This ones a little bit of a change of pace. I wanted to explore this story from another angle, so that's what this chapter entails.

Happy reading!

In the Psychiatric Ward of a Chicago Hospital

If one was blind, did it matter if the padded white room one resided in didn't even have white walls? It was a question Itachi had pondered for much of his eight years of psychotic imprisonment, and he finally had come to the conclusion that, yes, it did matter. It was the principle of the issue: if a padded white room did not have white walls, then how could it be trusted to hold in the crazed lunatics that it was supposed to detain? It didn't matter that Itachi had never seen the color of the walls of his cell or asked someone else to tell him. He simply believed that the walls were white because they were soft, which he had discovered after spending the first few weeks of his imprisonment slamming and clawing at them.

When he had calmed down enough to ponder the implications of the white walls, Itachi had seen them as a kind of comfort. White padded walls were cages for lunatics. Itachi was a lunatic. Therefore, the walls of Itachi's cell were white. He needed the mental assurance that they were white, otherwise, how could he trust them to lock him up safely, to slowly drain away his insanity until there was nothing left but a lifeless shell, unable to bring more harm to the people he loved?

Yes. The importance of the padded walls being white was very great.

After a few months of solitary confinement, most of which had taken place in a straight jacket, Itachi had finally calmed down enough to hold rational conversations, and he had been allowed visitors. First it had been the nurses, who had fed and bathed him - God, had that been embarrassing - than the doctors who came to ask him questions instead of simply watching through a camera lense - bet they got off on it too, the perverted bastards - and then finally, his father.

That was a hell in and of itself, those visits from his father. Even though he was blind, Itachi could still see the disappointed expression on his face. The first time he had heard those footsteps enter his room and the familiar voice, curt and rough, had cut through the haze of his brain, Itachi had gone wild, throwing himself in his father's direction and screaming, even after the doctors had pulled his father from the room, and continuing to fight until he had been sedated to the point of unconsciousness. His father hadn't been allowed back for a long time after that, but he was still the CEO of the hospital and held enough power to fire any one of the doctors, so they let him come back.

The cocktail of drugs he was on had made Itachi into almost a zombie, and the doctors had congratulated themselves on a job well done, for they had tamed an untamable beast! When his father came to visit him now, he was docile, almost unresponsive, but just far enough away from vegetative that the treatment was allowed, until the day Itachi had been clearer than normal, and had grasped his father's hand when he had reached to touch his son's arm.

"Please," Itachi had begged in a moan. "Please, don't let them put anything else in me. Have I no dignity left?"

Immediately, Itachi's father gave the order to stop the administration of all drugs to his son. The doctors had objected, of course; it was dangerous, now that Itachi was addicted to the mixture of chemicals they had pumped through his blood, and if they stopped, the withdrawal might kill him. Still, Itachi insisted and his father listened, so he was taken off the drugs.

The next few months were absolute hell as Itachi's body rebelled against the lack of drugs, and he spent most of it confined in a different room, writhing against the bed he had been trapped against. When it was over and his mind was clearer, however, nobody had expected how well he began to do.

Almost immediately, his crazed ravings stopped, and he was able to hold normal conversations with everyone who visited him, including his father. Shards of his original personality returned, bringing with them sarcasm and wit, but hardly ever a real smile. This was, after all, an existence, not a life.

Itachi had ceased needing to be restrained, but he still sometimes had fits that left him screaming and shaking in a seizure. As the years went by, those fits few increasingly farther apart, but they still happened, and each time Itachi would have to be sedated, something he loathed. Still, he was just glad that he no longer felt like an volatile animal kept in a cage.

Eight years had now passed since that fateful day when Itachi had torn out his eyes, and he was existing quite comfortably in his padded white cell. Over his ruined eyes, a bandage of sorts had been placed, to save him the horror of having a terrible scar visible across his face, not that Itachi cared. He was, after all, blind.

Itachi had been awarded puzzles and games on the grounds of good behavior that were made out of big blocks of wood, so he could feel the pieces and not have to see them, and he used these to stave off insanity caused by boredom. Pun intended.

