Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ Scarlet ❯ Sanctuary Among the Strong ( Chapter 7 )

OoO--SCARLET--OoO

OoO--OoO--Chapter 7: Sanctuary Among the Strong--OoO--OoO

The Earth Country is a dry and unforgiving place. Even for a shinobi, the journey through such lands is trying, especially after the comparative ease with which we traveled northward through the Grass Country. There is nothing but wind and rock, as far as the eye can see, and a few scraggly desert plants with roots that must have been sharp as swords to pierce the soil there. The wind is hot and drains the water from your breath in the daytime, and at night it is cold and wails like a dying woman. There are settlements there, of course, or they wouldn't call it a country. But these are in the canyons, formed where the land has been cracked and bowed by earthquakes and then hardened into sunken fortresses against the wind.

I was grateful for the black cloak with the red clouds, and pulled the straw hat down low in front of my face to keep my eyes from tearing. Orochimaru must have been suffering the same discomfort; he wore a perpetual grimace and was unusually quiet. As for Souen, our silent companion, she seemed immune to the cold. Her expression never appeared to change, in fact. It was like someone had carved her from the stony lands we walked across. Only her eyes were liquid and alive, like a deer that has seen you in the woods and frozen in place as its last defense. They had sent me on a mission with Orochimaru to test me; what sort of test Souen was I couldn't fathom.

At night we slept in the shelter of outcroppings or in dugouts we'd made ourselves, never in the towns.

At night I saw strange dreams.

In my dreams I did not see the Uchiha I'd slaughtered, nor Shisui, whom I'd loved, nor Sasuke. Instead I saw the idiot, Tobi. We were in the woods, alone. Night had fallen, but the air was filled with a pregnant stillness. Something was about to change, forever. I could feel it.

Tobi laughed. “Where are you going, Uchiha Itachi?”

I was still wearing the clothes I had worn when I killed my clan. There was no blood on them yet; I was going to Konoha to bathe myself in blood. But when I tried to answer him, my throat stuck. My words would not even come out in a whisper. I stood stock-still, frozen.

“You think you know because Pein told you, don't you?” Tobi turned a somersault, landing on a lower branch of the tree he was in. His movements made him seem like a monkey, laughable and clever all at once. “He thought you cutting ties with the Uchiha was the answer. He thought it would bind you to Akatsuki forever! Ha!” He sank into a crouch, regarding me with a sudden sharpness that unnerved me. “Our bloodlines are not perfected like his. We are flawed, a shattered mirror image of what we should be. But there is a way for us to be more than what we are. And that is why Konoha feared us. And why you must now throw yourself into hell to save the only truth left.”

I was impatient. Everyone promised ways to achieve new heights, new kinds of truth, all for the cost of my freedom. I didn't want to listen. But I was locked in place, and couldn't speak.

“You'll remember soon,” Tobi chortled, backsliding into idiocy. “Why you disobeyed your true masters. What your true purpose is. You'll remember, you'll remember! Ha! When the darkness comes for you.”

He held our his hands to me, fingers uncurling like grotesque flowers to reveal what he held. Bloodied eyes, torn from their sockets and dangling pink nerves, rolled softly on his palms.

I awoke screaming, my voice finally freed.

Wind howled around our encampment, mad and stinging. Orochimaru leaned against an outcropping nearby, long arms folded across his chest, wearing a slight sneer. “Nightmares, Itachi-kun? Regret killing them?”

My tongue was dry and coated with the dull metallic taste of dust. I rose to my knees and spat, washing away the grit. Then I turned away from him, wiping my mouth with the corner of one sleeve, and lay down again, pulling the brim of my hat low over my face. I didn't answer him. But I didn't sleep, either. This was the fourth night I'd had nightmares this bad. And I felt certain I had met Tobi before--not the simpleton who tagged along after Zetsu, but the shrewd man who seemed to know a secret I didn't. Or a secret I knew but had yet to remember.

