"...You see…I am Itachi."

Sakura felt a flicker of fear at this solemn declaration--after all, it wasn't entirely impossible that a ninja as powerful as Itachi could or would do something as bizarre as implanting himself in his younger brother's body (Orochimaru had done it, after all)--but the crazed look in those dark eyes told her that Sasuke was still not fully in his right mind at the moment, and thus the verity of anything he said was suspect.

Nonetheless it was only with great difficulty that she managed to ask, "Are you saying...are you saying that Itachi has...possessed you? Just like Orochimaru did?"

The Uchiha shot her a searing what are you, stupid? look. "Of course not."

"Then what—?"

"—But we're the same...he and I, we really are the same now. I...have become Itachi..."

Abruptly Sakura stood and, leaning forward, grasped his upper arms and squeezed them tightly, giving him a slight shake. "What are you talking about, Sasuke?"

Eyes eerily blank, he stared past her, over her shoulder, and murmured almost dreamily, "I am following so closely in his footsteps, sometimes I'm sure I'm in his shoes, and that we're walking together, inside one another..."

"No, Sasuke, you're wrong," she insisted. "You...you went your own way. Away from us, and away from Itachi as well." She shook her head slowly. "The two of you are so different, I just don't see it...how are you at all like Itachi?" Other than the fact that both of you chose ways that were filled with darkness? she just barely kept herself from adding.

Sasuke's gaze cleared somewhat, slowly refocusing, and as he looked up at her solemnly, for a moment she could almost believe that he was sane again. "In the end...I, too, was unable to walk the path."

What? she thought, but she bit back the question and remained silent, waiting for him to elaborate on his own.

"I...killed them. I killed all of them." The words were calm, emotionlessly flat, and he was staring down at his hands where they rested limply on the covers before him. "I'm a murderer just like he was...our hands are both covered in layers of blood, so much that we could never hope to be truly clean again." His eyes were wide and guileless, but unmistakably mad once more as he stared up at her, that slight, unnerving smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "It was our destiny, our purpose, that the color of our hands should match our eyes. It was what we were born for, after all."

She was losing him again, and quickly, too...this time probably for good, or at least for a long while. She knew the signs well enough to know that she didn't have much time, and she had a very important question for him--a question that she had to know the answer to, or else Tsunade would almost certainly have him killed once Sakura told her everything the Uchiha had said thus far. "Sasuke." She shook his shoulders again, much harder this time, as if hoping to somehow shake his sanity back into him. "Sasuke, you have to listen, you have to answer me—just one more very important question!"

A flicker of comprehension crossed his face at the urgency in her tone, which she knew was the closest thing she'd get to any real form of acknowledgment or consent.

"You said before that Orochimaru is gone...how did you...get him out of you?"

"I didn't."

"What?" Sakura gulped, jerking her hands back from his shoulders and just barely resisting the urge to scramble away from the bed. "But you said—"

He scowled at her faintly. "I said that he's gone...and he is. But it was not my doing."

"Not your...? Then who—?"

"Itachi."

She blinked. "W-what?"

"Itachi was the one who freed me..." His scowl deepened, and he stared down at his clenched fists. "He...saved me...from being Orochimaru's puppet for the rest of my pathetic half-life." Sasuke snorted, a wry smile faintly curling about his mouth. "Of course, he did it for his own, entirely selfish reasons...saving me was just an accident of sorts, something that was necessary for him to get what he wanted." Bitterness crept into his voice, which had sunk to nearly a whisper, and his eyes narrowed until they were mere chips of obsidian. "And heaven forbid that Uchiha Itachi be kept from getting whatever he wanted!"

"How? How could you have survived?" Sakura whispered. "When a body becomes a host or container for another soul or spirit...when that spirit leaves, the host dies too." She slowly shook her head. "It—it doesn't make sense—"

"Life rarely does. But if you really think that it's impossible, then you seriously underestimated Itachi...and the power of the Uchiha bloodline." A small, smug smile touched his lips. "He used an incomplete, altered form of the Fūin Jutsu: Genryū Kyū Fūjin..." An odd look came over Sasuke's face, his eyes focusing and unfocusing, and he eased himself back down onto his pillow, one hand pressed flat against his forehead. "Although...perhaps he was not as gentle about it as he should have been..." His voice was weakening, but he still managed to give a short, dry laugh. "But then again, Itachi never really was one to be gentle..." He snorted, draping his arm across his eyes, his mouth still turned down bitterly. "He saved me just to turn me into a murderer, how ironically perfect. And of course, I exceeded his expectations on that account by far," he muttered darkly. "Though perhaps it wasn't totally my doing...it's still my fault..."

