Itachi sleeps, and he dreams a long night of strange dreams.
All nights are long for him, and all of his dreams are strange. They always have been, since the night he first unlocked his clan's kekei genkai.
Even in its current, weakened state, the Sharingan is memory incarnate, and nothing escapes its grasp. It preserves all memories in absolute clarity, as if trapped between sheets of glass, untouched by the greasy, bruising fingers of time. It is clinging and possessive, unwilling to sacrifice even the smallest detail to decay.
Things Itachi has lost, things he can no longer have, come back to him in dreams.
The Sharingan clings, desperately, but only to memories.
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Itachi did not awaken his Sharingan until he was ten years old.
Even without it, though, Itachi's rise as an Academy student had been meteoric. He'd been told as much countless times—that he was both unparalleled in his class and in his generation, a shinobi without compare, without equal.
And truly, he believed that he was.
He graduated at the age of seven with the highest grades in his class and was placed on a genin team soon after. Though both his assigned comrades were his seniors in both age and experience, it became clear from the inception of the team that neither could - or would, inevitably - be able to match him for either talent or skill.
As a reward for the unblemished mission record that followed, he and his teammates were assigned to lead the Fire Daimyo's escort for his annual trek between Konoha and his summer estate, a mission that, while simple, was one the village held in high esteem. His father greeted the news with a tense, mechanical nod of his head, before patting Itachi's shoulder once, lightly.
As expected of my son.
Despite the perfunctory and frankly rote nature of the mission, in the days leading up to their departure, Itachi found himself possessed by the abrupt, unshakeable belief that something was bound to go inexplicably, irreparably wrong.
Nothing of note had preceded this sudden concern. Nonetheless, the night before that mission was meant to begin, something - some feeling, some impression - began to tug at his consciousness in a way that quickly became impossible for Itachi to ignore. It made his skin itch and his chest ache, and he found himself unable to sleep through it.
He spent hours sitting up in his bed as the night sky grew light and grey, rechecking his weapons pouch and poring over the mission scroll he'd been given, tracing his thin, trembling fingers up and down the marked paths they were to take. Even this strenuous preparation did nothing to soothe his mounting anxiety, and by morning light, his eyes were weighted with several hours' missed sleep, and he arrived at the gate of the village with dark bruises already blooming above the thin hollows of his cheeks.
Though he continued to try to rationalize away his strange fear, logic was of little comfort to him. His unease followed him throughout the mission as sure as a hand at his back, a whisper in his ear that continuously pulled his attention away from their client and into the woods around them, drawing confused looks from Shinko and Tenma.
For that entire week, Itachi did not sleep. His sensei's reassurances - and later, his thinly veiled warnings - were useless against the parasitic dread that had borrowed under his skin. After several nights of lying awake in his tent, his chest bubbling with unanswered anticipation, he began stalking their campgrounds at night, waiting for some danger to manifest, as he was certain it would.
And yet, it never did.
His hair hung limply around his face, and his appetite dwindled down to nothing, yet ultimately, his fears proved to be unfounded. Several days after they departed from Konoha, they arrived at the Daimyo's summer residence safely, without incident, and the mission was deemed successful.
Little more could be said than that.
They departed the Daimyo's residence on good terms, made quick work of their return to the village, and Itachi spent the next three days lying in bed, his body overcome by the exhaustion he'd waylayed for the duration of his mission.
Later, he thought over his performance, as he often did, and concluded that he'd been nervous due to the high profile of the mission, which had expressed itself as irrational paranoia.
That was an adequate enough explanation for him.
Itachi continued on and was dutiful in his training, and in time, the mission with the daimyo fell away from his thoughts. Under Shisui's tutelage, he quickly graduated from genin to chunin, and was shortly after admitted to ANBU as its first Uchiha member.
Little more can be said of it than that.
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And yet, that was not the end of the matter entirely. Though the mission with the daimyo had been wholly uneventful, and though there was no shortage of other, more pressing matters that had captured his attention, Itachi could not shake the feeling that something unusual had happened to him, or come close to happening to him.
He felt changed, as if his mind had been opened to a terrible, unspeakable truth.
Again, months after the escort mission, he would occasionally be overcome by that same strange feeling, that same cloying, seductive, unshakeable sense that there was something just beyond his grasp, something he should be seeing, something that simply was not right.
And yet, there was nothing. At least, nothing he could decipher.
The feeling would strike him randomly, at seemingly unrelated moments. It would begin as a prickle at the back of his neck, until it settled in his gut, or at the base of his spine, until his legs began to grow numb. It was there the day Tenma, his genin teammate, was promoted to chunin, as well as the week after he was admitted to ANBU, when a member of the Aburame clan, Sugaru, was killed on a mission in Kirigakure.
Time after time and again: nothing.
He spoke of it, of course, to almost no one—it was a feeling that he couldn't even explain to himself, let alone to another person.
Or rather, only ever to one person.
It was Shisui, after all, rather than his father or mother, who he initially turned to when his Sharingan awoke, and it was Shisui alone who Itachi could safely confide in.
It was Shisui alone who could both understand and honor his need for confidence, and who would do so without question, or prompting.
Other Uchiha would not have been quite so understanding.
