It was easy to fall into a routine, even as some small, distant, part of him recoiled from the blood on his hands, dripping from his sword, dried in permanent brown stains on his boots. This, he realized, was the true benefit of the mask: not to strike fear or to conceal his identity from others, but rather to hide from his own self. He was just one of a hundred now, a faceless figure bent in shadow, with no conscience or conscious thought of his own. He considered the sharp profile of the laughing fox hanging from the hook by his bedside table, fangs bared, whiskers drawn in crimson and black swirls across the porcelain surface.
He had never really liked foxes.
Shisui slipped the mask on his face, pulled on his cloak, and went to work.
It was the absence of noise that woke him, more than anything else.
Thirty six stuck his head out of his bed, rubbing his eyes and restraining the urge to scratch at the bandage wrapped around his head. Around him, he could see all the other kids slowly wake up, some of them looking pale and sick like they were about to throw up, others looking more like they had to use to bathroom real bad.
Sixteen was sitting on top of his bed, legs crossed, quiet-like. Twenty two sat on the floor by his side, head tilted towards the ceiling.
No one made any noise and thirty six thought that was the weirdest thing of all, like all of them had the exact same lump in their throats, the tight feeling in their chests that made speaking impossible.
But he had to.
"What's going on?" he asked, his voice scratchy and hoarse, shattering the silence.
"Can't you hear it?" Sixteen said, fingers wrapped tight together, like a monk making his devotions.
Thirty six didn't really get it until twenty two spoke up finally. "There's no morning bell."
They lay in neat rows, six by six, on clean white tables with bright surgical lights chasing out all the shadows in the room, washing the color out of their cheeks. Thick black cables spidered across the room and lay attached to their heads, rippling with blue arcs of chakra that danced in time to thirty six steady heartbeats.
"Time, " Danzou said slowly, thoughtfully, as he looked down at the laboratory spread beneath him, through the glass panes that separated the observatory and the room below, "is something that I always seem to be short of."
Shisui said nothing. He was bent on one knee, masked face looking down at the floor. He could feel his own hot breath curl against his skin, trapped by the heavy porcelain weight of his mask. The eye holes of his mask were small, black strips of darkness obscuring the edges of his vision.
"I had plans for the boy, since perhaps even before his conception." Danzou paused, thumb rubbing the wooden handle of his cane. "What better way to kill the father than with the son?"
He imagined Sasuke looking down at his father's corpse, grinning, with the crimson red pinwheels spinning in his eyes and a kunai dangling from one small, boyish hand.
"But, in this way too, he will serve Konoha as well, reborn as a perfect soldier. His mind will be molded into something new, something better. Harder, stronger. The perfect tool." Danzou lifted a hand up, and the masked agent below instantly straightened and saluted, his badger mask glinting with reflected light. He stood in the center of a giant array, seal characters spiraling out from around him in labyrinthine tangles before connecting with the long black chakra cables. He had long yellow hair, tied back in a practical queue, just visible from a gap in the hood of his cloak.
His hand began to fall as the agent brought his hands together, fingers twisting into seal signs-
"Release!" Shisui shouted, his eyes bleeding Sharingan red. He tore through all the careful illusions he had gathered, striking through all of the delicate chakra strings, and let go.
The agent shattered into a hundred different shards of reality, falling to the ground in a heap of technicolor lights. The laboratory plunged into darkness, lit only by the shimmering pile of shattered genjutsu on top of the seal array, before that too faded away into nothingness.
"Uchiha," Danzou spat in a soft, deadly voice, all at once a curse and an invocation. "So, this is when you choose to betray me at last?" Fire roared to life from his hands, throwing the sharp planes of his face into sharp relief, casting strange shadows across the scars stretching over his cheek. The rafters of the ceiling caught aflame, shimmers of heat and waves of smoke rising up and around them in an intoxicating, heady combination. Behind them, the glass windows cracked in warning.
"Agent Shu?" Danzou continued in that low voice, perfectly controlled fury sublimated into lethality.
"Dead," Shisui said, and unsheathed his blade. "As much as I sorrow for his loss, I could not- cannot allow this to happen. In the name of the Sandaime Hokage, upon his request and his command, I arrest you on highest charges of treason, murder and the endangerment of Konoha citizens."
"Oh?" Danzou laughed, a terrible noise that rose from the hollow depths of his chest. "You dare accuse me of treason? Boy, what I am doing is for the good of the Village, to protect it from weakness and poison. You think I don't know what your Elders are planning, what Hiruzen refuses to see?"
