Author's Note

I do not condone incest. I by no means support incest. Inbreeding leads to genetic illnesses. I by no means support or endorse incest or inbreeding. I therefore will not "ship" cousins, siblings, or anyone else biologically related together. Don't ask why this disclaimer is here.

Also, excuse the formatting issues. "Issuous" is not a word and it is in no dictionary, but it fits the context as "to have issues", but an adjective and starts with an "i" so I shall use it in here.

Chapter 36

Katiya (two months later, approximate time: not that significant)

Fight room.

As one might have expected with prolonged tenure at Otogakure, we know eventually it would have had to come to pass: there would be some that would have... daily issuous excursions. Daily.

Fight room. Fight room. Fight room.

Katiya (approximate time: 7-something PM)

Katiya dragged herself to meet with Itachi yet again. It was far from important now, the meet. But she went anyway. At least now, with the conclusion of her last experiment, Katiya had realized another way to end Itachi's suffering—if he was willing to take it. She made her way to the forested clearing that was their meeting place for the day, arriving in front of the person she was there to meet.

"Someone followed you," Katiya felt Itachi say to her mind.

Katiya narrowed her eyes as the tomoe of Itachi's Sharingan revolved and a flash of an image appeared in her mind's eye. Two people, at different angles directly behind her, as seen from a bird's eye view. Katiya frowned. Their attire was that of Otogakure. Although she knew Kabuto was nowhere near Oto at the moment, she knew it had only been a matter of time before he or Orochimaru himself sent spies after her. Katiya gripped the edge of her staff.

"Stay here," Itachi ordered out loud before using a Body Flicker Jutsu to engage with the spies, vanishing with a quick swoosh.

Katiya let Itachi leave. She waited a moment before sighing. Sure, I'm going to let an increasingly blind man who can barely fight nowadays ruin the success of my damn work on him, she sarcastically thought.

Katiya sighed through her nose. Ushi, hebi, tori, saru, tori, hitsuji, Katiya mentally chanted and hand signed for the Sensing Mist Jutsu to dissolve her staff into an airborne mist to seek out the third potential member of the spy team. She used her own Body Flicker Jutsu and moved to attack the last shinobi she located, regathering her water into a weapon.

Katiya* (approximate time: five or ten minutes after the last time stamp?)

Swoosh.

A body thudded to the floor. Itachi swung around. Katiya simply raised a brow at his expression from behind him, pulling her chakra-infused water back into the loose form of a staff from its previous pressurized-sword state. She bent down to begin stripping the body of weapons and whatever else she thought useful, completely unfazed by the oozy red glop slowly coming out of the body.

"I thought I told you to stay where you were," Itachi told her.

"And I thought I told you to stay away from using your Sharingan or elevating your blood pressure," she replied. "I wasn't sure you noticed this one" —she gestured to the body— "so just be glad it wasn't enough time to kill you."

"You didn't have to kill him."

"They just should be grateful I gave them a painless death. It's more mercy than I can say half of Oto even gets. What, you'd rather slowly kill yourself from Sharingan overuse I explicitly told you avoid than to kill one of them?"

Itachi gave her a look. "Yes," it said.

Katiya let out a derisive scoff before muttering, "What for."

Itachi pulled one of the still-living shinobi's eyelids up and performed some sort of genjutsu. "They're Kumo-nin, not Oto-nin," he said, answering her indirectly.

Katiya blinked somewhat disappointedly—she would have preferred to kill an Oto-nin. Kumo spies on Oto now. Okay, Katiya mentally noted instead. "In the greater scheme of things, it still doesn't matter if we killed them or not. No information would have gotten sent out, and as far as Kumo's concerned, Oto killed them."

Itachi did the same genjutsu to the other still-living enemy spy. "They have families, Katiya."

"Once again. The name's Katsu. And maybe you should have thought of that before killing off your own, hypocrite."

"... I only did it because it was the best choice I could have made," he said morosely.

