Chapter 24

"Reclusion"

"What was Sasuke so excited about?"

Itachi looked up from where he'd been staring down at the streets of Konoha. Chiharu was walking across the roof towards him, a small paper bag in her arms. "Hm?"

"You didn't notice?" she asked as she sat down next to him.

He turned back to Konoha. They sat atop a four-story apartment building in the south side of the village; the unique vantage point made it a favorite of Itachi's. Far to his left was the Hokage Monument and Hokage Mansion, and far on his right was the Uchiha compound in the furthest corner away from the village's political center. In between these two points was the Academy in the north side of the village, the Konoha Police Force building run by his clan, the main shop street that ran through the center of the village, and the Tanade House closer to the compound. There were memories all around him.

He glanced back at Chiharu, realizing that she was still waiting for him to respond, a kind yet slightly concerned look on her face. "I haven't seen Sasuke yet today," he muttered finally.

She smiled hesitantly "I won't keep you too long then," she replied. "I imagine he'll want to show you whatever it is he's excited about. But for now… I brought us something."

He raised a brow at her, watching as she rustled inside the paper bag in her lap.

She pulled out two sticks of dango, and held one out to him with a smile. "I half-suspected my parents to pop in on me out of nowhere while I was paying for these," she chuckled. "Hopefully it was worth the trouble."

He reached out to take his from her. It was impossible not to brush his fingers against hers as he did so with how short the sticks were, and he noted the faint blush on her cheeks as he pulled his hand back. "You'll get in a lot more trouble for this than I will," he said in concern.

"They told me to go out and meditate today," she said, then took a small bite of her treat. "Usually that means no training – if I head back late enough they won't care to check."

He wasn't sure how sound her plan really was, but he couldn't complain too much. It had been a long time since he'd had dango – after his entrance into the ANBU black ops, his parents had been much more severe in their ban of sweets. He shook his head at the thought of them and took a bite. The taste was just as delicious as he'd remembered it.

They ate in silence for a while, looking out at their village in the twilight. Haru resisted the urge to look at her friend again, knowing she was probably overthinking his thoughtful demeanor. She'd found him on this rooftop plenty of times before, usually when he needed time to think after a particularly difficult mission. Oftentimes she would join him, sometimes she would comfort him. Today she'd just wanted to treat him – a random kindness they'd both come to expect out of each other in their friendship, a way to use their unique bond to keep each other sane.

They'd both been busy enough lately on missions with other teams that a treat like this was more than welcome. In fact, she'd hardly seen him over the last two weeks for how busy they were – for most of her ANBU missions Itachi was on her team, or was her team Captain as of the last year. Their teamwork was impeccable by anyone's standards, and every mission they'd ever done together had been successful. In the last several weeks, though, she hadn't been assigned to his team at all, but Hatake Kakashi's. She glanced over at Itachi. He hadn't seemed happy about the arrangement either.

He met her gaze once he'd finished his dango. "…Thank you," he said quietly.

Haru blushed lightly again. She wasn't sure why, but the sincerity in his tone and something in the way he was looking at her had her flustered. She wondered if it was the sugar. "Of course," she replied, and took the last bite of hers before taking the dango stick from him to dispose of it. As his shoulder moved to meet her movement, she noticed something glinting under his shirt.

His hand followed her gaze absent-mindedly. He'd forgotten he was wearing it, but he pulled it from beneath his shirt to allow her a better look.

"Where is that from?" she asked, watching it glint in the dying light. "I've never seen you wear jewelry before."

"I've had it for a while," he said vaguely, distracted as he watched her examine it.

It was a simple necklace, three circular charms attached equidistantly along a smooth, silver chain. She noted its high quality, then looked up at its wearer, who was already staring at her. "What is it?" she asked him.

His fingers closed around each charm one by one, as if counting that all three were indeed there, and his gaze moved back towards the village. The hand that wasn't on his necklace brushed over hers that rested on the gravel of the rooftop. His skin moved against hers as if unconsciously, and she blushed again while she watched him contemplate his answer.

After a long moment, he told her: "A reminder."

The wind through the trees overhead competed with the rush of the small stream below, a symphony of white noise broken up only by the calls of birds in the distance. Pebbles glistened in the breaks of sunlight on the banks of the stream, making the morning light seem strangely brighter. There was a scent of wildflowers on the breeze that mixed refreshingly with the clean scent of the vegetables in the basket.

It was the first warm morning they'd had in a week, and the green-eyed kunoichi kneeling in the stream couldn't help but feel comforted by the traces of spring returning to the forest. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed the sounds of birds and the smell of wildflowers, and she welcomed the sense of calm her surroundings cast around her shoulders. It had been a long time since she'd felt able to relax at all.

