The cold did not go away. The innumerable tunnels of the cave were buried in the hopeless darkness like the deepest dungeons of hell. In the dark, one was not able to distinguish anything and therefore had to grope and navigate only by weak air flows between the walls.
Reaching the next branch of the underground corridors, Itachi first found an old fire pit. Only when the gloom around began to form a definite shape, illuminated by the dim flame light, it became possible to see at least something beyond one’s own nose.
The cave hall where Itachi was seemed to be much smaller than the previous one. The low arches almost pressed down from above, the walls came together very tightly, as if in a torture chamber. There was barely enough space on the floor to stretch out at full length. Only two or three tatami, but not more.
Itachi found handcuffs with chakra-suppressing chains at the near wall. Zetsu warned that jinchuuriki were extremely hardy. Because of the beast inside, their strength was incommensurable with anything one could imagine, so even now, when this girl's body was unconscious, it had to be handled with caution.
He alternately closed the shackles around her wrists, threw each of the chains stretching from them over the rings under the ceiling and fixed them with pins on the floor. The girl hung on the wall like a puppet, whose hands were pierced through. Itachi walked around her, checking whether the chains were securely held. Jinchuuriki didn't move. Hardly alive, drained of blood by wounds and therefore pale as yurei, she now most of all looked like a fresh corpse.
Itachi, as best he could, shook her off from the stuck dust. Pulled her long hair matted under dirt and blood from her forehead and lifted her head slightly by the chin. Her face, scarred by scrapes and bruises, still retained some signs of former prettiness. Slightly slanted eyes, low forehead, soft cheekbones. Tan, not older than thirty. Judging on complexion, presumably, close-quarters combat kunoichi. Weapons, as well as protection means, were absent, although he could not exclude the possibility of spatial equipment.
Itachi's gaze slid over the metal on the headband.
The shinobi symbol of the Hidden Cloud Village. Shinobi... this girl must have had comrades whom she protected and with whom she ate from the same pot. For whom she went on missions and risked her life. Her parents, friends, partner, perhaps even children were waiting for her at home. But for now, all this was left behind and would be very soon covered with a haze of oblivion.
Now she was halfway to the other world, in just one step from presenting her soul to the Shinigami. Her whole former happy life would turn to dust any minute and sink into obscurity, exactly as it had once happened to him.
Itachi slowly closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and, taking a deep breath, removed his hand. The girl's head fell lifelessly on her chest. Probably, he might even have felt sorry for her if she would not be an enemy ninja, and he - a hire of the criminal organization. But for him, jinchuuriki was nothing now: just another victim on the way to a bright goal. Mourning for her would be carried out in her village anyway.
Itachi took a step back and looked around. It was as quiet as in the grave. Somewhere in the distance, a barely discernible hum could be heard - the wind was wandering through the adjacent corridors. The silence was lulling.
The faint warmth from the flame lessened the shiver a little. Itachi sat down in front of the fire and, coughing, stirred the coal remains with a stick. The long fatigue gripped him by the shoulders, and he began to watch the fiery sparks rising up to not to fall asleep.
Shinobi… What was "being a shinobi"? What did "village" mean and what did "clan" mean? He still didn't know, even though it had been so many years since he first started asking himself these questions. Why was he forced to kill in order to drag out his further existence, and why was "killing" always the only way out? Why did he have to kill even the strangers? He had never heard anything about that girl except that she was a vessel for bijuu, he didn't even know her name. And still, she would have to die for nothing.
It was rumored that the universe contained six worlds within. And if Itachi lived in one of them, then he had no doubt that this world was the lowest one.
Those who had been born in it, he heard from Hidan, turned into hellhounds.
After all, the whole shinobi’s life was most like hell.
The fire was burning out little by little. Befuddled with his own thoughts, Itachi dozed off. Images from the past rose before him, were interrupted by fresh memories, faded and reappeared. Being in this strange intermediate state between the dream and reality, he heard a sound similar to a strangled cough, and hardly forced himself to revive.