He had improved enough that sometimes interns and medical students were even given permission to see him and use him as part of their training. They often stuck their noses in the air and asked better than him, so Itachi enjoyed throwing the conceited bastards for a loop. Once upon a time, he had been a medical student, too.

All in all, it was a satisfactory existence. The room was comfortable now that he wasn't stark raving mad anymore, with a bed against the far wall, a small round table where he took his meals and two wooden chairs to match, and a couch for lounging, though he hardly ever used it. It was hard to read a book when one was blind. At least there were no ghosts to bother him anymore, which was the most comforting thing about his cell, and the real reason that he had recovered so much over the years.

Or, there used to be no ghosts to bother him.

One day, as Itachi was tugging at the interlocking parts of a wooden ball to try to get it apart and reach whatever was rattling inside, a young girl's sweet little giggle interrupted his puzzling. Itachi wouldn't necessarily call himself 'cured' of his insanity, but he had progressed beyond the point where he would break into a fit at the mere sound of a ghost's voice. The cameras trained on him, he had long since learned, had been switched to video but not audio, since a blind, almost-sane man was going to talk to himself and he had been deemed well enough not to require the added security, so he kept his head down and appeared to focus on his task while talking to the ghost with as few lip movements as possible.

"Who are you?"

"Nobody important," the girl sighed. "No one want to talk to me, so I must not be important. Is that true? People talk to you sometimes, so I know you're important."

"I suppose," Itachi mused. "How long has it been since somebody talked to you?"

"Since I died, about five years ago." A pout could be heard in the girl's voice. "Even big brother Kissy doesn't talk to me anymore, even though I follow him all the time."

Well, at least the girl knew she was dead. Child ghosts were often the hardest to deal with. "Kissy?" Itachi asked, referring to the brother she had mentioned before.

"Kisame. He works here now, and he's going to come see you tomorrow. I wanted to come talk to you first, even though I thought you wouldn't be able to see me."

So Kisame was going to be his new nurse, the last one having reached retirement age and decided to stop putting up with Itachi's sarcastic nature. Since then, a stream of temporary nurses had traveled in and out of his room, but the local gossip had told him that his new permanent nurse was being assigned tomorrow.

"I can't see you, girly," Itachi said, tugging on a wooden piece that slid out of the ball with a sharp click. One down, fifty or so to go. "I'm blind."

"Oh!" The girl seemed sorry to hear that. "But you can hear me?"

"No, I can't hear you. I'm just guessing what you're saying and then responding to it."

"Really?"

Clearly, the girl had not heard of sarcasm before she died. Itachi let out a sigh. "Of course I can hear you. And I'd be able to see you, too, if I still possessed my sight."

"Wow."

It was becoming irritating to just have a girlish giggle and simpering voice for the identification of the ghost, so Itachi ventured another question as he pulled another piece from his wooden ball. "What's your name, girly?"

"Me?" The girl tittered. "Oh, I don't know. Nobody talks to me anymore because I'm not important, so I've forgotten my name. I do remember that Kissy called me Button, though, but I don't know why. I think he's forgotten, too." Sadness overtook her tone. "I follow him all the time, but he never talks to me. Am I not important enough?"

Itachi had blocked the information from his mind a long time ago, but it was slowly trickling back. The girl was obviously a specter, which he could tell from the way she kept repeating herself, and she had latched herself onto her older brother, Kisame, instead of a physical location. Such a thing was rare, but not unheard of, and Itachi suddenly pitied the man he hadn't yet met, imagining how having a dead ten year old hanging around messed with his sex life.

The girl kept rambling on about importance and her brother Kissy, but Itachi tuned her out, succeeding in pulling out another four pieces from the wooden puzzle ball before the door opened and a pair of familiar footsteps echoed through the room.

Shit. Itachi hadn't realized that his father was coming to visit him today.

The door closed and the footsteps got halfway across the room before stopping abruptly. "Itachi.… You know that there's…"

"A ghost in my room?" Itachi supplied. "Yeah, I noticed. Low class specter, attached to a worker who's going to be my new personal nurse starting tomorrow. Nothing to worry about."