Within the clan, the awakening of one's Sharingan was a rite of passage, a story meant to be retold and reinvented until the initial tragedy of it had been washed so thoroughly by reminiscence that all that remained were the bare threads of the story and whatever glory had been woven into it.
For Itachi, though, this was not the case. It never would have been regardless: the jockeying and chauvinism of other shinobi had never appealed to him, nor had he ever been one to be liberal with matters of fact or truth, especially where it concerned his own accomplishments, which more often than not required no exaggeration.
But ultimately, the decision wouldn't be his to make. When his Sharingan awoke, there was simply no story for him to tell—no pain to exploit, no feat to valorize, no tale to spin, as so many others had before him.
There was nothing.
It came to him as a dream, so vivid that years later - even as an adult - he can recall with perfect clarity the intricate details of it: the taste of ozone in the air, the strange, midday darkness, the sharp ache in his chest, as if he'd swallowed ash.
A blurry, distorted figure stood ahead of him, though somehow, he knew innately that it was Sasuke. He would always know Sasuke, he thought. By their very souls, even when he could not plainly make out Sasuke's face, he would always know his brother.
With clumsy, dreamlike steps, he approached Sasuke with a creeping, dreadful slowness, his vision rocking with every heavy lurch forward. His feet dragged painfully, and every muscle in his outstretched arm screamed with exhaustion, though he continued reaching forward, as if he were chasing something just barely beyond his grasp.
But Sasuke was right there: right before him.
His brother's face became clearer as he drew closer, though Sasuke remained frozen in place, his arms pressed flat against the wall behind him, his eyes blown wide, as if struck with terror.
It made sense, then, that Itachi would continue to hobble closer, his chest rattling what felt like his very last breaths, so that Itachi could assure him that whatever Sasuke was afraid of, his older brother would be there to console him.
Of it all, that was the only thing that did make sense.
When he reached Sasuke, and could finally see the naked, dumbfounded look on his face, Itachi felt his lips stretch into a smile, before he pressed two fingers to his little brother's forehead, and everything else faded away.
Itachi shuddered awake in the middle of the night, his bedclothes and sheets damp with sweat, and his chest sore as if he'd been screaming, though the house was silent and still around him.
That did not necessarily mean that he hadn't been screaming, but it certainly made it less likely.
Soon after, he realized that his entire bedroom was preternaturally bright, despite the late hour reflected on his bedside clock. It was an artificial light, not in the way that sunlight would fill a room, but a softer glow, as if everything in his room was illuminated from within.
Clumsily, without much coordination, he threw aside his sheets and scrambled out of bed. Despite the greater clarity in his vision, he found himself stumbling through the house until he was slumped against the bathroom door, his inflamed cheeks resting against the cool, lacquered wood.
He didn't have the strength to fumble for the lightswitch, but even in the dark, he could see the red glare in his eyes, and the single tomoe floating in each.
Without a spark, without some kind of situational stressor to trigger it, and without any other legitimate reason for why his Sharingan had awakened so suddenly, Shisui was the only person Itachi felt safe confiding in, until he could no longer conceal its existence.
And so he confided in Shisui, having no one else he could turn to.
It was not fate that had brought him and Shisui together, as fate itself could only ever exist in hindsight, a cobbling together of coincidence and pattern seeking. Still, Itachi recalled their first meeting with that same strange, incessant sense he had that there was something that ought to be shared between them. Not one thing in particular, but that his existence and Shisui's existence were meant to converge, that his tall, gangly-limbed cousin was meant to become not only a part of but a fixture in his life, as sure as if they'd met in a past life.
They only discussed it once.
Because who's to say that it isn't fate, huh? Shisui said, his voice light with good humor. You finding me, and me finding you—?
We're clanmates, Itachi added quietly, though inwardly he preened at the thought, that charismatic, magnetic Shisui would see as much in Itachi as Itachi did in him. Of course we're friends.
But we knew, Shisui insisted. He never said what, exactly, it was that they knew, but Itachi immediately understood what he was referring to: he, Shisui, the two of them—that something about them both was predetermined, bound to happen. How did you know, and how did I know?
Itachi could never find an answer to that. It simply was—Shisui was Shisui, and he was Itachi. Whatever it was that was between them, it might as well have been fated.
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Itachi's time in ANBU did very little to stymie the animosity between the clan and village, though both sides seemed convinced that the role he would play would be a crucial one. He was promoted in the spring to Team Ro, a team that worked directly under the Hokage, until the fall of that same year, when he was promoted yet again and assigned his own squad.
It was on a mission with that same squad that the remainder of his life would be sent off course entirely. His head had been buzzing with that uncanny feeling, that sense of displacement that remained as omnipresent as it was inscrutable.
While he'd learned to ignore it long ago, as well as such a thing could be ignored, it had become insistent, to the point where he struggled to keep his attention trained on the two ANBU he'd been assigned.
His team was a dozen or so miles out from the village when the feeling became too much for him to ignore, and he turned around, abandoning his two teammates. They had been Danzo's men before they had become his men, and they would continue to be Danzo's men regardless of how long they might be under his command. He understood that, and knew that there would be no lost loyalty between him and them.
Itachi said nothing to them other than there was an emergency, that he could not continue, and that he needed to return to the village.
Alone.