Haru sighed contentedly as she picked up the last cabbage from the pile behind her, then began to gently wash it in the stream. She counted herself lucky to have found such a fertile area – even within the perimeter she'd set, she'd found natural croppings of cabbage, spinach, yams, carrots, even leeks and nasu; not to mention berry bushes and a large plum tree on the eastern edge of the perimeter. She'd only rarely been so far south, but the climate here was so much nicer than the rest of the country.

She set the cabbage down in the basket to her right, regarding her harvest pensively. She'd have to go hunting soon, probably tomorrow, she figured. There were only a couple rabbits and one pheasant left in the natural fridge she'd made, and those would be gone by the end of the day. She almost dreaded the inevitability of having to feed more than just herself, as it would take twice as long to gather all the food necessary to nourish an additional person. And there was no telling when that change would take place.

A leaf fell from a tree above into her basket of produce as the wind picked up, and she plucked it out before she stood from the stream. She began the walk back to the small cabin at the center of her perimeter, basket cradled in her arms. She'd have to do a perimeter check tomorrow as well, she added to the to-do list in her head. Hopefully she'd have enough chakra to get everything done.

The cabin was small, mostly built of wood with stone lining the bottom third of the wall, and dark wooden slates covering the double roof. It had been built in the corner of a small clearing in the forest, and when she'd found it she could tell it hadn't been inhabited in years. She'd had to dust and pick up debris for a full day (not to mention setting up the perimeter as soon as she'd arrived) before settling in that first night, and it had taken her half of the next day just to set the place up for an indefinite stay, including fixing the limited plumbing so they'd have running water and using random earthenware pots she'd found lying around outside to make a natural fridge. The cabin had no real kitchen to speak of, just a sink and a small pantry, so she'd had to build a cooking spit in the clearing outside. When the task ended up taking up two hours she couldn't help but curse herself for always leaving the fire-building to her teammates when she'd had to camp out on missions.

After the first few days the living arrangements had been much easier to deal with, and she'd begun to find a sort of pleasure in the simplicity of her new lifestyle. She'd never necessarily considered herself an outdoorsy-type, especially since she'd mostly found herself camping for missions and not for fun over the years. There hadn't really been room to enjoy it until now.

She slid open the door to the cabin and removed her boots at the door before entering. She moved the meats around in the earthen fridge next to the sink before placing the basket inside and then washing her hands, figuring now was as good a time as any to get started on the day's work. There was at least a week or two of it left before she'd be finished, she estimated, and the sooner she was done the better – not that she had any idea what to do then.

There were only two rooms in the cabin, the bathroom and the main room, with only a wall dividing the bedroom area from living area in the main room. She went the small distance from the kitchen through the walkway, pulling a chair from the wall up next to the large bed.

Haru stared down at Itachi's comatose form lying prone beneath the covers. He hadn't awoken once since she'd found him in the ruins of his and Sasuke's battle – not that she'd expected him to. When she found him he had been on the brink of death, the primary catalyst being the degenerative disease in his organs coupled with chakra depletion and extreme physical exhaustion – not to mention blood loss. Had she found him even a few minutes after she did, he would've been gone.

She'd gotten lucky in many ways, she knew, even beyond reaching him with such good timing. She'd found this cabin, for one, having happened to run in the right direction after leaving a hot spring with Itachi still over her shoulder. Her journals full of the medical research she'd done on his condition, and even some notes she'd taken on his Sharingan over the years, sat on an end table next to the bed thanks to her foresight before leaving on her last mission. Her research combined with observations she'd been able to make their first few days in the cabin had yielded her a life-saving understanding of his disease, because she'd just happened to tilt her head a certain way while using her Keigan and noticed the pattern in cell distribution that she'd been looking for.

But that had been three weeks ago. The only luck she'd really had since then had been finding more and more vegetables growing in the forest around the cabin, and, she supposed, in that she'd made so much progress on healing Itachi. She'd never dealt with a condition that required so much continuous attention to heal – usually because of her Keigan she healed patients in record time with minimal to no use of chakra, but a disease like this… she couldn't imagine how long it would take a normal medic to make any progress on it at all.

The problem was the fact that the disease was the result of a birth defect, meaning that she had to be able to heal the deteriorated cells (which three weeks ago had meant almost every cell in all of his organs) accurately enough that it would be completely eradicated. Not only did this process take a while just because of the nature of the disease, but without the diseased cells already eradicated, when she would go back to healing him after a night of rest, the disease would have spread again. It never spread faster than she healed him, but it undid enough of her progress on a daily basis that she was having to waste time healing parts of him that she'd already finished with the night before.

