blood?"
Staring at his palms, Itachi sounds so far away when he says, "They asked me to, Sasuke. It was their only way out."
The silence, it rings. Stunning in its message.
"You don't seriously expect me to believe that? They asked you to do it, to be killed, to ruin everything and leave us behind? Leave—" Leave me.
"Better my hands than those that were coming for them. Sasuke!" Itachi taps sharply on the table, pulling his focus. "The more I tell you, the more danger I put you in. Both of you."
"Don't talk about her," Sasuke hisses. "Unless you're going to tell me what the fuck you thought you were doing, getting her caught up in your mess."
"The family's grip was tightening on them, our parents," Itachi says, ignoring him. "The more the branches grow, the more out of the trunk's control it gets. There were far-flung factions forming that no one could control, and they were slipping up. Things that we would never endorse. Messy murders. Trafficking rings. Financial aberrations, millions disappearing, leaving trails. Family business runs amok and turns into common street crime with too many ways to trace it back."
"If this is even true, any of it," Sasuke says, "why wouldn't they stop? Convene the family, handle the rogues? They weren't stupid, and neither are you." Pauses. "So why did you—"
Itachi parries again — not her, not now. "Control didn't rest with them anymore. The new operating arm shifted out of our influence into another's, and we became a sideshow. True, it did not look that way; in the eyes of the media, we were as notorious and powerful as ever. But in the wake of Madara's passing—"
"Grandfather?"
"Great-grandfather," he corrects. "he left reigning stakeholder power to his young adoptee. His favorite, but . . ."
Trailing off, Itachi's gaze slips somewhere else, a familiar expression or lack thereof so familiar to Sasuke, the one that makes him look slightly unhinged and always prompts shivers, wondering at the crazy lurking in his own genetics.
"It threw everything into chaos," he said, low and slow. "It became unsustainable."
"And you told me nothing!" Sasuke leans forward again, staring him in the eyes. "Meanwhile I was getting kicked under Father's feet like a dog, when I wasn't getting ignored."
"You were a child." His brother's voice is narrow, cold as the table and the floor and the air. "What could you have done? Things were dire, and I had to work to make moves against Madara and his charge."
"Then why did you tell her?" And now Sasuke's eyes are alight with that rage, that ragged edge of a flame dancing at the edge of particularly flammable debris, dry as bone. "Why did you recruit a girl to help you cause an accident? To help you commit murder?" Closer, closer. "What did you do to her?
"Sasuke—"
"Just how sick are you, Itachi? Going to marry her in so she couldn't talk, because you knew she—" but he can't say it, it's sitting in his throat in a knot but he'll gag if he tries to articulate it, "she would have done it for you."
"It was a mistake," Itachi says. "I admit I made several. And yes," he adds, drawing his attention again, "in the beginning, the intent was to use her for our own ends. It was a directive that came from the new order, and I intended to carry that out to keep up appearances."
"Oh, what then," Sasuke spits. "you started to feel something for her?"
"It wasn't like that. If you know one thing — it was not like that."
Sasuke's shaking, eyes glittering. "Then what was it?"
But how can Itachi explain? That she cut to the core of him and laid all his faults on display; that a force much stronger than him channeled through her and took him to task; that somehow in the moment he'd first laid eyes on her and she stared back with the unnerving green eyes of an inalienable being from another space and time, he'd known they would not be able to use her easily as hoped but he had orders to follow.
They'd chosen wrong, and possibly had been the catalyst for her, for this.
That if he blinked into his future he didn't think he'd make it out of her orbit alive.
"I admired her intelligence, her strong sense of justice. The type of person that felt so incompatible with a family like ours, everything we stood for. Everything we were doing. Perhaps I thought . . ."
that she could be protected, that she could
change what we were, with her connection to something divine, that she could
repair something in me.
"By the time I wanted to bring it all down, felt trapped and unsure of how to extricate our family from this, I felt she needed protection. She had been drawn in too deeply by then. As I said, it was a mistake."
"And she didn't—" Sasuke breaks off, eyes searching Itachi's with an almost demented gleam, "she didn't ask you to do what you did."