"You may continue on without me," he said brusquely, to no reply. They seldom spoke directly to him, though he assumed they scrupulously listened to every word that came out of his mouth so that it could be reported to Danzo later.
And ultimately, it was good that he had chosen to go alone, because he could not say for certain what might have happened to Danzo's men if they had followed him back to the village and seen what he'd seen.
A flock of crows greeted him at the edge of the village. This, he thought little of.
The crows had always been drawn to him and Shisui, and they'd never led either astray. He followed them as they flew off towards the training grounds, past the cliff over the Nakano, and deep into the forests surrounding the village.
And they led him to Shisui.
Or rather, what was left of Shisui.
The crows settled in a circle, a dark, still ring of feathers around Shisui's body, as black as an inked seal. They parted only to admit Itachi, hundreds of black eyes and cocked heads tracking his movements as he approached, head spinning, to stand next to Shisui.
Anything more than that was beyond him. It was as if his entire consciousness had been removed from his body, leaving him unable to speak or feel or do anything, aside from stare.
There was something deep within his body, in his mind, that shifted at the sight of Shisui's broken body, his bloodied face.
The holes where his eyes had been.
Something in his mind, Itachi thought, had been created for the sole purpose of shattering when the world became too much to bear.
But it didn't, though. Not then, and not ever.
Sometimes he wonders whether his life would have fundamentally changed if it had.
He stood there, staring down at Shisui's body as the sun sank in the distance, dragged down under the horizon by its own weight. His knees began to ache and blackspots gathered at the corners of his vision, but he stood sentinel, watching his best friend's face for the last time, trying to coax whatever fragile thing there was inside of him to crack, to explode.
To do whatever it was it had been created to do.
But it never did. And maybe it never would.
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More ANBU arrived, eventually.
Maybe it'd been because Itachi had returned from his mission so abruptly. Maybe they'd noticed the swarm of crows over the forest, swirling around him in a deafening storm of black feathers and beaks.
Maybe he'd just been unlucky.
The ANBU entered from the outer edges of the field, where several dead Foundation members were lying, their bodies bound in their grey cloaks. Killed by Shisui, he supposed, though a part of him was suddenly angered by their easy deaths—that they had not perished by the hand of someone willing to make them suffer.
Itachi heard a sharp intake of breath from behind him as one ANBU approached behind him. "What the—oh, you mother fucker…"
The ANBU snatched his wrist, but Itachi didn't attempt to resist, and his arm fell limp between them, dead weight in the ANBU's grip. With his head still spinning, he went along passively, blank eyed and mute, as the ANBU dragged him back into the village, jerking and knocking him about as they went.
They headed straight towards the ANBU hideout, through the hidden, cave-like entrance under the Hokage monument, down to where the holding cells were kept. Itachi watched with a strange, clinical interest, feeling oddly untouched by any of it, his body swaying with each disembodied step.
His cell door was sealed behind him with an earthy grind, severing him from the rest of the world with a wall of pure stone that would bury him alive should he attempt to break his way through it.
And then they left him. At least, he assumed they did—the cell was pitch black and completely silent, as if it were removed from the same reality together. There were no retreating footsteps or fading snippets of conversation, no vibrations or flashes of light from beyond.
It was as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist.
Itachi lay slumped on the bottom of his cell for what felt like days, pressing each sensitive spot of his memory until they all felt equally bruised. He could feel that thing within him pushing against the inside of his skull, pushing so hard against his eyes that at times his vision would go dark, that he would see stars, that once he swiped the back of his hand over his eyes and a streak of blood was left behind.
But it held. The world around him had collapsed, but that one, unnameable thing with him had remained solidly intact.
When the interrogators finally came, there was not much left of him for them to parse through. Only one of them - the interrogator, Itachi could only presume - was formally dressed in T&I apparel. He gave every appearance of being a Yamanaka, from his blonde hair to his solid, pupilless eyes, which meant Itachi's interrogation could be quick, and that there might be no need for him to speak.
The Yamanaka looked him over clinically before nodding to one of the men who'd come with him. "Hold him still."
Itachi's arms were wrenched painfully behind his back, though he didn't try to resist until the Yamanaka set his hand down over his head, and the first probing tendrils of chakra touched Itachi's mind.
And then he began to scream.
The images blurred like hot summer rain as the Yamanaka haphazardly pierced together his fractured memories.
He worked with surgical precision, so exact that Itachi barely saw more than a second or two of blinding, epileptic flashes before the Yamanaka had narrowed in on his mission that same day. The interrogator slowed his review so that he could watch Itachi's return to the village, his encounter with the flock of crows, his search for Shisui—
The tendons in his hands creaked from how hard he was digging his nails into the skin of his palms, his grip so intense that later he would find blood crusted on the inside of his sleeves.
—then the other ANBU's bodies. Shisui lying in the grass, unmoving, splayed out the way he would often lie after a long spar, the red, bruised skin around his eyes, blurring—
The jutsu cut off abruptly, like an interrupted dream. The Yamanaka's hand lingered on top of Itachi's head for several long seconds. His grip loosened, until it almost felt warm.
Fatherly, even.
"A latecomer," the Yamanaka finally pronounced as he withdrew his hand. "He didn't touch the bodies, either. Forensics should be clean." After a moment, the Yamanaka added, somewhat uneasily, "Get this fucking kid out of here."