Katiya looked skywards, complaining to what was a god of questionable existence in her mind. "And you think I made a worse choice by killing this one person?"

Itachi narrowed his eyes in another affirmative response. He knew it was never really just one.

Katiya repeated her previous point. "If they were Oto-nin like they had been dressed, they'd have fared much worse if they'd have been kept alive."

"You don't know that."

"Oh, don't I," Katiya said coldly with obvious sarcasm, "How many bodies did you have to scrape off the floor this week? Because I don't remember you being a medic-nin in Yomi-no-kuni."

Hell.

Katiya calmed herself. "What's the point of keeping these idiots alive if you know there's no benefit to you? What can they give you for all the mercy you have? What do any of them even matter?" she asked. Though her voice was quiet, her morose tone carried throughout the area they were in.

Itachi gave the Kumo-nin one last look before moving to walk back to their previous more secured location. "Because if not, if the positions were reversed, they would have no reason to be merciful to you."

"And what guarantees they'd do that even with a reason?" came Katiya's swift question of a refute.

That gave Itachi pause.

"If your brother can kill one person to be hailed as a hero, my time as a medic's better used elsewhere. Killing's a heck of a lot easier than healing, and I don't mind being hailed as a hero," she continued. Katiya pulled out a scroll from inside her flak vest. She held it out for him.

"What is it?" Itachi asked.

"Proof." Proof that my time as a healer means nothing if death breeds heroes. It was the thing she had come to deliver, anyways.

Itachi unwrapped the scroll to examine the contents. The kanji script indicated what was stored was a compilation of lab reports, a few sealed books of relevant data she doubted he knew how to interpret, and a jutsu formula. It wasn't even close to a perfect copy of her mother's jutsu—or even close to being a perfected jutsu at all—but Katiya didn't think that really mattered.

"The experiment that yielded the data was a failure in terms of your idealistic morality, half of the subjects dead for reasons somewhat beyond my control, but you don't need to focus on that… That's just everything you need to know if you want to live longer than five years—maybe less—the way you're currently going. I'm sure Konoha won't mind if you die sooner than when your brother decides to kill you anyways, but you are paying me for something, so..." Katiya shrugged, "if you want to live, I have to say, your attempts at pacifism aren't really helping you."

In her mind, Itachi using the jutsu would have meant she was done. She would have been free to take her life, do what she wished, everyone else be damned. His resulting mental state would have been questionable after the procedure—but one corpse. Any fresh random corpse. All that was needed to guarantee a nearly immortal life for him. His brother could have even killed him, after the jutsu was complete—just like he wanted—and he might even have a chance of life after. The resulting altered mental state of Itachi's might've even helped the image of heroism he wanted his brother to have become all the more credible.

"There is a medicine I heard of… Kotaro," Itachi tried.

"Kotaro is a chakra-infused painkiller processed within a living being. A painkiller, nothing more... Funny you mention it because that and the hallucinogenic saigenzai it comes from can kill you, basically like every medication when taken to extremes. Except this one doesn't actually stop damage from happening and you need a lot less of it to wind up dead. You'd basically be taking some antivenom's side effect of a fever to treat hypothermia. Good luck."

"But the chakra… if my disease is caused by chakra, can the chakra of the medication counteract it?"

"No idea," Katiya grunted apathetically. "Kotaro's a combination of rare and expensive so I haven't even seen it, much less experimented on it."

The only knowledge Katiya had on the medication had come from her own readings of some of Oto's more obscure texts. If every shinobi's life depended on another's death, her attempts of being a healer of shinobi, of people, of her relationship with Gaara, mattered none. Kotaro was another meaningless attempt of a shinobi to attempt otherwise, but without even having seen it, Katiya had become ready to dismiss it.

Itachi looked over the scroll in thought. "If I can procure some, will you treat me with it?"

"If you pay me enough, I can do whatever you want with it," came the reply. Itachi gave Katiya a look at that. She smiled joylessly under her balaclava before adding, "Seriously. I have another quarter of my antivenom set to purchase… but I can always use whatever else more to add meaning to my life."

