Fan fic

A few nights after, Sasuke had a nightmare and came into my room again, just like he had when he was five. “Eight years is too old to be scared of the dark,” I told him. He just stood there, in the shadowed doorway, rubbing his eyes. “Did you see a ghost again?” I asked, as he climbed into my bed and claimed the middle space and my pillow for himself.

He rolled over, too embarrassed to look me in the face. But he mumbled into the pillow, “There were lots this time. Watching me in my bed.”

It didn’t take him long to drop off to sleep in my bed. I stayed sitting up for a while, watching him breathe. His face, in a square of moonlight from my window. The curve of his cheek and his spiky, tousled black hair. He looked like something awkward and unfinished.

We’re connected by something I can’t name, Sasuke and I. It isn’t what others would call love---it’s more like I’m filled with the responsibility of making him into something worthwhile. Because he’s a piece of what I could have been, and because I can’t let that go, I choose instead to master it and make it my tool. He’s a piece of my shattered conscience, trailing after me like a shadow. Or a ghost.

Looking at him back then, in that square of moonlight, I wondered what sort of creature he would become. After all, when an artist holds a brush in hand before a blank canvas, can he help wondering what form he’ll give it?

“But there’s no hope for us in this village,” I murmured. “There’s nothing.”

Sasuke muttered something in his sleep, then rolled over.

I was staring at him, but suddenly my eyes saw something else. My head snapped up, and my eyes flared red with a rush of ambition.

I knew, then.

There was more. For me, for him. My clan was afraid of it. But I . . . was not.

After my induction into ANBU, the workload tripled. I was left with very little time to train on my own. Nevertheless, I still found the time to locate the hiding place for the scroll, and to begin a deep study of the Mangekyou Sharingan. No one ever caught me---of that I’m sure. If they had, it would all have ended before it began.

I wanted that power. My flailing mind latched onto it like a death grip on sanity. Every time I activated my Sharingan, alone or in combat, I tried to simulate the emotions the scroll claimed brought the technique into play. Dojutsu, you understand, relies on chemical reactions in the brain to activate it. And certain emotions . . . The only Mangekyou cases documented in the scroll involved the user killing a loved one.

The ultimate mixture of hatred and love.

I stopped letting Sasuke come to watch me train. It’s strange to admit, but the emotions required to produce the Mangekyou Sharingan make you see the world differently. If Sasuke had been with me while I was training for it . . . I don’t know what I would have done. It hadn’t taken me long to grow impatient with myself. Simulating the emotions in my mind wasn’t producing results fast enough, and the prospect of an easier road was beginning to tempt me.

Just one person. One . . . beloved . . . person.

And I could reach the height. Know myself, what I was and why I was.

I was almost never home during those days. When I was home or at work, my father was watching me so carefully I felt like a prisoner in my own life. Always he asked after my health, out of worry, but also because he sensed his prized son and heir was slipping through his fingers.

I was slipping away. I was dying, slowly, inside. Every mission I undertook, I became less and less Itachi and more a creature who acted only according to the desires of others. My body was acting on its own, moving as I’d trained it, while my heart was buried somewhere cold and hopeless.

Then came the mission where I almost slipped away entirely. I . . . the details of that mission aren’t clear to me, even to this day. My mindset during that time . . . everything was a blur. Gray and hazed over. The strain of too many sleepless nights and overuse of chakra. Our mission was to thwart an assassination on a Fire Country noble. Lady Aki, who ruled in her dead husband’s stead. I was with ANBU, acting in conjunction with a Jounin team---Shisui’s team. He had made Jounin not long after I did. Crawling along the ceiling, I sighted the assassin coming around the corner in the hall long before my comrades did. The hall was dark, but I could smell his fear. Though I could barely see his face, I knew he was young; a boy.

I was upon him before my comrades even noticed his presence. He was quick; he slid out from beneath me. I went hurtling after him down the hall, onto a terrace where the lanterns were lit. Knocked him down, crouched over him while he lay stunned. Raised the knife.

