Fugue

&you're caught between hell and high water; you're walking in a mirage.

(a/n) this is kind of a spiritual successor to Insomniac, in that it's what Insomniac should have been if I didn't fail so much at life.

1/3/2012: Updated to fix broken line breaks. Also haha, joke's on me, Shisui's personality has been revealed to be actually totally the opposite in canon. Oops.

'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

I have to do this quickly before Kisame gets impatient, and she's really not cooperating with me.

Admittedly, one couldn't possibly expect a young woman to meekly go along with whatever fate is planned for her by two menacing missing-nin in a seedy side alley behind a cheap hotel, especially when one is holding a sword as long as she is tall and the other one has his hand firmly pressed against her mouth and is trying to pry open one of her eyelids with the thumb of his other hand. That's turning out to be surprisingly hard to do, by the way.

"Itachi-san, maybe you should let me take over." I'm not looking at him, but I can hear the grin that's on Kisame's face. "She might be more docile with one of her arms off."

She whimpers under my hand and thrashes harder. I still can't pry her eyelids open. Maybe her incredible facial muscles come as a result of her line of work. Or maybe it's because I'm trying not to pop her eyeball out of its socket. "Kisame, I think a one-armed prostitute might be more of a hindrance than a help to us."

Time for a new plan.

My hand leaves her eyes, brushes a few strands of hair away from her face and tucks them behind an ear, resting there. I lean in.

"If you make a sound," I tell her, "I let my partner calm you down his way."

She tenses up, trembling. I'll take that as an oh god please don't kill me. With the hand previously occupied with her mouth, I stroke a thumb along her cheekbones. She has nice skin, actually. I linger there before moving down to the base of her neck, past the neckline of her dress. I can feel the lines of her brassiere under the silk. With the other hand, I'm massaging the vertebrae at the base of her skull. She's so tense she isn't even trembling anymore. My fingers find the pressure points I'm looking for along her spinal column.

Not many people know this, but the effects of most forms of genjutsu can be enhanced dramatically through physical contact.

My tongue slips between her lips as my chakra shoots into her, disrupting the natural flow of her energy, up and down her spine, chasing branching entangled electric lattice lines of nerves into her brain as I lean in, pressing a knee to her center.

She moans and goes limp in my arms. Eyelids flutter vainly. I catch a sliver of dark blue iris.

Jackpot.

Seven minutes later, she's walking out of the alley no worse for wear—except maybe her hair is a little mussed, her lipstick a little smeared, her knees a little weak, sure; her eyes might be slightly unfocused and the forefront of her thoughts gently wiped blank except for a few easily remembered instructions—but the point is, Kisame had wanted to cut off her arm.

He's snickering behind me, and I can taste her perfume at the back of my throat.

"Didn't know you had it in you, Itachi-san," he chuckles.

"Let's move," I tell him, unconsciously rubbing at my lips with the callused pads of my fingers, with the jagged edges of my bit nails.

I feel sickened.

Fugaku's at the point of my knife, and I can see in his eyes that somehow he's been waiting for this for a long time.

I'm covered in blood so fresh I can feel it running on my skin where it's slipped in between the seams of my ANBU body armor. Blood has a stink, a thick wet salty tang in the air that you don't smell so much as taste. I want to scrub it off my tongue.

"Do it," he hisses, tendons in his neck rippling against the kunai's edge. "I didn't raise a coward."

"Yes, you did," I whisper.

The knife moves and his blood sprays out of him at full force, splattering me and gushing onto the floor.

In a way, it's beautiful.

At this point, I can hardly even see. I'm blinking blood out of my eyelashes in time to parry Mikoto's blow. She'd pulled three kitchen knives and thrown one; now she twirls the other two in opposite hands.

I blink once, twice, three times, and my ninja-to is between her ribs.

I don't remember putting it there. I don't remember what happened in between the blinks.

Come to think of it, I don't want to.

She gasps my name in syllables ground between glass.

I open my mouth. "M—"

But she's already dead.

In between the time it takes for her to slowly slide off the end of the blade and when I hear Sasuke screaming mother father outside the door, I have time to lean back, to stare at the ceiling with my mouth still half open and words dead on my tongue.

To this day, I still don't know what I had been about to say.

I don't remember the first time I met Shisui. He was just always there. After the Red Day, after Sasuke was born, after the Nine-Tailed Fox's attack, when the family moved to the compound in a corner of the village, I saw him more often, but I know I knew him before then.