"I'm not worried about her," his father said, coming toward the table Itachi was sitting at and placing a hand over his to stop the movement jiggling the puzzle pieces. "Are you alright with her being here?"

Annoyed, Itachi snatched his hand out from underneath his father's. "Why wouldn't I be? She never did anything to me."

"Well, I thought… since… you know, it was a ghost… who…"

"It wasn't some specter who drove me to this, Father," Itachi said with a snarl. "It was when a former Akatsuki draugr decided to ensnare me in a nightmarish hellhole that some part of my mind snapped and I decided that I would be better off without my sight. Now, leave me alone! Weren't you going on vacation?" He sneered the last part, but in reality, he longed for those times when his father was gone, when he didn't waltz into his room every other day as if he owned it. No matter that he actually did own it. Technically, he owned the whole hospital.

"We canceled," he said shortly. "I felt that I couldn't leave you alone for the whole summer, so your mother and I are staying behind."

This left the unspoken thought that Sasuke was going without them. As much as he hated his father, Itachi was glad that he knew his son well enough to not mention the youngest member of the Uchiha family. As much as Itachi had healed after his incarceration, he was still not ready to face the reality of what he had almost done to his brother.

A comfortable silence overtook the room as Itachi went back to his puzzle and his father sat down opposite him, watching the blind man struggle with the wooden ball. He reached out a hand to help his son, but Itachi slapped it away. This was his existence, and this was his game, and he was going to win it, if only because he had nothing else to strive for.

Just as Itachi felt like he was about to solve it, his father spoke again. "You should try to help her fade, you know."

The answer to the puzzle slipped out of his grasp, and Itachi slammed his hands down on the table. "Jesus! What the hell do you think got me into this place, Father? Let me tell you, it wasn't butterflies and rainbows!"

"Itachi, listen-"

"No!" Itachi screamed, standing up and knocking his chair over backwards. "You listen to me! This is your fault! Help the ghost fade, you said. It's just an obsessive figure; you can handle it. Well, that obsessive figure turned out to be an Akatsuki draugr, and I had to fight him with a single shitty silver knife and a vial of holy water that didn't even work on the atheist bastard! I'm lucky - or unlucky, depending on how you look at it - that the only thing I lost that day was my mind!" When he finished, he was panting, his hands splayed against the table, and he knew that he would find his tendons to be whitened with tension if he could see them.

The quiet, monotonous voice of his father filled the sudden silence. "Are you quite finished?"

The absolute lack of reaction drew all the anger from Itachi and left in its place simmering despair. "Get out."

"Itachi-"

"Get out!" Itachi roared, pointing in the direction he prayed the door was in.

Not another word was uttered, but the chair across from Itachi slowly scraped across the floor and it was pushed back from the table, then footsteps receded from him and walked toward the door. It was only when he heard the click of the lock latching itself did Itachi relax, his arm drooping from its pointing position to lay against the table. Turning, he found the chair by colliding his shin into it, and he struggled to pick it up before setting it down in front of the table and resuming work on his puzzle.

Less than a minute later, Itachi pulled a single piece out of the puzzle ball, and the whole thing collapsed into a pile of wooden pieces, revealing what had been inside. With trembling fingers, Itachi pulled it out, feeling it all over to discover its identity. It was a baby's rattle.

A child's toy. For some reason, it made twisted sense to the broken Uchiha. A child's toy for the child, the lunatic locked in a cage. That's all Itachi was.

As if to accentuate his newfound misery, the little dead girl giggled.

The next day found Itachi in a better mood, but not by much. During the night, the rattle and completed puzzle had been taken away from the room and replaced with another one, which he discovered when his fingertips trailed along the surface of the table, but he didn't touch it. Yesterday had cured him of any desire to play with new toys.

Itachi had long since learned to dress himself, having enough dignity left to know that to have another do it would be embarrassing. Thus he was waiting at table, seated on the side facing the hallway, when the latch in his lock clicked and the door swung open. The footfalls following it were loud, as if the person they belonged to were of enormous stature.

