It takes Karin and Sasuke's friend Naruto almost half an hour to walk to Itachi's house from the interrogation cell where they've been keeping her. The woods grow more and more dense the further they go, tall, pillar-like trees crowding in further along the rough path they've been walking. Karin glances up once and can barely make out the sky through the canopy, boxed in by the weave of branches.
Naruto, in all his excitement, doesn't seem to notice.
"So I guess this makes us friends now!" he said when they left the ANBU building, apparently forgetting the past weeks where he's more or less ignored her existence entirely. He threw one unexpectedly muscular arm around her shoulders like they'd known each other forever, and the Konoha shinobi standing nearby had turned to squint at them, looking Karin up and down as if she was some kind of threat. "Since you're Sasuke's friend and all!"
Karin doesn't think Sasuke would exactly agree with that assessment, but it's only one more thing Naruto doesn't seem to notice.
He has all the energy of a hurricane, and his whirlwind thoughts fly haphazardly between them as they walk, filling the silence until it's ready to burst.
"—and then Sasuke and I went to Kumo, where we met this other jinchuriki named Killer Bee!" he chatters, rambling a good half-dozen or so paces ahead of her. "And then we got him to help us track down the other Akatsuki, but then we met Madara, who wasn't really Madara but this other guy named Obito, and he was actually the leader of the Akatsuki instead of Pein, but Obito was—"
His enthusiasm is suspicious, but at the very least it's consistent, and Karin prefers it a hell of a lot more to the three-way awkward silence that settled between her, Itachi, and Sasuke while they've been waiting to hear how exactly Konoha plans to handle their combined fates.
They're all technically missing-nin at this point, but it doesn't quite shake out the same way between them all.
Sasuke's the hero of a war that managed to pass by without either Itachi or Karin so much as hearing about it, having fought his way across the continent while the two of them were holed up in one of Orochimaru's old hideouts for several long months as warden and prisoner.
The choice to stay behind with Itachi hadn't exactly been hers to begin with, but after spending the last months stuck alone with him, Karin is certain she would've preferred the war, goddesses and undead shinobi and all.
A whole war went by and she is, after all, still nobody: at the end of it all, she's still just a random girl Sasuke brought home so he could keep his brother from dying somewhere along the trip from Oto to Konoha.
As for Itachi—well. Karin still isn't entirely sure what she's supposed to make of him.
Out of the three of them, Sasuke is the only one who still tries to talk, but what passes for talking in their lonely little cell are rare, open-ended, intentionally vague questions Sasuke exclusively aims at Itachi: why did you—or that one time when you—breaking the silence every few hours.
Itachi never answers him, keeping to his steely, pissy silence, but when Naruto showed up to report he and someone named Yamato had finished building a house where he could stay, Itachi had turned to Karin and said, Perhaps you might wish to visit before deciding to stay with me.
… You invited Karin?
Like all of Sasuke's questions, Itachi had ignored that one too, but Sasuke has never been someone who would give up so easy. Why the hell would you want Karin, of all people—
Karin, of all people, wasn't going to stick around to be insulted in a conversation she wasn't even a part of, and so she had scrambled to her feet and waited for Naruto to let her out, one narrowed, lilac eye burning a hole in her back.
Itachi, what could you possibly—
She was at just as much of a loss as Sasuke was, but she already knew if Itachi answered at all, it'd just be another lie.
Get me the hell out of here before they try to kill each other again, she snapped as Naruto fumbled with the cell door one of their dumbass guards must have decided to lock.
Naruto had been firm about it: none of them were prisoners, they were just… better contained in a cell.
It wasn't like a flimsy door lock could keep Sasuke in if he really wanted out, either.
So, even if she hasn't been able to get a single word in since she and Naruto left the ANBU building, Karin appreciates the freedom anyway, because it's been days since she's been able to move comfortably, to walk further than the dimensions of their cell.
As it is, her knees ache as she jogs after Naruto, who doesn't so much run as skip, jump, and throw his hands up in all manner of expressions, picking up his pace the closer they get.
It would be hard to lose track of him, though, because his sunflower-sunshine chakra is everywhere, radiating off of his body in surges that would've probably killed an ordinary person by now.
There's—there's something else in it too, but it's cold, buried deep in his chakra, and Karin isn't particularly eager to figure out what it is.
"This is it!" Naruto calls back to her as he stops a couple dozen feet ahead of her, waiting in the middle of nowhere. Karin hurries on ahead to catch up to him, and gets her first good look at the house.