I'm so confused... Sakura thought with an inward moan. After nearly two months of silence punctuated by crazed ramblings, he had actually told her quite a bit about what had happened, and to her extreme frustration, she found that she was at a loss to understand most of it. Itachi had freed Sasuke from being Orochimaru's container? Never mind the how, which she didn't think they would ever know, but why? Sasuke said it was for a selfish reason, but what could that possibly be? And what's all this talk of being a murderer? Surely Sasuke doesn't think of himself that way just because he killed Itachi. That simply wouldn't make sense; all shinobi ended up taking lives at one point or another--Sakura herself had done so many a time, and though it had been difficult at first, she did not regret it or consider it wrong. Morals didn't even come into the equation: it was kill or be killed, or worse, kill or have your friends and comrades killed.

Well, another straight answer is probably too much to ask for, but here goes nothing... "Sasuke...why do you insist on calling yourself a murderer?"

He dragged his arm away from his face to look up at her wearily. "What else do you call someone who takes the lives of innocents?"

"Innocents?"

"Yes...all the music has died, and it's my fault."

And just like that, he's gone again. Sakura heaved a sigh at his dispassionate tone and seemingly nonsensical words. So much for getting another straight answer.

A haunted look tinged the already readily apparent madness in his eyes, and his hands curled into white-knuckled fists. "Nii-san...he's here with me even now...I have become his container now..."

"Stop it!" she snapped, rapidly tiring of his continued self-contradictions. She sincerely wanted to shove her fingers in her ears to block out his irrational ramblings...or tape his mouth firmly shut with medical tape. "You told me yourself that Itachi is dead!"

"But so long as I am alive, he will never truly die. We share the same blood, the same fate...blood is our fate, blood is our birthright..."

Oh yeah. That medical tape was looking very tempting just now.

She was quite honestly considering it when his eyes suddenly went wide, though the lunatic sheen in them did not fade in the least. "I-I can't stop it...not even when I try...the blood still comes, more and more of it, endlessly..." Sakura shivered at the tone of helplessness and despondence that had entered his voice. "I keep striking the notes, but they don't make any music…they just fall and die…"

Something clicked in Sakura's mind. No...he--he couldn't have...Not Sasuke... Slowly she stood, leaning over the bed once more to force him to look her in the eye. "Who did you kill, Sasuke? Tell me. Tell me now."

But though he was looking straight at her, he didn't seem to have heard her, didn't seem to be aware that she had even spoken, much less asked him a question.

"They're not singing. They wear the notes, but they can't carry the tune. They're all off-key…" He gave an odd sort of chuckle that for some reason made her skin crawl. "Ironic that there is now not a sound in Otogakure..."

She felt her whole body suddenly go cold, as if her blood had turned to ice, and her stomach gave another lurch. I-I'm...oh God, I think I'm right... Legs shaking, she stumbled out of the room, sharply advising the first medic-nin she passed in the hallway to keep an eye on Sasuke, forcing her unsteady legs to carry her onwards.

Tsunade looked up with mild surprise as her ex-apprentice burst into her office, breathless and panting and still dressed in her long white medic's coat.

"Sakura-chan? What's wrong? You look pale as a sheet!"

"Tsunade-shishou, send a recon team to do a sweep of Oto no Kuni—the whole country!" She dropped wearily into the chair in front of the Hokage's desk, propping her elbows on her knees and cradling her head in her hands. "And though it…probably doesn't matter at this point…it might be best if it's done quickly."

The Godaime frowned slightly at the girl's behavior and odd tone of voice. "It's Sasuke, isn't it?"

The pink-haired kunoichi gave a wordless nod, still desperately hoping that she was wrong, that she'd misinterpreted the Uchiha's odd ramblings, that she'd been trying to make sense out of something that truly held no deeper meaning.

