What horrors do his crimson eyes behold? These are the unfathomable depths of Uchiha Itachi.

I don't own Naruto nor do I profit from these writings in any way.

"Speaking"

"Thinking"

"Demon"

Hyouhyou

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Life was a routine. After awakening an hour before dawn, three hours before the academy began; he would eat a snack, then dress and spend an hour training. He would train either by practicing his chakra control or running laps through the city. Then he'd return to his apartment to cool down and shower to prepare to go to the academy.

Every element of his life had been turned to his goal of becoming a ninja in the year since the Kyuubi attack. He either studied theory or trained in his free time. He practiced chakra control techniques at all times. As he walked in the direction of the academy, Itachi channeled chakra into his legs and feet. With just enough chakra he would be able to soften his footfalls and hover slightly over the ground, effectively erasing his footprints.

In class, he covertly practiced balancing small items on the knuckles of his hand using chakra. The practice had earned strange looks from his now reticent academy instructors. It had taken a large amount of trial and error and slipping a few places in the class ranks but eventually he had discovered why his chakra control was so abysmal.

To sum up Itachi's chakra control woes, the way that the academy instructors taught channeling and molding chakra was simply inadequate to his needs. Rather than drawing power from a well deep within, channeling his chakra was now like sitting next to a geyser and getting soaked in the overflow of power. He surmised that to protect itself from the strain caused by the rush of power filling him, his body was instinctively restraining the amount of chakra that he could use at any one time.

The result of his situation was that Itachi's body would channel increasingly larger amounts of power until there was a sudden surge of what could only be the demon's chakra. Immediately after the power surge his celestial gates would restrain his power and his techniques would be underpowered for days.

The solution that he had found was to change the way that he channeled and molded his chakra. Channeling chakra was almost effortless, too effortless. If he drew too much chakra then his body would restrict his power in an effort to protect itself. Instead of drawing out his power Itachi allowed his chakra to flow freely from himself and focused solely on how to quickly reduce the flow to prevent the power surges from triggering an involuntary response.

Molding chakra was an easier challenge as instead of trying to shape the chakra into the form that he wanted, he simply envisioned the effect that he needed and poured the appropriate amount of power into the technique. The methods that he had come up with made his chakra control slightly imprecise but that was a problem that could only be resolved by practice alone.

On the evenings after the academy Itachi often stayed behind to practice shuriken no jutsu or traveled to a pond to practice fire ninjutsu, often with an Uchiha member watching in the distance.

To those who watched him Itachi seemed to live his live as if nothing was wrong. It scared the shit out of people. The unflappable child had gone from abysmal chakra control in the days after the sealing to the best in his class, possibly the entire academy, within the space of a year. His family provided him with monthly gift hampers of food and training equipment but kept their distance otherwise. His parents saw him rarely and he had not been invited to his younger brother's introduction to the clan or even allowed anywhere near to Sasuke or any other child in the village. Wise minds worried about the affects of this isolation and fully expected him to act out in response to this ostracism.

All of the subtle slights, meaningful pauses in conversation, harsh glares and muttering when he passed were simply ignored like the water falling off of a duck's back. Where grocers and shop owners dared not to deny service to someone bearing the Uchiha banking talisman, some businesses would provide unnecessarily brusque and deliberately rude and demeaning service.

Itachi mentally catalogued the stores according to necessity. Those food or weapon stores that attempted to provide him with substandard items in addition to substandard service were not worthy of his patronage. The storeowners that provided vital supplies but were rude to him were treated to total indifference regardless of what they said. Storekeepers generally took his business since money had nothing to do with personal prejudices. The few who quietly but blatantly refused service were treated to a weapon that was rarely unsheathed in public, Evil Itachi.

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"You heard me we don't serve your kind here!" Grunted the bookstore clerk.

Itachi pitched his voice to garner the attention of the nearby customers. "You don't serve Uchiha?!"