My first clear memory of him is when I was five and he, eight, after the Red Day but not long before Sasuke was born. He was hanging upside down from a low branch by his knees. I was underneath him, reaching up with short arms, trying to grasp his outstretched hands. I think he had offered to pull me up into the tree itself.

I remember seeing him suddenly shift and a spasm of fear cut his laughter short, and the next thing I remember, I was several feet away and Shisui was in a crumpled heap on the ground.

I remember thinking he was dead.

I remember thinking I'd killed him.

Later, I found out he only cracked his clavicle. He'd be fine after a visit to the healers and a few days of inaction. As for me, Father took me aside and privately commended me on my reflexes—apparently, I'd dodged faster than the onlookers had believed possible. He asked me if I felt any differently. If I saw any differently.

I told him I didn't feel any differently. I wanted to see Shisui to say sorry.

About a day later, he found out from Shisui that I'd awoken my Sharingan.

By contrast, I remember the day I met Anko with crystal clarity.

I'm in a booth at a restaurant with Shisui. It's the day he's promoted to jōnin. I've been in ANBU for a month at this point, so I'm glad that he's catching even with me again, after I'd shot past him after the Chuunin Exams. We're supposed to be celebrating, but neither of us is a very big eater.

"See if you can score us some alcohol," he says, elbowing me in the rib and running a hand through his perpetually mussed hair.

"Shisui, I'm twelve and you're fifteen. They'd never serve us."

"Fsh, you don't know that."

"I do. I've watched you try."

"You're ANBU. I'm a jōnin now, and older than you."

"Then they'd want us sober for missions."

"You have such a stick up your ass."

"I know. You make a point to tell me as often as possible."

Someone slams a bottle onto our table. I can read "OSAKE" written down the side in large, obvious characters.

The young woman holding the neck of the bottle smirks. The light above her head picks tawny auburn highlights out of dark purple hair. "I'm sick of listening to you two argue about it. Here. On me." She winks, and it's somehow predatory. Her hips sway sarcastically as she walks back to her table.

I am fascinated.

While Shisui's nudging me and pouring, I can't rip my eyes away from her. I have a bad habit of switching on my Sharingan in public, outside of combat, just to see, to memorize certain body language quirks, the unique hue of others' chakra. Hers is midnight blue, so deep and rich it's like staring into a reflection of the night sky in the sea. I feel like I might fall into it.

"Itachi. Wake up. We have booze." Shisui seems annoyed with me. "Are you even listening to me?"

"I know we have booze. I've been right here." I have to rip my gaze away from the back of her head. I have to fight the feeling that as soon as I'm no longer looking at her, she'll disappear. "I'm not drinking that."

"Come on, Itachi," he says, waving a cup tantalizingly under my face. "This might be your only opportunity for another...what, six years?"

"I'm not drinking that," I repeat. "I'm more concerned with who gave it to us."

Shisui tips the cup back, coughs and rubs the back of his hand across his mouth. Tears spring into his eyes, and it takes him another few moments to speak.

"You don't know?" He jerks a head towards her table, pitches his voice a hair lower. "That's Mitarashi. Mitarashi Anko."

I blink.

"You know," he says leadingly. Scoffing with exasperation at my clueless expression, he leans in a little closer. "Orochimaru's bitch."

Now I remember. I had been about seven at the time, still in Academy, but I remember hearing Father snort about it at the dinner table. "Let her back into the village? What a joke. To really believe she'd choose this over her sensei." I remember his eyes flicking towards me and then back to Mother. He knew I had been listening. "To any individual, his family takes precedence. She has no family. No real guidance. She can't be expected to know what's right from what's wrong. It's cruel, to place those kind of expectations on someone. Sarutobi's too soft."

"I hear she likes to steal kids away from their sensei, you know," Shisui says. He's deep into his third cup. "Recruits them."

"Recruits them into what?" He rolls his eyes, as if to say he won't tell me if I don't already know. "Is there proof?" I press. No matter what I know about their veracity, his stories never fail to draw me in, even unwillingly.

"No, but everyone knows." He smirks.

"You're an asshole. That's not something you say with no proof."

"Relax." He puts an arm around me, squeezing my opposite bicep. "You're so uptight. Besides, she gave us booze. I'm not going to say anything."

I'm already ignoring him, turning back over my shoulder, and my eyes meet hers. There's a sad smirk on her face.