And that was all there was to it. Another ANBU guided Itachi back up the stairs toward the building's exit. He walked mindlessly, propelled forward by the ANBU's hand on his shoulder.
"Go home now," the ANBU told him, his voice strangely similar to his former captain's. "Go get some sleep," and the door clicked shut behind Itachi.
Itachi blinked, realizing he was now alone on the side of a street, somewhere in the market district of the village. He turned back once and saw solid concrete where the door he'd come through had been, as if it had never existed in the first place.
With nowhere else to go, he began to stumble his way down the street. It was as though a tether had been severed, leaving him floating. He was free to go, but where? Almost distantly, he recalled that he had abandoned his mission, that he'd sent his team on without him, but it seemed so long ago now that he couldn't bring himself to rouse a single feeling about it.
The night sky overhead was cracked open like a massive geode, full of stars and bright crooked edges. The vastness of it made his head spin, until he could no longer keep his steps straight. He stumbled into a patch of grass and emptied his stomach into the dirt, bile burning the back of his throat.
He lay there for several seconds, waiting for the world around him to slow, to stop rushing, before he picked himself up and started to trudge back towards the Uchiha clan compound.
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Itachi returned home nearly an hour later to find both of his parents waiting for him in the kitchen, a grim assembly. Sasuke had, presumably, already been sent to bed, which meant that there was no need for them to speak in indirect terms about anything that had happened.
He sat down by the door and mechanically began to remove his shoes, his fingers slipping through the buckles with a clumsiness that was unlike him. He set his shoes aside and stepped into the kitchen, his arms and legs moving robotically, without feeling.
His parents didn't say anything, but he could hear their suspicions in the silence that followed.
"Mother," he started, though filial piety demanded he greet her second. He added, almost as an afterthought, "Father."
His mother frowned, a small crease appearing on her forehead, though she said nothing in response.
She rarely did, though, and he'd long gotten used to that.
His mother seldom ever shared her thoughts with him, the way she did with his little brother. The things she would share with Sasuke comfortably, casually, communally - the sparrows nesting outside her window, the spiders she'd swiftly remove from inside the house with cup and paper - those were deemed to be beneath his notice and were preemptively screened from him.
Which was not to say that Mother was cruel, or that she was cold towards him. Mother loved freely, without restraint, and yet her deeper thoughts were often a mystery to him. They had been for years, as if a concrete wall had been erected between them the moment Itachi left Konoha to accompany his father to the Third Shinobi War.
He had always wondered, watching her furrowed brow, her tightly pressed lips—wondered where her mind was when she failed to voice her thoughts. What she truly saw, and what she comprehended.
After everything that had come to pass, what did Mother truly think?
His body swayed.
He opened his mouth again to speak, but couldn't find any words meaningful enough to explain what had happened.
Could not comprehend exactly what had happened, such that he could hope to explain it.
"Itachi…" Mother started, her lips pressed into a thin, straight line. She rose slowly from the table, one hand outstretched as if she were confronting a skittish cat. "We heard that—"
"I will be cleared of all charges," he announced. He did not know this for a fact, nor did he know what narrative his parents had been told, but he could think of nothing else to say. "I did not kill Shisui."
With that, Itachi took a deep breath, before he excused himself and hurried to his room alone.
His bedroom door slid shut behind him with a soft whisper, despite how violently his hands trembled. He stumbled over to his bed and collapsed there, his body lifeless, his hair tied messily and uniform unchanged. The dark ceiling above him seemed to warp and spin with strange shadows, until the sheer force of physical exhaustion was such that he could no longer force his eyes to remain open.
He dreamed no dreams that night, though several times he would awake to the sound of a shoji door sliding open and hushed voices from rooms away. The house thrummed throughout the night like a beating heart, pumping the lifeblood of the clan in and out of its chambers until sunrise.
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The next day he woke to the sound of the door sliding open to his room and the quick patter of feet up to his bedside. His entire body went rigid, but it only took seconds for Itachi to identify the intruder.
"You might as well join me," Itachi said, surreptitiously sliding his kunai back into its hiding place behind his headboard, his little brother none the wiser.
Sasuke dove down into the covers and wriggled under Itachi's arm, pressing into his body against Itachi's the same way a loyal dog might rub up against his owner's legs.
"I heard you come home late last night," Sasuke muttered, his voice muffled into his armor. Almost bored, Sasuke took one hand and knocked it against the padding, either unaware or unbothered by the dark stains that had set into it. "You said you'd be gone for several days, and then I didn't see you at breakfast…"
The idea of being physically touched by anyone - even Sasuke, who was more often than not the exception to every rule governing his universe - made each nerve in his body scream. Still, he found himself placing one hand gently on top of Sasuke's head, smoothing down several sleep-slicked strands as he pulled Sasuke closer.
His brother squirmed, fighting against Itachi's smothering. "Did you finish your mission early, Itachi? How did it go?"
"Ah." Sasuke's strange obliviousness was almost impossible for him to comprehend, for as much as he envied it. By the time he had been Sasuke's age, he'd seen and inflicted death upon others in equal measure. Sasuke had been kept blissfully ignorant of it all, though, shielded from the same horrors that had become so commonplace to Itachi.