Flustered, the man stuttered a denial, "T-That's not what I mean at all!"

Itachi pitched his voice even higher to give it a more childish quality, he widened his eyes and demurely covered his lower lip with a hand to hide the fact that he had bitten his lip and was really crying tears of pain.

"Why don't you like the Uchiha?! Don't you love Konoha?!"

Several incoming customers left at the ruckus and a masked jounin in the adult section looked up at them from the cover of the newest installment in the Icha Icha series. By now the shopkeeper was sweating from nervousness. He leaned over to the seven year old boy and hissed.

"Get out!"

Itachi replicated something that he had seen his younger relatives do in their more unruly moments. He puffed his cheeks cutely and leaned toward the old man and let loose with tears and a shrieking cry.

"Why! Why! Why! Whhhhhyyyy!!"

Startled by the unexpected tantrum the storeowner realized that people were beginning to gather outside his store. Some people who couldn't see what was happening were muttering about mean old men and unruly children. The man realized that it was only a matter of time before the police force came to investigate the disturbance.

"All right fine, I'll sell them to ya!"

The tears, screaming and foot stomping abruptly stopped and the boys face quickly adopted a shrewd look. With a sinking heart the bookkeeper imagined what the boy would look like with horns, bat wings and a pitchfork.

"You know thirty ryo is a bit steep for some used books. I'll take them off your hands for five."

"They're worth thirty brat."

"Tsk, tsk… And the kiddy porn?"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the cache of kiddy porn that I'll say you're hiding in the cellar under the floor. And that you just tried to convince me to pose for your collection. I sure that you'll be vindicated but by then my dad will probably have torn this place apart looking for it and you know…" Leaning in with a sinister air he whispered. "I heard that they 'do' things to people like you in jail, stuff happens."

The old man's eyes widened, "That's blackmail!"

Itachi turned his head aside and watched the shopkeeper out of the corner of his eye, speaking in what was obviously a false childish tone he warbled, "I'm sowy jiji, what does bwakmwail mean?"

The man looked like he was having a fit. Unable to speak coherently he simply threw the books at Itachi and pointed at the door. The satisfied child caught the books expertly and made his way out of the shop.

Taking in the curious looks that he was receiving Itachi calmly gestured to the paling shopkeeper and cutely cocked his head to one side.

"Hey lady, that ero-jiji just said that I should ask you. What does fellatio mean? And why is it all that you're good for?"

He slipped away under the cover of the screams.

Heh, Evil Itachi.

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Life in Konoha wasn't as intolerable to Itachi as it could have been. The navy blue high-collared Uchiha shirt hid the lower portion of his jaw, mostly concealing the whisker-scars on his cheeks from view. The crest on his back and his silky dark hair gained him passage and admittance to stores and through the streets with a minimum of fuss so long as he kept his head down or there was a police officer nearby as there always seemed to be.

His instructors seemed wary of him but generally marked him fairly. Not that they ever had cause to take away marks. Aside from a three month period during which he had been unable to use bunshin no jutsu Itachi had consistently remained at the top of his class in senjutsu, ciphers, shurikenjutsu, taijutsu and basic skills such nawakiri no jutsu.

His abilities which had earned him vocal praise from his sensei were now met with awkward silence. His classmates had all noticed the difference especially since their parents had begun to warn them away from him. He had once overheard two instructors musing about his suitability as a ninja and the drastic fall and then rise in his ninjutsu skills. They never explicitly said 'why' he was unsuitable but parents had been vocal in their relief about his decision to opt out of the graduation test when he was six.

The shinrabanshou within his body had not activated with the sealing of the fox. Itachi could only in hindsight spot the incidents when it seemed that he had known or done something unusual. If his father's words could be trusted, then he could hardly judge what would be unusual for him, since the technique had been implanted at his birth. The only indication that it might be in him were the reactions of others. How many times had an instructor commented on his unusual talent for the ninja arts, or on his advanced knowledge?

