Warning: Graphic animal abuse, graphic child abuse
"He's red."
It's the only thing Itachi can think of saying when staring down at the bundle of bloody fat nestled in his mother's glistening arms, standing amidst a pile of soiled blankets next to the birthing tub. It's screaming and crying like he's never heard before, so loud he wants to pinch its nose closed and cover its mouth to shut it up. Itachi wonders how all its organs fit into such a small space, but he wonders the same about his own belly.
"He's fresh full of oxygen," Mikoto whispers around an open-mouthed smile, black eyes fixated on the bloody creature. "Look how tiny he is." He hates how her breath whistles over her dry tongue. "Isn't he tiny? Look, Fu."
Father's face is marred with a soft grin, ugly. "Almost as tiny as you," he reflects. His grin widens when his eyes settle on Itachi. "'Small as a loaf.' That's what Akiyama used to say."
Father's footsteps are light through the house the following month; the eye of the storm passing over. He helps mother more often, cooks dinner when she's busy tending to the ravenous fat in the crib, even goes so far as brushing his hand through Itachi's hair and saying, "I love you," before bed one night. Itachi grabs his wrist with both hands overhead to force his palm down, keep him close, keep touching me.
Itachi realizes this new addition to their family does little to sabotage his position within it, and that is a curious thing.
Then god comes down and ruins everything.
No matter how many nights he waits by father's door, he never touches Itachi again.
Sasuke reminds him of kittens and baby birds; little, warm things he can crush inside his fists. He likes prodding him and feeling the way his fat body molds down to the bone like an overripe tomato. A physical display of Itachi's frustration, he's a ball of plush pocked with red fingerprints and dents. A chubby stress ball; a crunchy baby bird; he wrings Sasuke's arms with both hands just to see the agony blow out his kitten eyes.
He watches him cry in his lap with those pitiful, little fists held to his chest. Sasuke watches him, too, peeks out beneath clumped lashes with his toothless mouth gaped, incapable of deciphering where the pain is coming from when it's just the two of them.
Incapable of conceptualizing how someone he loves could hurt him.
The misery blurring his dark eyes is an otherworldly sort of cathartic.
Itachi falls in love.
"But mom made those," says Sasuke in a small voice, feet turned inward while he nervously picks his nails, looking up with black kitten eyes. He's got tomato guts splattered over his face like real guts. Itachi stares at him for a second, fist dripping.
"She won't know it was you," he says. "How's she going to find out?" Sasuke seems to hesitate, still not taking the tomato offered. "Come on. It's fun. I do it all the time." Not to mother's fruit, but he might as well be. Small fingers pry his open and take the tomato, his little brother holding it in both hands, hesitant. Itachi grins. "Like this." He claps Sasuke's hands together and watches the juice spatter Sasuke's face, tongue snaking out to clean whatever hit his own mouth. Blinking, lips softly parted to expose his upper-front teeth, Sasuke opens his hands to see the ruined mess inside. "Isn't it fun?"
His brother's nose scrunches. "Kinda a little," murmurs Sasuke. Itachi watches him nibble the tomato's remains off the heel of his palm. "What else can you squish?" he asks.
"Everything."
Kitten eyes look up with glittering excitement. "Really?" asks Sasuke. "Can I see?"
Itachi nods. "Only if you keep it a secret."
He takes Sasuke into the woods where no one will find them, where the mommy birds make their nests low in the branches.
Sasuke comes out different from when he went in.
There are cats everywhere around their house because father won't stop feeding them. When he thinks no one's looking, Sasuke tries to trick them into believing he's a cat too. He skitters around the backyard on all fours, mewling and yowling to himself. Itachi likes watching him because he knows he shouldn't be.
Baby brother is truly a terror.
All the strays bat and hiss the second Sasuke gets too close. Itachi nearly laughs when one snags him by the nostril with a hooked claw, Sasuke suddenly reverting to human and leaning back on his shins, desperately trying to back out of the pain. The cat shrieks and springs from his lap, leaving Sasuke huddled with his hands covering his face. His shoulders hop to his ears.
Itachi lurches.
The strays scatter.
His bare heels thud the grass beside Sasuke, hand striking out to grab a fistful of cat scruff. Sasuke screams for him to stop. Claws slicing up his arm, Itachi twists at the waist and throws the cat with all his might, sending it soaring cartwheels over the wall and into the back alley. He hears the meaty thud of it making contact with something.
"Stop! Don't be mean!" Tiny hands pound the side of his leg. Itachi looks down to find Sasuke weeping, his left nostril bleeding a ribbon into the dip of his Cupid's bow. "They're my friends!" he urges.
"Animals don't have feelings."
Sasuke whimpers through spitty lips, fisting into his pant leg. He leans his forehead against the side of Itachi's knee.
"You know that."
"They're my friends," Sasuke weakly protests.
"I'm your friend," says Itachi. His little brother meets his harsh stare with uncertain eyes. "I'm not good enough for you?"
That isn't true and he knows it, because father loves him more.