OoO OoO OoO

We passed through towns with more tumbleweeds than people, following rumors of the Rokubi. The beast had surfaced in its own monstrous form one week prior, but the people of that town had only seen it in the distance, and one night it had disappeared in the middle of a lightning storm. What this meant to us was that the Rokubi's previous host--its Jinchuuriki--had lost control of it and someone had been forced to reseal it. And this meant that we should not be hunting a lone person but the very Stone Village itself.

The Leaf have never had good relations with the Stone. We fought them in the Third Great Ninja War. Their lands were unforgiving and their economy low, so naturally they couldn't forgive Konoha for its prosperity. They tried to take Konohagakure, though, not the Fire Country. It would have been easier, had they overthrown its government and entangled themselves with the civilian populace. It would have complicated things when the Leaf tried to drive them out, because the Leaf protect civilians and would hesitate to sacrifice any. But they went straight for the more powerful enemy.

The result was devastation. I saw glimpses of it when I was four years old. And I saw it end with the rampage and capture of the Kyuubi. Violence is the most powerful teacher; the world is changed by it. It is the one true path to peace.

In the small town of Akaga we spent the night in an old, rickety inn atop a tavern. The walls were thin, and the wooden floors smelled like they'd rot through if the air weren't so dry.

Evening found us seated at a table in a darkened corner of the tavern with our wide-brimmed hats pulled low, sipping at sake but not really tasting it. By this time we had come to realize we were nearing our journey's end, for we had finally detected the presence of Stone Village shinobi, following us like shadows. How stupid they were in their wariness--we didn't even have to expend the effort of finding them. Orochimaru had a reputation among the shinobi of this country dating back to the Third War, when he was expelled from Konoha for experimenting with forbidden jutsu on Leaf ninja and Stone prisoners of war alike. Doubtless he's been counting on his reputation to get Iwagakure's attention, I thought.

“Arrogance befitting a man who wants to be immortal.”

I froze, the sake bowl halfway to my lips, frowning. Someone had spoken the last sentence aloud to me. I was sure of it. But when I looked at my two companions, Orochimaru gazed past me, watching the tavern's entrance, and Souen merely stared blankly into her bowl. The voice had been a man's, rough and deep.

Orochimaru turned back toward me, smiling slightly. “It'll be tonight. They'll move tonight. You know your part.”

“You know your part. Play it well.”

I lowered my head, not wanting him to see my confusion. Twice I had heard the voice of someone who wasn't there. I was beginning to wonder if the regret I'd thought I didn't have was merely walled up behind a dam of . . . something, and now that days had passed between killing my clan and beginning my new life with Akatsuki there were hairline cracks forming in the wall.

OoO OoO OoO

I took first watch that night. In the unsettling darkness of the room we shared, instead of listening for the soft approach of Stone enemies, I heard whispers that neither of my companions could. They came from far corners of the room, even though no one was there. I had not slept well since we'd left the Fire Country, and my first reaction was paranoia. Hypnosis. The Stone are throwing their voices as part of some genjutsu. Or . . . I glanced round at Orochimaru, who appeared to be asleep on the opposite end of the room. He always seemed to sleep well; he had no conscience. When Souen slept, she seemed dead.

I shook my head, straightened my back and closed my eyes. I took a few deep breaths, sitting cross legged and gathering some meditative chakra to center myself.

“You don't have to do this! Itachi!”

“For the good of the Leaf . . .”

“Where will you go after . . . ?”

“If I am to be their tool, let it be on my own terms. Among the strong . . .”

With a grunt of disgust, I rose to my feet. The more I focused on being clear-headed, the clearer the voices became. Conversations with myself that had never happened, that made no sense.

“I'll relieve you.” Orochimaru was sitting up, watching me keenly. Either he was a light sleeper or he was extremely wary of my behavior on this journey. “You'll be useless if you don't sleep.”