Itachi looked up when his new nurse entered the room, an old habit that had refused to die when his sight had. The giggle of the man's dead sister came from near Itachi's elbow, and he unconsciously greeted him.

"Morning, Kisame."

He mentally cursed when the footsteps stopped. "How do you know my name?"

"The walls are thin." It was a lame excuse, but the only one Itachi could think of on short notice.

"Hm." Finally, Kisame moved closer, setting down a tray on the table with a clink. "I have your breakfast. It's hot cereal."

The dead girl giggled again, and Itachi sighed. "Sometimes I think they give me cereal so often because they want to watch the blind man make a fool out of himself."

"Is that so?"

Emboldened, Itachi went on. "Yep. Soup, too. You should have seen the time they gave me this tomato soup. It got everywhere! It also didn't help that I don't like tomato, even though it's S-" he stopped abruptly. Itachi had been about to say his brother's name, a name he hadn't spoken in eight years. The little dead girl must have been doing things to him.

Paying no attention to his sudden silence, Kisame sat down on the opposite side of the table. "Here, I'll feed you."

"Hm." It would be humiliating, but what pride did Itachi have left in this place? At least he had dressed himself that morning.

The smell told him it was oatmeal, and the first bite told him it was sticky and unflavored. Itachi made a face and pushed the next spoonful away. "I don't want it," he said petulantly.

"That's no way to act," Kisame admonished. "Someone took the trouble of cooking this just for you, and you don't even want to eat it?"

"Humph." But when the next spoonful was offered to him, he took it.

After the entire bowl of oatmeal had been consumes, Itachi remained seated at the table, pointedly not touching the puzzle. He had had enough of children's games for a while yet. Then, to his surprise, after cleaning away the dishes, Kisame sat down opposite him.

"So, what do you do here?"

"For fun?" Itachi wasn't used to holding conversations that didn't end in shouting matches or periods of self-enforced silence.

The chair creaked, meaning that Kisame probably leaned back. "I guess you could call it that. What do you spend most of your time here doing?"

"Puzzles, mostly." Itachi gestured to the one on the table. "It keeps my brain occupied, at least, so Big Brother knows I'm not trying to plot a dramatic escape. Bah. It's not like I ever could try to escape, anyway."

"Why not?" Kisame asked.

Encouraging an inmate to attempt escape? Someone obviously hadn't paid very good attention in Caring For Crazies 101. By way of answer, Itachi tapped the cloth wrapping his head.

"Ah."

Itachi snorted, a small amount of humor held in his pseudo laugh. "I think it would be hilarious: imagine all the doctors discovering I'm gone, and looking all around for the man with the bandaged head, and all the while I'd have stolen someone's trenchcoat and sunglasses would be sitting in the corner, listening to them run around in a panic. Then I'll stand up, cool as can be, and walk out the door and right into a lamp post."

That drew a hearty laugh from Kisame. Emboldened but the success of his story, Itachi continued to map out his blind escapee escapades in downtown Chicago, which included everything from following the bus line by ear to stealing an old man's Seeing Eye dog in order to cross the road, only to ditch the dog and get a Seeing Eye Parrot at a nearby pet store. The entire time Kisame was in stitches, and finally Itachi felt an almost girlish giggle bubbling up inside of him that he had to let loose in a deep laugh. He couldn't remember the last time he had laughed, really and truly expressed mirth, and the experience was freeing, in a terrifying and exhilarating way.

After their mutual mirth had died down, Itachi observed of Kisame, "You're pretty new here."

"How can you tell I'm new?" Kisame asked, something straining his voice that was almost, but not quite, suspicion.

"You stayed to talk to me," Itachi said with a trace of loneliness. "Usually, people avoid me, if they can. My old nurse used to sit outside the doorway and knit while she was on duty, just so she wouldn't have to be in the same room as me."

"Why?"

"Because of who I am. Don't I have a name tag on the door?"

He heard a rustle, which was presumably Kisame nodding his head. "Yes, but it only says Itachi."