Everything remained as before. No one had looked into the cave, the last embers burned down on the fire pit. Itachi stirred them again so that they would not go out for some time. The cough repeated.
Itachi turned around in a spurt. The jinchuuriki girl hanging on chains in front of him twisted convulsively and vomited blood. When this cramp had passed, she haggardly lifted her head. Blood trickled down her lips, and her eyes stared unseeingly around.
But she seemed to have regained consciousness.
There was a clang. The metal of the chains rattled, echoing in one’s ears with an unpleasant ringing. Itachi watched jinchuuriki without getting up from his seat. Having woken up after fainting, she probably did not fully realize what had happened to her, and therefore tried in vain to free herself from the shackles, unaware of where she was.
“It's no use trying,” he said, turning back to the fire. “You're wearing handcuffs made of metal that suppresses the chakra. Although it is very worthy that even in them you were able to wake up”.
Her fortitude really deserved respect. In this girl’s stand, Itachi could scarcely help her more than with idle talk, although, to be honest, he did not even want to talk right now.
The chains stopped rattling. Jinchuuriki moved her eyes blindly, as if trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. Finally, she gathered the unfocused attention on Itachi in the corner. Her gaze cleared a little.
“Cats have nine lives, you crazy fanatic”, she wheezed mockingly. “Didn't you know?”
It seemed that in the darkness of the cave, jinchuuriki confounded him with Hidan. Itachi got up and came closer.
“If I were you, I would not be that snarky: anyway, the one you fought with is not here now. I'll watch you til the morning, and then the sealing process shall start. Therefore, save your strength if you want to survive at least until dawn”.
The girl gritted her teeth with a creak, and a predatory grin appeared on her lips. Itachi didn't flinch. If she was not clever enough to keep her head down, he would personally send her to watch some dreams before the ritual began. He didn't have the slightest desire to argue with the impudent ninja of the Cloud.
However, jinchuuriki did not hurry to answer; still bristling, she studied his figure with an absent-minded glance for a minute, and this was definitely a sane decision. Finally, her black eyes froze on the plate of the headband - and immediately filled with something similar to the bile and interest at the same time.
“Uchiha Itachi…” she hissed completely like a tiger-cat. “I didn't even think that I would be able to meet you in this life”.
Itachi left her words unanswered and silently returned to the fire.
“A cruel clan assassin, who is unscrupulous to kill both a child and an old man…”
Itachi was silent, sitting down in front of the fire. There was no need to remind him of that. Sometimes, for the sake of the common good, one has to make great sacrifices.
“Maybe it's even good that the spirits brought us together here. I have some information for you…”
He felt even a bit curious about what information the jinchuuriki from the Village of the Cloud, which he saw for the first and probably the last time in his life, could provide him with. Itachi frowned, lifting his collar higher. The flames of the fire had almost gone out, and the cold began to get through him again.
“Why do you think I should be interested in this?” he asked blankly.
The girl coughed again, spitting stale blood. When the cough left her, she spoke hoarsely:
“Because it's about your brother”.
Itachi tensed. Then he looked intently at the prisoner hanging on her hands.
“More precisely”.
She grinned.
“A favor for a favor. You help me to get out of here - I'm telling you everything I know. Deal?”
Itachi slowly sniffed the cold air.
“I have no reason to believe you, just as I have no reason to help you. I work for Akatsuki, and we were commanded to bring all the Tailed Ones to the statue of Gedo Mazo. I’m not going to disobey an order just because of your vague speeches”.
“I can't speak more clearly until I’m sure enough that I can trust you,” jinchuuriki said. “All I can say right now is that your brother's life is at stake. If you let me die, he’ll lose it next”.
It looked like a bluff. Unfortunately for her, jinchuuriki wasn't the first to bluff in front of him.
Itachi squinted at the girl from under his brows, hiding his nose behind the collar.
“Your words are too predictable. No wonder, because now you find yourself in a situation from which there is only a one way out. It is natural that you will act exactly the same as others would”.
Jinchuuriki raised her head.
“What do you mean?”