Haru activated her Keigan and leaned over him, pulling the bedcovers back just to make things simpler. Indeed, the outer bronchi of his lungs had been taken back over by the disease – which had been the last place she'd healed last night before she'd needed rest. She sighed, but examined the rest of him with a sense of accomplishment. She'd isolated the disease to the bronchi in his lungs by now, and she could imagine she'd be able to completely eradicate it by tomorrow morning – if not sooner. After that she'd be able to finish the work she'd done on his eyes, which she'd only paused progress in to prioritize the worse deterioration elsewhere. He'd been almost completely blind after his fight with Sasuke (she assumed from overuse of the Mangekyou,) but with the progress she'd made in the last three weeks, he should have been at the point he'd been at before their fight.

She sat down and set to work, hoping perhaps she'd gotten faster at healing him after three weeks of practice.

The first thing that registered in Itachi's mind was a wooden ceiling. The second thing that registered was a heartbeat.

His own heartbeat.

But that couldn't be right. It was some type of illusion of the afterlife, some perk or trick of paradise or hell. He could hear his own voice in his head, the last words he'd spoken before he succumbed to the darkness, "I'm sorry, Sasuke. There will be no next time." He felt altogether too conscious and not awake enough.

Itachi blinked. Still the wooden ceiling. That couldn't be right, either. He could barely see Sasuke's face in hindsight, a blurry, black and red shape in the darkness, tunnel vision, no details, not even enough to make out his expression that he'd assumed would be fear or anger. But his vision now… He couldn't make out the whorls in the wood but he could make out the paneling and the gradients of color.

He shifted stiffly. There was no pain but there was an ache along his spine, he wasn't sure from what. Surely this was hell, then. This was the prologue to an eternity of emptiness or pain or darkness. This was a fever dream. He sat up, slowly, feeling out his stiff limbs and ligaments and muscles, trying to remember how to coordinate it all.

Then he was sitting up. More panels of wood. He turned his head to the left: a window with a bright light shining through, too bright to make out shapes, more wood paneling, and an end table covered in papers and journals and books and an unlit candle. To his right: wood paneling, a rigid wooden chair with a pillow lying on the seat, a sleeping bag on a cot next to the wall. The room emptied into another, no door, and across the way he could make out a sink, a cabinet, a large earthenware pot, a threadbare rug.

He shifted again but something held him to the bed – there was a large, fluffy, black comforter laying across his legs, bunched up around his hips from when he'd sat up, beneath it a thin green sheet and on top of it a dark brown fur blanket. He moved from beneath the covers, his head swimming in all the colors and textures. It had been a long time since his eyesight had been so detailed, and with his last memory shrouded in the dark of blindness, this afterlife, this fever dream, was starting to give him a headache.

Itachi stood carefully from the bed, using the wooden chair for support. Once he was sure his balance and coordination could be trusted, he walked into the next room.

There was an old couch on the opposite side of the wall that divided the place, and to his left was a small fireplace that hadn't seemed to be in use in a few days. Directly ahead of him was a small table and another rigid chair. Beyond that was a sliding door made of glass, green curtains pushed over the right of it so that the natural light from outside poured in. He had to squint his eyes against the brightness, and when even that wasn't sufficient he held a hand up in front of his face to block out the bulk of it. He had to make his eyes adjust, he knew. For some reason everything was too bright in the afterlife.

After several minutes of alternating his gaze from the blinding outside to various darker spots within the small building, he was able to make out more details of the outside: greens and browns, then trees and grass, what had to be a small clearing in a forest, then a dark spot out in the clearing that he couldn't make sense of from this distance. Everything farther than ten feet away was still too blurry, and he found himself rather disappointed that some of his ailments had followed him to wherever he was.

He took a deep breath – something nudging him in the back of his mind, but he didn't care to figure out why breathing would cause that feeling – and slid open the glass door, still slightly squinting as his vision filled with more light, more color.

It was warm outside – a perfectly mild climate with the slightest of breezes and the sun raining warmth upon his skin. Something smelled amazing in the clearing, like something his mother had once made when he was a child. But still, there, a hint of some type of flower on the breeze, something clean and sweet mingling with the damp smell of earth. He looked out, finding the dark spot in the distance, but now that he was on the threshold it wasn't all that far. It was moving, and there was smoke rising from behind it.

It was… a person? A woman. He took a few tentative steps forward, refusing to watch his steps so he could watch the scene in front of him. His bare feet met the grass in near silence and he continued, relishing in the cool, comforting feel of it, as his vision grew a little more detailed.