It was brittle, that kind innocence, and there was no repairing it once it'd been fractured. Itachi understood that then, much better than he ever had before.
He sank his fingers even further into Sasuke's soft hair, his grip tightening. Even his brother's body was entirely unlike his, his muscles soft, undefined. Delicate, almost.
Fragile.
"Itachi?" Sasuke poked his head back up, his brows furrowed. "It's getting kinda hot in here…"
"Right." With a low, slow exhale, Itachi released Sasuke, aware of the small patches of sweat left behind under his armor where Sasuke had rested. "What time is it now?"
"It's close to noon."
"You should be at the Academy," he noted dully.
Sasuke looked away. "Mother says I don't have to go today… No one will tell me what's happening, Itachi." He leaned up on one elbow, his soft, child's face screwing up in confusion. "Why are you still wearing your uniform?"
"I came home late."
"And early," Sasuke pointed out. "You were supposed to be on a mission last night. Did something happen?"
"Yes. There—" The words caught in his throat. He had no idea how to explain things to Sasuke. It occurred to him that what happened should not be explained to Sasuke. At least, not yet. Not any time soon. "There was an urgent matter requiring my attention."
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The Third Hokage never summoned him for an explanation—either to ask for one, or to offer one to Itachi. For all of his misplaced sympathies, he was far too precarious for that, it seemed. Resolving matters between the village and the clan had been the Hokage's priority before, but the deaths of both Shisui and Danzo complicated much of the progress that had been made.
And Itachi was too unreliable to be used any further.
Several days after Shisui's death, he returned from a shower to find voluntary discharge forms placed in a neat stack on his desk. The Hokage had already affixed his own seal to the document, with Itachi's own signature being the only missing portion.
There was no message attached to it, so Itachi read his own into it: You can walk away from this.
Once upon a time, he would have liked to, though never would he have accepted such an offer. Now, though, Itachi slipped the papers into his desk drawer and left them there. If the Hokage wanted him gone badly enough, he would find a way to dismiss him.
Within the compound, the clan continued to meet in secret. No more invitations were extended to Itachi, but occasionally he would return at night to find the entire compound emptied, save for the children sleeping alone in their homes.
He suspected - but never attempted to confirm - that they continued to meet in the same location beneath Nakano Shrine, protected only by their own assumption that he would not infiltrate a clan meeting he was not asked to attend.
They weren't wrong. He did not.
Itachi allowed them to continue to meet, in the way that a tree allows the rain to fall. It simply did not concern him any longer, one way or the other. He had no wish to deal with their business any further than he already had. So long as he could protect Sasuke, the clan was theirs to doom as they pleased.
On the nights where both of his parents would be conspicuously missing, Itachi prepared his singular meals and listened to the soft, rhythmic sounds of Sasuke sleeping several rooms over, until years later, when he would return home for the first time to find himself entirely alone.
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Danzo Shimura, as it turned out, had been a man with many allies but very few friends. He was mourned by few, would be avenged by none, and his many efforts against the Uchiha clan would ultimately prove to have been futile.
Itachi simply did not believe it at first. Could not believe it at first.
He had not seen Danzo's corpse himself when he'd discovered Shisui's body, though he'd hardly spared more than a second to look at the others who had died that day, and could not say with certainty whether Danzo himself had been among them.
At the time, it seemed impossible that something so consuming, something so pivotal, could ever come to such a simple end. That Itachi could wake up one morning only to realize everything that had given his life meaning could have been resolved so suddenly.
And if it all could have been so simple, who should bear the responsibility for not ending it sooner?
In the weeks following Shisui's death, he took to patrolling the compound at night, knowing that any attack, any invasion by Danzo's men, would only come at night. He waited for that strange feeling to return—for that apprehension to strike him the same way it had the day Shisui died, alerting him to the danger before it would strike.
But it didn't.
It never did, and maybe it never would.
He never strayed far from Sasuke's side, cataloging every shadow, any sudden movement around his brother. He became accustomed to short nights of strange dreams, flickering pantomimes with very little sense to them.
Exhaustion would carry him only as far as his bed, but it left him with nothing to fend off the dark hours his Sharingan would spend translating images over into his dreams, as if it could make sense of what had happened by making him relive it over and over again, in increasingly creative ways. He saw Shisui, limping along the forests cradling the socket of one of his missing eyes, the other still intact.
Shisui, imparting his final words to Itachi before tumbling, eyeless, smiling, into the Nakano below.
Sometimes Itachi would be there, carrying Shisui to safety over his shoulder, far away from the pursuing Foundation members. Sometimes it was only Shisui, alone, poisoned, dying in the woods with no one to comfort him in his last minutes.
To the extent Itachi could avoid sleeping entirely, he did. Otherwise, he tried to fill his days with as much activity as possible, to stave off his ever-approaching collapse, just as he had as a child, on his mission to the Daimyo's summer residence.
When Sasuke would leave for the Academy, Itachi would follow closely behind him, waiting outside while Sasuke had his lessons and played with his classmates in the schoolyard. He would flare his chakra occasionally, wanting to stay mostly hidden, while making others aware of his presence, should they falsely assume that Sasuke was unguarded.