I wasn't in a position to argue. My judgment was being clouded, I sensed. By what, I had no idea. But self-induced insomnia would only make my paranoia worse. I crawled into a corner and leaned my head against the wall, pulling my cloak up to my chin. Though I wasn't comfortable with Orochimaru watching over me while I slept, my head bowed and exhaustion took me.

OoO OoO OoO

“Come back to me, have you?”

I stood in the glade as before, and Tobi was there.

“This time, you've come of your own accord,” he said, peering down at me with his head cocked, curious. “You're beginning to WANT to remember.”

I touched one hand to the hitae ate at my brow, an unconscious gesture of uncertainty. Was I here to remember? Was this dream some kind of slow answer to a question I couldn't ask? “What is it I've forgotten?” I asked him. “You know, don't you?”

He giggled, swung a complete revolution round the tree limb he clung to, like an acrobat performing. My confusion seemed to excite him. “Yes! Yes!” he laughed. “You must remember this place! This is where I took your memories after we did it!”

Leaves scattered from his perch, falling over me in a flurry of green.

“Did what?” I demanded, brushing them away from my face. “What memories? This is the place where Pein told me to kill the Uchiha before I joined Akatsuki. I've never met you here.”

Tobi executed a flip, landing in a crouch right in front of me. He rose to his feet slowly, and for the first time I became aware that he was taller . . . And that he was an Uchiha.

From the depths of the spiral mask he wore, I felt the glare of the Mangekyou Sharingan. I tried to break away, but I was not strong enough. Vines blossomed upward from the ground beneath me, clamped round my body, curved to cradle my head. I froze; black thorns barbed the thinner vines across my cheeks, pointed toward my eyes, cupped my throat so that the tips scratched the skin just over the arteries.

“Look at me, Uchiha Itachi,” he said. His voice was deeper, older, sane. “I took your memories from you before we killed your clan. Because you asked me to, that you might keep your sanity.”

What sanity? I wanted to scream. Do you call this sane? `We' killed my clan? `We'?

But thorns had slid between my lips; a gentle warning.

“I gave you back your memories,” he said, “because you need to hate where you've come from or you will never leave it behind.”

I don't hate them, I thought, fighting to breathe around the thundering of my heart. They were nothing to me at all. The only one who mattered was . . .

“I have given them back to you,” he said, “because you are dying. And because you ought to remember the face of your killer.”

His hand passed before my face, like a cloud across the sun, and when its shadow was gone the vines had melted away and I could move again. He was gone, and I stood in the glade alone, a snow of leaves at my feet.

Then a twig snapped behind me, a deliberate noise.

I spun quickly. Pein stood behind me. He wore his hat with the brim pulled low, as he had on the day I killed my clan.

“You?” I murmured. “Is he trying to tell me you are going to kill me?”

Pein did not answer. He stood still and tall as a statue, face grave as stone. A breeze rustled through the glade, rasping leaves like dry bones scraping. And the wind whispered, in Tobi's voice, “It was not here. When you chose to kill everything you loved, you did not choose proudly, standing here in the forest with your head raised. No . . . You chose to kill them on your knees.”

The world melted into night, and then I was kneeling, head bowed, in a dark room that was all too familiar. I was on my knees, kneeling as shinobi do so that we feel smaller than the lords who play their power-games with our lives. There were some lords in the room with me, but they stood in shadows, in the furthest corners, away from me, watching with misgivings. At the forefront, looming over me, were the elders of Konoha. The Sandaime, his brother, his sister-in-law, and Danzou, the leader of Root. Others. Old men and women, pitiless and soft, who had not seen battle in decades, and were all the more disgusting for asking me to do what they wanted while their eyes were lined with sorrow.

“You will have to leave, afterward,” they told me. “We will buy you time.”

I would have to leave, afterward, so that I could become their mistake, their byword, their village sacrifice. It was not enough that I gave them my blood and my service. They wanted my soul.

