Chapter dedicated to CatGurl2004. My muse. –pets her- XD

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Only Masashi Kishimoto-sensei does. So chillax.

Mistakes are a fickle thing to those who commit them. Similar to sins, but remotely lacking any religious consequences, man is known only for punishing himself in the face of his faults. Only those highly ignorant and superior to the rest of mankind would patronize those who have been false.

Xxx-xxX

With a sudden maturity, perhaps the same very type that let Itachi's hands push Shisui into the lake he was known and named after for some sort of source of irony, Sasuke's fingers are longer than they used to be. Cuts dawdle less than Fugaku on his hands, and as the tide of their cousin washes out from beneath them Sasuke is planting himself deep into the soil of their clan with the simple accuracy of the throw of shuriken.

Itachi has little time to uproot him (but he will, because he no longer loves his mother and watching her bleed away into a stain on the floor he has walked his entire life with the apron strings that once held him so tightly as a child secured around her neck and waist is much less a burden to him than Sasuke becoming the people he has already watched fade to save him in the first place).

Xxx-xxX

It is with a sort of dry, senseless humor of a man who has lost something to grasp unfamiliar territory in his hands that he catches the simple fact of the color of a shinobi's forehead protector judging Shisui's worth.

The men and women gathered there are not sorted into family, friends, and foes as any normal man would have it be, but simply those who knew Shisui and those who did not care to look beyond his face. Haughty, selfish beings, those who do not bother to use the tools resting in their palms, those who do not bother to catch the flicker of a man behind a boyish face by simply relying on the sharingan that was given to them. Itachi decides that he will one day see everything with a tool so he will not mistake that which he is seeing as such.

Once the blood is on his hands, it will stain his eyes.

But right now, he is still cleaning that which is Shisui from underneath his fingernails (and as though the length of Sasuke's hands affects his senses, Sasuke seems to recognize whom it belongs to, one who is not his brother no matter how much effort he put into himself).

And a world that was mostly red had darkened. No sharingan looks upon him now, for the legend has ceased, and in its place is his younger brother and that which is now black- what has changed is now unchangeable in its newest forms, and the path to tread is told at its best when one will look upon the color of Sasuke's eyes as he will have it.

The funeral for Shisui is as dreary and false lived as a dream-world, cast away in the shadows creeping along their walls and eventually up their spines in a shiver. But everything can fade when that tremor has ended, as soon Shisui's will, and all the dreams become the sins and are a memory once more.

Dreams become the truths at the end of a world that is not their own, and Sasuke's is creeping towards the edge of that which is Itachi.

Dreams have all started here.

Xxx-xxX

Rumors are similar to a nightmare, but coming from false and boasting mouths such prevents Itachi from holding something tight to his chest and forgetting.

Sasuke says gossip is the rain, washing away the news of yesterday and at the funeral for Shisui there is a live storm that drenches the earth and their cousin is gone. He is lowered into the ground more easily than the wails coming from his mother's mouth that is better suited to petty whispering, for truth does not come easily from the mask that is her powder and hairspray which run out onto the gravel to chase after her son.

Itachi cannot say she will not be jealous of her make up.

Mikoto has a bundle of white roses she had hesitantly dug up from her garden that morning clasped between her hands that have attached themselves into the corner of her breasts. She is the mother, Itachi thinks, and she will not be soothed from them.

Fugaku is simply standing respectfully in the same stance he always is in, hands clenched into fists at his sides and back straighter than anyone else's. Sasuke once told Itachi that he liked his father because of that, as if an even spine means anything. After all, Itachi's father has never once had to strangle his best friend in front of memories.

It seems odd, now, that Itachi was remembering everything while he murdered him, from the grass crown Shisui placed on Sasuke's head to the fake smiles he painted over his features- and somehow Itachi only realizes at his funeral despite all his genius that Shisui might've been more like him than he knew. But he lets the rain wash the thought away, because now is the time that Shisui is placed elsewhere. Whether he is forced into the next life through tears or the thunder storm raging overhead that cracks as a whip of punishment over Itachi's back, arching down until he is placing his chin against Sasuke's head and sobbing, and sounds suspiciously like Shisui as he yells and rages further than a storm naturally should.