Itachi surveys him with an expression of dismay, uncertainty. Where has he seen those eyes before, teetering on the edge of obsession? He wonders if this is jealousy over a being he never had an option to possess; he's not sure anyone can, the way she is, the damage their interference caused. His intrusion in her life has changed a fated trajectory — possibly, though, it was always her lot and how long does that clock have left?
Oh, do you love her?
"Ask her to come here. Tomorrow."
"No."
"I'm sure she'd remind you it's not your decision."
The guard and Itachi share a curt nod, and he comes forward while reaching into his pocket for the keys to release his ankles. Sasuke's shaking again in anger and disbelief at being shut down so easily.
Itachi's face is unreadable. "Unless I speak to her, there's no more to say."
And he's indicating he wants to be done, to leave, the previously-considered keepers more like aides to a king as they move at his behest.
"Why her?"
Still with that impassive face against Sasuke's outburst, he holds up a pale hand and stays the guards, speaking quietly.
"Because it's the way of things. A girl with average parents, no extended family, no connections, producing an incredibly intelligent girl with dreams much bigger than she understood? From a small, dusty town where deep, dark secrets are kept all the time? If she happened to disappear on the way home on her long, lonely bus ride in the dark — well, she was often alone, too smart for her own good, young and beautiful, and that's simply what the world does."
In a sliver of a moment, the flicker of Itachi's haunted eyes conveys some type of apology.
"Snatches poor small-town daughters and eats them all alive."
.
.
Tendrils of smoke coil against the glittering parapet of glass — the light is dim. With the back of her dress so low and yearning for the tailbone, shadows dancing among the bones and sinew, an outsider could consider the view as a painting, an exquisite and alien representation of a woman rendered real.
It's not her cigarette, but there's an illicit speakeasy mood in the hotel bar tonight, and if not there, where? If not now, when?
Sakura and the bartender politely ignore it, each dwelling in one's own orbit.
One gimlet down and another waiting for her lips. Imbibing in hotel bars, at least, is acceptable to partake in alone.
"There's no way, hm," a man says, "that you're here alone."
A stranger takes the open seat next to her without asking, sizing her up with gleaming blue eyes. Sakura glances at him out of the corner of her eye and notes his appearance, soft, and how uncannily he reminds her of Ino.
"After all, you're the prettiest one in here — besides myself, of course."
This time, she can't keep silent. "So humble. You really do remind me of someone I know."
"That better be a good thing." He smiles easy, but with an impetuous edge. The familiar type of peacocking that some men being ignored shift into a bit too quickly.
Sakura's eyes stay on the glittering glass castle of bottles behind the bar, loftily sifting through the words on the labels with the idleness of choosing among fruits in a market.
Taking the measure of his intensity.
"So who are you with tonight? C'mon."
Sakura takes a sip of her gimlet. Stares straight ahead. "Nobody."
"That's good then, hm? 'Cause neither am I."
He waits for her to take the bait, but he's left dangling.
"The way you've been sitting here, the whole scene, yeah, it's like a painting. And you're the center of it." He holds up his hands, fingers touching fingers to mimic looking at her through a viewfinder. "It's a perfect thing, really."
She glances at him, taking in his dark eyeliner and relaxed, open body language. Swagger. She resists the urge to punch him straight off the stool he seems to be balancing on.
"Hm," she voices, noncommittal, bored.
"Listen," and now he sounds harsh, irritated, "I just think you and I could—"
"Who do you think I am?" she asks, finally turning to face him, lips tight. "A lonely woman of the night? Someone's wife? Stupid? Get out of here."
"Whoa, lady, that isn't what I was—"
"Is he interrupting your evening?"
Sakura and the stranger both turn to Sasuke, who turns eyes on the latter with intense dislike.
"Hm, listen, the girl and I are just having a conversation."
"You're talking at her, and she wants you to get lost."
Sakura sets her glass sharply on the wooden bar, the sound an admonition. "I'm able to handle this myself, thank you."
But she smiles. Any excellent observer can see that she greets Sasuke as a flame consumes a match, as something feral devours their own young.