My hand, already a fist pressed to the floor where I knelt, clenched until the knuckles whitened. I bowed my head and said “Yes.” My voice was so quiet, my demeanor so calm. But I screamed inside. The pain in that silent cry shattered my sanity and very nearly my will. From the moment I bowed my head to their orders of death, that scream became a river coursing through my blood, which I could only bury but never silence . . .

OoO OoO OoO

I woke screaming.

Something hit me, hard. “Shut him up,” Orochimaru snapped.

I blinked, fighting back stars and tears of pain. My head had struck the floor, hard enough to bleed. There was pressure, terrible pressure, on my back, suffocating me, and I thrashed in blind panic. Someone's hand clamped across my mouth, thin and cold, and I rolled over to see Souen's pale face looming above me, her spiked hair like a brown halo. Her face, as always, was blank, but her eyes were luminous. “Hush, the Stone are here,” she warned softly.

I gagged, and she loosened her hold on my mouth, in time for me to vomit on the floor.

“See to him,” Orochimaru ordered. “We're leaving.”

There were muted thudding noises in the halls, the soft footfalls of killers. Noise and images clashed in my head, thunder split my skull; I fell again, on a dry part of the floor. There came a crash and the sound of wood splintering; the enemy had broken through the door. Souen shook me. But I could only lie there, my cheek on the floor, breathing dusty wood and seeing places and people I had left behind. There was blood in my mouth, and the metallic taste of dust, and a bitterness that burned my tongue and belly. That floor, in that godforsaken little room at the inn, was my one anchor to sanity as the rest of the unraveling world reeled around me in a dark rush.

Souen lifted me, after a while. She was inhumanly strong for someone so small and frail looking. There was a clash of blades in the hall; Orochimaru swore at me.

My memory grows dim, there. Or, rather, the memories that Uchiha Madara had awakened again grew so much brighter.

OoO OoO OoO

When at last I came to myself, was lying in cool darkness, against cold stone. Someone had laid a rough cloth over me, and the muscles in my limbs, my back, trembled.

I was scarcely in possession of my senses, but I could see, in the wan light of a candle mounted on the wall nearby, that we were in a prison. Souen sat near me, knees drawn up to her pointed chin, watching me with something oddly like pity. Orochimaru sat near the bars of our cell, watching me with obvious distaste. He appeared dirty but otherwise unharmed. His face and lanky hair shone with sweat, and he sat huddled with his arms crossed, like a petulant child.

“Useless,” he snarled. “They send me with a `team' and I end up doing everything myself.”

My mind was operating on two levels at once. I heard everything in the present, but it was as if I were separated from all of it by a screen of smoked glass, collapsed into myself like a snail into its shell. Even as he spoke to me, my memories spoke as well. At the time I wasn't even sure they were memories; they might well have been hallucinations created by Tobi, whoever he was, to control me. Or they might have been my own sanity finally collapsing under the crushing weight of guilt.

I struggled to focus more on the present, dimly aware that I might die if I didn't. I recalled what Zetsu had said, about them testing me. Given Pein's displeasure with Orochimaru for attacking me, it was probably a safe assumption that he was being tested, as well. If I could not come to my senses, I would fail the test.

“We are . . . captives of the Stone?” I rasped. My tongue was dry, but my mouth tasted like blood. Doubtless I'd cut something when he hit me at the inn. Either it was the concussion or I was going mad, but in my head I heard the echoing voices of the Leaf elders, telling me to kill Shisui. “You must do this, or Konohagakure will perish. We are all prisoners of fate, Itachi . . .”

“We are,” Orochimaru agreed. “But not because Akatsuki has sent us here. It's because of you.”

Confused, I thought at first he could hear my thoughts. Then I realized he referred to the Stone, and to our current lack of freedom. I attempted to push myself upright. Failed. My backside had gone numb from the cold, rough flagstones beneath us. Everything had gone numb.

“Me?” I managed. My tongue felt thick and dry. “How could they know me?” In my head, my dead father said, “I scarcely know you any more . . .”

