Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ Scarlet ❯ Akatsuki ( Chapter 6 )

{OoO}---SCARLET---{OoO}

 

{OoO}---{OoO}---Chapter 6: Akatsuki---{OoO}---{OoO}

 

There was no sense of freedom after what I'd done. I'd thought there would be. When you cut your chains, aren't they supposed to fall away? If I was not happy with my clan, why should I be unhappy without them? I asked myself that, back then. I think it was the weakness of the human need to belong. I have joined Akatsuki, I may share its aims, but I do not belong to it. The ties we forge only serve to fetter the mind.

 

Back then, even though I had killed them, the weight had not lifted. All I felt was the sudden, driving urgency to move. It was as if, now that I'd set things in motion, my life had become an avalanche I couldn't stop. I had exchanged the shackles of Konoha, which would never let me run where I wished, for the curse of never doing anything but running.

 

I made it all the way to Konoha's southern gate before the alarms finally sounded. That was how quickly I'd killed my clan; the moon was just setting as I scaled the massive wall. I panted as I ran, tired and disoriented. The sudden cacophony of noises echoing through the village confused me---outraged cries, screams, orders, people leaping across the rooftops searching for the killer. The confusion was an irritant. I didn't like that the commotion behind me reminded me of what I'd just done, because some level of me, some deeper core, knew that it was an unforgivable thing. That I deserved death.

 

I ran up the wall, gritting my teeth against the noise, wishing the muted thud of my sandals on the heavy wood would drown it out.

 

But once I'd scaled the wall and run down the other side, I descended into an eerie hush. Eager to drop into the safe darkness of the forest's embrace, I let myself fall the last twenty feet of the wall, landing in a crouch on a carpet of moss. I tensed; it wasn't the quietest of landings. Bizarrely, the sound had startled me. My throat went thick as I waited for someone to come after me, rain down judgment.

 

After what seemed an eternal few minutes, no one came. I stood up, slow and grim-faced. My knees ached, and so did my head. The quiet here was still as death. It was the empty quiet that falls briefly on a place, before it is overrun with danger. They might be coming for my death, but I was already dead to them. I swallowed against a dry throat and took off, heading north as fast as I could.

 

I wanted the man from Akatsuki to find me. But after nearly an hour of hurtling through the branches, I was still running by myself.

 

`If he won't find me I'll go to his rival,' I thought. I was hoping he wanted me enough to stop me from going to Orochimaru. If I could not find people like me, I sensed that I was going to run forever instead, a scared rogue wolf, preying on whatever he could and achieving nothing but survival. I wasn't an animal; I needed more than survival.

 

I needed a purpose.

 

{OoO} {OoO} {OoO}

 

 

Orochimaru found me first.

 

He found me twenty miles out from Konoha.

 

His voice floated down through the trees, sinuous and sly. “You've done it, haven't you.” It was not a question.

 

My body, already strung taut with nerves from the night's bloody work, reacted immediately. Before my mind could form a verbal response, my fingers had flung eight kunai upward, toward the sound of his voice. They sang wickedly through the sleepy forest air, embedded themselves somewhere in wood above me with sharp, vicious impact.

 

“You've come to me,” he said, in a deeper, condescending tone I didn't like. He coalesced from the green shadows of a tree at ground level; he'd taken shape from the mossy bark itself---the same jutsu he'd used to escape me the last time. But he wasn't running now. He'd caught me off guard, throwing his voice but approaching me from the side. And his gaze on me was nothing like a master's for his star pupil. Rather, it was like I was the meal he'd been starving for. As if now that he thought I'd finally stopped resisting him, I'd been reduced in his eyes to a living, speaking chunk of meat.

 

But I was not an animal. And I have no master.

 

“I'm going to Akatsuki,” I answered, sinking my stance even lower to spring, like a cornered tiger. “If you are not with them, I want nothing from you.”

 

He wore their black cloak, decorated with red clouds like blotches of blood. And a wide-brimmed straw hat, from which there dangled a single bell. On his hand he bore a ring with insignia on it that I couldn't read from that distance. He was dressed like one of them. But I remembered the other Akatsuki member's warning. They did not trust Orochimaru, and I would be wise not to trust him, either.

 

His lips stretched into a grin, and he stopped twenty feet away from me. “Oh, I think you wanted to find me. Or you would still be running.”