The instant I realize she saw me looking, my head snaps back around stiffly. I pretend I didn't notice.

I have to meet her.

Fast-forward two hours. The sun has sunk below the rooftops, and Shisui's kneeling in an alley. I'm holding him up while he retches into the sewer grate, coughing and swearing.

"That bitch," he slurs. "She poisoned me..."

I rub his back. "Shisui, there was nothing wrong with the sake. You're the one who tried to drink the whole bottle. That was really stupid." I'm terribly worried at this point. Shisui's never been this sick. Granted, he's never put his liver through this kind of agony, either.

"You didn't drink any. You were s'pposed t'help," he gasps before heaving again, this time nothing but bile.

"I told you I wasn't drinking any. You didn't have to finish it all in one night. That's not how it works." He's really pale. I'm almost in a panic now. "Come on, I'll get you home." I put his arm around my shoulders and help him to his feet. He's nearly unconscious. Oh, no wait—his head is lolling against my shoulder. He is unconscious.

I look up and Anko's leaning against one of the buildings on my left. I have no idea how long she's been there. Some elite we are, the pair of us.

She doesn't look as triumphant as I would have expected. "I thought about warning your friend there, but it seems he's found out his limits the hard way," she says, staring out into the street. She's biting her lower lip almost methodically, chewing off the chapped skin. "Lie him down on his side. Keep his chin up, but his mouth down, in case he vomits again. You don't want him to aspirate it."

She's still not looking at me as she says so. I have a feeling she expected this to happen. I could easily call her out on it.

"Thank you," I say. "I'm sorry."

Anko whips around, scrutinizing me as if she thinks I'm making fun of her.

"Don't thank me," she says. "...Uchiha, right?"

"Itachi," I confirm, bowing a little under Shisui's torso. His breath reeks. "This is Shisui. And...?" I'm hesitant to admit I already know her name, considering the circumstances.

"Anko," she says, a small smirk climbing the right side of her mouth. "But you knew that."

So she had heard us. I feel my cheeks flush red. She laughs. "I'm used to it." She starts walking out, but turns back to me. "You know, you owe me," she says.

Um.

"For the alcohol." She grins, that predatory look back in her eyes. "I like dango. I'm free Thursday afternoon." She winks.

I think my mouth is hanging open slightly as she leaves, and I'm actually grateful Shisui's unconscious right now.

The floor is so interesting.

I'm staring at it, memorizing every whorl in the wood, the ridges, the scratches of years of shoes and people rushing in shouting Hokage-sama and people bowing stiffly and waiting to be reprimanded and people kneeling with their fist against it, elbow locked and trembling, trying to keep their breathing steady while they wait for the Hokage to tell them they should have done their job and killed their younger brother in cold blood.

You know, the average stresses of an office floor.

Sandaime sighs, and I hear something broken in it.

"You couldn't do it," he says.

I am a coward.

"He didn't know. He was too young. The youngest in the clan. He wasn't informed. He's loyal to the village, I know it."

Bullshit, Itachi. He has nothing else to be loyal to, now.

"You couldn't do it."

I am a fucking coward.

"Please," I say, and it comes out a whisper. It comes out choked in blood. "He can be a hero. He'll be an asset to the village."

"I don't see why we should honor your request when you've proved incapable of honoring ours," someone else says. His voice is stone and steel, granite and knives—unyielding, sharp, ugly. Danzou. I would love to point out that a confidential order signed by three advisors and the Hokage stamped with the village crest can hardly be construed as a request.

I ignore him, concentrate on Sandaime. "Sir. You know I wouldn't ask for this lightly." My knuckles tremble against the hardwood. "Don't tell him the truth. Let him believe in our clan. Let him have his pride." Let him have this lie, Sarutobi. Let me have this lie. Don't let me down.

A dark chuckle. Danzou again. "Since you don't seem to get it, let me put it in terms I think you can understand, Uchiha. You lost. You failed. You don't get to dictate to us."

"Danzou," Samdaime snaps, but it doesn't elicit a response.

I am a coward. But I'm not yielding here.

I didn't want to have to resort to this.

I look up, finally. "Danzou," I say, and it surprises me how cold I sound, how steady my voice is. I'm shaking, but my voice is ice. "Since you don't seem to get it, let me put this in terms you can understand. If you touch one hair on Sasuke's head, I will leak everything I know about this village to the other countries. All of them. Everything."