They should all get out of the rain, now, but things don't matter as much as Mikoto will complain as their shirts and dresses will have to be dry cleaned the next day when someone has died.

Itachi does not cry, but he tries restlessly as everyone else freely screams louder than one would as they die, because it feels unnatural not to.

Shisui once asked him what mistakes he saw when he stared at a person, but the faults are lost in the dark of Sasuke's hair- or perhaps all the ceiling lights broke and shattering, for the momentary relief comes as he promises himself it's a dream.

Xxx-xxX

Shisui had a meaning to his death, perhaps as much as the one of his life, for Itachi had chosen to let him sink into the river they so often lived by more than just for irony. Or perhaps that was all they ever were, because if Itachi remembered right Shisui had once told him that irony was one of his favorite things. Itachi doesn't know what he likes anymore, just as he won't admit that ever since Shisui was gone the list has become frighteningly blank.

And Sasuke is enviously unaffected.

Itachi wishes he would become a child again, an infant where the most important thing was the warmth of Mikoto, but all that was signed and sealed away with the death of Shisui.

With the mangekyou in his possession, Itachi has never felt more blind.

Fugaku is not a stupid man, and recognizes Itachi's actions for what they are. But through the next weeks, he does not say a word to anyone about his son's intentions.

Questions come up- buried as he was Shisui has dug back more faults than answers, and Itachi can't blink past the mistakes. Plans, whether vague or complex to the point of hopelessness, have always made it impossible to ignore what has gone wrong in the face of ruining what one has plotted to happen.

Then again, Itachi killed less Uchihas than he had planned three weeks from the night of Shisui's burial, and he does not assume that it was because of pure coincidence. For despite being the main focus of everything, Sasuke was his biggest mistake, and he has ignored him most of all.

Itachi is only sorry for not thinking he would regret Shisui's death as much as he did.

Sasuke manages to capture him in his eyes bluntly lacking the sharingan whenever Itachi begins to doubt himself- and he thinks that interpreted carefully, Sasuke could manage to theorize that the clan massacre was his older brother's way of telling him he loved him. After all, Sasuke wouldn't accept it that blatantly.

And Sasuke sees better than Itachi, because for the next four days he avoids him as if it was Itachi's fault for killing Shisui.

But in the end, everything was indebted to him. Sasuke broke the mirror, and seven years of bad luck is an invitation to a lifetime of loving his older brother best.

-Only those of bad fortune –breaking mirrors, passing a black cat- have such lack of luck to lower themselves from the level of what once was, godliness and pure prodigious skill, to something of lesser value. Mortal places in rank. They say I am a Kage. But what was I once? We are defined by what lowers or raises us, what brings us to value. That which I work for has left me empty handed, and blind. Irony- things come back from the grave.-

AN: -weirded out- O-o This chapter was so…different? from the rest of the story? I almost want to say it doesn't fit, because it does, but this fanfiction is really making me think of it as a designer clothes collection, where it doesn't exactly add up precisely, but it IS a collection of clothing. Like, it all has a certain theme to it, or something. This has ended up being more a 'collection' of one-shots than it has been a multi-chaptered fic, but I sort of like it better that way.

Fanart:http//s13. photobucket. com/albums/a284/LunaGlossamer/?actionview¤tuchihaoyako05. jpg (Remove Spaces) This was from the LUVERLY CatGurl2004, who draws me bunches of fanart! –huggles her- So say thank you to her for this. So preeetty. OO –stares at picture-

REVIEW PLEASE!!!

(And things'll get MESSY, ye old readers. REAL messy. Like: Itachi killing his clan, ItachixSasuke action, Itachi joining Akatsuki, fun little bits of Akatsuki members, fun little bits of angsty emo shit, etc. etc. In the words of that highly annoying commercial: Be happy, be healthy:D…D: )