“You think you know what my weakness is, and you're trying to catch me on it. In other words, you do what anyone would do in your place. And, of course, you expect from me the reaction of an ordinary person”.
Itachi paused, and in the deathlike stillness of the cave, only the dripping of water in the nearby tunnels could be heard for a while.
The silence between the walls soon reverberated with a thoughtful low voice.
“The thing is that I am not someone who can behave like an ordinary person. Ordinary people, they... live their lives bound by what they accept as correct and true. That’s how they define reality”.
Jinchuuriki listened.
“Clinging to their pitiful lives, they want to avoid death by hook or by crook. Fleeing away from mortal life, they create illusions and forget themselves in them. They laugh in joy and cry in sorrow. They flatter themselves with false hopes - and all of it just to evade the curse of death. Watching their attempts does even entertain sometimes”, Itachi turned away, and the impassive gaze of his black eyes slid over the glare left on the stone by flame in the fire pit.
Under the low vault of the cave, from which the words scattered with a shrill echo, this majestic speech sounded gloomy, like reading a death warrant in the underworld.
“I haven’t been living just to quench my thirst for life for a long time. I don't care when someone is born or dies, dwells in misery or thrives. I have rejected all the mundane matters of this reality. Human suffering is far from me now. Therefore, if you are afraid to die,” Itachi squinted, and inhuman rigidity reflected in his gaze, “make me believe that I have a good reason to keep you alive”.
Of course, he was only frightening. Destroying the vessel ahead of time, as Zetsu said, could end with a loss of bijuu, so it made no sense to kill jinchuuriki now.
However, unaware of this, she was defeated and silent. Then she stirred cautiously - the metal of the chains immediately responded to her movement with a thin ringing. Swaying on the handcuffs, the girl bowed her head, and clumps of disheveled hair slip off her forehead.
“I'm not afraid of death. For the sake of my Village’s safety, I am ready to sacrifice even my life,” she said. “But before you and your friends finish me off… So let it be, I will say something more”.
The seconds of this short silence stretched like hours. Jinchuuriki seemed to be testing his patience - she waited, as if preparing to jump into cold water. Itachi watched the dancing flames dispassionately; he knew that his face was not able to show a single emotion. Jinchuuriki didn’t see even a shred of anxiety on his face, and this made her discontentedly continue.
“The next bijuu of Konoha…” she hissed, looking caustically in his direction, “will be Matatabi”.
Matatabi? Interesting. Why on earth should the Cloud Village voluntarily give away such a powerful weapon as bijuu? This girl was clearly keeping something hidden. Perhaps it would be worth spending a couple of extra minutes on the interrogation. If it came to Sasuke, Itachi was ready to find out as much as he needed.
He turned around, fixing a piercing gaze on jinchuuriki.
“Who told you that?”
“The right guy,” she snapped.
“What else do you know?”
Jinchuriki narrowed her eyes.
“Curiosity, you know, killed the cat,” she smiled, but immediately after added briefly: “Sasuke is supposed to be the new vessel. You'll be able to hear more when we get out of here”.
Itachi turned away. Right, Sasuke was supposed to be the new vessel. But not for the beast. For one of the sannins, who definitely won't let him go just like that.
And this kunoichi… What, he wondered, was she expecting? Did she hope that he would take her for the word and in the same moment betray the organization? What a reckless idea would it be. However, the fact that his younger brother was clearly involved in the story of jinchuuriki still aroused inescapable suspicions.
The silence dragged on.
More than anything in the world, Itachi would like to pull out all thoughts in this girl's head, to dispel all memories, to understand how much of what she said was a lie and what her real plan was. In a good way, he should have drilled through her brain, read it like a book, from cover to cover, and broken the code of her true intentions. Only then he would have found the desired peace. Nonetheless, using the techniques posed a huge risk. Itachi wasn't sure if he had enough strength. Kisame has already reprimanded him…
“Well, it's up to you whether you believe my words or not,” an insidious hiss broke into his thinking. Itachi turned around - jinchuuriki was looking right at him, and in her bestial eyes, swollen from the blood flowing from her forehead, contempt was mocking. “You... you hold your brother for someone special, if he was the only one of the whole clan whose life you decided to spare. Am I right, Uchiha Itachi from Konoha?”