All in all Uchiha Itachi lived his life quietly and alone. Whispers followed after him wherever he went but no sign of discomfort ever left his apathetic shell. Eventually the day that he had been waiting for approached. The academy graduation exam would begin in two days.

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"Next up, Hyuuga Hideo, please come into the exam room." A chunin academy instructor called out.

Itachi sat next to a window in the upper back row of the academy lecture room as he reminisced about the two days of rigorous testing. Rigorous for everyone else except for him that is. Honestly, were they even trying with the ciphers? They used a simple polyalphabetic substitution with letter transposition using the angular declination of the sun at the beginning of the exam as a cryptovariable. The hidden message was an obscure history of the order in which the different areas of Konoha had been settled with certain words and phrases misspelled or out of order which conveyed the true message.

"Hokage-sama loves to eat hot manjyu with his tea on cold evenings."

The misspelled words also held a message in a simple cipher.

"He also enjoys reading dirty books and is a closet pervert."

"Weird."

The most difficult part of the exam was deciding whether to go along with the widespread cheating that was taking place in the examination room or finish that portion of the test right there so he could rest before the next test.

The rest of the written exams passed in a similar manner to the bemused child who was genuinely puzzled by the sometimes comical looks of extreme concentration and the looks of irritation when he foiled attempts to cheat using his test-paper. There was nothing he could do about the Hyuuga though. Except for re-arranging the answers in the correct pattern thirty seconds before the end of the exam, the boy's look of horror was priceless on his normally sanguine face.

"That's why I prefer pencils to pens."

Oops, channeling Evil Itachi again, gotta keep those wings tucked in.

The physical exam had been more of a challenge by comparison. Though there may have been a possible assassination attempt during the survival test. He had saved one of the darts from the hidden snare that had been disguised by a chunin-level genjutsu and left on his path. His examiner had shrugged the advanced trap off as perhaps being left from another training exercise. A chunin-level trap, carelessly left in an area designated for new genin or academy students to hold a survival exam where the possibility of injury was already high.

"Right."

There was a poorly disguised look in the chunin's eyes that boded ill for Itachi's taijutsu evaluation. The chunin couldn't actually do anything that would seriously harm him but he could hamper Itachi's taijutsu score by going all out, that and land several painful blows.

Itachi settled into a non-academy ready stance that had been taught to him by an uncle when he was five. It was the basis for the Uchiha clan's taijutsu, Sekkendou, an adaptive and reactive style that focused on analyzing an opponent's attack and counter-attacking even as one is being attacked. When combined with the sharingan's analytical and chakra sensing abilities, the Uchiha fighting style took its true form as an eclectic system of techniques that evolved in the midst of battle and often left their opponents wondering if the Uchiha could see the future.

Even Itachi had underestimated the potency of whatever poison had coated the darts. Deciding to save himself the trouble of whatever the chunin who was 'evaluating' him was planning Itachi had palmed the dart that he had taken from the snare in the survival test, into his hand, between the knuckles of his index and middle finger.

When turning aside the fast and brutal blow that the chunin had struck at him with, Itachi had stabbed the tip of the dart into the crook of the man's elbow. Immediately the offending arm went limp and the chunin's face gained a faint green tinge. The man wobbled backwards and seemed ready to cry out as he collapsed backward.

Itachi judged the moment perfectly. He waited until the man's mouth was fully open before unleashing a roundhouse kick with all of his pent up frustration behind it. The instructor's jaw was unhinged with a sickeningly wet and meaty pop. Teeth and blood sprayed some of the on looking instructors as the injured man fell on his back and began choking on blood.

Ignoring the pathetic wheezing sounds coming from the fallen teacher Itachi walked past the academy nursing staff and his awestruck classmates. Standing before his chief instructor, he waited until the man focused upon the boy standing before him. With an innocent pout and a slight moue of confusion he asked the man a single question.

"Ano…Sensei, do I pass, de gozaru?"