It's… Well, it's not much, but she didn't expect a whole lot.
The trees are no less dense here, and their branches wrap around the perimeter of the house in a way that already has Karin anxious for their first serious storm, if they even make it that far.
It's only a single-story, and Naruto tells Karin gleefully that it was built (with his help) in a single day, yesterday. It's made from a chakra release she's only ever heard about in legends, a power strong enough to tame demons but apparently convenient enough to build houses for former criminals, too.
There are a few crooked, hastily-poured concrete stairs stacked under what might as well be the front door, a single narrow window posted next to it. Karin closes her eyes and senses that, aside from Naruto, the closest person is almost half an hour away and they're on the move, the distance growing every second.
That's probably for the best.
Naruto puts his hands on his hips, grinning at her so hard it probably hurts his face. "And now it's all yours!"
Except it's really not, and she's only there until, inevitably, Sasuke's brother gets tired of her too and gives her the boot.
Karin doesn't bother responding, and Naruto's grin evens out, tucking itself away for later when he sees Sasuke again.
The steps are firmer under her feet than she expected them to be, and Karin slips inside the house and Naruto follows close behind. "Yamato-sensei did a pretty good job, I think. He's made a whole lot of houses in his lifetime, so he had a pretty good idea of what to do."
She runs her hand along the door frame, skims her fingers over the walls, and feels a busy thrum of chakra within it, as if the wood itself were somehow alive. As if it had its own life force. The texture is glassy smooth, as if it had been sanded down and varnished, but something like that just doesn't happen in a day.
It's disconcerting.
Karin's sensing is an integral part of her, something she can't silence, and when she kicks off her sandals, the house hums under the soles of her feet, can't help but demand her attention. Shuffling over the floor, she moves through heavy clouds of lingering mokuton, a fresh-grass scent that tickles her nose and trails after her as she walks.
It calls out to her, though, tugging at her senses as clearly as if whispers of Karin were rising up from the floorboards, leafy tendrils rising to catch her ankles as she walks.
It's something, she decides then, that she'll just have to learn to ignore.
Naruto gives her a tour that lasts a few minutes at best. He's fidgety now, rocking back and forth on his heels every time Karin stops to look at something, sneaking looks out the front window while she runs her hands over the few sturdy tables and chairs that are scattered around the open living space, not organized in any particular way.
Under his feigned excitement about the house, he's clearly impatient to head back to the village, back to where Itachi and Sasuke are waiting to get their final orders from the Hokage.
Karin supposes she isn't important enough these days that she'd even need to be there to hear them; there's nothing the Hokage would need to say to her that couldn't be passed along through Sasuke, if he cares to listen. Or Itachi, if he'd condescend to speak to her.
Luckily for Naruto, who's becoming more anxious with every passing second, it doesn't take very long to show someone a back porch, a living room, and a kitchen.
A single bedroom.
A single bed.
Karin closes the bedroom door behind her carefully, and decides that's another problem she's not quite ready to think through.
Itachi's house is little more than a shell of a house, only complete in the sense that Karin doubts whoever made it has any interest in coming back to add a few square-feet to it.
There's a gutted-looking space off from the bedroom that's more of a closet, but Naruto swears he can turn it into a bathroom, he just needs to get some pipes, find a tub somewhere.
There must be something in the air in Konoha because Karin finds herself believing that it's absolutely something Naruto means. Something that matters to him.
She stares for a long time at a square gap in the kitchen counter before Naruto hurriedly promises they can fix that too, that his and Sasuke's first new mission together will be putting in a sink and making the house habitable, tomorrow.
He throws another glance towards the front door when he pretends to adjust his headband, and Karin wonders if he might just leave her there if she takes any longer.
"But yeah," Naruto starts, shuffling towards the door. "I hope you don't mind the whole bedroom thing, but you can probably work something out between the two of you? Yamato-sensei just assumed Itachi would be here by himself so…"
"It's fine," Karin finally says, taking one last glance around the interior. Some tables, some chairs, and nothing else. All of it's bare: bare walls, bare tabletops, bare floors. Even the wood itself is bare, no discolorations or gradients in any of it, pure brown from the ceiling to the floorboards. Karin sighs and turns towards the door and isn't even surprised by the very obvious relief that's plastered across Naruto's face. "I don't really care."
AN:
I had to try so hard not to just have "itachi is that bird who's bad at math" as my summary. But that's it, that's the whole fic. Itachi is the bird, and he's bad at math.
Thanks to everyone who reads, reviews, and favorites!She's survived worse, after all.