Itachi, for his part, ignored the statement before returning Katiya her scroll. "I am willing to accept treatment with Kotaro rather than your new jutsu formula, Katiya."

"We just had an issue with spies and you're still calling me 'Katiya'—Okay." Not like Lord Orochimaru doesn't already know my name but okay. "This semi-functional jutsu will just be waiting for you just in case."

Itachi bowed his head. "You said yourself that the jutsu experiment failed."

"It only failed in terms of your moral standards. It's probably more than able to heal you from your disease."

"A jutsu cannot be called a healing jutsu if you must kill to perform it," Itachi replied curtly. "You wrote in your notes here that your mother performed a similar jutsu without insanity as a side effect, that the emotional conditions of your mother's jutsu were the same as those of your own attempt to replicate it… but yet your jutsu still failed."

Katiya narrowed her eyes. She had told Itachi her mother's jutsu cured their disease—not granted relative immortality like both jutsu truly did but she understood him to at least be able to grasp the gist. "My mom died performing that jutsu—I was working on a jutsu to work from someone already dead. Obviously the status of the sacrifice was the biggest variable," she replied, brushing aside the sentiment. The differences hardly mattered anyway.

"But it is not the one that led to the failure of your jutsu."

Not the variable that led to the jutsu failure. Katiya met Itachi's eyes. He was no medic-nin but he was a supposed genius to have made ANBU captain so young and had her attention.

"Both your and your mother's jutsu rest on the recipient taking chakra. However, the chakra of your mother's jutsu was given willingly. The chakra from your experiment was not." Itachi's gaze bore into Katiya's. "There is no guarantee the chakra given would be used the way the deceased intended, but chakra taken by force likewise has no reason to guarantee it will abide by its host's terms."

Itachi paused for a moment to let what he had been saying sink in. "The bond you wanted to create in your jutsu failed because the chakra share would have had to be mutually willing in order for there to be a mutually equal and therefore stable chakra bond."

Mercy and love meant little unless it was mutual. But it meant nothing if it was not given willingly, if they were never to be offered in the first place. Katiya frowned and glared at Itachi. She wanted to call bullshit on his logic, but willingness wasn't a variable she nor anyone else in Otogakure ever really took into consideration. It felt like bullshit to her, but it was a valid notice and her science dealt better with validated facts than feelings. Katiya allowed herself to muse it over.

"I will attempt to procure some Kotaro for study, " Itachi said finally before leaving, taking the scroll she had offered. If Katiya noticed Itachi had forgotten to pay her, she didn't say anything about it. We can suppose Itachi would pay dearly enough, soon enough regardless.

Author's Note

The Kotaro and the saigenzai thing come from a Naruto novel most people don't really consider all that canonical. Both substances are fictional to my knowledge. They are here in this fiction because I'm tired of making up my own technobabble when I can just steal some from Kishimoto's novel(s).

Katiya (the next day, approximate time: time.)

Love, Katiya mentally scoffed, Emotions are side effects of situations, not products. Take that out, where's the benefit now? What "love" is there?

Katiya drove her heel into someone else's face and pushed chakra into her own ears, artificially stiffening the eardrum with a single crackling, thudding pop. She had gotten better at the maneuver and she found it prevented her from hearing the melodies of a sonar genjutsu or perforating her eardrums from a hypersonic blast. She ran her hands through the signs for a Sensing Mist Jutsu to make up for the loss of one of her senses and pulled the spare water out of the fight room's sweaty air.

Two people watched Katiya—"Katsu"—without participating in the fight(s) themselves as the medic-nin herself yet for another day decided to spend her off-hours pummeling Oto-nin in a fight room. She paid them no mind.

But love is no emotion. It's a choice, only one with infinite possibilities. While this current path has only one.