 

Disappointment clenched into a knot in my chest. As I ran, I'd wanted two things and two things only: Akatsuki or the Leaf. But Orochimaru was the middle ground; the easy death where I wouldn't have to face those I'd wronged. I couldn't have explained at the time why I didn't want my death to be easy, but that's how it was. Ah . . . that's not to say that I want to die now, either. But even my death someday must have meaning, or I can't say that I've lived.

 

Before Orochimaru I straightened, squaring my shoulders. I was a man. What I had done had aged me beyond the possibility that I could ever be a child again. I must become the man I was meant to be. And he must see that, because he was the voice of my doubts.

 

“I will run until I reach Akatsuki,” I said sharply. “If you are not Akatsuki, then I will pass you by.”

 

His eyes narrowed, and for a brief instant I caught a gleam of fear. It gave me strength. I knew that if you had someone's fear, you had power over them. The Hyuuga I had killed in the arena. Sasuke. Those feeble teachers of mine, whose lessons trail after me like shadows.

 

I sprang forward.

 

And he convulsed, like a man wretching. The air between us seemed to waver. He struck at me, neck elongating like a serpent's. It was like a face from a kabuki stage, ghastly white and expressionless. Except the mouth yawned wide as it came at me, hungry and foul, fangs like needle points. Yawned and breath like cloying sweet wine, with a hint of rotting wet leaves brushed my cheek like a sly hand. Disgusting. He's a poison, I thought. Burn it, purge it, raze it down.

 

And then the clearing was full of dark shapes, black capes flocked with crimson clouds, fluttering like bats' wings as they swarmed me. It was an ambush.

 

Akatsuki had found me. And they were going to kill me.

 

Until this moment, I had always been fighting for a purpose. I never found joy in killing; only in the end the means brought if I had truly hated my opponent. But now my last hope was crushed, for Akatsuki didn't want me. There was no purpose left. And the thing that had been chained inside me, that killing my clan had not freed, snapped free. The forest air, the blades nestled in my palms, the sweat that trickled between my shoulder blades and down my temples . . . took on a queer intensity. It was as if the world was breathing me in, preparing to spit me out.

 

My last coherent thought before the clash was, You will not spit me out. I will burst free of my own will.

 

There is a place, in battle, where you lose yourself and become everything that you are fighting against. Ordinary life is black and white and red; wrong and right and blood. But in battle, in the clashing of true strength on strength . . . you can find a place where the brilliance drowns everything out. Where you become your enemy's hatred, feed off it, swallow it whole. You and they are lightning, your footsteps thunder.

 

I had never known this before, in all my life. Tasted it, maybe. The Hyuuga boy, the towering sight of the Kyuubi destroying everything in its path. Yet here it was, rained upon me. Destruction.

 

I thought, This is a good time to die.

 

I must have smiled.

 

But I did not die.

 

Instead they beat me down.

 

I could not use the Mangekyou Sharingan against them, for I had already exhausted that dojutsu in Konoha. At the time I could not differentiate between the jutsu of my attackers. My skin was broken and white hot, nerves wires of pain threaded through limbs that somehow refused to fall. I could not stop myself, someone would have to nail me to the earth to make me still.

 

Akatsuki is the greatest strength I have ever known. They knew I would not be stilled until I fell. Their faces blurred around me, some grinning, slavering, insane, some cold and stone-hard with purpose. Blades pierced me through, slid through me like pins through cloth. I was in too much pain to feel them. The breath burning in my chest burst forth as fire, I could not have held it back if I had tried.

 

At the pinnacle of this timeless, brilliant moment, they felled me. Bruised face upturned as if in worship, I finally succumbed. Flesh is flesh, after all.

 

And they did not kill me.

 

Darkness reeled through my pounding skull. My head dropped. Then it lifted. I was caught in their arms, they were pulling me upright, pulling my hair to tilt me back so they could see my eyes. I tried to swallow, the brilliance fading. The euphoria's dissipation was slow.

 

“He's finished,” one of them said.

 

“What . . .?” I managed, around a blood-thickened tongue. My nose was broken; the pain of speaking was dull and unbearable all at once.

 

Someone approached. I could scarcely see who. All I could see were shadows in the fading brilliance, surrounded by these living ghosts in the wood. They were the ghosts of my desires. I strained red-rimed eyes to see them more clearly. They were everything I wanted, and I could hardly breathe for fear they would sink back into dreaming.

 

The shadow approaching me was my height, or the height I would have been if I were able to stand straight. I had no pride here and no defense. He could do with me what he would. In the back of my mind a quiet, tired voice whispered, Finally, someone with the power to judge me.

 

Oh let me be worthy.