Everything. For example, ANBU names. Military strategy. The truth of the massacre. The seal code to the barrier around the village.

Danzou's single visible eye widens. Homura and Koharu go white. Sandaime still isn't looking at me. I can feel my eyes itching. Clarity washes over my vision. I've activated my Sharingan without even thinking about it. Homura and Koharu's chakras are murky brown and dirty yellow, like mud and trampled straw. Respectively.

Sandaime's is a familiar indigo, normally so serene. It seethes now, roiling like storm clouds.

Danzou snarls, ready to deliver another blistering indictment, no doubt, but Sandaime puts out a hand. "Enough," he says. I'm staring at Danzou, something nagging like whispers in the back of my mind.

His chakra is stone gray, like always.

(but isn't there, isn't there a strange halo around his arm and eye, something like double vision, like an afterimage, something that bleeds soft silver-bluish threads into his aura like a bad watercolor portrait, something I've seen before—)

I feel cold.

I'm seeing things.

I'm seeing things.

I swallow and taste blood and I'm seeing things and Sandaime is talking again so I have to listen to him, I have to calm down, I have to breathe. I'm still shaking.

"Itachi. In light of what you just said, you leave us no choice."

Cold washes into my gut.

"Sasuke will be kept in the dark. As per your request, there will be as limited contact between him and us as I can make possible."

Oh.

Oh, thank god.

I return my gaze to the floor. I can't let them see me break down.

"Thank you, Hokage-sama," I manage, my mouth dry.

He nods. I can't see it, but I just know. "Now get out," he says.

He's right. Dawn's approaching, and I can't be seen anywhere near here for the next forty-eight hours or so.

I bow again, press my head to the floor (resisting the urge to let it lie there and to simply pass out), and move to leave.

I'm not looking at Danzou.

It's too much like something I can't think about.

"Do you love me?" she asks one night.

My jaw actually drops.

"Itachi," and now she's sitting up, looking at me with an unreadable expression, and this isn't a joke, "I'm asking you if you love me."

I...

"I..." My mouth is moving and words can't come out. I'm trying to tell her I love her. I'm trying to tell her of course, why wouldn't I, what else is this if it isn't love, and I can't. The words are stuck somewhere down in my throat.

Something hardens along the line of her jaw.

"If you can't say yes or no, Itachi, get the hell out of my house."

I look at her for a long moment. Without a word, I move to gather my things.

On my way to the door, she speaks one last time.

"You're a fucking coward," she says.

I don't turn to face her.

"I know," I say.

I leave.

"Where were you last night?"

His tone is casual, too casual. I can sense the accusation hiding in it.

"Something came up. I couldn't go. Too suspicious." I am lying. I am completely lying.

Shisui scowls at me. "Come on, Itachi. Your clandestine ANBU meetings can't possibly all be happening on the exact same days as the clan meetings. You've been gone for the past four."

Exactly one of those occasions had been a real ANBU meeting. One more of them had been a meeting with...someone else. The last two had been a different kind of meeting entirely. "Bad luck." I'm peeling an apple in the branches of a tree. Shisui is two branches above me. The apple peelings are in a little pile on the ground some dozen feet below us.

He scrutinizes me. I continue peeling.

"I hope you haven't found some girl or something," he says.

Damn. I've nicked my finger with the knife.

He laughs at his own suggestion. "Ha! What am I saying? We are talking about you, after all."

"It was your suggestion," I say, sucking on the cut. "Of course it's ridiculous." I take a bite of apple. It tastes weird.

"Because I mean," he continues, "even if, crazy as it sounds, you of all people managed to hook up with anyone, you're the last person who'd let it come before the clan. I mean, come on."

I look at the apple and recoil. It's smeared with red. I must have nicked myself deeper than I thought. "Shit—"

He looks down and grimaces. "Oh, sick. Here, give me that."

"What are you—"

He reaches down and snatches the peeled, blood-smeared, half-eaten apple from my hand. He licks the blood off, takes a bite, and then hands it back to me. "There. All better."

I practically throw the apple across the street. "You're disgusting."

Shisui practically falls out of the tree laughing. "Oh my gosh, your face, Itachi—" Still laughing. "I don't think I've seen you make a face like that—ever—"

I slide out of the tree. "Whatever," I call behind me, moving as if to leave. Predictably, Shisui follows.