"Be that as it may," Shisui said as steadily as he could. The sword never wavered in his hand. "That doesn't justify your actions, Shimura Danzou. Will you comply with the law?"
"And you?" Danzou's voice turned even quieter, harder. "Your hands are just as marked as I am, child. You are blind if you cannot see that he is using you as well, his own hidden sword in the darkness."
"Be that as it may," Shisui said again, his voice shaking with fear, with rage, with a hundred different frightening emotions, "but you hurt my cousin, you bastard."
He lunged forward, chakra singing in his veins.
Danzou smiled and drew his hands together in a seal. "Now," he said, and the room exploded.
Kakashi tugged open the shades of his window, letting the silver moonlight filter into his assigned room at the outpost. A laughing cat peered through the glass panes, whiskers like dark slashes across its smooth face. A hand, curled up into a fist, hovered over the glass.
Had it only been a month since Tenzou had knocked on his window that fateful night, white-faced and trembling with fear? Had it only been two months since Kakashi had died in the middle of a war-torn future and woken up in the scattered nightmares of his past? Had it only been ten years that wound backwards, like water spilling up through the gaps in his fingers and back into his cupped palms?
"Captain," Tenzou whispered, his chakra flickering and curling in on itself. "Genma…"
Good men died, blood washed over the earth, and the world went on as it always did, time flowing endlessly forward, even here, in this impossible, improbable world.
Kakashi bent his head. "I know."
They were gentle, if nothing else. His body was washed carefully, with soft cloths imbued with herbs and stitched with seals of purity. His hair was combed and braided into a neat queue, then tied it with a traditional white ribbon. Finally, they tied a black armband around his arm, embroidered with a silver spiraling leaf, then laid his body onto an unrolled ceremonial sealing scroll, marked with black serpentine coils of symbols.
A medic, with a light touch, carefully signed Shiranui Genma and bound his corpse to paper and ink, securing him for the last journey home.
Kakashi closed the door behind him as he left the morgue and stepped into the attached infirmary room. He stopped in front of an empty stasis chamber, watching the chakra infused water slowly drain through a grid in the floor, tubing laying limp and detached by the glass sides. A placard with Genma's name, water-stained and wrinkled, still hung by the corner of the chamber.
"Sometimes," Jiraiya said beside him, puffs of breath swirling around his mouth as he spoke, lips blue-tinged from the cold air, "the body just passes on anyway, organs shut down, and the cells die off, even with a support system in place." He sighed meditatively, geta scraping on the tiled floor. "Perhaps it's better that it ended this way."
Kakashi observed the swirling vortex forming as the blood flecked water circled the drain. "He was too far past normal healing," he said, quiet. "You don't think maybe if Tsunade had been here…"
"No," Jiraiya said, his voice almost unbearably kind. "Not even she could have brought him back."
Kakashi felt something almost like hysterical laughter bubble up in his chest, choke the breath out of his lungs, squeeze tight around his heart like a vise. How could have had thought- dared to presume that ten years of experience, ten years of fucked up failure would have been anywhere near enough to fix his own mistakes in the past?
The past was never the problem.
It was always him.
He hadn't been good enough, not now, not then, not even in the future with Pein standing over corpse and his students scattered across the remnants of the world, broken and shattered because he wasn't enough, was never enough.
Sasuke was missing, Raidou was barely clinging to life, the Uchiha Massacre was growing more and more likely and now- and now, perhaps worst of all, Genma was dead.
Kakashi tasted copper and salt on his tongue as something warm settled on his shoulder, chakra flowing from it in steady waves.
"Don't you even think about collapsing on me, boy," Jiraiya snapped, his voice sounding as if it came from a long distance. "Get your shit together."
Kakashi dimly realized that he had bitten clean through his tongue, blood pooling in his mouth, staining the cracks of his teeth. Unsteadily, he dragged his tattered mask down and spat onto the floor. It splattered across the white tiles in jagged crimson drops.
Jiraiya's hand pushed harder against his shoulder, guiding him towards a chair by the far end of the room. Kakashi followed almost helplessly, his limbs moving of their own accord. He couldn't stop looking at the nearly empty stasis chamber, at Genma's name. He sank into the chair at another nudge, heady waves of chakra still flowing through him from Jiraiya's steady, unwavering touch.