He observed Sasuke's classmates as well, though only a handful of the other students stood out to him—a Yamanaka, whose clan was inextricably bound to T&I, sitting at the uncomfortable boundary between the village and the ANBU.
She seemed to care for Sasuke and would greet him loudly, with her hands cupped around her mouth, if they happened to arrive at the same time. He recalled his own interrogator with distaste, though he was inclined to think they would have the greatest sense, out of anyone, of the precariousness of the divide between the Uchiha clan and the village and would be the most careful in navigating it.
Though perhaps not.
The most conspicuous among them was a clanless girl with pink hair who, for no reason Itachi could discern, seemed determined to engineer as many futile encounters with Sasuke as possible, hiding her face behind schoolwork and classmates whenever Sasuke so much as glanced in her direction.
Though not remarkable in the least, she concerned him the most, simply because her circumstances were the most difficult to rationalize. She excelled in academics but had few successes in taijutsu or shurikenjutsu. An easy cover, he thought—incompetence that would be easy to fake.
Danzo might have been dead, but Itachi was not so much of a fool that he could believe his agents were gone. The girl was an almost exact fit for Danzo's model—a young child, who no one in particular would find remarkable, who could move among her targets with ease.
Perhaps even she was unaware of it.
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Several months after Shisui's death, Sasuke kicked in the door to Itachi's bedroom. Little had been said between them in the past months, though Sasuke had sent more than a few wayward glances his way.
He stomped up to Itachi's desk, his tiny little fists balled at his sides. "You need to stop following me and my friends," Sasuke announced. "It's getting really weird."
"I'm doing nothing of the sort," he responded, though Sasuke's unflinching stance quickly caused him to change tactics. "I'm surprised you were vigilant enough to notice."
Sasuke frowned.
"There is much that you've apparently failed to notice, though." he continued. "The girl with the pink hair—she's unusually fond of you, isn't she?"
Sasuke's cheeks reddened, first with something Itachi was unable to identify, but then with embarrassment, then guilt. "Is this because of Shisui?" Sasuke asked softly. "Cause Shisui…"
"This has nothing to do with Shisui," Itachi said calmly. "It is about you, and your obliviousness. It is an embarrassment."
Sasuke's brows furrowed. "What? My…"
Itachi hummed lightly as he leaned back into his chair. He could not explain to Sasuke what the true danger was. To do so would mean the unraveling of everything he had sought so hard to protect.
More importantly, so long as Itachi was there to protect him, Sasuke had no need to know the dangers he faced.
"You are becoming too close to them, those other children in your class," Itachi said instead. "It makes you appear weak, that you lower yourself to their level." He waved one hand with the artifice of disdain. "You cannot be so comfortable among them, Sasuke. They are not Uchiha, and they do not want what is best for you. They see you as a rival, something to take advantage of, something that must—"
"Itachi, stop it!" Unexpectedly, Sasuke swept his hand across the front of his desk, sending a stack of scrolls and pens to the floor. "This isn't funny! It's weird! Everyone is scared of you!"
"How awfully childish of you," Itachi said disdainfully. He watched his pens roll across the floor, their ink leaving long, bloodlike smears against the wood. "But not entirely unexpected."
That did very little to calm Sasuke's mood. Rather than be mollified by the criticism, Sasuke abruptly stomped away and slammed Itachi's bedroom door shut. He refused to speak to Itachi at all for weeks following, beyond what was absolutely necessary for two people sharing a home.
Their parents said nothing, and they continued to eat their dinners over quiet tables.
It was unfortunate, but Itachi accepted it as a necessity, something that would, ultimately, help to protect Sasuke against greater dangers, should he take anything Itachi had said to heart.
Sasuke would never learn how Shisui died, after all. He never received an explanation for any of it beyond a great tragedy.
That was enough, though: Sasuke never questioned it, and he never thought to investigate the matter beyond what he had been told. He accepted it, and he moved on.
Anything more than that was Itachi's burden to bear.
Itachi could not help but to agree with their father, though neither of them would ever acknowledge it out loud—it was simply better that way.
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Itachi was still awake several nights later when Kakashi came knocking at his window. The rest of his family had long gone to bed, however, and so Itachi was the sole person in the household still awake. His nights were often like that, as were his days—he had no determined sleep schedule, in order to prevent himself from becoming too easy to predict.
Kakashi was not wearing his ANBU uniform, though there could be no other reason why he would show up unannounced at such an hour.
"Senpai," Itachi greeted, as he pulled back his curtain.
"Haven't seen you around lately," Kakashi started. "Thought it might be worth it to come check on you."
"Someone sent you," Itachi immediately guessed. He'd spent a respectable amount of time under Kakashi's command, but very little had formed between them by way of casual bonds. "Is this a mission summons?"
"Call this a social call," Kakashi said, as if such a thing existed among ANBU, least of all the two of them. "I've heard things, though. Heard you've been creeping around the Academy and making some of the instructors nervous."
"An Academy instructor would not be able to identify me so easily." It was not lost on him that Sasuke's Academy-aged friends had apparently also caught onto his presence, but he did not let that small detail negate his suspicions. "So either you are lying to me, or these Academy instructors are not what they purport to be."
"The Academy teachers are feeling a little apprehensive knowing they've caught your attention," Kakashi continued, "and it seems you've got a little too much free time on your hands lately."