"Aww, come on, don't be mad at me," he whines. "If you're hungry, I'll get you another apple—"

"Shisui." I've stopped, and he bumps into me.

"What?"

I turn. "Are they really that worried about me?"

"Itachi, you're kind of important."

Maybe I should be a little more careful.

"I'll be at the next meeting. I promise," I tell him. "Regardless of what comes up."

He grins. No, he beams. Ruffling my hair, he says, "I knew you'd come through, Itachi."

It makes me feel a little better. Calmer. Having a definite course of action does that.

I feel like I've seen this man before.

"You're Itachi-san, aren't you?"

I'm not paying attention to him. After what Sandaime's just told me, I need to go home and crawl under the table and not come out for another twenty years or so.

He's tall, deceptively so. His mask only has one eyehole. He's perched lightly in a tree some several meters ahead and to the left of me. I'm going to walk past him and ignore him.

As I pass, he says, "I can help you, you know."

That stops me. "...I'm sorry," I say, "I think you have me confused with someone else."

"Oh, I don't think so." There's something strange about his voice. It should sound far more muffled than it does—he's wearing a mask, after all. But that's not the case. Every consonant comes out as sharp as a blade, so perfectly that it almost creates echoes inside my ribs, resonating somewhere down in my core.

I am suddenly very nervous.

"Who could I possibly be mistaking you for, Itachi-san? After all," and I can almost hear a subtle smirk playing around his lips in the way he says this, "there's no one else quite like you. The solitary prodigy. The stoic child-warrior." A shift and he's leapt from the branch to the road ahead of me before I've even flinched yet.

He cocks his head like a curious child. "But it's not really what you want, is it? You hate all this."

"I don't know what you're talking about." I'm slowly shifting my center of gravity, just in case.

"Slaughter." He says it slowly, oozing on the sibilant, lazily rolling the vowels around before cutting them off at the T. Just the way he speaks has my stomach turning, has me remembering things I never think about, has me thinking about what I've just heard from the mouth of one of the few people I have ever trusted.

(It's thousands and ten thousands of lives versus scores of them. It's math.)

(It's faceless strangers versus my flesh and blood. It's basic.)

"I am a shinobi," I finally say, moving to brush off the encounter and continue on my way. "What I think is irrelevant."

"Ah, what a good answer!" he chuckles. "But not quite what I'm looking for—"

"Look somewhere else," I say. Flat. Cold. Direct. There's no hint of my growing unease.

The silence grows. "That's it, isn't it? You're a coward, Itachi," he says, and he almost sounds disappointed. I note he's dropped the honorific quite easily.

"I'm not afraid to die."

"No, you aren't." I get the sense he's testing me, somehow. "You're afraid to live. You're afraid of winning."

I'm remembering things I don't want to. "No one wins in war." I'm remembering black sky and dirt stained red. I remember the crows. The taste of blood, the stink of it. Bodies black with decay.

The Red Day.

He laughs, as if I've told a good joke. "You would say that, wouldn't you?"

"Who are you?"

He shakes his head. "It's my turn to ask the questions. I'm asking you what you want."

I've flicked my Sharingan on. His chakra is black, black like ink, like dried blood, and it coils thick and opaque inside him like smoke over a battlefield. "Why?"

"Because," and there is a smirk somewhere in his words, "it doesn't matter what you want. What matters it how much you want it. What you're willing to do for it." He leans in closer to me and I am paralyzed with fear and—as much as I can't admit it—curiosity. "I can help you get what you want."

What I want is for this to disappear. For this to be gone.

"Let me guess," I say. "In return, you expect me to help you get what you want."

"And that," he purrs, "is the answer I was looking for."

The first time we make love—the first time I make love—is the third time I've ever been with her.

I wake up to the sound of her crying in the bed next to me.

"Oh—Oh god—" I'm stammering, blanking, reaching out but she's pulling away, and I'm worried I've done something wrong, afraid I've screwed up somehow, and I want her to stop crying but I don't know what to say to make it better. "I'm—I'm sorry—"

But she's beaten me to it. "I'm sorry," she sobs into her knees, her hair spilling down over her arms and hiding her face from view, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry...I'm so sorry..."

I try to touch her on the shoulder, but she jerks away. There's a pause where I'm not speaking and she can only sob, until she stops crying and the silence between us yawns like a chasm.

"Anko, what's wrong?" I whisper, finally.

