Red and Purple
Itachi never thought he would enjoy violence.
As a child he was scarred by the death and blood his father showed him, an event that unlocked his sharingan, and to his father's chagrin, his unending want for peace. It was a desire that lead to him killing his clan, to him working under Akatsuki for years infiltrating the order. Yet, like so much else in the long hellish story of his life, that was a lie.
In truth, Itachi had hated his clan for wanting war. He enjoyed killing the older people, the fools who wanted innocents to die, and his mind was too preoccupied with the mission to care about the children he murdered. It was only after did he have the 'mercy' to pity himself for the lives he had taken. It was perhaps a year later that the resentment interrupted his nightmares, and he realised pity was too much of a mercy for him. He told himself he needed to be a angel on the inside, only fight for peace and nothing else, help in secret and fight for what he trusted was good.
But again, that was a lie.
What Itachi failed to realise for so long was that he was a murderer. A killer, and good at it too. It didn't take much to convince him to kill someone he was apathetic to, and when he did, there was always a little voice congratulating him from the darkest deepest pit in his mind. He rationalised it eventually, thinking it the leftover effects of his extended deception as 'Itachi, the clan killer' rather than the real him, but now, walking on a death path towards the soon to be severed head of Naruto Uzumaki, that the clan killer was the real him.
Itachi always enjoyed violence. He enjoyed it when he was young, impressing adults in spars. He enjoyed it when he was 13, killing as an ANBU. He enjoyed it as a member of Akatsuki. Yet, every time he curtailed it. He didn't deserve the enjoyment, feeling that he ought to be stoic, to punish his mind for the violent thoughts it proliferated, but now, moments away from facing his brother's killer, he let himself enjoy it. Itachi let the real him out.
They knew each other's location, yet neither strayed from their path. Both walked on cobblestone path, their fates incident on one another. Still, neither ran, both men on their way to the other's apocalypse.
Eventually the other was on the horizon. They continued, faces staring at each other the entire time, on and on, until the specs became blobs, and those blobs became ninja.
They stopped. Both men had blank faces, though Naruto's showed more intrigue than Itachi's, and black eyepatches, interestingly enough.
"Come for me then? Like all the other shitheels?" The jinjuriki spoke first. Itachi's face didn't twitch.
The blond spoke again, smirking as he tried to get a rise from the Uchiha. "You know I killed two of you already? Kakuzu, the other was an unknown, both were pretty easy. Not sure why you two think you stand a chance." His voice was laden with derision and ridicule. He believed the man standing in front was weaker than he, and perhaps (No, definitely) if the Uchiha was like he was a few days ago, he would be right.
Itachi stayed silent for a moment, letting the Uzumaki know the pointlessness of his jabs, before starting himself. "What happened to your eyes?"
This time Naruto's smile stretched fully, showing a set of white teeth, and sharpened, beastlike canines. "I guess I could ask you the same, Uchiha. Did a bird steal your sharingan?"
Said Uchiha didn't respond, just looked, hate pouring from his remaining orb. Naruto guessed he had become more resentful since they last met, perhaps a relationship between himself and one of the Akatsuki he had killed recently made it hard to separate work and personal life.
"Well, since you won't tell me, let me show you mine first." He spoke again, mouth sadistic in the way it opened now, as he ripped off his patch, showing a red eye, black tomoe swirling inside.
Itachi stayed still.
"You get three guesses from who this came from. First two don't count."
The Uchiha kept still.
"You know, he died weak. Tired. Scared of me. I hear you tried to make him like you, and let me tell you, if that is what you are meant to be like, your eye will be in my socket next."
A rapid rush of killing intent flew from Itachi, immense and dense and filled with the kind of sadistic hate unimaginable to most. It hurt Naruto more than it made him scared, the force filled with the raw sickening emotion of pure rage and hate. It felt like what his disdain was of Sakura times a million, the sludge slick spill of stomach high waste clinging to you until your scream in inane emotional outburst. Naruto could admit, he nearly stepped back from the feeling alone, but when he looked up at his opponent's face, he damn nearly fell over.
The Uchiha's face was solid steel, sharp and angled, an immense directory of violence etched into every wrinkle and every cell on it. Now, Naruto could tell, the two truly were brothers, with the spelling of rage stricken across their features making the light bend around their face as if their murderous intent was enough to control reality itself. Worse than that was the solitary eye, more gruesome than Sasuke's, part way clouded with grey, yet still glowing blood red, twirling around hundreds of times before landing on a spiralling triangle.
"Uzumaki. The Akatsuki are dead. I killed them. I killed them because I am, even now loyal to the leaf." The man started pacing, seemingly uncaring if the blond decided to take a cheap shot whilst his back was turned, perhaps confident that if he did it wouldn't be an advantage anyway.
