I'm still alive!
To those who may have worried (I'm just flattering myself here), you need not do so. I swear, I know what's going to happen in this story and how it's going to end. It's just that I've been super busy with school and such that I can't guarantee frequent updates. None the less, thank you so much for following this story and thank you for your reviews. I hope you enjoy this story as much as I do.
As always, thank you for choosing to read this.
Adversarial.
Despite all the contradicting testimonies against this, the fact was that Itachi was a crier. Though it may seem that he wasn't the type of guy to just let the tears shed, he was. People generally saw him as the kind of person who generally didn't show much emotion, and granted he didn't exactly sob while he shed tears, but the fact still remained that the stoic eighteen year old did in fact have feelings and he did cry.
Crying was an activity he found very therapeutic, especially when violence was not an applicable source of emotional outlet. And thus, like a poor, sad, sad, little man, whenever Itachi felt sufficiently stressed, distressed, upset, or emotional, he sat in his room alone and cried. Two nights after his last meeting with Hisaki, this was exactly what he did.
Sometimes, good people are put into situations where they must carry out bad deeds. Such was especially the case when one took up the occupation of shinobi, in which situations were constantly changing and sometimes, the bad deeds became inevitable. The year he met Hisaki was also the same year that the first mission casualty fell by his hand.
On Wednesday, the day after Sasuke had accused Hisaki of being his girlfriend, Itachi was sent on an important mission. It was more or less an espionage mission, seek out a group of outlaws who were threatening the safety of Konoha and its surrounding villages, find out what they were planning to do, and stop them, if need be. The mission was simple enough, one that only really required the services of one shinobi, but as with general protocol, shinobi worked in teams of three. So he, along with two other both newly promoted jounins embarked on their mission.
Itachi had never previously worked with these two ninjas, but because of his young age (Itachi was younger than both of them), he was not shown the sort of respect that a squad leader would regularly have. Itachi didn't mind this in the slightest, for it had never mattered to him what other people thought. The complication came when (perhaps tired and fed up of a weekend of intelligence work) one of his team members had downright refused to follow his orders.
The group of outlaws were strengthening in numbers and there was ambition of an invasion of Konoha and usurping the Hokage's power. Had it gone Itachi's way, he would have returned to the village, informed the Hokage and before the weekend, the group of thugs would have been apprehended. Perhaps overconfident because of his recent promotion, one of Itachi's squad members, a man by the name of Niwashima Hiroto was insistent that the right decision was to personally teach the group a lesson. He might have overlooked the fact that they were outnumbered at least ten to one, and despite Itachi's squad likely being more skilled than any of the street thugs, it would not be efficient or productive.
Yet despite Itachi's constant warnings, before they could return to Konoha, the idiot of a man had snuck off; trying to take the group of bandits off guard and Itachi had to go take back his man. Hiroto was injured and losing the fight when Itachi and their third man arrived. Of course, the group was no match for the combined efforts of three Konoha jounins and Itachi's sharingan, even if one was injured. In less than an hour, most of the thugs were incapacitated, some had fled, but some gave chase as Itachi and his team were returning to the village. There was a pursuit, and they couldn't move nearly as fast while supporting an injured man. One of the pursuers was faster than anyone on Itachi's squad could have predicted and in an effort to hinder the man, Itachi threw a kunai at him.
He had been aiming to hinder or disable. Generally, Itachi's aim was excellent, regardless of the size or movement of the target and he could throw his weapon with such speed that by the time a target could react, the weapon would have already hit. This man however, was a very talented ninja himself and saw it coming just at the nick of time, which would be his downfall. He moved to dodge and instead of hitting his shoulder as it would have, the kunai scraped past his neck, severing his cartoid artery.
The man shouted in surprise and pain. Looking back, Itachi saw what seemed to be a sea of red. Blood spurted out from his neck, splattering everything that was within a close enough vicinity. It came out in sync to the pumping of the man's heart. There was nothing that anyone could do. He gasped and gurgled and in less than a minute, he fell thirty feet from the tree top, dying if not already dead. Itachi and his team were gone before he hit the ground.
His uninjured teammate sighed with a breath of relief and grinned nervously at Itachi. "Good one," he said. "I thought we were never going to lose him."
Hiroto had gone unconscious and Itachi didn't reply so the entire journey was silent but for Itachi's thoughts screaming panic at him. For the first time ever, a man had died by his hand. Perhaps he was not an innocent man, but a man none the less. In the time it took for Itachi to blink, he had gone from being a public servant, a peacekeeper, to being a killer. He had taken a life, and the only reaction anyone else had was to tell him it had been a good one. The world did not make sense.
By the time he'd reported the details of the mission to the Hokage and returned home, it was very late into the night. Both the Sandaime and his own father had commended him for his noble and hard work on the mission, telling him all the things they thought he'd wanted to hear. All the while, it seemed as if death had become an acceptable norm to everyone around him.