Orochimaru sneered. “Your hitae ate. Why wear it if you're not going to slash it as an Akatsuki member? If you'd really wanted a souvenir from the Leaf, why not just take some Uchiha finger-bones?”

Pain flared in my skull, and a wave of nausea swept through me. I gritted my teeth. Whatever was happening, my sanity was being shaken to its foundations. I thought of Tobi, holding eyeballs in his palms. Of the way I'd bowed, so humbly, when Konoha's elders had ordered me to murder my clan. If it was real, and the dreams were true . . .

If they were, and there had been no sense of pride or accomplishment when I had finally broken free of Konoha . . . then the massacre I had committed had not been my choice. The emptiness left by my vanquished pride brimmed with pain. Confused, I swayed toward belief. Had I really been a victim of the elders' cruel orders? Had I become a will-less tool for killing? Why was I even alive? If the dreams were true, nothing I had ever done, from the moment I was branded that genius, had ever been my choice. Nothing that had mattered, anyway. The “testing of my limits,” my hatred for my clan, was all an illusion, given to me by the Uchiha who called himself Tobi, to pacify me, a drug to anesthetize my soul until the deed was done and I was free.

But is this freedom? Is it?

If the dreams were true . . . If they weren't dreams, but memories . . . They had used me, their genius, their shining star, to spy on ANBU while they plotted in the shadows. Konoha had used me, their conveniently troubled genius, because they knew my mental state had never been truly stable and insanity was the cleanest way they could explain to the rest of the village what I'd done. But why? What could they gain?

Was it real? What was real? Oh gods, let something be real . . .

“They know you're one of the Leaf,” Orochimaru hissed. “Though not that you're an Uchiha. So keep your temper, if not your wits, about you.”

Because I have a use for you.

He didn't say it, outright. But he didn't need to. I knew that look. He spoke to me like I was an investment about to slip through his fingers. I was beginning to understand that he wanted more than just my Sharingan eyes.

“Someone's coming,” Souen murmured, turning wide-eyed toward the hall.

And someone was.

OoO OoO OoO

The Stone shinobi saved me.

Well, perhaps saved isn't the right word. Extended my life.

My face stung from the slap. They used crude torture, trying to intimidate me.

My tormentor's hand dropped to his side. His eyes, narrowed to slits, regarded me with the air of a man pretending he is morally comfortable with cruelty when he is, in fact, only well-practiced in it.

“What is your name? What rank do you hold in Konoha? Why have they sent you to spy?”

The questions rained down on me like iron pellets. My head throbbed. They pained me in a way that their fists could not. Somehow I had completely lost my sense of adrenaline, so that I didn't care what happened to my body. But my mind, treacherous machine that it was, went on working, showing me memories that might or might not be mine.

“Itachi,” I mumbled though swollen lips. “Exile from Konoha. Fled to the Earth Country.”

“NO,” he snarled, his voice a whip-crack. And it began again. Strike flat of palm to face, alternated with fists to ensure that one form of brutality did not become too easy to bear. Hours on end, or maybe only minutes, even through the pain I could not feel the passage of time. The beatings only made it worse.

But time must have passed, for I gradually became aware of something. My mind, ever restless, sought new avenues since my dulled senses had practically shut my body down. I started trying to suppress the flow of so-called memories, to let myself think clearly as I had before the final dream at the inn. I entered a sort of meditative state, and stopped answering the Stone interrogator's questions altogether.

There's no point answering, there's no point, I reminded myself, every so often when the pain threatened to break through my self-induced trance. Even if you give him the truth, he won't . . .

Another blow, blood trickling from the corner of my eye, trailing past my ear.

Even if you tell him the truth . . .

. . . he won't listen, for it is not the truth he wants.

Somehow, during that indeterminable time, my head became clearer.

Am I so different? Even if it isn't the truth, my dreams are trying to tell me something. Someone or something is trying to reach out to me, to wake me, to warn me. But what I see when I dream, waking or sleeping, is not what I want to see. So I shut my eyes.

I shut them.

My eyes opened, rimed with blood and sleep.