"I killed my clan on their behalf, I joined them on their behalf, and if the village was the only thing I had ever loved in my life I would defeat you cleanly and bring you back there on their behalf. But, as it turns out, I loved someone else. My brother, the one I let live, in some misshapen desire to see him not hurt. I scarred him, once, then again, and both times I hated myself for it, yet I believed he would live a life worth living once he killed me. That was the sole reason I lived, for him. And you killed him."
Naruto knew better than to open his mouth, but he couldn't help it. "I don't need your life story."
"Do not worry Uzumaki, I will kill you soon enough, you don't need me to rush. You see-" He spoke in return, and, like Naruto before him, pulled the eyepatch off his face. He opened his closed eye, and behind were the purple glow and rings of the steel shining rinnegan.
"What the fuck is that?" Naruto asked eyes wide, confusion evident, and terror from the seemingly infinite power that emanated from it even more so.
"The eye of god. The one I earned from killing the leader of the Akatsuki." Itachi spoke, standing still now, facing Naruto at an angle.
His eyes, despite the colour, burned not with mystique but cold, calculating rage. "I made so many mistakes, and one of them was not being there for my brother. The other was not letting my rage drive me. But now I understand. I am a killer, more than you could ever hope to be. I am good at it, and it defines me. So, I will kill."
He finished, raising his arm, pushing his palm out, and commanding gravity to move.
For Naruto, the world exploded.
.
.
.
Then he collided with a tree.
And another.
And another.
And another hit him harder, sending his body spiralling enough for him to hit the floor and skid across the dirt like a fleshy missile, carving a line in the ground.
Naruto knew if he hadn't already been in sage mode he would have been dead. It took a minute (a second really but that was eons in ninja time) for him to realise what had just happened.
The eye was strong and had to have something to do with controlling his gravity. Combine that with whatever insane powers Itachi had picked up over the years and he would have to step up his game. If the man really did kill the Akatsuki, he was a monster, capable of carnage on an unseen level. Whatever he had been hit with, the energy didn't move like what a ninja could do. It twirled and twisted like nature chakra, but different. It made his stomach swirl simply in the way it flowed through the space around it, destructive and furious. It mirrored its master perfectly, inhuman and machine.
Attempting to get his bearings, Naruto looked up, seeing the former Akatsuki member floating casually mid-air, his ominous, deathly strong eyes staring down at him as his cloak swayed behind him. The blond's borrowed sharingan could see the massive amount of chakra flowing into and from the purple eye, but the red one, Itachi's original, was being fed more and more. On instinct, Naruto prepared a defense, just as Itachi cast a massive bomb of darkness onto him, extinguishing the world of light and replacing it with the heat of the void.
The treeline burnt with black flame, the impossible explosion of infinite power and unending destruction of Amaterasu that, if its master willed, could swallow up the whole land of fire. It continued burning with a heat so immense it would fuse bone and disintegrate flesh with the barest flicker of the smallest flame for a time, void and death carved into the world, impossibly deep and hellishly foul.
If the Uchiha was a fool he would leave, content with the lie that he had left the jinjuriki no possible escape, but he had been on enough missions, leaf or no, to know that when victory seemed certain it had a tendency of being the opposite, and the sadistic part of his brain, the one he needed to feed, wanted a corpse in front of him as evidence. He waited for a minute, eyes burning into the fire he had caused, and as the minute mark ticked over, a projectile flashed out the flame, too quick for him to dodge, the ninja being forced to deflect it with a small push of gravity. It flew off his side into the air behind him, where it exploded, hitting him in the back with an insane energy and sending him down back to the earth. He could have tried to regain his bearings, but Itachi knew to adjust for his mistakes, and that the jinjuriki had used the fact he had little convenient and quick manoeuvrability in the air to hit him, even if barely.
Instead the Uchiha chose to continue descending, his left eye spinning as he cancelled his Amaterasu. The black gave way to a glowing orange figure, Naruto flowing with the full, stolen power of the now dead 9 tails, with the even more stolen sharingan spinning with power. His arms rose up, both spinning twin tailed beast bombs, the man yelling as he tossed both, his long-spiked hair flowing like a tail from the momentum he put into them. Itachi had a better time defending this time, his eyes adjusted to the speed. His body twisted above them, arms aimed down, pushing a blast of concentrated gravity into condensed energy, the balls both sent to the ground, blasting underground. Itachi landed in a flip, rushing towards the jinjuriki.