Itachi frowned again.
He didn’t make decisions. All he needed was to know the truth, just the primary truth, real and undistorted. Itachi understood that for it, he could drop dead, but certainly find out everything that he was able to find.
For now, it was early to use his last resort - the ground of the evidence shook too much underfoot. In this case, he had to act with minimal losses, so that at a critical moment there still was a trump card up his sleeve.
This girl hadn't realized yet, but her words had already created his answer.
Itachi raised his hand in the seal of Confrontation, and the cramped cage of the cave had drowned in red light streams. A cawing was heard; the fire on the floor grew into a huge wall of flames. Jinchuuriki, still as helpless as she was hanging on handcuffs, was chained to a giant black cross without an upper crossbar.
“Moon reader”.
The light flashed before the eyes, coloring everything around in opposite tones. The glow of a scarlet disk sparkled above their heads. In Itachi’s hands, the katana materialized. He swung it and closed his left eye.
Jinchuuriki smiled bitterly as soon as he approached.
“Just now, they wanted me to be sacrificed to Jashin. Do you think some kind of illusion will scare me?”
Instead of answering, Itachi stuck the blade under her rib. The blade went through the fresh wound to half and hit the bones from the back. Jinchuuriki choked, rolling her eyes. A ferruginous smell hit the nose.
Genjutsu blocked all five senses. Only in this way was the complete shutting out of reality possible. Only in this way would she be trapped in an illusory fear.
Itachi slowly began to turn the katana on its axis. Jinchuuriki grinned again, looking up past him. She tried to close her eyes and couldn't, because in her head, he forbade her to do it.
“Tell me everything you know. And the sooner you do it, the better it will be for you”.
“Don't think you can break me so ea- easily…” He took out the katana, so that blood gushed out of the wound, and jabbed it again.
The girl started to shake; the veins swollen above her temples revealed her attempts to endure the pain.
“I say once more: tell me everything you know,” Itachi moved the blade to the side, tearing the wound more intensely, so that each time it went through the flesh at different angles. “I don't want to torture you any longer than you deserve.”
Jinchuuriki growled.
“You call this "torture"?” she smirked through her teeth when Itachi took the blade out again. “In our village, even a genin won’t be scared of such a katana. Your accomplice tortured me more exquisitely”.
Itachi narrowed his eyes. Well, if so, then he would certainly try to spice up her suffering.
He removed the katana; the crossbar to which jinchuuriki’s wrists were chained slowly bent forward, and several green sprouts appeared from the soil under it.
“As you know, bamboo is very unpretentious. Its shoots grow rapidly and reach a length of four shaku per day”.
Jinchuuriki looked down in dismay. Now she hung with her back up, and bamboo stalks broke out of the ground exactly where her shadow fell on them.
“But the most important thing is that bamboo grows no matter what. If its stems meet an obstacle on the way,” Itachi walked away a few steps and sat down on a tamarind chair, which helpfully grew at a distance, “for example, human flesh, so they simply tear it and come through”.
The girl bared her teeth, turning her bloody face to him.
“You are threatening me with such an old-fashioned torture?” she hissed with hatred. “You just don't have the patience to wait for this seedling to sprout through me!”
Itachi indifferently looked at her hostile grin. A crow landed on his shoulder, flapping its wings, and cawed loudly. Jinchuuriki froze in fear.
“I'm not in a hurry. Inside of genjutsu, the hours fly like seconds in reality”.
Itachi stroked the crow's plumage. He croaked again, making himself more comfortably on his shoulder.
Jinchuuriki lowered her head helplessly. If the pain could not bring her down, then the expectation of pain, which was much more terrible, would surely cope with it perfectly. For her, time would pass unbearably slowly. Itachi would speed up and slow down its track however he wanted.