"Is this your way of forcing my hand?"
"I don't want to make you do anything," Kakashi said. "I'm not interested in giving orders right now."
"But you will if you have to, if it becomes necessary?"
"Like I said, this is a social call."
"It does not feel particularly social," he remarked drily. "What is it that you want from me?"
"Well, as far as I know, there's a discharge form somewhere in that desk that you never signed." Kakashi cocked his head. "So technically, you're still one of us."
"But this is a social call?"
"Yeah. Just between friends. We're friends, right?" Before Itachi could respond, Kakashi nodded towards his desk. "Are you going to sign the form?"
Itachi pondered it for a moment. "Likely not," he eventually conceded. There was nothing to prevent him from being involuntarily moved from active duty, and such was in fact fairly common among the ANBU.
Still, the grey area he was in - not quite ANBU, but not quite anything else - had afforded him a good deal of freedom that he was not particularly eager to squander.
"It seems to me like you've got some unfinished business," Kakashi remarked.
"What are you suggesting, senpai?" Itachi asked mildly, though he could not prevent a sliver of steel from creeping into his tone.
What did Kakashi know?
Or, rather, in the months since Shisui's death, and in the months since Itachi had left ANBU, what had Kakashi learned?
"Danzo's roots went deep. Deeper than most know."
"I wouldn't be surprised." Certainly, it wasn't news to Itachi. "I have no intention of involving myself with their affairs, so long as they continue to stay out of mine."
"You never struck me as the vengeance type," Kakashi said, as if agreeing. "So I'm not too surprised nothing's been done yet."
"Vengeance is for the overly emotional. It is pointless." Itachi wrinkled his nose. He could not say why the topic of vengeance left him so uncomfortable, only that something in him found it repugnant. "I'll not be caught in such a self-destructive trap."
"Seems like you already are." Kakashi paused for a moment, as if waiting for that to sink in first. "But who am I to say. You're free to keep stalking around the Academy while you wait for them to make a move on you first."
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Itachi followed Kakashi's implicit advice and returned to ANBU. It was the one place where his eccentricities wouldn't be questioned. The one place where, perhaps, they'd even be encouraged.
He assumed his former position as if nothing had changed, unable to feel as though anything had. He was unable to feel much at all anymore except for a great, dark emptiness.
Among the other ANBU, this was something no one found strange. Among some, maybe, it was understood.
His reintegration into ANBU was seamless, though he could sense some discomfort around him, unease at his possible role in Danzo's death, and in the rebellion that almost was.
What he found there confirmed some of his worst fears: that the Foundation would never be fully uprooted from the village without force, and the ANBU who remained had done nothing to purge its ranks of Danzo's loyalists, those most likely to carry on his will within the village.
It seemed to him that Kakashi was right, and that someone ought to do something about that.
As nameless and faceless as Danzo's agents had been, almost no one would take note of their quiet, inconsequential deaths.
By the time the former Foundation members did seem to suspect something was amiss, their numbers had dwindled to the point where it didn't matter anymore. They, the deepest roots of the tree, sunken into the furthest reaches of the soil, were already being dug out and left to rot.
Itachi continued to run missions, leaving the village and traveling to all ends of the continent but going nowhere in particular.
He became restless if he had to spend any more than a week in the village, and found himself constantly returning back to the office for another mission, another excuse, another reason to leave the village that had let Shisui die.
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His career as a shinobi ended less than a decade later, shortly after his twentieth birthday. The years between he doesn't remember well or at all, worn smooth by routine, weeks and months blending seamlessly together under a brush of few colors.
It started with bruises. A few weren't anything notable in a shinobi, and even a dozen or so could be easily accounted for. Several dozen were harder to explain.
They appeared everywhere—he would undress in the ANBU locker room and find his entire torso discolored, bruises in shades of blue and purple and yellow stretched between his shoulder blades, dotted across his ribs like storm clouds.
As far as injuries went, they were far from what would be considered extreme among ANBU, but when several weeks passed and the bruises continued to multiply without explanation, ANBU Tiger finally broke the stony silence that typically haunted their locker room.
"Dammit, kid," he said. "Isn't it about time you had someone check that out?"
Finding no particular reason to be concerned with such minor injuries, Itachi put it off for several more weeks until, finally, someone must have sent in the request themselves, and he was summoned for a "routine" health check for the first time in his ANBU career.
At first, the med-nin only seemed confused.
"I just don't think it should be doing that," the med-nin said apologetically. He gingerly set his hand against Itachi's chest a second time and sent another burst of chakra through his system.
It was frigid and viscous, as if the med-nin had injected cold gelatin into his veins. His arms ached with a muscle-deep kind of soreness, and the next breath he took felt unusually labored. The discomfort lingered even after the med-nin pulled away, and Itachi stretched his arms out to work the settling numbness out of them.
Much to his annoyance, fresh red marks had already started to bloom on the inside of his arms, right along the paths of his chakra points. "May I leave now?"
"Um." The med-nin seemed to hesitate. "Let me get a second opinion on this."
A second opinion quickly turned into a third, and then a fourth. Lunch passed, then dinner, until finally Itachi asked, irate, "Is this not something that can be handled at another time?"
The small crowd of med-nin shared a look.