Naruto began to dash forward as well, launching yet another bomb, one which Itachi easily dodged over, throwing a kunai into the ground as he did. Unplussed, the sage continued, yet found himself airborn as the Uchiha's rinnegan swirled, the flow of gravity bringing him closer to his foe than he desired. As they were mere meters away from each other, the gravity intensified, as Itachi pulled his fist back and smashed into the now accelerated Naruto's skull, hard enough to make the man do an improvised backflip.
Not satisfied with a mere concussion, the former Akatsuki member continued his pursuit, using his powers to raise the ground beneath the jinjuriki into the air as he collapsed into the ground. The force of the elevating ground pushed the man to the ground as the rock rose higher and higher before being slammed into with shards of missile launched ground crashing into it, creating a huge sphere of cobbled together rock in the air, floating.
Then, it exploded with a burst of orange power, energy so immense and hot it demolished the top of the rock, leaving a few splintered shards of stone. Now exposed Naruto dashed from rock to rock like a pinball scattering down a series of pegs, rushing with a supersonic speed right into the Uchiha. Itachi managed to react, barely, his eyes spinning as he summoned the power of gravity without his arms raised, a small barrier erected around him, halting Naruto's fist slightly, but the attack still getting through and smashing the former Akatsuki member in the jaw, breaking the bone and severing the right side completely.
His black figure flew through the sky, before stabilising, flipping over and slowing down to a stand. The severed jawbone held still in the air for some moments, blood dripping down the gruesome injury, before skin stretched over freakishly, and the bone mended itself, steam and flesh sprouting out from the wound to cover it, soon making Itachi look the same as before. Expecting his opponent to be disoriented and weakened, Naruto didn't notice the counterattack that had been prepared, Itachi dodging above and smashing the top of the jinjuriki's head down with a quick overhead kick, knocking it him into the dirt.
The Uzumaki rolled back up, determined not to lose, lashing out with a series of lightning-fast blows battering at Itachi's defence, a desperate attempt to force a mistake with unrivalled power. A final hit to the chest pushed the cloaked man away slightly, where the blond's impossibly quick body flicker into an attempted kunai stab managed to push a blade right into the opponent's chest, under his ribs and where his heart would be.
Naruto looked up in disbelief at his quick victory, the image Itachi had placed in his mind in the past few interactions much to dangerous and experienced to fall to such an elementary move, and as one would expect, he saw only a sadistic smile on the Uchiha's face. His arm transformed into a bony sharp blade, a thrust aimed at the jinjuriki's own heart in retaliation, Naruto realising just how inhuman and unnatural the man's powers truly were, able to move or hide his heart as he willed, and change his body as he wished. Panicking, he stopped the improvised spear, his glowing chakra cloak and strong grip preventing the blade from stabbing into his heart by diverting it the stab far into his stomach instead, but the desperate defence left Itachi's other fist open and able to smash the jinjuriki in the face, knocking the blond back in a stumble and ripping the hand-katana out with an arc of blood splashing out.
Itachi was pleased with his performance so far, but had ran into a limitation with his eye. He could only use one of the 'paths' at once, limiting his offensive abilities. He realised that the orange cloak was a huge deal of Naruto's power, and removing it would allow him to be wounded more easily, but he was too quick and strong for Itachi to fight on par with him without the Asura path. The plan was then to use the Deva path for long range to get him close, use the Asura path to weaken him, and then use the Petra path to extract his power.
He had tried to entrap the Uzumaki in his genjutsu, but as he expected even with the strength of the rinnegan empowering his abilities, his foe's mind was too well defended against his techniques, the sharingan itself being a large bulwark from the effect of his illusions. It didn't matter too much, Itachi having other, more physical offenses to use, but it frustrated him (a good frustration, the kind that makes you more lethal) that he couldn't use his most familiar art.
Plan solidified, the Uchiha pushed on, attempting to capitalize on his hit on Naruto, but the jinjuriki dodged easily, speed still quicker, ducking under the blow and smashing a strong fist into Itachi's gut. The attack was strong enough to crack ribs and rupture organs, but Itachi had strengthened them with his powers, metallic coating making them harder to shatter. Regardless, the attacks were still harsh and brutal, and Itachi realised, desperate. He could tell through the rift seen in his brother's stolen eye that he feared him, a force he didn't and couldn't understand.
Rising from his crouched position, Naruto used his advantage to put out some damage, smashing Itachi's head to the side with a roundhouse, then twisting in a reverse spinning kick aiming again for the Uchiha's skull, reasoning that even if his heart was hard to destroy, his brain would be different. However, his kick was stopped by a hand sprouting out of Itachi's flesh, picking him up into the air where he was spun around in a cartwheel and finally smashed into the ground with a massive thud, the blow smashing a crater into the ground and causing all of the wind in Naruto's chakra enhanced lungs to be vented out..