"Figures." Itachi rubbed angrily at the bandage covering his ruined eyes. "Daddy Dearest is too afraid to put my full name on the door." He laughed without humor. "You'd figure it out soon enough, but if you want to know who I am, call me Mr. Uchiha. Itachi Uchiha."

There was a moment of shocked silence. "Uchiha? Your father…?"

"Owns the hospital, yes." Itachi sighed. "Ironic, isn't it? The CEO's son is the chief resident of the psychiatric ward. You know, the only reason he hasn't sold the hospital yet is because of me. He thinks I don't know, but being blind has made my hearing better, and I listen to a lot of conversations when people think I'm not paying attention. I don't even officially exist anymore; my death was a documented occurrence eight years ago. The only people who know I'm here are the ones who tend me in my padded white cell."

Kisame appeared to react to the bitterness in Itachi's voice, reaching out to brush a hand over the one Itachi had left on the table. "Why are you here, anyway? You're much more coherent than the others here."

A harsh laugh exploded from Itachi. "Oh, believe me, I'm just about as insane as they come. I was incarcerated for 'violent behavior'," he said with air quotes, then gestured to the cloth covering his ruined eyes. "I did this to myself, and I tried to-" He broke off suddenly, memories of his brother swamping his mind. Torture, he could handle, but what he had tried to do to his brother was something he could never forgive.

Overcome by things he had thought, hoped, were forgotten, Itachi stood up and felt his way to the bed against the far wall, laying down with his back to Kisame. "I don't even know why I'm telling you this. You should probably go."

Kisame didn't stand, but Itachi heard him shift in the chair. "Do you want me to leave?"

"It doesn't matter what I want." Itachi wrapped his arms about himself in a semblance of a broken hug. "I'm the crazy person here, remember?"

Kisame said nothing else, but, after a long moment, he stood and left, shutting the door behind him. The click of the lock sank Itachi into a despair he hadn't felt in years. Suddenly, right behind him, the little ghost girl giggled again, and Itachi covered his ears to block out the sound.

"Go away," he muttered.

"I don't want to!" The back of Itachi's neck tingled, as if the girl was leaning over him, either her hand or her hair trailing against his skin. "I want you to talk to Kissy for me."

"No."

The girl was not perturbed by the refusal. "I want you to tell Kissy that Button loves him."

Itachi waved his hand behind his neck, hoping to shoo the ghost away. "Go away."

"I want you to tell Kissy that Button loves him."

"No."

"I want you to tell Kissy that Button loves him."

"Shut up! I don't want you here!"

"I want you to tell Kissy that-"

"Enough!" Itachi sat straight up in bed. "I'm not going to tell Kissy that Button loves him, so just leave me alone!"

Kisame's deep voice resounded from near the door. "What did you way?"

Itachi froze, his hand coming up to cover his mouth as his sightless gaze turned toward the door, where Kisame had obviously reentered without Itachi realizing.

The big man took a step forward and repeated his question. "What did you say?"

And here was the great divide: on one hand, Itachi could blow the whole thing off and pretend like it never happened. On the other hand, he could try to tell Kisame the truth. Which one would be more worthwhile? It was impossible to tell, but something in Itachi's gut pulled him in the direction of the second option.

Trembling, Itachi replied, "I said, 'I'm not going to tell Kissy that Button loves him.'"

Taking another step forward, Kisame asked in a deadly quiet voice, "And why would you say such a thing?"

"Because… Because…" He took a deep breath, then stated, "Because Button asked me to."

The effect was instantaneous: Kisame strode towards the bed with heavy footsteps, shouting, "Why would you say that? How did you know? Damn you, you crazy fool!"

"Stop!" Itachi cried, holding up his hands in panic. Surprisingly, Kisame stopped.

"What?" He growled out.

"Is the door closed?"

"Of course the door's closed; it's standard hospital procedure."

"And the cameras: are they on or off?"

Suspicion crept into Kisame's voice. "They're off because I'm in here with you; again, standard hospital procedure. Why does it matter?"