"Kakashi."
Shiranui Genma.
"What is your name, rank and registration number, soldier?"
"Hatake Kakashi, jounin of Konoha, registration 009720," Kakashi said automatically, the familiar, well-worn words spilling out from him.
"At least you're not catatonic," Jiraiya said, voice just a touch wry. He knelt down, his mane of spiky gray hair filling up Kakashi's entire vision. The stasis chamber and its attached placard slipped out of view, obscured by the bulk of Jiraiya's chest and his massive chakra presence, lurking in his bones like a banked fire.
"I've only seen you like this once before, Kakashi, and it was just yesterday for a few seconds, right before you went on a cold-blooded rampage and nearly murdered the prisoner." Jiraiya's chakra flow slowed to a trickle, but Kakashi could feel it surging through his parched chakra coils, fire affinity calling to fire.
"I need you to help me understand, Kakashi, because I don't know how to reconcile this man sitting before me and the one I saw a few months ago at the festival. You look the same. You wear the same blacks, the same ANBU armor. But I swear to the heavens and the Sage of Six Paths, you're not the same person. What changed? What's going on right now?"
How strange, Kakashi thought slowly, that he had been to this man's funeral and now Jiraiya was alive; how strange, that Genma had been alive and now he would have a funeral in this mixed up, fucked up hell of a past.
"I was supposed to save them," Kakashi said dully. "My kids, my pack, my team. I couldn't. I can't, because I'm not good enough."
Pain cracked like a whip across his cheek, burning bright like a lightning strike. "I've already seen one Hatake walk down this path and that's one too many. Don't you dare follow your father into the darkness," Jiraiya said coldly, his hand still raised from slapping Kakashi's cheek. "You can't blame yourself for events out of your damned control, brat. Shiranui died a good death, a soldier's death in service to the Village."
A white hot fury burned the fog out of Kakashi's mind, lent his leaden limbs sudden energy. "You don't understand!"
"You're damned right I don't," Jiraiya shot back. "I know this isn't the first time you've had a teammate die on you, but it is the first time I've seen you lose it like this. What's different, this time? Why is it fucking you up like this?"
"Because it's not just Genma- it's Sasuke, it's Naruto and Sakura, and the whole damned Uchiha clan. It's Danzou and ROOT and Akatsuki," Kakashi spit furiously. "I came back to try and save my pack and all I've done is just make everything worse."
Jiraiya's mouth didn't quite closed.
"I need you to untangle that for me," he said, after a long moment. "How is Naruto, Uzumaki Naruto of all people involved in all of this? And Fugaku's missing son. And what's all this about Danzou and an Aka-whatever? You coming back?"
The transfer, or time travel or whatever the hell Kakashi was supposed to call this- it had never really been a secret, only difficult to explain. It had been easier instead to assume the role of his younger self, to pretend to be something other than he truly was and then make his own quiet moves to change the future.
In the shattered remnants of his failed plans, Kakashi didn't know quite what to say.
"You're really doing a splending job of convincing me you haven't gone completely off your rocker," Jiraiya said, a touch of a half-hearted smile curving his mouth.
"It's complicated," Kakashi said finally. "And I'm not sure if you really will believe me anyway."
"Something would be better than you just staring at me like this," Jiraiya said, raking his hand through his thick curls. "Or you going all quiet again," he added in a very soft voice.
"I…" Kakashi stopped and cleared his throat. "I am actually thirty years old. Somehow, I've managed to travel back in time and enter my younger, twenty year old body."
Jiraiya choked.
"From my own personal recollection, in one year's time, Uchiha Itachi will murder every single member of his clan, save his brother, Uchiha Sasuke, in order to protect the village from a coup engineered by his clan. In six years time, when I was, or will be, twenty six, I was assigned a genin team consisting of Uchiha Sasuke, Uzumaki Naruto and Haruno Sakura. The team subsequently fell apart due to my own inadequacies," Kakashi said, letting his voice fall into the rhythmic cadences he normally used to give reports, distant and detached from the circumstances.
"Sasuke betrayed the village to join with Orochimaru and later killed his brother and made several attempts on the his former teammates' lives, and mine. An organization composed of missing-nin also made several attempts on Naruto's life and on the Village in order to extract the Kyuubi's chakra. The head of this organization, known as Akatsuki, eventually breached Konoha's walls and invaded the Village. I died during the battle and found myself waking up, here, ten years in the past."