"What did he say, Sakura? Tell me everything."

For an ANBU squad traveling at top speed, the border of the country of Oto was about a day's journey from Konohagakure. It had been known as the Land of Rice Fields before Orochimaru had taken over, so a large portion of the country consisted of rice paddies and terraced hillsides; the thick, all-encompassing forests that the Konoha ninja were used to dwindled down to irregular but deep patches of trees on rolling hills, with the occasional spires of rocky mountains heaving up around the paddies and through the leafy canopies. Try as they might to keep within those clusters of trees, at times there was no way to avoid traveling over the open ground or along the dusty roads winding through the water-filled fields, both of which felt appallingly revealing.

The sun had set several hours ago, and the nearly full moon was choked by thick strands of cloud, providing them with additional cover, and despite the fact that they were currently moving through the temporary shelter of a small forest, Naruto frowned. So far they hadn't found much of anything in this country—it was even more desolate and deserted than the times he'd visited it before; in fact, they hadn't run into so much as one enemy nin yet.

Some mission.

Not that they hadn't found anything at all, of course. Actually, they'd found something quite interesting: deep within the mist-wrapped boles of another, similar cluster of trees, they had discovered one of Orochimaru's many hidden lairs. They had approached the wooden, house-like entrance to the underground caverns with extreme caution, Shino sending a few of his insects in to check it out before any of the four ANBU ventured forward. The report they brought back was strange, but the shinobi found it to be accurate when they looked for themselves: inside the lair was nothing but fine ash and singed stone. Everything--and if there had been people there too, then everyone--had been totally and utterly destroyed, burned to cinders.

That did not bode well in Naruto's opinion, and he could sense that the whole group was a bit more tense after discovering the lair…but perhaps that was a standard procedure for Orochimaru. The man was undeniably insane after all--perhaps he ordered everything to be burned whenever he switched bases to hide any secrets that might have accidentally been left behind.

Not likely, Naruto thought, eyes narrowing at the implications of the alternative.

"Hold on a second," Kiba's voice suddenly came over his radio's earpiece, echoed by a deep growl from Akamaru. Both the man and his big, shaggy white dog suddenly leaped into view, coming to a stop in a small clearing directly in front of Naruto. (Since they were trying to confirm whether or not the information Sasuke had inadvertently given them was correct, Tsunade had assigned Kiba to the recon group, knowing that the Inuzuka family's tracking abilities would most likely prove to be quite helpful.) He was soon joined by Aburame Shino, whose kikaichu bugs were also especially useful in gathering information. Naruto himself was along because he'd been in the Land of Sound a couple times before, and knew where two lairs (or their remains) were…and having been inside both, Tsunade had figured that he'd have at least a vague idea of what to look for. Also, the loudmouthed blonde had been fairly insistent on the matter after seeing how upset Sakura was, and if someone was searching for incriminating evidence against Sasuke, then Naruto wanted to be there to make sure that said evidence was the real thing, and that there hadn't been a mistake. The Hokage had grudgingly admitted that he probably did know the Uchiha's fighting style better than anyone else in the village, and she was right: if Sasuke had had anything to do with this matter, Naruto would know.

"Something wrong?" Shikamaru, who was once again the team leader, asked as he and Naruto landed near-silently beside the other two.

"I'm not sure. Just now Akamaru mentioned that he smelled something, and I'm surprised that I missed it myself…" Seeing the unspoken question in his teammates' eyes, he hesitated for a moment, then said in a low voice, "It's…the smell of death. And it's an extremely strong scent, though it's pretty old."

All four exchanged grim looks, then Shikamaru said, "Well, I guess we'd better check it out. Lead the way, Kiba."

Giving him a quick nod, the man and his ninken were off, their companions close on their heels.

After a while Naruto started to notice an odd smell as well; he could feel the Kyuubi shift a bit inside him in response to the scent. It smelled strangely familiar, but he couldn't quite put a finger on what it was…

They'd followed Kiba for several miles, and had once again been forced to take to the open road, when the brown-haired ninja suddenly jerked to stop, making a retching noise low in his throat. "The scent is getting stronger," he said a moment later, looking at them over his shoulder and giving them a strained smile. "We're getting close, I think."