 

Else there is nothing.

 

He touched a hand to my swollen cheek. His hand was cool and steady, but even in that state I could see his eyes were more a threat than his killer's hand. He possessed a bloodline limit I did not know at the time. His eyes sent a shudder down my spine. My shoulders would have shaken were they not held in the vise of the three Akatsuki holding me fast.

 

“I am Pein,” he said. “We have shown you pain to prove ourselves to you.” He leaned closer, a faint smile amused on his lips. He was young, like me. “You wouldn't join us otherwise, would you?”

 

My lips moved, cracked. Tried to form the word no. Failed. But he understood. He was the one who had come to me and told me to kill my clan.

 

“You have suffered,” he said softly, stepping back. “Already, before we laid a hand on you. You paid a price for your power. We all do. But pain is good, if it is for a purpose. Suffering is a power unto itself.”

 

He spoke like a monk. And I understood, even with my concussion-addled senses, that he believed in a cause greater than himself. A zealot. I had always looked down upon zealots. But I could not deny his power. I wanted to swim in it, wrap myself inside it, sleep inside that cocoon until I emerged as something new. Unfold black wings and leave my chains behind, in the discarded husk of the boy who had loved Shisui.

 

“I will join you,” I whispered, voice ragged with blood-salt.

 

He nodded once, fixing his terrible gaze on mine as he did so. I held it, broken though I was.

 

Then he turned and moved away. My vision swam, then re-focused. I saw him stand before a pale figure, who was also being held by two cloud-cloaked brethren opposite me in the clearing.

 

“You have gone above and beyond what was asked,” Pein said softly. But there was a razor edge to his words that had not been present when he spoke to me. “What was that jutsu?”

 

Orochimaru grinned. I could see the gleam of his teeth. “I was going to subdue him for you. But it seems you were all in a mood to thrash him.”

 

Without another word, Pein slid past him and started into the green darkness of the wood. In response to Orochimaru's answer, his silence was like a door swinging quietly shut. I sensed that Orochimaru's time with these men was running out.

 

“Bring him,” Pein called, voice disembodied by the night. He has a voice like silver.

 

“We'll heal you elsewhere, Itachi-san,” someone else told me politely. “Where your countrymen won't follow.”

 

Even as he reassured me of this, my mind was fading into somewhere my countrymen couldn't follow.

 

{OoO} {OoO} {OoO}

 

When I awoke again, it was to the sound of birds twittering, and a gentle stream of yellow-green sunlight through leaves.

 

And to something oval with a spiral on it looming over me.

 

“Zetsu-sama! He's awake! Oi, Zetsu-sama!”

 

Fortunately this glad proclamation was muffled by the oval, which was actually a mask. Otherwise, the noise would have startled me, and my hand would have gone for the kunai pouch at my hip, which they had left on me. Now, of course, I know that kunai would have been as useless as flinging a handful of feathers at him . . . But back then, my instincts would have compelled me to defend myself from him. He wasn't wearing a ring like the others, nor a hitae ate with a slash through his village's insignia. He wasn't wearing Akatsuki's cloak, either. And, judging from the exuberance of his voice, I could practically hear the idiot's grin behind the mask.

 

This man was simple.

 

Or so I thought.

 

“Get off him, Tobi,” someone said, and I heard footsteps shuffling through the grass, presumably Zetsu's.

 

Someone squatted beside me, resting long elbows on his knees. Half of his face was black, the other white, and his head was encased in what looked like the mouth of a giant carnivorous plant. His eyes had an odd, blank intensity to them, as if he were staring at me but seeing something else more clearly than he did what was right in front of him. He smelled like death and rotting leaves.

 

“Are you going to eat him, Zetsu-sama?” the idiot asked, hovering nearby.

 

Zetsu sighed, as if Tobi's voice had brought him back to earth. “And why would we heal him so I could eat him?” His voice was soft, and slightly lisping.

 

“He's prettier now?” Tobi ventured.

 

Ignoring him, Zetsu said to me, “Pein has a message for you, now that you're awake.”

 

Only a message? I thought. What about the truth of this organization? What of its goals?

 

“You will be sent on a mission,” Zetsu explained. “Everything will be explained to you along the way.”

 

“I'd hoped to meet the others,” I said, frowning and sitting up. He didn't try to stop me, and the instant I was vertical a sharp pang stabbed through my skull. I have a weakness, just over my brow, where that concussion the Hyuuga boy gave me. One of the previous night's blow's had apparently found it. “Last night---”

 

Zetsu gave a faint, derisive snort, and rose to his feet. He struck me as a generally patient man, but right now he seemed on edge. In a hurry to be somewhere. And I was slowing him down. “You've been unconscious for two days. The others have left. Gone to our current stronghold.”