Silence wound tight between the two of them, straining towards a breaking point.
"So," Jiraiya said, his brow deeply furrowed, clearly struggling to absorb Kakashi's words. "That's why you flew off the handle when I reported Sasuke's disappearance. And an invasion of Konoha, of all the possibilities..." His voice trailed off, his face settling into an unreadable mask.
Kakashi felt a sudden exhaustion wash through him, the furious, frustrated anger from before quickly dissipating. He was tired to the bone, weary, and above all, frightened of what the unknown future might still bring.
"I can definitely see why you thought I wouldn't- why I don't believe you, Kakashi. Time travel?" Jiraiya shook his head. "Talking sage toads and prophecies, I can do," he muttered. "But this stuff?" He blew out a rough breath.
"I can show you your funeral," Kakashi said.
Jiraiya stilled.
With heavy, numb fingers, Kakashi drew up the borrowed chakra within him, Jiraiya's own chakra, and wove an illusion made of memories and old dreams.
"Watch," he said and opened Obito's eye to let Jiraiya see.
Even without Obito's eye to etch it into memory, Kakashi could still remember the way his formal blacks felt on his skin, how they smelled of mothballs and scented detergent. It was a hot, humid summer morning, with only a few clouds in the sky. It was a beautiful day.
A framed picture of Jiraiya lay in front of the Memorial, lined with black ribbons; here was a much more familiar face than the living man standing beside him, a little older, with deeper wrinkles and laugh lines.
Next to him, Jiraiya swore softly underneath his breath.
The illusion shifted and changed, revealing Naruto's bent back, the heaps of chrysanthemums laid in a mound in front of the Memorial.
"He looks just like Minato," Jiraiya said haltingly.
"You took him on as your apprentice, later on," Kakashi gestured toward the two squat frogs sitting by Naruto's side. "He learned how to summon toads, among other things."
"Fukasaku and Shima!" Jiraiya started, his face growing pale underneath his deep brown tan. "There's no way you've ever seen them before. This is all just an illusion, not…"
"A memory," Kakashi finished for him and let the strands of chakra go. Reality rippled into place around them, the hot summer day fading away to reveal the sterile white walls of the outpost infirmary.
Jiraiya was on his knees in front of him, his hands clasped together as if in prayer. At any other time, the look on his face might have almost been funny.
Now, all Kakashi could feel was fear.
"Now you see what's really at stake," Kakashi said, his voice slow and bone weary. "Sasuke's missing and I know that Danzou is involved in this whole mess, instigating and maneuvering himself into power. We're maybe days away from the Massacre happening again." His head sank into his palms, Obito's eye throbbing endlessly behind his battered Konoha band.
"I'm still not exactly sure what's going on, but I know this." Something hard and solid collided with Kakashi's skull. Blue and white stars shot across Kakashi's vision as Jiraiya ground his fist against his head.
"You idiot," Jiraiya said, but his gentle tone was at odds with his words and actions.
Kakashi flinched, too stunned to do anything more than blink stupidly at Jiraiya's face.
"Let me guess, this is the first time you've told anyone about this thing?"
Kakashi nodded dumbly.
"And let me make another educated guess: you thought you could handle this all by yourself, huh?"
This time it was Kakashi's turn to look at the other man, his mouth ajar.
"Not your team, your ANBU squad, not me and definitely not the old man Hokage, right?" Jiraiya sighed, his black eyes full of a warmth that Kakashi couldn't understand, his thoughts fracturing and spinning into a thousand incomprehensible fragments.
"Have you ever thought," Jiraiya continued in that same tone, "that we might even want to help you out? You don't have to solve all the problems, save the entire world all by yourself."
His fist flattened out, his hand now ruffling Kakashi's spiky silver hair as if Kakashi were a boy again, to chide and lecture.
"Teamwork," Jiraiya said simply.
Kakashi's eye began to prickle with heat as he closed it; underneath his Konoha headband, Obito's eye began to weep.
"Now," Jiraiya said fiercely, "let's figure out how to get back home and kick some asses."
The Sharingan saw the world shattering moments before it truly happened, enough time for Shisui to throw every ounce of chakra he had into the most important body flicker of his life. With the Sharingan, he saw Danzou mouth something seconds before his lips even moved, catching the minute muscle movements of his face, projecting and evaluating and calculating in less than a heartbeat's moment.