He propped his cheek with his fist and, continuing to stroke the crow, closed his eyes. Yes, the hours inside of genjutsu flew like seconds… But it was such a shame that even now he couldn’t fall asleep. He always needed to be on his guard to prevent the chakra’s overspending.
However, bamboo was doing its job. Letting it grow on its own, Itachi practically did not interfere in the illusion’s course, and this, it must be said, significantly saved the energy he expended. According to this scenario, he would still be lucky to have enough power for getting the information in a slightly radical, but much more effective way.
However, whether he would act in this way depended solely on jinchuuriki and her compliance now. Itachi was not particularly keen to use brute force often - by doing that, he got tired faster and, in addition, there was always the same result coming out.
And this result, without exaggeration, was not very attractive.
A scream pulled Itachi out of his oblivion thoughts. Raising his head, he saw that the first peaked stalks had already pierced the girl's chest and stomach.
Jinchuuriki held on with all her might. Tensing her whole body and feeling the perspiration bead, she desperately tried not to give herself any slack. Like a tempered warrior who had been tortured a lot of times, she clenched her teeth to a squeak and rolled her eyes, since now she couldn’t close them anyway.
She was in pain. In real pain. An ordinary person was not able to get away from Hidan and Kakuzu alive. It was already a miracle that she had not died yet and even regained consciousness. Moreover, the damage from injuries received in reality was felt four times stronger in the illusion.
Unable to suppress a cry of pain once, jinchuuriki could no longer control herself.
This pain was tearing her apart.
“Oh, give me strength, dear Matatabi…”
The bamboo inexorably grew higher. For sure it had already cut through the skin and ribs and now was about to injure the inner organs. Under the red bed of the illusion, an animal-like long-drawn howl went up.
Itachi waited. Information was all he needed.
Finally, this indestructible soul gave in.
“Good, good!” the girl screamed, choking on blood. “I'll tell…”
Itachi let the crow go - he noisily soared into the air and disappeared from sight in a whirlwind of feathers. Itachi got up from his chair and, taking up the katana again, squatted down so that jinchuuriki's face was at the level of his eyes. She glared at him with venomous look.
“Matatabi inside me…” the growing bamboo slowed down, “is incomplete”.
Itachi bowed his head, letting her continue.
“The process of transferring... began a long time ago, over ten years…” The girl was breathing heavily, the air was coming out of her with wheezes, but every word she uttered made Itachi only frown more. “Now Sasuke's body should already have two thirds of the cat's chakra. To survive... he has to find me and take the last third”.
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Should he believe her? One had to try very hard to lie so eloquently under the torture, and Itachi doubted that she was able to do it now. So far, he did not feel any affectation - this was only possible for a very well prepared person. Additionally, this kunoichi was only half human. Who knew how skillfully cats could talk one’s ears off.
Straightening up to his full height, Itachi turned the katana blade up, holding the tsuba with his fingers.
“You speak as if you wanted to do Sasuke a favor,” he began dispassionately, standing with his back to jinchuuriki. “A ninja who helps the enemy shinobi… You don't think I'm going to fall for this, do you?”
The girl saw him look over his shoulder. Through the bloody veil that covered her eyes, she probably could not even make out his silhouette, but even in spite of this, her pupils burned with a strange, unreasonable and surprisingly wild resolve.
“It's not about helping,” she hissed, barely overcoming the pain caused by bamboo shoots. “Sasuke won't survive without me, do you understand?”
“And why are you so desperate to save him?”
The question hung unanswered under the scarlet vault of illusion. Itachi silently looked at jinchuuriki. She was clenching her teeth, as if she was going to say something at any moment, but the words never left her bloody lips.
Perhaps, there were good reasons for that.
Itachi closed his eyes. As he expected. If she refused to speak, then silence must have been beneficial to her. What should she be hiding from him? He could hardly imagine.
Still, it was a pity that her first try to throw dust in his eyes turned out to be just a bluff.
“You haven't said enough to convince me”.
There was a terrible scream - the bamboo continued to grow. The leader, Itachi thought, would certainly be glad to hear that one of his subordinates managed to prevent an escape attempt.