That night, he didn't sleep. Alone in his bedroom, Itachi stayed up the whole night and shed silent tears, part in sadness and guilt and frustration and part for fear that the old nightmares would come to haunt him.
The very last time he saw his brother, saw anyone for that matter, he cried. Maybe it was because his body was so sick and so tired of life, of fighting to live and living to fight... or maybe it was because he had no more tears to shed. That time, the last time he saw Sasuke, the last time that he saw, he had cried blood.
"Good morning," Hisaki Uchiha greeted him the next morning with a sweet smile when they met each other. This time, it was inside the Uchiha complex. They were bound to have come across each other there eventually. Because he was so tired, he hardly recognized her. Everything he saw was no more than a focused blur.
"Morning," said Itachi, who was so tired, yet too afraid of old horrors etched into his mindset to have gotten any sleep. On top of being tired, he was also feeling impatient and very grumpy that morning. It was the equivalent of having gotten up on the wrong side of the bed, only he'd never actually gone to bed.
He had done a lot of thinking, and he decided that he was very angry. He was angry at himself, first and foremost, for having done the horrible deed. He was also angry at his idiotic teammate, for having been so stupid and reckless in the first place. He was also substantially annoyed at the Hokage and at his own parents, for not understanding his dilemma. After that, he felt rather betrayed because it occurred to him that they (all being accomplished ninja) must have taken lives during their careers too.
"You look like you're dead," Hisaki quipped rather cheerfully. She had only just gotten back from taking Naruto back to the Hokage and the little man always put her in a good mood.
Perhaps 'dead' was the trigger word, but the moment she said it, Itachi felt his annoyance rising once again. Now he was angry at her too. He found it hard to believe that even she, the girl who cried at a memorial stone every other Tuesday, could use such a subject so flippantly. She must have recognized that what she said had upset him, because she stopped smiling too.
"Wow, sorry," said Hisaki, looking almost mockingly concerned. "I wasn't aware that you were so opposed to being teased."
Itachi scowled. What did she know? She was just a stupid insensitive girl who'd probably never had an ounce of pressure from anyone to do anything. As soon as the malicious thought came, Itachi felt bad for even thinking it. It wasn't her fault he was a ninja, or that she didn't know what was upsetting him or that every day of his life he had to carry out tasks that opposed his personal ethics.
"Why are you so quiet today?" she asked him. This was a strange question because as far as Itachi was aware, he had never been verbose around her to begin with.
"I am I any different than I was before?" he asked.
"Yes," she said dryly. "Usually you're an impartial, apathetic silent. Today, your silence is angry...and brooding, and sulky." When he didn't reply to this with more than a scowl and narrowing of his eyes, she continued. "Anyways, it's none of my business what's on your mind. You don't have to tell me if you're not inclined to do so."
"Alright, I'm not inclined to do so," said Itachi firmly.
"Fine then," said Hisaki, sounding like an affronted child.
"Fine," said Itachi too.
They stood there, glaring each other down in a way more befitting of two eight year olds than eighteen year olds.
"Where are you going?" she asked him finally.
"That's hardly your business either," Itachi pointed out irritably. When he first saw her that morning, Itachi had no intentions of acting this way but the more she deflected his anger, the more irritated he got and the more he wanted her to share in his frustrations. Truthfully, he had been heading home for breakfast after his morning training, which was never a big deal or much of a secret.
"Itachi," she said, looking him right in the eyes. Itachi almost averted her eyes but when she caught his gaze, she held it. He realized in a short moment that Hisaki was a very pretty girl. She was beautiful in a very typically Uchiha way, like his own mother, or more like Junri, whose appearance Itachi only vaguely remembered. She had very kind eyes, and a lot of love.
There was a time when no one in the village looked twice at Itachi. There was a time when he was recognized as no more than the son of Fugaku and Mikoto, an Uchiha. There was a time when words like 'genius' or 'prodigy' were not associated with his name. During that time, Junri Uchiha, who was a good friend of Itachi's mother, would often visit. Itachi, who was so young, was not so aware of who she was, or what position she held in the clan, but he liked her.
Junri was very kind to him. She laughed very easily, and she never treated him like he was baby. Even at a young age, Itachi did not enjoy being patronized by adults who believed they could see through his every intention and correct his behaviour because they were older and wiser. Junri used to sit with Itachi at the kitchen table and have conversations with him.
When he was four, Junri and her husband died on a mission.
"What?" Itachi replied, suddenly feeling very tired and very worn out. He wanted nothing more than to be alone and to be able to sleep in peace. He sighed. Warm hands met his cheeks and right before Hisaki pointed it out, he realized it for himself. The tears had blurred his vision minutes before and drop by drop, they rolled down his cheeks, burning his skin along the way.
"You're crying."