Hesitated.

The face below me was mine.

A shadow of me, I remember thinking in horror.

He hadn’t copied my face with any jutsu---I was wearing the ANBU mask---but in my mind’s eye he was what I’d once been. A boy, who’d come to this place to kill in cold blood.

A terrifying question came to me: What if I were in his place? Would I surrender myself to die? Isn’t it the fate of the weak to die?

Lanterns swung over us, shifting the red-yellow glow back and forth. I wavered.

And then . . . it came to me. An answer. The first lesson I ever taught myself.

Yes. If I were weak, I’d die. It’s the order of life.

But I’m strong. I hate. And this boy, rank with fear, is already dead.

I slashed his throat.

It was Shisui who pulled me off him. I was covered in blood, and shaking.

“Idiot!” he bellowed in my ear. “We could have questioned him!”

Then I tore free of him, turning. “Don’t touch me.” I still held the knife.

I was shaking with excitement. A nameless energy filling me. Here was someone I loved, who loved me. And I wanted to kill him. I could have, my certainty was so clear in that moment.

But he slapped me hard across the face. And, while my eyes were still filled with stars from the pain, held me so tight against him I couldn’t breathe.

“Shit. Itachi. Don’t . . . EVER . . .” He had no idea what to say. I think he knew, then, where my path was headed. Knew it had already taken hold of me beyond any hope of return.

But when we returned to the village later, he said nothing to my father.

The power I had tasted on that mission, in that moment, was the precursor to the Mangekyou Sharingan. To put that feeling into words . . . it’s near to impossible. It’s standing on the threshold between winter and summer, feeling the sun on your face and knowing you will be warm if you step through. Then your boiling blood cools, and the door shuts, and you are left standing frozen in a colorless hell, so hollow you would crack if anyone touched you.

Once you’ve tasted that height, you can never stop reaching for it.

I killed Shisui on a warm night in autumn.

It was . . .

My parents caught me sneaking out before the dawn of that day. I claimed it was for a mission---one whose secret nature I could not divulge because my father was not in ANBU. He reminded me of my duties and told me where my loyalties should lie. I listened, I nodded, but his words meant nothing to me.

In reality, there wasn’t any mission. I spent the day preparing myself for what I knew I had to do. When night fell . . . I was ready. I went into it with a clear mind.

Shisui was following me. Trailing me, as I knew my father had asked him to do, because my father had sensed the lie. I let my friend follow me for a ways, through the Uchiha compound, until I came to the stone bridge we’d jumped off of as children. There I stopped, and stood staring down at my reflection until Shisui finally showed himself.

“You knew I was there all along,” he accused me, coming to stand beside me. He rested his elbows on the bridge wall, looking downriver as he spoke.

I smiled. Shisui always had a knack for stating the obvious. “My eyes are as good as yours,” I said.

He sighed, shaking his head and still refusing to look at me. “Your eyes are cold and sad,” he told me. His words were simple, but coming from a young man who wasn’t comfortable with speaking his heart they were heavy indeed. He understood me so well.

“I am sad,” I answered him. “So sad. Even with you beside me, I’m alone.” I meant every word. I was already grieving for him.

The human heart is a wonder. It can turn to steel even as it breaks.

Shisui nodded slowly. Once again, he could say nothing to me. I was an abyss he knew nothing could fill.

“Let’s run, Shisui,” I said quietly. “On the water. Like we once did.”

When we were children, and the world had color and I hadn’t learned what real strength was.

We jumped, into the river, and went racing beneath the hunter’s moon. Feet splashing softly on the surface. Gentle brush of wind on our faces.

He was always faster. He ran ahead . . .

I . . . can’t speak of it. What it felt like to watch his last breath rise through the water until it burst silver on the surface . . . That is the deepest pain I’ve known.

And I won’t speak of it. That memory is for me alone.

I gained everything that night. And wept, for the last time.

[size=29]none of this was done by me[/size]