Jinchuuriki roared heart-rendingly. Her body was cramped by the pain, but, alas, even that could not stop the bamboo shoots.
“Y-you will regret not believing me when it will be too late,” she rasped, lowering her head in furious despair. “Sasuke and I are bonded. He'll die, and you will be no more able to change anything”.
Bonded? What did she mean by that?
Itachi came closer. The crossbar began to move away slowly, so that the jinchuuriki, half pierced by bamboo stalks, was in an upright position again. Itachi brought the katana edge to her throat.
“How do you prove it?”
The girl stirred, seemingly capable of losing consciousness at any moment. Then she tilted her head back, as if looking down at him from under her eyelashes stuck together with blood.
“Unfortunately,” she said, grinning mockingly, “I didn't have time to take any memorabilia with me when I was in your neighborhood”.
Itachi closed his eyes and exhaled slowly.
Memorabilia... memory. Exactly…
He hesitated, refusing to go to extreme measures. Even with careful chakra allocation, Tsukuyomi took too much of his power. Some excesses were saved, but they should not have been thoughtlessly squandered before the situation was clarified sufficiently.
On the other hand, there was only one way to ensure that this would really have happened.
Sasuke had value. Itachi couldn't risk him yet.
Now, he would only have to make a last effort… No matter what happened, he definitely needed to find out the truth. The truth was at the heart of everything.
Itachi turned around and stretched out his hand. Jinchuuriki stood still under the gaunt palm that cupped her forehead. The girl's eyes glazed over, her body went limp helplessly.
Itachi was making his way through her memories. He was looking for the very crumbs of thoughts that would make him believe.
He could hear the scraps of conversation. The broken speech that echoed like a ghost in the ears, the rustles of the past, blurred images of the bygone. All this flashed in his mind similar to the motley kaleidoscope, like a fabricated hallucination, like a dream of a fever patient, like a malfunction of the nervous system. Indistinguishable words, faceless figures, colors and shapes, rapidly replacing each other in a psychedelic sequence.
The shinobi of the Cloud took care of proper protection. The information from her vessel was surrounded by a solid barrier, but what he wanted to find was hidden not in the vessel itself. Itachi closed his eyes. He invoked familiar images to his mind. The block seals, previously unnoticed by him, embedded in her cerebral cortex, darted before his inner vision, but they did not interest him now. Direct access to the memory was open, and it should be used immediately.
A vision arose in his thoughts. A wide road. Flat facades of peasant houses. A stone wall with small red circles along it - the symbols of the clan.
Here it was. Now he had found it.
They could leave as many mental traps as they wanted on the periphery of her consciousness, but there was no such trap that he would not be able to circumvent.
It would just be worth acting more perfectly in the future: poor health forced him to hurry and to waste impermissibly much energy.
Itachi concentrated and began to observe.
The outlines become more precise, vivider. High above his head, there is a cloudless sky, very close to him - gloved hands. Not his - of the girl whose eyes he was looking around. Dusk is coming. Uchiha quarter goes to bed.
The road turns into a dark alley. Jinchuuriki is breathing jerkily, sitting down on one knee. She listens and strains her sense of touch - the beast inside allows her to feel the energy flow. Then she rises noiselessly - Itachi sees her palms in front of him - and climbs the wall, gently falling on her elbows and cat-like bending out her whole body.
The picture blurs on and off. It is interrupted by white noise; phantom voices and screams that have never sounded in reality. Jinchuuriki resists, but Itachi doesn't care: he will make her show him everything she remembered.
The chakra rises in streams around his eyes; he sees the wall again, hears the crickets’ chirping and the slamming of shutters. Jinchuuriki climbs over a flat slate and reaches the second floor in one hunting leap. She creeps under the canopy from the rain and sneaks inside.
Itachi recognizes this corridor; long black rails on the floor and under the ceiling delineate the sixteen tatami living area that he and his brother shared in his school years. Sasuke's corner was enclosed by a painted partition at that time; if jinchuuriki remembers it too, then…
The air above the bamboo floors is broken by an otherworldly voice.
