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beta: Icescim
The Philosophy of Self
Chapter Eleven
Now that Naruto and Kakashi had joined them, it was easier to evade pursuit and lay false trails. Naruto, with his Kage Bunshin, set down several false trails. Kakashi gave the blond a few pointers and a little help that would make the trails, he assured them, good enough to confuse even the elite Root.
It didn't take them too long to make it to the safe house—a hidden place equipped with strong ward-seals that was used by Konoha ninja who were under pursuit. Sometimes, after missions, enemies would try to hunt Leaf-nin down, following them even into Fire Country territory. Since it would be bad if the Leaf-nin led enemies straight to Konoha's door, there were these safe houses. Once a Konoha ninja activated the ward-seals, nobody—neither friend nor foe—would be able to enter the location until the ward was taken down by those inside. They were some of the strongest seals on record, dating back to the founding of the Hidden Villages. They would be safe, at least until they decided they were prepared enough to drop the wards.
As soon as they'd made it to the sealed area, Kakashi activated it. Sakura felt the seals take as a wash of warm, fizzing energy across her senses.
At the center of the sealed area's fifty-meter diameter was a small, sheltering cave. They swept it for any resident animals, and then settled themselves.
Almost immediately, Kakashi turned to Uchiha.
"Alright," he said. "Now I want some answers."
"Oi, Kakashi-sensei…" Naruto started to protest. The Copy Ninja held up a hand to silence him, and he subsided, frowning.
"I'll tell you everything I can," Uchiha said.
"Good," Kakashi said, a hint of a dangerous edge to his voice. He hadn't re-adjusted his hitai-ate, and both his eyes stared with a hard light to them. "Then start by telling me what you're doing with my student's body, Uchiha Itachi-kun."
Sakura nearly choked on the air she was breathing.
"What?" Naruto asked flatly. "What?"
Uchiha looked at Kakashi. "I had wondered if you'd guessed. Almost… hoped."
"I suspected from the start. We worked together in ANBU; I at least recognized your manner," Kakashi replied dismissively. "Now, your answer."
"You can't possibly be serious," Sakura burst out.
"Yeah, there's no way he's Itachi! Sasuke killed him!" Naruto added, fiercely. His hands were curled into fists at his sides.
Kakashi slanted a look at them. "You two have noticed as well. You do yourselves no favors pretending otherwise."
Sakura's mouth snapped shut, and her stomach wretched sharply in distress. :You know he's right.:
"No," she whispered. "No. I can't…"
"Sakura?" Naruto's pleading voice made her look at him. Seeing the pained denial in his eyes—he knew it also, but wouldn't admit it—she winced, recalling Uchiha-san's words, days earlier: He doesn't want to lose his friend. She couldn't bear Naruto's hope, so she looked instead at the man wearing Sasuke's face.
"You were supposed to be dead," she said, almost plaintively.
"I was dead," he told her, told them. He paused. "But then I woke up."
"Liar! You're lying!" Naruto snarled. There was blood dripping from his clenched fists now, and his pupils stretched and shrunk, wavering between human-round and animal-vertical.
"Naruto!" Kakashi snapped, using his Team Leader voice, "Go outside and cool off."
Naruto's nostrils flared and he flexed his hands a couple of times before stalking out of the cave with a disturbingly predatory grace. Kakashi watched him leave, and then moved his icy gaze back to Itachi.
"Perhaps start from the beginning," he suggested coolly.
"From the beginning?" Itachi echoed. "From the beginning, or from the beginning of this?" He gestured at his borrowed—stolen?—body. Then he shook his head and started without an answer:
"As I said before, Sasuke killed me. I was dead. And then I woke up, and I was sick, and like this. I don't know what happened."
"That isn't the answer we want," Kakashi informed him.
"It's the only one I have," Itachi said, a little sharply. "I don't know what happened while I was dead. I just remember that I was, until I opened my eyes. I didn't know what had happened. I didn't know where I was, or who I was. I knew only that I had to get away."