"I can see something up ahead," Naruto said, jabbing a finger at a smudge on the horizon. "Come on, let's go!" As they got closer, the smudge slowly formed into a good-sized town, and Naruto realized that he'd been through it before with Jiraiya. "I recognize this place," he murmured as they continued to move quickly forward. "There was a really good teriyaki stand at the edge of town, and I…" He trailed off and slowly came to a halt as he got his first good look at the place:

The town was in shambles. Half the buildings had been burned to the ground, and the other half had partially collapsed, many of them showing signs of serious fire damage as well; the wooden wall surrounding the city had been smashed through in numerous places, and the gates were hanging at odd angles on their melted hinges. Shattered rock and splintered wood from the damaged and destroyed buildings filled the streets…and dotting the rubble were the remains of the town's inhabitants, all long dead and mostly decayed.

Because of what Tsunade had told them during their mission briefing, this wasn't totally unexpected...but being told that something is a possibility and actually finding that something are two very different things.

Though sobered by what they'd found, they continued on into the city, coming to a stop in the middle of the street about a hundred meters inside the gates and gazing about them in disbelief.

"...This is so messed up," Naruto muttered, voicing the inward thoughts of the entire group.

The whole place reeked of death and decay, and the restless blonde snorted in a futile attempt to clear the smell from his nostrils, but it was everywhere, permeating everything. Well, now I know what that weird smell was, he thought with a grimace, pulling up the attached Kakashi-style mask on the close-fitting, sleeveless black top of his ANBU uniform (he didn't think he'd ever used it before, but he was very happy to have it now) to block out the smell a bit; Kiba had already covered his own nose, and was now kneeling beside Akamaru to cover the nin-dog's nose as well.

"What happened here?" Kiba said as he got to his feet, and though muffled by his mask, his voice still carried a clear tone of horrified awe.

"It was a massacre," Shikamaru said quietly. "Just like Tsunade-sama said."

"Why didn't we hear about this before?" Kiba demanded, still sounding rather shaken.

"Yeah," Naruto agreed. "You would think someone would have noticed…that someone would have found them before now."

"I don't know…" the lazy genius mused. "It looks like a pretty self-sufficient place, and it's also pretty out-of-the way. They probably didn't get many visitors."

"No way," Naruto shook his head. "This place was, like, a tourist trap! Ero-sennin fell for it, too…he's lucky he's so powerful, or they would've killed him. We should have heard about it…shouldn't we? I thought Tsunade had this country under constant ANBU surveillance."

Shino, who had yet to say a word since night had fallen, suddenly moved away from them, carefully making his way over to one of the many corpses and crouching down beside it.

Frowning thoughtfully, Naruto watched him for a moment, then glanced around at the other bodies strewn about. "Not that I'm complaining of course, but why don't they smell bad? All I can really smell is dirt."

"Because they've been here for months," Shino said in his usual terse manner. He alone of the four (five counting Akamaru) seemed largely unfazed by what they'd found. Naruto supposed that it had something to do with the fact that Shino was himself infested with bugs, and he was still alive: thus, the sight of all the dead bodies in a similar state was not particularly troubling to him. (Of course, Shino never really seemed fazed by anything.)

"And no one buried them...because no one was left to," Shikamaru said grimly.

"This is a bit strange, though," Shino admitted, peering a bit more closely at the corpse.

The blonde cocked his head at him. "What's strange?"

"Tsunade-sama told us it that it has been roughly three months since this occurred. The insects should have broken all the bodies down to mere skeletons by now. These still have some flesh on them, though it isn't much."

"It's probably because there are so many," Shikamaru said with a grimace as Shino rose from his crouch and calmly rejoined them in the middle of the debris-filled road. "We haven't found any other villages yet, but it's very possible that they've been destroyed, too." He sighed, shoving his hands into his pockets, and glanced around at the small group clustered around him. "All right...I know it's a pain, but let's split up and look around for some clues concerning the cause of all this."

The others nodded wordlessly, and all four disappeared in simultaneous puffs of smoke and whirls of leaves.