"Down, Evil Itachi, down!"

Incidentally, no one ever did figure out what Itachi had done. The chunin instructor certainly wasn't talking, even after his jaw was popped back in and the wires were removed. The poison was a fast acting cocktail of soporifics and pain-inducing hallucinogens with amnestic side effects that quickly broke down in the blood-stream. The man had intended to leave Itachi helpless, in pain and afraid in the forest where no one would find him for hours.

The nurses just thought that the chunin had been kicked in the head too hard. By the time that fully certified medic-nin got their hands on him the poison was already out of the man's system. The chunin instructors thought that their colleague had been either incompetent or careless and that such an injury was to be expected when underestimating a genius student.

Itachi's Taijutsu score was the highest ever seen since Maito Gai's explosion of youth.

"Seishun!"

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After the disappointment of the written exam and the excitement of the physical exam Itachi thought that things were looking up. The ninjutsu portion could only get better right? Maybe his instructor would steal the scroll of forbidden seals and he'd be forced to hunt him down.

"I'm not that lucky."

"Tenzen Mai !"

Itachi looked around the classroom with an air of disinterest. There was only one other student remaining. He was an Uchiha like Itachi, a number of years older though like the rest of the class. Uchiha Shisui, he thought the boy's name was, perhaps ten or eleven years old. Young, but nothing compared to Itachi's seven years of age.

The boy in the lower row felt his stare and turned to look at Itachi with a slightly challenging look. A challenging look that faded into mild irritation as Itachi pretended not to see him and that he had been looking over the other boy's head at the chunin by the door all along. It seemed that Shisui was beneath Itachi's notice even though the other boy was second to Itachi in just about every subject in the academy.

"Uchiha…Itachi!"

At the chunin's call Itachi calmly stood and walked down the stairs to the front of the class. Following the directions of the chunin, Itachi crossed the hall and entered the examination room. Usagi-sensei and another chunin instructor sat at a table in front of the class. They had finished marking a paper when Itachi entered the room. Itachi walked slowly into the room taking in with a cool gaze; the brief flash of irritation that flickered across the face of Usagi-sensei's assistant.

As Itachi came to a stop before the two men Usagi-sensei spoke, "Ah! Itachi I don't need to tell you that you've already passed the exam. Make three bunshin of yourself and you have the Rookie of the Year Title in the bag!"

From the cleam in the assistant's eye it seemed that the man knew of Itachi's past difficulty with the technique. Usagi-sensei seemed oblivious to his partner's behavior. Itachi tapped his chin and thought for a moment. There was this one technique that he was fairly certain had come from the shinrabanshou.

His fingers formed handseals in the blink of an eye, too fast for even the chunin to follow. With a soft murmur and a puff of smoke five Itachi stood before the instructors.

The assistant looked livid but Usagi-sensei was pleased as he handed the hitaite to Itachi. Both men were surprised however when the Itachi standing before them threw the forehead protector to the one exiting the room, who caught and pocketed the item before leaving. The chunin could only stare in shock at the boy who stared back at them impertinently before vanishing in a cloud of smoke.

"K-K-Kage Bunshin!!"

"You rock Clone evil Itachi, or evil clone Itachi or whatever."

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AN: I haven't forgotten about Naruto I'm just planning what role he should play in the story. This is the second chapter of the story and where things really begin. I know that Itachi's personal relationships need to be explored and I will. As for Itachi's parents giving him up for the sealing the jury is still out about their deeper motivations. The most obvious one is for the power of the Kyuubi to combine with the Shinrabanshou. They expected to have Itachi under their thumb but the Sandaime enacted an enforced separation. The Uchiha clan didn't like the idea but are convinced that a few years of separation would only highlight the bonds of family. How did I do? Somehow Evil Itachi reminds me less of evil Miharu and more of one of my kid brother's friends who used to think that going around kicking adults in the crotch was funny. TTFN