“Do not hurry, let yourself look around.”
“Do you see him, Matatabi-san?”
Telepathy. That's why their voices sound so loud in his head.
“Second door on the right. There are two people downstairs, be careful.”
Footsteps are heard. Itachi catches them by ear faster than jinchuuriki feels vibrations in her memories.
“Someone is coming. Quickly, hide.”
Her viewing angle is too wide - apparently, jinchuuriki uses all four limbs to move. A black fog begins to grow on the sides of the vision. Itachi only has time to see the female silhouette in the rouka, and then the picture in front of him fades like a jammer screen, and for a while he can distinguish absolutely nothing else.
Black out. Sometimes it happens. People are sure they remember everything completely, but in fact half of the significant details are irretrievably lost. One just needs to wait for the next turn of thoughts.
The darkness doesn't hang around for long. When the colors begin to flicker vaguely before his eyes again, Itachi notices a room mired in twilight. Its angle is quite strange - the tatami is visible, as if from afar - and in the first seconds he cannot even determine the location of the jinchuuriki herself.
A familiar voice comes from somewhere below.
“Is anyone here?”
Itachi looks down and sees a woman's dark hair. Now it becomes clear to him: jinchuuriki is held on the ceiling by the pull of the chakra. She must have managed to escape a moment before the hostess crossed the threshold.
The air is filled with silence. Jinchuuriki hides, trying not to give herself up even by breathing. The woman, holding the shoji, turns her head in puzzlement. Her voice dissolves into the midnight silence.
“Wind?..”
She pushes fusuma into the adjoining room and disappears behind it. At the next moment, the image of tatami is rapidly approaching - jinchuuriki jumps to the floor.
“Did she not notice me?”
“It's all right. She's with the baby now.”
“Can you feel them?”
“Yes. I see the tangle of chakra lines. We'll have to wait.”
In front of Itachi, the contours of the walls and ceiling waver, scattered in the semi-darkness. Jinchuuriki looks around, and Itachi recognizes the known wings of cranes on washi canvas. All added up. At one time, it really was his room.
“Stay here for now. I'll let you know when we can move on.”
Jinchuuriki stealthily moves across it. Under her gaze, a futon rolled up for the day with a bookshelf behind it and a kotatsu corner float by.
“Are you sure she won't smell me?”
“I'm sure. The musk will hide your presence.”
Itachi hears a forced yawn. The floor, which has been looming before his eyes all this time, is slowly moving away.
Behind the futon, a long plate of a full-length mirror is leaning against the wall. Jinchuuriki stretches, putting her hands above her head, and when she passes by, unconsciously looks at her reflection. Itachi sees her as being very young, almost a girl. Or rather, a gangly teenager on whom the shinobi uniform hangs like on a coat-rack. Her blonde hair barely reaches her shoulders, but her face is hardly different from the way she looked at Itachi in the illusion. The same soft facial features, the same pitch-black eyes of a carnivore
Here, she seems to be no older than fifteen.
“I always thought,” jinchuuriki leaves the mirror and looks around the room. Itachi runs with her gaze over the rows of book backs, the closed oshiire doors, the empty tabletop, on which there is only a piece of paper with a reminder to bring a class report to the Academy tomorrow, “that musk masks only the smell.”
“For ordinary cats, yes. But I am a bakeneko, and my smell is fused together with the chakra. By hiding it, you're hiding your traces, too.”
Itachi stares intently at the vision. In front of him are his personal belongings, his clothes neatly folded after ironing, sorted bundles of kunais, a plate with half-eaten taiyaki, which he used to take to his room after dinner. Everything around him belonged to him, and to see it through someone else's eyes was at least unnatural.
But what happened to him? Where was he himself at that moment, why did he not recognize the slightest sign of a stranger in his own room? Was he sent on a mission? Or did he stay late due to the training again?
Jinchuuriki notices a plate with cookies. Itachi involuntarily winces - in the memory transmitted to his head through the jutsu, she feels a painful hunger.