"And then we found you," Sakura said quietly.
"And then you found me," he agreed. "And you brought me to Konoha."
"When did you remember?" Sakura asked. She recalled how many times he'd said that he wasn't Sasuke. Had he known, so early?
"I knew I was Itachi when Hatake-san told me who had killed the Uchiha. I didn't remember until the trial."
They fell silent, remembering the trial. What had been said. It was an order.
Sakura tried to push it from her mind. It couldn't be true. It couldn't, because that would mean… She bit her bottom lip. Part of her wanted Itachi and Kakashi to just keep ignoring that particular 'elephant in the room', but another part just wanted them to face it and get it over with. Part of her needed to know.
"Who gave the order?"
Sakura flinched and jumped slightly at the question, and at who had actually asked it. Naruto moved back into the cave stiffly, his voice slightly hoarse. He looked drained and pale, but his eyes burned bright blue, determined and resigned at once. Itachi watched him for a moment before responding.
"It was Danzo's mind that came up with the idea, and his hand that passed the order down. But it was the whole Council that went behind the Hokage's back to approve the mission; Sandaime-sama's diplomatic negotiations had run out of time."
Sakura noted how Naruto's stance relaxed a little after hearing that his 'Jiji' had not been party to the Massacre. Still, he asked, harshly: "You didn't do anything to stop it? You just accepted the mission?"
Itachi's gaze sharpened. "You cannot know how much I wished Sandaime-sama's negotiations had succeeded." His eyes closed and his chin dropped. "I could not see another way. The Clan would not be appeased, and the threat of a coup d'etat was growing. If the Uchiha had gone through with their plans, hundreds of innocents would have died. In the worst case, thousands. I could not let that happen."
He opened his eyes, looked at them squarely. "I accepted the mission because it was the best path I could see at the time, and there was no more time to look for better. And if I was the one to do it… then I could name a condition. I could save Sasuke."
Something like an explosion was occurring in Sakura's skull. Like his words were a fuse, her thoughts were bursting into bright, shocking ideas and revelations.
"Save Sasuke?" Naruto echoed, sounding surprised and angry. "What, like you loved him or something? You killed his family! You tortured him!"
"No, Naruto," Sakura said softly. She stared at Itachi. "Don't you see? He wanted Sasuke to hate him. He wanted Sasuke to kill him."
"You were the scapegoat," Kakashi said thoughtfully. "You became an enemy of the Village to save the Village. And you couldn't let Sasuke keep loving his older brother. Sasuke had to hate you, had to stay loyal to Konoha. Sasuke couldn't know that the Council gave the order to kill his family."
"Correct," Itachi said quietly. "I had hoped to give Sasuke a purpose, a goal to keep him from despair. I had hoped my death would give him closure. And I had hoped to… atone, in this way."
Sakura shivered a little.
Itachi's voice dropped a bit more and he admitted: "I had not anticipated Orochimaru. I hadn't intended for Sasuke to ever leave Konoha. But even so, I took care of Orochimaru and the Cursed Seal during my fight with Sasuke. With his goal accomplished and Orochimaru's influence gone, Sasuke should have returned to the Village."
"He didn't, obviously," Sakura said, sorrowfully, without rancor. "We were close on Sasuke's trail, when you and he fought. But when we got there, there was nothing. Even your body was gone. And someone had taken Sasuke."
Itachi's head jerked up, and his gaze—though he had no Sharingan—froze her. "What?" he said. "Someone tookSasuke? He didn't leave under his own power? He was taken?"
Sakura drew back a little, surprised by his sudden intensity.
"Yes," Kakashi responded for her. "Once we reached the battleground, there were only fading chakra signatures and rainwater washing away blood. We could identify your signature and Sasuke's, but not the others."
"Others?"
Kakashi made an absent gesture. "One smelled of plants, green things. The other smelled of… ash."