As a man walks into water and drowns.
"Listen," the stranger says, sitting up a little straight, chest swelling a bit wider, "I got here first." Eyeing Sasuke's appearance — hair windswept from outside, leather jacket dotted with pinpricks of rain — he adds, "Punk."
Sakura shifts her shoulder and faces the bar again, away from both of them; long pink locks cascade over her skin which catches, in certain errant bits of light, the glitter of yesteryear.
"This isn't your watering hole, or a desert." Her dismissal is curt. "I'm not interested."
But she glances over her shoulder to meet the dark eyes of a stranger slightly less so now, his eyes reading the ancient runes in each knob in her spine, framed by the open back of her black dress.
"What the fuck — but it actually is. It's a bar! That's you call — hm, you know what—" The blonde ends his stuttering parade by tossing bills on the bar and looking like he might spit. He seems to want to say more, though whether it's the dangerous energy coming from Sasuke or the absolute disinterest of the woman he's just tried to pick up, he sneers at them both as he sweeps away with a vanity that, admittedly, is still charming on him.
Sasuke takes the vacated seat and shakes his head at the bartender, instead taking up the same behavior and watching Sakura in profile.
"Frostier than I've seen you," he says quietly.
Taking another delicate sip, she narrows her eyes. "He has something weird about him."
"Do you think he's a leftover journalist — looking for an angle?"
"Not that type of weird," she says. Smiling to herself, she continues. "And anyway, you'll be happy to know that most of them were apparently enamoured with following me around town."
Before he thinks about it, he's brushing the pink sweep of hair off her shoulder,
and her stomach swoops, the heat of him causing fever and spins.
"How was . . . ?" She doesn't finish, in part because it's difficult to discuss aloud and eyes feel everywhere and in a little, in part, because she's breathless as his hand lands on her thigh.
He ignores the unspoken question, and can't ask her his own. Not now, not with her looking like this, spots of pink high in her cheeks and legs for days and a little threatening, a poison fatal to drink that he'd imbibe without complaint.
"This is new," he says in her ear, slipping a finger underneath the hem against her thigh.
"Paparazzi are sated easily. Pretty girl buying pretty things. Sweets and—" her breath hitches "— dresses, soft and feminine."
Sasuke hums some noise of amusement so close, too close,
and here she is, melting, all honey and spice.
"Thank you," he whispers, "for distracting them,"
and all of her aches.
He doesn't thank her for distracting him too, but she knows.
It's in the way they kiss in the elevator, the more gentle manner, tonight, they whisper and beg, please, oh gods, please, the way they only make it as far as some tiny supply closet left unlocked, tender with one another as if they are truly only sand and dust, as if this is their last time around the sun.
Several miles away there's a woman's body in an alley,
a hole blown through the side of her face,
odd crescent moons in humanoid bite marks all over the skin,
and nobody finds it until morning.
Thank you for reviews from last time:
to Chikachoo - it's definitely been the goal to try different dynamics esp. with Sasuke and Sakura themselves.
to Arya Tripathi - thank you for reading and putting up with being ... lol
to SpringHime - "chaos and magnetism" yay I'm glad that's coming through and you like it!
to SailingNotSelling - I was excited to write this part and start digging in so I'm glad you're excited too!
to Midding - More questions, more answers, more questions
to ILoveCats72 - That made my heart soft omg
to summerspringss - oh man there aren't many higher compliments than this, that you read in one sitting and it makes you FEEL so much. Itachi, like the whole cast, are pretty complicated and I've really tried to explore in here that people aren't just "good" or "evil," or that certain characters are clear victims only and some are the perpetrators, but that everyone's reasons are super layered and complex. Good people make poor or selfish choices and less good people can make selfless ones, if that makes sense. Basically, I'm so happy you like!
to Raine no Jutsu - always pulls us back in, doesn't it? just can't quit haha. happy you like it!
to Jade - Ch 6 is a favorite of mine too, for all those reasons. It's fun to weave canon things into a modern setting and explore who they could be in another universe. It's interesting to explore Sakura with a different life as well.