Sasuke shakes his head fervently. "You're my best friend!" he assures Itachi, whose stare remains unwavering. Demanding further contribution. He deserves to cry for implying anything of the sort.
"I'm your only friend." Itachi shifts and forces Sasuke off his knee—forces him to meet his gaze without an anchor. "I love you more than the whole wide world."
Scooping forward, throwing his arms back around Itachi's leg, Sasuke nuzzles his bloody nose into his thigh. "I love you, too!" Panic laces the confession and guts it hollow. The words themselves are all he wanted; sincerity means nothing to him.
Itachi brushes him off and teaches him how to stop cuts from bleeding, his baby brother sneezing throughout with bloodshot eyes. Father mentions a week later that he hasn't seen his favorite cat in a while. Sasuke erupts at the table in tears to confess that he killed it, making him a liar.
Something he will have to remember.
Itachi stays up listening to him cry and feels rejuvenated the next day.
They're sitting on the dock together watching the clouds reflect off the lake, the sun's glare forcing Itachi to squint. Father is quiet beside him, still dressed in his uniform, legs long enough that the heels of his sandals kiss the water. Fingers folded gently in his lap, Itachi stares at him and waits. Nothing comes.
"Am I in trouble?"
Father's chest rises with a deep inhale, lifting his head to look out over the lake. "Should you be?" he asks. Itachi thinks before shaking his head. Dark eyes roll toward him—black and shallow and human. "Be honest." He didn't have to hear that to know father disagrees. They've had this discussion plenty of times.
"Is mother angry?" asks Itachi.
Father sighs again. "That's something you should ask her yourself." There's a brief pause. "I told her you'd be apologizing once we're home."
Itachi looks down at his hands, fiddles with his nails, chewing the insides of his cheeks in consideration. "How come I only have to be honest with you?" When he looks back up, father's eyes are even darker than before.
"Who told you you can lie to your mother?"
Itachi holds his gaze with knitted brows. "You did," he says. "You told her I'd say sorry."
The look his father gives him is a railroad stake between the eyes. "You do as you're told," Fugaku answers.
He isn't the only one in this family that doesn't require sincerity; mother accepts his apology as if nothing had ever happened to begin with.
The flattened cat in the back alley reeks for an entire week.
He remembers being very small when mother taught him to cut tomatoes. It's one of the softest memories he has.
Four feet tall, eight years old, looking up at mommy with bright, curious eyes as she took fruit into her hands and crushed it into mush. It's okay if you squeeze too hard at first, she told him. It all tastes the same.
But it's broken, now, Itachi had contested.
It's okay if they break. The sound of a tomato's flesh popping echoes down the empty alley of his memories. Mommy had guts on her lips. Just try to be more careful with the next one, alright?
Itachi always thought tomatoes were the closest thing in size and mass to Sasuke's heart.
Alright.
"Do baby birds have bones in them?" Sasuke asks him beneath the low-hung branches of a dogwood, white petals scattered over the dirt beneath his huddled feet.
Itachi has both hands clasped together out in front of him, locked upside down, the thick roadway veins of his wrists popping out proudly—like they're begging to be cinched off by a noose-knife. The fact his hands can hold so much violence inside: An orgasm of the id.
"Don't you hear them?" Itachi answers him in a whisper.
There is an underlying rage living inside of him that he has yet to put a face to. A constant buzz beneath his skin, a fever he can't sweat out; when there's nothing left to break, Itachi rakes fingernails over his pale thighs and writes curse words in red, risen flesh. Every word mother hates. Every word father cuffs his head for.
Secret, little revenges that aren't capable of fulfilling him anymore at this age.
The first time he stoned a cat was at five years old and it ruined him. Cried and wept and sobbed in the bathhouse for what felt like years when it lasted only minutes. I just wanted to see it. Wanted to see the look on something's face when it's horrified and begging for forgiveness. Wanted to know what he should imagine when murdering the parents who raised him as a fatted calf.
Wanted to know what it felt like to have someone cawing and clambering for his mercy.
Wanted that someone to look exactly like the crying, kitten-eyed boy he fell in love with.
Animals and children are easy to abuse. No one respects them. He certainly doesn't. The cat he stoned turned into four and the rest is gore-glazed history. Something has wronged him; something has raped him; it left a thing behind that's eating him from the inside out.
He is going to find it and he is going to kill it.
He sees it peeking through the sliding doors and every kitty-scream and baby-birdy-gurgle vomits through his system and retches out his eyes, the bones of a hundred tiny animals crunched between clenched molars. Sasuke's throat is entirely red with his seven-year-old tendons jutting out. Begging for noose-knives. Begging for mercy. He's as red as a tomato. He's two inches away from Itachi's face.
All he smells is the urine dripping down Sasuke's thighs.
His voice weaves through his caged teeth like poison: "Say you're sorry."
And Sasuke tries. He really tries, gaping and spluttering and choking while Itachi cinches his neck tight as a vice. He's so short he has to bend over to strangle him and it's infuriating.
Father stops him this time, but next time he won't have the chance.