 

My back teeth clenched against the ache in my head, and I pushed myself to my feet. Aside from the ache in my head, everything else worked. My limbs didn't even feel weary. And the vague wavering at the edges of my vision following the killing of my clan was gone. I was standing here in the sunlight, in a world bright with color, as if nothing that had transpired before had really happened. It was like waking from a bad dream. The killing had been the storm; this was the red dawn after.

 

My memories were shot with lightning. I reached up and pulled the hitae ate from my head, shook the lightning from my hair.

 

Zetsu was looking at me.

 

Then I remembered that Pein and the others wore their villages' forehead protectors with a slash through the insignia.

 

I drew out a kunai. But realized Zetsu's stare was disapproving.

 

“I wouldn't bother,” he admonished. “You haven't proven yourself yet, and you haven't severed ties with Konoha in the way Pein hoped you would.”

 

The blood froze in my veins. It had never occurred to me that they would find out, or that they would care if they found out.

 

It was the greatest blunder I ever made. It haunts me to this day.

 

I drew in a calming breath. I was steel, wasn't I? I could prove myself. “What must I do?”

 

If his face weren't so expressionless, I'd swear Zetsu wore the ghost of a smile. “You will go with two of our members to the Stone Country. To find the rokubi.” He nodded slightly to one side, a gesture I realized was his equivalent of a shrug. “`What does that mean,' your face asks me. I am but the messenger. They will take you from here. You are theirs.”

 

And I saw behind him, coming toward us, two Akatsuki. One was a woman, short, with black kohl-lined eyes and short brown hair that stuck out in uneven spikes. Her gaze on me was wary and wide. She must have been in her twenties, but looked younger. Before I could react to the news of the task before me, her companion introduced her.

 

“Souen,” he said, with a thin smile. His eyes on me were cold.

 

“I am to go with you,” I said evenly.

 

They were sending me on a mission to capture a six-tailed demon with a mouse of a woman and Orochimaru.

 

Zetsu was already leaving. Already. Tobi shambled after him.

 

This was indeed a test. They were abandoning me, to Orochimaru. If I didn't survive, if I succumbed, I was not worthy of them.

 

“Zetsu is a spy,” Orochimaru informed me as I watched the messenger's receding back. “He entered Konoha during the confusion to see that you'd done what you set out to do.”

 

Then he added, in a lower tone, meant only for me, “Couldn't bear to kill your precious brother?”

 

Standing slightly apart from us, Souen watched this exchange without comment. Orochimaru spoke as if she weren't there. There was definitely something odd about her. Mental slowness, or deafness? No . . . or they wouldn't call her one of their own.

 

The fact remained, though. Whatever she was, I was under her watch, and Orochimaru's.

 

“Take this.” The serpent held out a folded black cloak.

 

I took it without hesitation. I must never hesitate again. They were waiting for me to hesitate. They saw me sparing Sasuke as hesitation.

 

“But I am not one of you,” I said, fixing him with an even stare. “Why should I dress as one of you?”

 

He flicked a strand of greasy black hair from the corner of his sneer. “Don't be stupid, Uchiha Itachi. This is another loyalty game. This is Konoha, all over again, only with a different mark being branded into your flesh.” He phrased the word as if tasting it. “You're their equal. So they fear you, and test you.” Again that hungry gleam. “Your answers don't lie here.”

 

He did not want me to join. There was my answer.

 

He was afraid.

 

I smiled thinly. Swung the cloak about my shoulders. Black unfurled around me, like wings. “We shall see. Let us go.”

 

END OF CHAPTER 6

 

Yamisui: I actually hadn't given up on this fic. I was waiting for Pein's character to be introduced, and to learn more about Tobi. It took Kishimoto forever to get around to it in the manga. (Though not nearly as long as it's going to take in the anime. If they pile any more flashbacks into the current episodes they may as well start running the series backwards.) As for where I'm going with the story . . . `Scarlet' is turning out to be a few chapters longer than I'd originally planned. I've come to love the Akatsuki characters now that they're being developed more, so I've decided to fill in a bit of what Itachi goes through upon induction into the organization. Ultimately, I still intend to finish where I began—in Otafuku, where Itachi sees Sasuke for the first time since the massacre. Next chapter: `Sanctuary Among the Strong.'