Itachi made an abortive jerk, as if he wanted to bolt out of the cave and away.
"Madara," he hissed, the expression on his face matching the intensity in his voice. This time, even Kakashi took a step back at the blaze of emotion.
"My, my… isn't it past your bedtime, my dear little clansman?"
"I have a preposition for you, Uchiha Madara-sama."
"Oh?"
A glint of one amused, red iris…
Itachi had always known that Madara was dangerous—it was one of the reasons he insinuated his way to the ancient Uchiha's side: To keep an eye on one of Konoha's most threatening enemies. But in some ways he had underestimated the strength of Madara's hatred, his spite.
Madara had expressed a deep hatred for the Uchiha Clan, the people who (in his mind) had chosen the coward's way out of the war—becoming the allies of their enemies was tantamount to surrendering. He had, by word and deed, expressed his opinion that the Uchiha had become weak, foolish, useless. In all their dealings, Madara had treated Itachi with a sharp contempt or dismissive condescension. Going by this basis, Itachi had not anticipated Madara taking an interest in his little brother.
The thought that he had not foreseen the possibility and thus had not taken measures to protect Sasuke… the thought that Madara might be dripping his poison words into Sasuke's ear… It made Itachi fairly burn with fury. So much so that he could not, would not even try, to conceal it.
The effect of his bared emotion and spike of killer-intent on Team Seven was obvious in their concerted recoil.
Slowly and deliberately—allowing them to fully comprehend and process the weight and depth of his feeling—he drew in his emotions. Tamping them down to a bare simmer, he paused. Took a breath.
Then he started to tell them. About how he made a deal with Madara, eliciting the older Uchiha's help in the Massacre. About his reasons for working with the reviled nukenin. How he joined Akatsuki and maintained a constant flow of information to Konoha's Intelligence Department.
How all of his actions, from the time he'd accepted his hitai-ate to the day he died, were to protect Konoha in general and Sasuke in particular.
He told them everything he could remember, watching as the pinched, suspicious disbelief in Sakura and Naruto's faces morphed into horror, sadness, pity. Kakashi's mismatched eyes watched him, sharply aware and blank of reaction. Itachi probably wouldn't know what the Copy Ninja thought of the revelations until he was finished speaking.
At last, throat dry and voice beginning to hoarsen, Itachi fell silent. He waited.
Naruto was the first to speak. He demanded: "How can we believe you?"
His voice was shaking.
"It does make a terrible sort of sense," Sakura said, a tremor in her own voice. Naruto turned to her incredulously.
"He could be lying!"
"He isn't," Kakashi put in. He hadn't looked away from Itachi. "Or at least, he is lying so well that I can't tell."
Sakura and Naruto fell silent at that. Itachi could guess why. Kakashi was easily one of Konoha's best. He'd even been considered for Hokage at one point. And he had a Sharingan, which was difficult to fool. If he said that Itachi wasn't lying, then it was true, more likely than not.
But that meant that Konoha was complicit in the deaths of all the Uchiha. Itachi could see in Naruto and Sakura's faces the struggle they were having with such an ideal-shattering truth. It was Naruto who seemed to be coping the better of the two, perhaps not surprisingly considering who—what—he was. Sakura was having a bit of a harder time coming to grips with it.
She stood staring at Itachi, denial on the surface of her expression and, beneath that, horrified belief. Her hands were opening and closing helplessly, like she wanted to do something, but was at a loss as to what she could do to make any of this better.
"I need…air. I need air," she said, words stilted. She turned and walked out of the cave.
"Kakashi-sensei?" Naruto asked. His voice was far from the boisterous, loud and firm tone he usually affected. He sounded… young. Unsure. Hurt.
"Follow," Kakashi said. "She might need your support."
Naruto glanced uncertainly between his leader and Itachi.
"I'll stay here," Kakashi said. Naruto hesitated a bit more, then shot off after Sakura.