She chokes out a laugh, clutching blankets to hide the soft swell of her breasts. "Itachi, how old are you, again?"

There's no point in lying. She already has a general idea of my age, anyway. "Twelve. Thirteen in June."

She laughs again. It sounds like someone strangling her. "He was right. He was right. I—I'm so sorry, I..."

"No, Anko, I—I'm sorry, I don't know what I did, I'm sorry, I'll go, I just..." I'm just talking now; words are just spilling out of me without order or coherence.

"I was twelve, too. The first time." Her hand goes to the mark on her shoulder. There are teeth marks over it. Mine. "He...told me no one else would want me. I was a reject. A failure. I was lucky to be alive. No one would want me." Tears are welling up again, spilling over her cheeks. Her face is red and blotchy and she looks all of her eighteen years for once, less alluring and unfathomable and deific under moonlight—but strangely, I almost like her better this way. Under the concern and insecurity and fear, I like knowing she's human like me. Broken like me.

"And I..." She chokes on the rest of her thought, pressing the palm of one hand to her mouth as if to hold in the urge to vomit. "You...After he..."

"Anko, it's okay." She's letting me touch her now, just a little; I'm running the back of my hand up and down her arm. "It's okay, it's okay. I wanted you. I still want you. It's okay. You're beautiful, Anko, it's okay. I'm okay. It's okay."

She lets me pull her closer, rub my fingers in her hair, babble assurances and reassurances and nonsense until I don't know which of us falls asleep first.

The next morning, we don't mention it. I'm back to rarely talking, she's back to speaking in sarcasm and jaded smiles and the only sign is a slight avoidance of eye contact on both our parts. We never mention it again, over the coming weeks and months of us seeing each other, of me using her to understand and her using me to forget.

I wouldn't call it lust, but I wouldn't call it love, either.

I'm outside his window, perched on the sill and tapping. It's a chilly evening. The sun's been down for a time, but the night is still comparatively young.

"Shisui. Shisui, get out here. I want to talk to you."

He walks in, sees me, runs over and pushes the window up. "What? You couldn't use the door?"

He's oddly tense. I am, too. "I need to talk to you."

"Funny coincidence. So do I." I back up and jump down as he, not to be outdone, climbs out through his window. He's still not smiling. He doesn't sound hostile, but it's strange to see Shisui not smiling outside of battle. "Want to take this conversation somewhere a little more private?"

We walk out of the compound, outside the village city limits but still within the boundary lines, out by the river. I'm leading the way, but that doesn't comfort me. I'm not sure I feel in control of this situation. I'm not sure I feel in control of anything anymore.

I have three weeks.

I have three weeks before I have to...

I swallow. Thinking about it is hard. "Shisui, I need to...to talk to you."

"You said that already," he says. He's got his arms folded. "So spit it out, Itachi." The Nakano roars behind us. It's been raining for several days, and the river has swelled considerably.

This is it.

"Shisui, what you're doing...what we're doing..."

"Don't tell me." His voice cuts across my words like a dull knife. "You got attached. Spending all that time with your whore has convinced you that the coup's all just a huge mistake, and we should just sit down and forget about it. Right?"

Wait... what?

"I'm not stupid," he spits. "The snake bitch. You've been after her with your tongue hanging out since day one."

He's right, I realize. The way I've been acting is irrational, and—

Wait, what? That doesn't even have anything to do with what's going on and

(thin razor spiderweb lines burn off behind my eyes)

my Sharingan are out and suddenly there's a dark sickness twisting in my gut.

He reads my shock, and then the betrayal.

"We are talking about the same thing, right?" he says, and suddenly there's a defensiveness in his posture, a cageyness in his words.

The river roars behind us, or maybe there's just something roaring in my ears, and I cannot believe what just happened.

"Did you just—"

His eyes widen. "God, I'm sorry," he says, and there's real apology in his tone, real sincerity in his face, all of it very, very real and very, very much complete bullshit. I can see them now, the fine spidersilk threads of silver-blue chakra that wind around his tongue, dance lazily in the air.

I am an idiot.

"Shisui, you bastard," I growl, dropping to a crouch and putting my hand to my weapons pouch.

Stupid. Stupid.