“I am Itachi,” I answered. “I am a murderer. And Konoha is no longer my home.”

He sucked in a breath, to deny it and strike me again.

Shinobi life is made up of rooms such as this; rooms with doors and no windows, floorboards that creak and walls that smell of dust and fear. But I had been in a thousand rooms like this before. Mute, on my knees, letting duty bow my head.

I was sick of letting myself be silenced.

I grinned, a feral baring of my teeth. I must have looked crazed. “I've killed the Uchiha. You'll find my name in every bingu book in every country soon enough. The cowardly old men who rule the Leaf ordered me to do it, then cast me out. You think I'm their spy? Fools!” I spat. My tormentor drew back. My saliva made a small red blot on the floor.

“You . . . have . . .” He seemed at a loss. Truth seems to have that effect.

“I did it willingly!” I snarled. “I'm their sacrificial demon. Demons care nothing for the lives of anyone, not even their own. So what would you have me say, then? What would you have me say?”

He struck me in the head, then, afraid I would go berserk despite my weakened state. I sat there, bound upright and dazed, my head spinning like a planet within the frame of my skull.

There he made his fatal mistake. He looked me directly in the eyes. The Stone are weak. What Village trains its shinobi to look into the eyes of someone who claims to have killed an entire clan famous for its dojutsu?

I didn't go berserk as he'd feared, but I did not sit silent with my head bowed, either. With the Mangekyou Sharingan wheeling red in my eyes, I compelled him to cut me free. I then extracted from him what I wanted to know, and left.

OoO OoO OoO

It took a great deal of strength to work the pulley system in the dungeon, to lift the prison door. But my two comrades were watching, so I carefully kept the strain from making its way onto my face. I must have looked terrible enough; I had washed the blood off my face but it was still swollen and bruised.

The door hung over them like metal teeth as they pushed themselves to their feet.

“They send me with a team,” I said, “but I have to do the work.”

Orochimaru managed a half-smile that was both calculating and irritated.

Souen's expression was blank as ever, but her eyes glistened as she left the prison to join me. “What did you do?” she asked. There was a smudge of dirt across the bridge of her nose, and her face was pale and drawn, as if she hadn't eaten in days, but there was an air of feverish anticipation about her. Something like hope.

I ducked into the prison cell, retrieved my cloak and fastened it around my shoulders. The straw hat was gone, which didn't bode well for walking across the plains under the sun of this harsh, unforgiving land . . . not that it mattered. I was going to survive. I had decided this, while the Stone beat me in that timeless room. With every blow, I'd felt my last illusions slip away.

The illusions I refer to were not the dreams, which might be memories. They were the illusions I had about what awaited me in Akatsuki, beyond Konoha's gates. Whatever the reason for my fleeing the Leaf to join this organization, be it ruthless ambition or some sort of noble self-sacrifice, I was not going to find any sanctuary here. Already I could see that Akatsuki had its own divided loyalties. It was imperfect, and regardless of my motives I was going to find no peace among them.

I was going to have to look to myself for answers, because looking for answers in everything and everyone around me was leaving me raw and empty.

. . . and I would begin by surviving this to find Tobi again. To ask him what he had done to me, why I was swaying toward belief that the Leaf had betrayed its own using me, why I felt grief and remorse and love and hatred washing over me in waves now, when how it felt to kill my clan should have been something dead and gone.

And what he meant by my “murderers.”

I turned to Souen. “I've used our captivity to my advantage. I will lead you to the Rokubi.” For the benefit of Orochimaru, who stood behind me, I added, “I will lead you.”

The choice to set aside the confusion plaguing me and carry out the mission was the turning point in my fate. I was to face a rocky, brutal slide into the truth, until at last I could face it, bruised and battered but clear of mind. But first Orochimaru turned on me. And the final piece of truth in the puzzle came not from Tobi, but from the man the Leaf called the “Frog Hermit.”

End of Chapter 8

Next chapter: “Traitor”