Her hair was a rich, deep brown, like the fur blanket back inside the cabin, and it cascaded in beautiful, wavy layers down the woman's back to the curve of her waist. She was kneeling with one knee in the grass in front of a small cooking spit, stirring a pan of what looked to be an assortment of spring vegetables in a dark sauce. Even from ten feet away he could make out the strength in her slender hands, and it stirred memories in the far recesses of his mind – by instinct he looked down at her clothes: a black, sleeveless turtleneck, black pants, black boots that covered her calves.

He recognized the uniform but couldn't bring himself to care. He looked back to her hair instead when the breeze picked up and wrapped it around the curve of her waist. She tossed her head to the opposite side, he assumed to get her hair out of her eyes, and it blanketed her back once more.

Fever dream, maybe. But not hell. This felt more like paradise now – and yet the thought made him sad. If this was the better side of the afterlife, and this woman was here, was she dead as well? As he stared at her in silence, his heart skipped a beat and he put a hand to his chest – her hair was wavy, larger waves near the top of her head and smaller ones near the ends, as if they'd been in a braid for a long time, and the sight was suddenly too familiar, too much like—

"…Chiharu?"

The woman froze, her entire body tensing all of a sudden before relaxing only slightly, as she took the pan off the fire and placed it on the surrounding rocks. She stood in a steady pivot. Her green eyes met his and he knew he'd been right. But that meant—

"Itachi," she whispered, eyes wide. He noted her strong hands again, now shaking subtly at her sides. Her voice was hesitant and surprised and yet so, so relieved. "How… how are you feeling?"

He took a step forward, taking in every one of her movements, each breath that filled out her breast and each blink of her wide eyes. Her right hand twitched forward as he approached her, as if she'd thought better of reaching for him – so he reached out instead. His fingers closed gently around a strand of her brown hair as he came to stand a foot from her, moving it behind her ear from where it'd been brushing against her cheek. Her eyes were glistening and he frowned.

"Itachi?" she muttered hesitantly.

This couldn't be Haru, he reasoned in his head. Not only because she couldn't be dead, but because she was too timid. If she'd joined him in the afterlife she would have embraced him by now, or taken his hand to lead him to greener pastures. This was a vision.

But then none of it seemed right. Her warm cheek against his palm, the softness of her hair tangled in his fingers – there was too much detail, too much feeling, too much of an ache in his arm for this to be a paradise or dream. But it couldn't be… he had to ask…

"Is this heaven?" he asked her, his voice hoarse, frowning a little deeper.

She opened her mouth, then closed it briefly as his question registered. "N-… no," she answered, frowning slightly in return. "You're not…"

"…I'm not dead?"

She shook her head, and her eyes filled with concern.

His fingers twitched in her hair and he stared at his own hand for a moment, letting it sink in.

He wasn't dead. He was still alive. And then it all made sense at once, the cabin, the bed, the clearing in the middle of the woods – her presence right in front of him, wondering how he was feeling, concerned about his questions and too nervous to reach for him. Breathing. Vision. He met her gaze again, making sense of the glistening in her eyes. Worry. Guilt.

Haru had saved him. Somehow. She had been in the vicinity of his and Sasuke's battle – she must have been tracking him as Kakashi's team had been. She must have figured out the timing of everything, known what was coming, and then somehow found him after he'd run out of chakra to continue the clone and the genjutsu he'd used against her. But then—

"Where is Sasuke?" he asked.

He could tell she was surprised at the calmness in his tone. "He's—" she started, breathed in, then started again, "he's fine. He's alive."

He nodded but frowned again, thinking.

"He was unconscious, too, when I found you both," she said quietly. "I made sure he was okay before I left – but he doesn't know you're alive."

"Ah," said Itachi, the frown slowly dissipating. He carded his fingers through her hair almost absently. There were so many questions in his head that he wasn't sure how to prioritize them – there wasn't a lot that he could just deduce at this point, and part of him feared to consider the possibilities.

Her hand met his, her thumb nestled in his palm, and she pulled it from her hair gently to hover in between their bodies. "I know you have a lot of questions," she said, her face almost expressionless. "But we should go inside so I can do a small check up and make sure it's safe for you to be walking around. And… you've been on and off an IV for a while… so I want to make sure you can eat okay." She smiled a little, though it didn't reach her eyes. "I made your mother's stir fry, coincidentally enough…"

He looked down at their hands, brushing his thumb across her palm, before meeting her gaze again after a moment and nodding.

She took a deep breath, and retrieved the pan from the cooking spit before leading him back inside the cabin.

A/N: This is probably my favorite chapter that I've written so far. Hope you all enjoy it! The cliffhanger has been resolved at last! Thank you all so much for reading~