Itachi swung his legs off the mattress to sit on the edge of the bed. "It means we can speak freely." He gestures in the vague direction of the couch. "Have a seat, if you would."

Itachi could tell that Kisame didn't like being bossed around by the person he was supposed to be in charge of, but he sat down on the proffered piece of furniture. When the sounds of his movements had quieted, Itachi asked, "Do you want to know the real reason why I'm in here?"

An irritated gasp escaped Kisame. "I don't see how that-"

Itachi cut him off. "Do you want to know why I'm here?" He repeated, gripping the edge of the bed.

"Fine," Kisame hissed in a voice that sounded like it came out through gritted teeth. "Why are you here?"

"I can see ghosts."

A beat of silence pervaded the room before Kisame voiced the obvious. "You're blind."

Itachi gritted his teeth. "Yes, but I wasn't before I came here! And I can still hear them, so let's just go with 'I can perceive ghosts'."

Another beat of silence followed this statement. "You're crazy."

This tore a laugh from Itachi. "I'm in a psychiatric hospital; what did you expect?"

"Is that why your father put you here? Because you think you can … perceive… dead people?"

Harsh laughter without any humor emanated from Itachi. "I don't think it: I know it, and my father does, too. It's partly that rat-bastard's fault I'm like this. We may act like just another rich family, but the Uchiha's help ghosts to fade, laying them to rest by helping them to sever their final ties to this world. He sent me to do a job I shouldn't have been given, and I saw things I wasn't ready to see. It drove me mad, and this," he yanked angrily on the bandage, "was the result."

Across the room, Kisame sat in stunned silence. It was no easy task to inform someone of a world of which they were ignorant; this Itachi knew, yet for some reason he had felt compelled to tell Kisame of his life and suffering. Perhaps it was because of the laughter they had shared earlier that day, the first that Itachi had felt in almost a decade, but he wanted Kisame to share in his life and know him.

Apparently, Kisame had recovered enough for words, because he soon said with a tight voice, "I have no reason to believe anything you say."

"No?" Itachi arched an eyebrow, which may or may not have been seen beneath the cloth on his head. "Not even if I told Kissy that Button loves him?"

"Dammit!" Kisame yelled. "Who told you about my sister?"

A smirk touched the corner of Itachi's lips. "I never said anything about your sister. I was just talking about Kissy and Button."

If Itachi could see, he would probably behold Kisame clenching his fists. "What game are you playing?"

"The game's sitting on the table."

Kisame stood up, even angrier than before. "That's not what I meant, and you know it!"

"Do I? I'm the crazy one here."

"Enough!" Kisame slammed his hand down on the table with enough force to jump Itachi and knock the wooden puzzle off the table. It bounced on the floor, landing with a dull thump. "Stop lying to me! Who told you about her?"

Itachi wished he could just tell Kisame everything, but he needed to see it for himself, otherwise he never would be able to accept what Itachi was telling him. With a sigh, Itachi prepared to lead Kisame on a wild goose chase until he came upon the realization by himself. It was one of the most difficult parts of the job of laying ghost to rest.

With a start, Itachi realized that he was going to communicate the little girl's presence to Kisame, therefore most likely helping her to fade, exactly what he had told himself he was never going to do again. Fuck it all, he swore in his mind, but comforted himself with another thought: he wasn't doing this for the dead. He was doing this for the living.

Apparently Itachi had been silent for too long, because Kisame slammed his other hand against the table as well. "Who told you, dammit?"

"I've been in confinement for eight years with no contact with the outside would," Itachi snarled. "Who the fuck do you think told me?"

Maybe it was his tone, or maybe it was the expletive, but something shocked Kisame enough to let his anger cool for him to think it over, settling back into the chair with a creak. When the answer - logical to Itachi, but utterly fantastic in nature to Kisame - hit him, Itachi could tell by his intake of breath. "Jesus-! Are you- are you telling me that… she's here?"

The girl spoke up again. "Is Kissy remembering me? Does that mean I'm important?"

"Here, and vocal," Itachi informed him.

"Jesus!" Kisame exclaimed again, then his voice hardened in suspicion. "How do I know you're not lying? Prove it to me!"