He passed by Danzou's fleetingly open torso and crashed through the glass pane separating the observation room and the laboratory just as the ceiling began to tremble and cracks began to appear in the earth.
"Now," Danzou smiled, and the room exploded, stone and fire raining from the heavens as the ceilings and the walls of the entire building began to collapse in on themselves.
Shisui dropped his sword mid-jump and his hands blurred through half a dozen seals dizzyingly fast, pouring everything he had into the jutsu.
Sasuke's face looked up him in peaceful, drugged sleep, as debris rained down around him and all of the other children, lying as still as corpses in the collapsing lab. I'm here, cousin, I'm here, Shisui wanted to shout, even as his lungs filled with smoke and ash.
He landed on the floor and slammed his hands down onto the ground.
The laboratory erupted as blue waves of chakra rippled out from the epicenter of his hands, waves of earth reaching up and around to create a perfect dome to shield the children. A perfect darkness fell inside the room. Shisui flinched as he felt the ground beneath and around him rumble and shake as the explosion continued on outside of the dome, bits of buildings and chakra fire raining down onto his construct.
Sweat trickled down the back of his neck as he fueled even more energy into the jutsu. It would have been easier, much easier, just to protect Sasuke, to spirit him out of this building and run like hell for safety.
Shisui looked over at the rows and rows of sleeping children, his Sharingan detecting thirty six beating hearts, thirty six flowing chakra signatures lighting up the dark earthen dome with a beautiful luminescence that only the Sharingan could see.
There was no way he could leave all of them behind.
Distracted, he stretched his senses to cover the entire room, checking over the integrity of his construct, the lives of his thirty six little charges. By the time he noticed the tiny chakra signature at the southern section of the dome, it was too late.
It collapsed open with an ugly sound, letting a fiery light into the dome and casting long shadows over quiet, sleeping faces. The sound of falling rocks grew louder, great slabs of concrete cracking open the earth and causing a hundred little small tremors every moment.
Danzou stooped a little to step into the gap and into the broken dome, wielding Shisui's sword. A ROOT shadow hovered at his heels, chakra-hardened blades in their hands.
"You disappoint me, Uchiha," Danzou said, his craggy face set into an unreadable mask. "I rather expected more from you than this."
Shisui spat onto the ground in answer.
"Well," Danzou said, unruffled. "That's what you get for allowing your emotions and morals to cloud your mind and your duty. If you'd been smarter about this and abandoned the children, you most likely would have been able to escape with your life."
"Fuck you," Shisui said, quiet.
"Shi," Danzou said, no longer smiling. "Finish him, but leave the eyes intact. I want to harvest them."
The shadow detached itself from Danzou's heels and leapt at Shisui, blades dancing wickedly with reflected firelight. Shisui looked up at the cloaked figure, the sliver of white mask visible in the dim light, and waited for the right moment.
Touch was the simplest, easiest way for genjutsu to take hold in the subject; sound was tricky, required extreme focus, and was notoriously inefficient considering the chakra use; eyesight was unreliable and only best worked when in combination with doujutsu, and even then, results were uncertain with the Sharingan.
Shisui needed only his own chakra.
The ROOT agent jumped in the air and towards Shisui, blue flickers of light blurring in the air as the dual blades wove a dangerous steel web. Shisui lifted one hand, the other still linked to the construct through the ground, and made one half-seal.
The shadowed figure fell onto the ground like a rock, blades skittering onto the ground and landing with a clatter in front of Danzou's feet.
Shisui staggered as his chakra levels grew dangerously low, lost to the Sharingan, the costly construct he was maintaining and struggling to rebuild with every bombardment, and now the genjutsu to dispose of the agent.
Danzou looked down distastefully at the ground and the crumpled figure of his tool. "Filth," he said in a low voice.
Shisui struggled to control his hard breathing, his hair now completely drenched in sweat and plastered to his scalp. "He deserved a better master than you," he said, his free hand clenched into a tight, white-knuckled fist. At least it was a quick, painless death; Shisui had used an illusion that heightened the fear and adrenaline of the individual to a lethal level in less than a heartbeat's span. The heart usually collapsed within a few seconds.
"I've heard rumours of your abilities." Danzou stepped forward slowly, his gait even and strong even without the use of a cane. Or perhaps, Shisui slowly realized, his thoughts muddled by chakra exhaustion, Danzou had never needed it in the first place. "But to see proof of it in person is quite different."