It was almost meditative, the fighting. Her thoughts weren't coming in loud, spoken words but impressions of them—words—thoughts. The things that were on the forefront of her mind and staunched all those thoughts were all physical instead. Like the arm about to punch her. Physical parts of life. Matter. If life was a progression until it itself mattered, the question now was about the matter of progression's manner.

Does it—?

Katiya ducked under someone's right hook before diving forwards. Another dogpile, another day. She used the pressurized water from her staff to throw them off.

The faint impression of thought that replied "yes" to her question seemingly never really materialized.

Someone tried to sneak behind her to attack her with a device that would emit high-frequency noise to deal physical damage. Her Sensing Mist Jutsu detected the action and she shifted the water closest to her to absorb the vibrational frequencies of what would be a concentrated sound blast. Two very thin surfaces of water took form between her and her attacker. Forming a vacuum with them by pushing the two layers together, forcing out whatever air was between them, and then pulling the layers apart, she shielded herself with a vacuum-barrier. Sound requiring vibrated particles to travel, and vacuums lacking particles to vibrate, the action dampened the blast. It was a maneuver that took time and heavy concentration to pull off, but so far effective.

While the device was likely still active (she could not hear it to confirm), she then used the water peripheral to the attacker to form an echo chamber out of a temporary water-filled bubble and bounce the noise at what was likely a higher volume to what the person had trained with in response. Because of a human skull's composition, the attacker felt the vibration more than heard it—the sound waves passing directly from the water to the head rather than via the eardrum. Startled, the attack plan of the attacker's was lost. The would-be attacker's fall confirmed her prior assumption.

It would have been to the advantage of Otogakure to turn her into a soldier rather than a healer in the upcoming invasion, she knew it and kept it in mind in her actions. But whose initiative it was—Lord Orochimaru's or Kabuto's—was now of decidedly little concern to her. The number of people she cared for—had loved?—and was capable of reciprocating it diminished so significantly that executing the initiative of someone else now felt the more sustainable path. For that moment, if not by much. Whose initiative it was had little effect on what she did now. She had nowhere to go, if not Oto, and her desire to go anywhere else was waning. She was tired of having Gaaras and Arashis.

Love still mattered little when it was not reciprocated. If Itachi thought his brother was receiving mercy by experiencing so much death, then her mercy could be no worse when it did the same. Itachi was still a hypocrite and her decisions were her own. A part of her contemplated spearing her would-be attacker with a sharp thrust of her pressurized water. With an irritated flick, she instead threw the attacker's body against a nearby wall with her staff.

Katiya left the room, having won yet again.

The elder of the two onlookers of the fight had a rather contemplative countenance. The ferocity of the throw—it was not an immediately killing one unless you took into account the standardly haphazard medical care, which "Katsu" as a (former?) medic-nin would have been fully aware of. It was hardly a first kill, but was a start to something else, perhaps to the two onlookers' plans.

"It's time," the elder decided.

The other onlooker, the younger one, bowed his head in acknowledgement. The pair both knew "Katsu" took little joy in killing but this last fight was indicative of the slow changes the elder of the two had been hoping to foster. Something they had been looking for was close. They needed someone to control the Jinchuriki of Sunagakure during the invasion. They needed a test for Lord Orochimaru's finest chosen vessel, but that rested on the Jinchuriki not killing the vessel beforehand. By any means possible, if necessary, was what the intention behind the arrangement was. Finally, Otogakure could be declared an official hidden village and finally, the real plans could come to fruition.

Everyone fighting in the room that day was one of her former patients.

Author's Note

I haven't extensively studied physics—but I plead "artistic liberties" and will say for the purpose of this fiction chakra is giving the water its shape thus allowing it to behave as one for the creation of a vacuum there… and that I have no idea the validity of the stuff my head put together from Google for those chunks of technobabble for the watery echo chamber or even if something like a thermos bottle could dampen sound… but. Technobabble. I try to stay away from it, but it can be hard to "show but not tell" braininess without it and I like rational characters so it's here. Please don't kill me over fictional science, but if you're willing and able to look over its validity, that would be much appreciated.