That was a simple enough process; Itachi had done it many times before. Turning to where he hoped the little dead girl was, he asked, "Button? Can I ask you something?"

A pout could be heard in the girl's voice. "Only Kissy can call me Button."

"I'm sorry; I didn't know that only…" He hesitated a bit on the nickname, "Kissy... could call you Button." A sharp intake of breath from Kisame told him that this was correct. "Anyway, could you tell me when you started following you brother around?"

The reply was punctual. "Five years ago this May."

"Five years ago in May…" Itachi mused. "Well, that should clear things up," he directed to Kisame. "Five years ago I was still in intensive care, and in May I was having my little episode where they took me off all the drugs I was on at once without weaning me off them. Therefore, I should have no knowledge of the fact that it was when your younger sister died."

"Jesus, she really is here!" Kisame jumped up from the chair and ran to Itachi, seizing him by the collar. "Where is she? Tell me!"

"Blind, remember!" Itachi managed as Kisame shook him back and forth.

The big man immediately released him. "Sorry."

The girl piped up. "Tell him I'm right beside him."

"She says that she's right beside you," Itachi relayed.

A frantic tone crept into Kisame's voice. "Where?"

"By your elbow, silly!"

"She says she's by your elbow."

"And now I'm hugging him. Tell Kissy I'm hugging him," the girl ordered.

With a small smile, Itachi obeyed. "She's hugging you."

Large fingers brushed against Itachi's arm as Kisame tried to embrace his sister's ghost. "I'm hungering her back! Am I doing it right?"

A girlish giggle sounded. "You're trying, Kissy, and that's all that matters."

"She says that you're hugging her back." It wasn't exactly what she had said, but it was what Kisame needed to hear.

All of a sudden, the little dead girl asked a question. "Will you tell Kissy something for me?"

"Sure," Itachi answered, knowing that this was what she needed to do in order to fade.

"What?" Kisame asked. "Did she say something?"

"She wants me to tell you something," Itachi replied.

"Oh," Kisame said, then quieted, paying rapt attention to Itachi.

"Tell him that I'm sorry I yelled at him. I didn't mean to, and then I was gone and couldn't apologize."

Itachi reported it to Kisame, who started to choke up when he replied. "No, it's my fault. I'm sorry, too. This would never have happened if I hadn't yelled at you and made you run away, and you would never have gotten hit by that bus!"

Ah, so that's how it had happened. A death like that would often leave a child a specter, wanting to apologize and make up for a fight that never mattered much to begin with.

"Please," the girl begged. "Tell Kissy that it wasn't his fault. I want him to smile and know that it wasn't his fault, and I didn't mean to make him mad."

This time, Kisame took a few calming breaths when Itachi reiterated the girl's words. "You didn't make me mad. I could never stay mad at you. I love you, Button."

The tenor of the girl's voice sounded like she had a sad smile on her face. "Tell Kissy… I love him too."

Itachi did as he was bade, and there was a rush of cool air next to his face. Standing up, Kisame asked frantically, "What was that? Where did she go?"

"She went where she was intended to go from the start," Itachi replied. "Somehow, she got stuck to you at her death instead of going there, wanting to tell you that she loved you, and as soon as you heard it, her objective was complete and she faded from this world. That's the job of an Uchiha: providing peace to those not alive, but not yet moved on to death."

Kisame drew in a deep, shuddering breath. "That sound like some job."

"It's not as glamorous as it seems, trust me."

All of a sudden, Itachi was taken by surprise as Kisame enfolded him in a hug. "Thank you," the big man whispered against his neck. "Thank you for helping my sister let go. I'm sorry I ever doubted you."

Slowly, Itachi raised his arms to embrace Kisame back, at the same time marveling at how wide his shoulders were. They stayed like that for a long time, until Kisame composed himself enough to pull back. Then the two moved back to the table and talked of inconsequential things until it was time for lunch, when they still managed to speak around mouthfuls of food.

And for the first time since being placed in the psychiatric ward, Itachi felt like he had found a friend.