He drops, too, but seeing that I'm not attacking yet, continues to talk. "Okay," and this time there is no real fake sincerity, no slight trace of a smile behind his words, no deftly woven spiderwebs, "okay, I really am sorry, Itachi. I've been worried about you. That was for your own good. I just want to help you get your head on straight, okay? I panicked a little. I know you're under a lot of stress right now—"

How long has this been going on? Since before I remember? Since before I can remember? Since before I learned who to trust and how not to trust anyone, Shisui's been there. I'd never even have considered—because it was impossible, because—

How much of it was real?

I don't know what's worth saving anymore. I don't know how I can save this.

Three weeks.

It might as well be three hours.

Shisui sees I'm not listening to him. That I can't listen to him.

In that moment, as I'm seeing truth for the first time in what might be years, he sees it in my eyes.

He knows.

"Traitor," he hisses, reaching for his own weapons pouch.

My fingers hook several shuriken as he pulls out a medium-length kunai, and I'm throwing—

he's dodging—

I feel something rush past my cheek—

drop to a hand—

impact—

jars the spine—

one of us slips, I don't know who—

and I've misjudged the stability of the riverbank, and I'm falling in—

the water's cold, and it shocks the air out of my lungs—

my weapons are torn from my hands by the current—

something pulls—

the world flips around me, or I flip around the world, and I feel the ground meet the back of my skull—

dull invert-colored stars burst behind my vision, back where the backs of the eyes meet the front of the brain—

I'm shivering violently, and he's pinning me down with an arm, he's got one hand to my throat.

"This," he pants, "I'm sorry, Itachi—"

(what is he doing, what is he going to do)

"—this is for your own good. It's—I can undo it after the coup, you know, give you time to settle back down—"

(oh god he's not going to kill me, is he, so what is he going to do)

His hand moves from my throat to the back of my neck.

My eyes widen and cold wet air shocks my esophagus raw. "Oh—!mmmmf—"

—he covers my mouth with his other hand and I can't breathe for a moment.

(oh shit oh shit oh shit shit shit shit)

The effects of most forms of genjutsu can be enhanced dramatically through physical contact.

Something cold, colder than the river, colder than the air, is winding along my spine, my nerves.

(no no no oh god oh gods please no no no this can't)

(I'm burning them off as they come, flashes of dark red bursting against silver-blue, but I'm fire and he is water and all I'm doing is raising a fog of blinding steam)

I'm going numb. I'm thrashing but he's heavier than I am and I'm trembling so hard from the cold that I can't even move properly, and he's got me pinned with a knee over my solar plexus so I can't even breathe without his say and he's got a hand to my throat, another holding my mouth shut, but that one shifts and I gasp without air, "No—"

"It's just a personality suppressant," he says, and there's real concern behind the anger behind the ice. "Like I said, I can undo it later, but you have to understand, I should have killed you by all rights—"

(he's right, something whispers, I'm breathing in fog and ice and steam and the cold is seeping down to my core, just shut up and listen to me, just to me, and this can all go right, it can go back to how it was, only better; the only tradeoff is you have to stop thinking for a while

and that's not so bad anyway)

I'm going numb. I can't get air. My breathing is slowing down.

(but he's moved his knee now, I should be able to breathe, he's moved his knee and his other hand's over my heart, and the silver-blue waves are crashing on me in time with my pulse, with my slowing

slowing

heart rate

and the softly slowing rising

and falling

of my chest)

I can't breathe and white spots are floating in front of my eyes and he's whispering in my ear now, but I can't hear it over the roaring of the river

(just relax and it'll go faster, Itachi

just relax

it'll be okay

I don't want this to hurt you

like the way you've been hurting me)

I can't hear anything,

(I can only hear him somewhere spinning spiderwebs across empty spaces in my thoughts)

can't see,

(the sky above me is the same midnight blue as—

—something—

—something I've seen before, I'm reaching for it with numb fingers and leaden limbs but he's drowning it out with words-not-words, plugging my ears with silvery static,

and I can't reach it, can't try

he won't let me have it)

can't feel, going numb

(but his hands are warm on the icy skin at my neck, his breath mists against my ear as he whispers soft silver fog inside my thoughts, so that doesn't make any sense, it doesn't make sense)

can't think, it's too cold, too many things are spiraling out of my control

(so let someone else take over for you, Itachi)

I can't do this.

(because you know

you're a coward, Itachi)

No.

Wait.

I'm not saying that.

But he's not saying that either.

I've heard that somewhere before—

Icy air rushes into my lungs at full force, the fresh cold slicing through the fog inside my skull, shocking me awake—

"Anko!" I gasp, and Shisui growls and slams my head against the ground again.