Not taking any chances, Itachi leapt back as a devastating close-range explosion of wind flew from the jinjuriki's body, a defensive flurry of wind destroying any and all foliage and stone nearby. Without even standing up Naruto body flickered towards Itachi, hand signs flashing as he spat out a wind bullet, the projectile whistling with immense speed and power, an attack that Itachi easily absorbed with a stretched out palm. He responded with a great fireball, no hand signs, which Naruto countered with a water bullet, the explosion creating steam, equal parts flame and liquid. After a suspicious second, Itachi noted a Naruto jumping out of the steam, with another rumbling around under him, the rinnegan able to see through the ground but not through chakra. The underground one was killed with a handsign-less earth spike, brutal attack piercing the clone's brain, whilst the one in front was forced to duck beneath 4 simultaneous swipes at his head with katana-esque arm growths.
More flame was pushed from Itachi's palms, creating a screen neither man could see through and forcing the younger of the two to retreat. Itachi pushed on, absorbing the flame's chakra and slashing down, his blades cutting into Naruto's cloak, cutting into his skin. Panicking, he leapt back, but Itachi's blades retracted, the Deva path pulling him in, where the Uchiha reached out with a threatening and ominous hand. Naruto's instincts yelled out for him to dodge it, and so he manipulated the earth below him, allowing his body to fall through just under his grasp, only a small amount of chakra being stolen by the Petra path.
He resurfaced a few meters away, jumping out just out quick enough for Itachi's white-hot heat to burst out the tunnel behind him without scratching him. Naruto had figured that Itachi's abilities were exclusive. He couldn't use one whilst he was using the other, which meant he was vulnerable, for just a moment. A moment he could use.
As it was, he was on the backfoot, Itachi pulling out more and more unique abilities as the fight went on when he only had a few. He was getting pressured, forced to rely on his least obvious tricks whilst Itachi seemed to only get stronger as the fight went on. It was terrifying, almost, this impossibly powered man, intelligent enough to use it, and with a deep burning rage inhabiting every cell in his body, rage and killing intent only intensifying since that initial explosion. More than ever, Naruto had doubt in his mind he could win.
The man spawned a few clones behind him and rushed with them at Itachi, who raised a hand to push the overwhelming force away with the Deva path. Before he could through, twin rasenshuriken flew from the hands of two clones, forcing Itachi to point his arms to the side instead and deflect the two projectiles, allowing Naruto closer than Itachi expected. Still though, even with his hands preoccupied, Itachi was not harmless, blood flowing from his tear ducts as his eye, somewhat repaired due to the influence of the rinnegan on his body yet still clouded, with the incredible power of Amaterasu springing to life and smashing a small black fireball into the lead clone, sending him flying back. Not finished with his defence, Itachi commanded the flame to shift into a multi-pronged lance, piercing each clone still standing in quick succession, the heat too sharp for even Naruto's clone's cloak to protect against.
As each Naruto burst into smoke, the real one remained hidden. Itachi guessed correctly, and dodged back where another burst out of the ground, rasengan raised into the air. The Uchiha simply grabbed onto the Uzumaki's arm, holding him and draining each drop of the 9 tails chakra from him, feeling more and more strength flow through his formerly broken body. He would have continued like that, had his newly found rinnegan hadn't felt an unusual amount of chakra emitting from a stray shard of rock that had burst out the ground.
The sound of a transformation halting pulled his attention upwards, where the real Naruto was, tailed-beast-bomb-rasenshuriken in his grip, the projectile already leaving his fingers.
At the point Itachi only had one good option.
"Susanoo!"
…
A/N: Hello. Been a while? Most of this fanfiction was written when I had much more time, in between classes at university with little to do than write, and from then most of my writing time has been preoccupied with personal projects. Thank you to those who took the time out to read my story, and I hope that this chapter is enough of a reward for continued loyalty.
The general problem with writing anything like this is most of the compelling part is in the pre-fight (at least for me) and then I have to write two entire chapters simply about two characters fighting, so in that fight scene I have to add character and good pacing and yada yada.
My intention for this story, by the way, was to get to 100 reviews. I saw other people do it, and I decided if I wrote shortish chapters and continued to release them day after day, I could do it myself. Of course, once I achieved this, it wasn't like I didn't want to write this story anymore, but it was easier to get distracted by more compelling ideas, like my original work. Looking back at this and some of my ideas, I do want to finish this story (even if some of you may not like the ending.)
Anyway, this fight will be spread out into two different chapters because this one is already like 3800 words and that is too much for one chapter.
Remember to review btw. It makes it easier to write new chapters.
Also some things to think about.
Where did Itachi's other eye go?
What is Madara doing?
What is Naruto's plan after escaping/killing Itachi?