He lifted the sword in the air, pointing it steadily at Shisui's heart. "All I do, I do for Konoha," he said, his voice solemn, and let the sword drop.
Shisui tensed and lifted his free hand into another half seal, gathering the remnants of his chakra within himself to prepare one final illusion.
Danzou stepped forward and-
Shisui watched in horror as the Sharingan read Danzou's movements towards Sasuke's table, his body anchored to the ground and to the dome construct he was sustaining. Shisui wasted precious seconds looking over at the other children, the Sharingan registering the weak flow of their chakra, then back over to Danzou's advancing figure, Shisui's own sword growing closer and closer to Sasuke's heart.
If he left his spot, the dome would collapse, unable to withstand the force of the collapsing building without his constant chakra support. The children would die, some crushed, others slowly suffocating in whatever small pockets of air that would form.
If he didn't, Sasuke would die.
Deep down, Shisui knew he had already made the decision, long before this moment ever came to pass.
He tore his hands up from the ground and threw himself into one last body flicker. Around him, the dome groaned as it slowly began collapsing.
The sword passed through Shisui's ribs, scraping against bone and punching through his lungs. Shisui doubled over Sasuke's body, his back curved over the little boy's face, as he coughed blood onto the floor.
"Useless boy," Danzou said softly. "You've always been predictable."
Shisui grinned up at him, flecks of bloody foam ringing his bruised mouth. "Yeah?" he said hoarsely.
"Surprise, motherfucker," Shisui laughed. The dome above them stopped trembling and began glowing a powerful, blinding iridescent blue, stone quickly knitting back together in one cohesive whole.
Danzou ripped the sword out viciously and Shisui nearly blacked out from the pain, blood bubbling up in his throat and his chest as he felt one lung slowly collapse.
"How did you-?!" Danzou roared wildly.
Stars and dots swam in Shisui's vision as he gasped desperately for air. "Did you really think that I would attack you without alerting someone for backup?" he wheezed. "The cavalry's finally arrived, asshole. You better run now if you don't want to get your ass caught."
Even with the Sharingan he could barely even see Danzou's outline anymore; distantly, Shisui thought it must be the blood loss, the pain and maybe even oxygen deprivation robbing him of sight. Even more distantly, Shisui thought he might be dying.
"Your eyes, at least I can have your eyes-"
Shisui managed a shaky grin as he instinctively palmed a kunai in hand from an arm holster, as easy and familiar to him as breathing once had been.
"No," Shisui said, and blinded himself.
The world, Shisui dreamed, was on fire. Or perhaps it was fire- Shisui found that he could no longer care about the difference.
"Amaterasu of the Heavens, answer my prayers, please, damn it, Shisui wake up, please, Shisui-!"
Ah, Shisui thought. Perhaps there was one last thing in the world he did care about after all.
"Itachi," he whispered, lifting a hand up to his cousin's face.
"Oh, Shisui, your eyes," Itachi wept. Shisui could feel the hot salty tears trickling down his little cousin's face.
"Shh," Shisui comforted him, tracing his thumb over Itachi's jaw. "Sasuke?"
"Safe, he's safe, they're all of them safe," Itachi said, his voice shaking. "All thirty six of them, Shisui, you big damn hero."
"Good, good," Shisui sighed and his hand dropped. It was as if in that one breath all the energy in his body had suddenly left him.
"Kurenai…" Shisui searched his fleeting thoughts for what he once had thought important, but now seemed lost in the void. "She...has the intel." Faded memories of a red-eyed, wild-haired woman at a laundromat briefly came to mind.
"Yuuhi Kurenai?" Itachi's voice grew harder and sharper. "She was your handler for the mission?"
Itachi had always been clever...
"'m sorry, Itachi," he finally said, his voice growing fainter and fainter as he struggled to hold on long enough. "F'r leaving you...like...this…"
Shisui could barely feel the tears falling down from Itachi's face and onto his own.
"...It's alright," Itachi said. "It's alright, just hang on for me, okay? We're on our way to the hospital, just hang on, damn it. Don't leave me."
Shisui smiled, one last time.
A/N: So, I've been planning iterations of this chapter (and the various plotpoints contained therein) for about two and a half years now, so it's a little weird and a lot of fun to finally see it written and published in its final form.
If you've been here since then: thank you. It means a lot. And if you're a new reader, welcome! Updates may be slow, but I do intend on seeing this through to the end, which may be a lot closer than you might think...