(STOP THINKING)

(it's a command that suddenly clamps down, black, smothering, inexorable—

but

it can't put out the one candle-flame of memory that's reignited)

(( "You're a fucking coward," she tells me, and I stop at the door. ))

And further down, there's

(( "I'm sorry, Sasuke," and he's waiting for the next line even though his face is falling, "Maybe next time." ))

I can't let this happen.

I can't let this happen.

I won't let this happen.

(and Madara's telling me it doesn't matter what you want

what matters is how much you want it

and what you are willing to do for it)

My hand comes up and latches onto Shisui's face. I'm thrashing and kicking up into his ribs and he's caught completely off guard.

(silk threads are snapping and the fog is burning off because I am not going to let this happen)

My hand comes up and neither of us have any weapons save our eyes and our chakra and how much we want it—

(I might be a coward, but I'm not afraid to die, and more importantly, I'm not afraid to live)

There's fire and ice in our blood, under our skin, flaring and needling and scorching and freezing between us—my fingers are splayed across and squelched against his face and my thumb has slipped between his lips and is stuck somewhere between his teeth and cheek; his thumbs are pressed against my windpipe, his fingernails digging into the soft skin behind my ears.

In a direct genjutsu battle like this, the kind where two roughly equal forces simply collide with each other until one is too exhausted to carry on, there are no ties. No draws. No defaulting to a sudden death round. This is the sudden death round.

Neither of us can bend.

One of us has to break.

And one of us does.

...My arm drops limply to the grass beside me.

It's done.

I'm done.

And Shisui's hands withdraw slowly from my throat.

There is nothing in his eyes anymore.

(it's what you are willing to do for it)

"Die," I whisper.

And without a word, without a sound, he turns, and walks to the river.

I have to force myself to watch.

I did this.

Shisui is dead.

Shisui is dead.

I killed him.

I killed him.

He's dead.

Hot tears are warming my icy cheeks and he's dead and my eyes hurt and he's dead and I can taste salt and metal and blood and he's dead and I killed him and he's dead.

"Well, I must say I wasn't expecting that," says Madara behind me and somehow I know he was there the whole time.

"Fuck you," I hiss, and I'm still crying.

And I run.

I'm a coward.

So I run.

I run through the compound (no one looks, no one comes out to see why Itachi's running through the streets at this hour and why Shisui isn't with him if he is), jump onto a bench to a low roof to a tree to down over the wall and I keep running until I'm at Anko's door, pounding against it with my fists.

She opens the door with a question between her lips and I bury my face in her shirt.

"Please," I gasp, before she can even speak. "Please."

She lets me in, and when I disentangle myself from her shirt, I see a half-shadow of my face painted on it in my blood.

"What—god, Itachi, what—what happened?" she says, and her voice is shaking as much as I am; I'm shivering because I'm still wet and still in shock and he's dead and I killed him and I don't want to think about this anymore.

I can't think about this anymore.

"Please," and my lips are already at her neck.

And, wonder of all wonders, her arms go around me, and she doesn't ask again.

We do it there, on her floor, until the sky shifts so that a small pool of moonlight bathes her floor in silver and even though I'm covered in sweat, somewhere deep down, I'm still cold.

I don't know what love is, and I don't know what this is, but I know that whatever it is, it can't last.

I'm lying in her arms, between her legs, and Shisui's dead and I killed him and I have three weeks.

I can't do this to her anymore.

She's sleeping now, and I run my fingers gently over her eyelids, her cheekbones, her nose, her lips, my Sharingan softly whirling and memorizing every curve, every eyelash.

"I'm sorry," I whisper, and I kiss her.

(and as I'm kissing her, I'm sending in soft red tendrils of chakra)

She stirs slightly, but I move closer, breathe deeper into her, shift one hand under the blanket to the small of her back.

Go back to sleep, I tell her without breaking the kiss, and she relaxes into me.

(I'm finding every memory we've shared, every kiss, every touch, every understanding

and I'm burning it all to ashes)

She'll wake up, and I'll be gone, and she'll get on with her life without knowing.

I owe her that much.

Some cowards are afraid to die.

Some are afraid to live.

I'm the worst kind of coward.

I'm afraid to choose.

-end.

'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
'Nothing?'

I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.

—T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land," II. A Game of Chess