Naruto wandered through the wreckage and the rubble-choked streets, his pensive frown deepening at every new horror he found. The devastation was so utterly complete, and "inhumane" was the least that could be said of the methods used to kill many of the people. So far, however, he hadn't found any conclusive evidence as to who had done all this. The kunai and shuriken had all been thrown with near-perfect precision, but that didn't particularly worry him: although he knew that Sasuke was definitely capable of that extremely high level of accuracy, he certainly wasn't the only ninja out there who was, so that observation proved nothing at all other than the fact that the killer (or killers) had been a ninja, and a very skilled one at that.

What did concern him was the easily recognizable pattern of the fire damage; it looked suspiciously like someone had used the Katon: Gōkakyū no Jutsu technique…and quite liberally at that. He became certain that his suspicions had been correct after leaping over and around a few very familiar–looking craters, hopping down into one of the surprisingly deep depressions to examine the ground a bit more closely; it didn't take more than a glance to confirm that they had definitely been caused by a fire-type jutsu.

He had to admit that things didn't look too good for his one-time closest friend.

Looking around, Naruto realized that he had wandered into the residential sector of the city—the buildings (or what was left of them) were no longer garishly decorated, but were instead shabby-looking and rather run down. All the doors were ajar or had fallen off their hinges, and some were missing completely; peering inside, he found the interiors to be in shambles and the occupants slain, many of them seemingly killed without warning while in the middle of their regular daily activities.

As the blonde rounded a corner, something about one of the houses caught his eye, and he carefully picked his way through the bodies and the surrounding debris until he stood before it.

It looked basically the same as every other semi-dilapidated house on the street, but for one thing: pinned against the doorframe was yet another dead body, this one frozen forever in the act shielding a smaller one; the ragged, faded garments hanging from the larger body made it obvious that it had been a woman—most likely a mother attempting to protect her child.

But what really caught his eye was the cause of their death...for it was an object that was all-too-familiar.

How could Sasuke have done this? Naruto wondered, grief and a strange sort of helpless anger wrenching at his insides, threatening to bring tears to his eyes. He knew the Uchiha had changed for the worse over the years—how could he not have, with an avenger's heart and the path he'd chosen?—but what the hell did Orochimaru do to him to make him capable of something like this? He shook his head slowly. The Sasuke I knew would never have done this…not for anything.

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it hadn't been Sasuke at all, maybe he was mistaken…

But the object before him gleamed with dull insistence, and Naruto heaved a sad, dutiful sigh. No...he'd seen it enough times and at close enough range that there could be no mistake—

"I know what Tsunade-sama told us, but have you found any solid evidence as to who...or what...did this?" Shikamaru's voice suddenly came from behind him, making the blonde start slightly; he'd been so deeply lost in thought that he hadn't even noticed the lazy genius's approach.

"Yeah," Naruto said quietly, taking a firm grasp on the object of his contemplations and wrenching it free. "Yeah, I have."

About half a week after Sakura had rushed into her office with her upsetting news, Tsunade called her apprentice back in to discuss the recon team's report with her.

"Your suspicions about the information you brought me earlier this week have been confirmed, Sakura…nearly the entire population of Oto no Kuni—which, granted, wasn't all that large to begin with—has been wiped out. Our scouts did a sweep of basically the whole country, and any and all towns and villages of a noteworthy size, including several series of previously unknown lairs, have been completely and savagely destroyed. No one was left alive."

"That's terrible," Sakura murmured, obviously troubled by the news. "But—there's still no proof, right?" she said half-hopefully. "I mean, since there are no witnesses, we can't know for sure that...that..."

"You're right, Sakura, there are no witnesses," Tsunade said grimly. "However...in one of the towns on the outskirts of Oto, the recon team did find some evidence as to who was responsible for the seemingly mindless slaughter..." The buxom blonde took a hastily-wrapped, oblong bundle from behind her desk and laid it out on the desktop, quickly slicing through the strings that held the rough cloth close about the object inside; as the cloth fell away, Sakura's eyes widened in shock at the sight of it.

No...oh, God, please don't let it be true...

The Godaime carefully passed the long, slender object across her desk to her apprentice, and Sakura felt tears coming to her eyes as she found herself holding Sasuke's black-bladed kusanagi.