"Maybe…" the first med-nin started, looking for consensus among his colleagues. "Maybe it's best if you stay here for the night."
One night quickly turned into two, then three, then four. It took more than a week for him to get an official diagnosis, which even then was not so much of a diagnosis, but the starting point of one: network dysfunction.
"Anything more than that is, uh, guesswork, I guess?" one of the med-nin laughed nervously.
Itachi did not find it particularly funny.
He was almost immediately relieved from all missions and was placed on indefinite medical leave. His retirement was never officially announced, as very few things in ANBU are, though at some point between Itachi's relocation from compound to hospital, his ANBU mask and plated armor both disappeared, never to be recovered again.
"Don't push yourself," Kakashi told him at the end of his first month of hospitalization. His former mentor had made his own departure from ANBU several years prior, though he still seemed to have access to information about their affairs. "You've done enough."
It was sincere enough that Itachi could believe he truly meant it.
With nothing else to preoccupy him, Itachi spent his time waiting, lying alone in his single hospital suite and staring blankly at the white, pockmarked ceiling.
He had been meant to do something great, he thought. Years later he would still think so, even after the worst of his hubris had been whittled away. There had been a destiny for him to complete, a niche that had been created just for him, that he would likely never fulfill.
Given how his life had turned out, he could only guess what it might have been. It was enough of a cliche already that an extraordinarily talented shinobi had been cut down in his line of work before his full potential could be reached. To cobble together some type of aborted destiny on top of that would be nothing but solipsism.
But still, there was a sense he couldn't shake—a sense that there'd been something he was meant to do, that he'd failed to do.
He could never quite decide what it ought to have been.
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Sasuke rarely visited unless he was accompanying their parents; he was too serious and too determined to make casual visits, wholly uninterested in anything without a clear and calculated purpose. The animosity between them had dwindled over the years, starved by Itachi's frequent absences, though hints of it would flare up occasionally.
"I am glad you came, though," he told Sasuke. He chose his words carefully, putting as little pressure on him as possible. "I wasn't sure if you'd have the time."
It was a short visit regardless.
"We're going to find the Sannin Tsunade," Sasuke told him. "Naruto and Sakura and me—Sakura did some research, and she said this Tsunade will know what to do about you."
"I see…" It was the most diplomatic response Itachi could manage—his concerns about Sasuke's friend had been long written off, hence why she had been spared from his purge of the Foundation.
Years ago, he had begun to wring out those memories until he recalled only a vague impression of a pink-haired girl who, above all else, seemed to be enormously infatuated with Sasuke.
It was what Sasuke wanted of him, after all, and he saw no reason to withhold it from him.
Still, some residual discomfort remained.
"The Sannin Tsunade," he eventually responded. "She hasn't been in the village in almost twenty years, Sasuke. I don't mean to insult your friend, but—"
Sasuke continued on as if he hadn't heard.
Itachi supposed that was simply how the two of them had learned to communicate, though—in flagrant disregard of the other's desires.
"Sakura says if anyone could fix you, it's her. She knows everything about medical ninjutsu, so we just need to track her down and get her to come back with us." Sasuke shoved his hands in his pockets, already glancing toward the door. "I got the Third's approval for the mission; we're leaving tomorrow afternoon to check out a town that's a few hours away."
"I see." The matter was settled then, and this visit was more of a courtesy than anything else. "I wish you luck and success, then."
Sasuke nodded briefly, and then he was gone.
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Sasuke and his team returned a month later, beat down and tired, but nowhere near as beaten down and tired as the Sannin they brought along with them.
"I have outrun… creditors and assassins and shinobi from every nation," Tsunade grumbled, flipping angrily through his medical records. "Every single town… casino… every single motel I went to for weeks, and they'd already be there."
She reached for the bottle she'd brought with her and took a long drink. "God, this is disgusting," she said, in a way that made it difficult to decipher whether she was referring to his records or her liquor.
Her assistant turned toward him apologetically. "Lady Tsunade is under a lot of pressure right now! But she promised your brother and his friends that she'd do her absolute best to look after you!"
"Sasuke's friend seemed to think you were the only one capable of sorting out this issue," he offered diplomatically.
The Sannin nodded solemnly. "If anyone can figure this out… it'll be me."
Rules of logic would thus dictate that when even Tsunade found herself unable to invent a cure, there was no one else alive who would be able to do so.
With no cure in sight, and little else that could be done, Itachi was discharged from the hospital with firm orders to avoid all shinobi activity indefinitely. He returned to his parent's house and, for the second time, felt a chapter of his life come to a premature end.
"We can make you more comfortable," Tsunade's assistant said, wringing her hands together, "but beyond that there isn't much we can guarantee."
He refused to throw himself upon their mercy and accepted only the accommodations he deemed necessary—the biweekly checkups, the injections for his aching muscles and tendons. The others - mobility aids, seals to monitor his health, dedicated nurses - he soundly rejected as unnecessary intrusions and resolved to handle matters on his own.
His life became unbearably simple, his world uncomfortably narrow, like a bubble constantly leaking air, growing ever smaller. The med-nin shied away from giving him any sort of numbers or estimates, and he lived in a fog of uncertainty.
The rest of it fell apart slowly, piecemeal.