“There are cookies here! May I…”
“Don't touch it. No one should know that you were here.”
Jinchuuriki looks around, and the room seems to fall down one level again - she gets on all fours. The dough fish on the plate inevitably come closer, and Itachi realizes that jinchuuriki is sniffing them.
“But cookies will dry up if no one eats them…”
“A good shinobi should not leave traces after himself.”
Jinchuuriki exhales in frustration, and the plate begins to move away again. A shelf with books takes its place. These books were checked out to Itachi by the Academy a long time ago and were supposed to be studied during the full four school years, but it happened so that he had read them completely before application, and since that time they were without need gathering dust in his room.
Picking up one of the tomes with her pinky, jinchuuriki pulls it out and unfolds it on the first page.
“I think I told you…”
“I'll just look through a little and return it right away!”
The yellowed paper under the columns of hieroglyphs crisps in her fingers. As Itachi has not opened these books for a long time, some pages have stuck together because of fresh ink.
“It seems that someone doesn't like to read much!” jinchuuriki giggles. “Let's see what's here. World history…”
A book personally presented by the Third Hokage to Itachi in gratitude for his assistance in the evacuation and rescue of citizens. When the village was attacked by the Nine-Tailed, he was forced to help the clan. He was barely five years old at that time, and a year before that, the Third World War unfolded before his eyes; to be honest, he did not even think about any rescue.
The pages rustle, replacing each other. Dates come up on the margins, detailed comments grow in angular brackets. As Itachi remembered, the book has been written by an author from Konoha who used clear and quite impartial language. A lot of facts and figures, dry statistics and objective data characterization.
“What?
«Hashirama sold Matatabi and Gyuki to Kumogakure at the first Five Kage Meeting as a sign of friendship and balance between the newly formed hidden villages…»
Matatabi-san, did you see that? What rubbish.”
“Authors of historical books often try to show their country to the greatest advantage.”
“But they’ve muddled everything! In this Konoha, don't they even know that you and the Eight-Tailed have been belonging to the Cloud Village since the dawn of time? How ignorant. Because in fact it's all wrong, and you and Gyuki came to us long before that… Hashirama guy.”
“Everything Konoha knows about our village will always be only a small part of the general history. And history is never objective.”
“But it's not fair! Because of such stupid books, they will consider us just helpless kittens…”
“It shouldn’t concern you. You're a kunoichi, so you’d better think about your highest priority.”
A clap sounds. Jinchuuriki hastily closes the book and returns it back to the shelf. Hiding in the futon shadow, he listens to the footsteps behind the partition. A moment later, it drives off, and Mikoto, bathed in moonlight, appears behind it. Itachi hardly recognizes his own mother. As a child, he saw her completely different, somehow statuesque and for him unattainable in a feminine way; she met even her death with exactly the same dignity, but in the eyes of this girl, Mikoto was an ordinary housewife, unattractive and too plain.
“Is she gone?”
“Not yet.”
The slippers soles creak on the tatami. Mikoto lingers in the doorway, finally glancing at his eldest son's room with her black eyes. The wind from the veranda slightly ruffles her hair.
“Still, it’s just wind…” the mother whispers and goes out into the corridor.
Jinchuuriki looks out uncertainly from behind the futon.
“Is she gone now?”
“Not yet. Wait until she comes down the stairs.”
“And now?”
“No…”
“And now?”
“You foolish girl! Be patient. Or have you forgotten how you lost your first life?”
For an indefinite time, a lull is established — both in the minds and in reality.
“It's all clear now. Go.”
Jinchuuriki jumps over the futon and reaches the threshold of his brother's room. The vision of memories begins to ripple again, it blurs and is overgrown with gaps. Itachi was ready to resist physically what he expected to see, but jinchuuriki should not have known about his feelings. As long as he is just a bystander, he will keep impeccable composure.
In Sasuke's room, the shoji are tightly shut. He himself is quietly sniffing under a fluffy blanket, carefully tucked up by his mother from the sides. Before going to bed, Mikoto always came to say “good night” to Sasuke. She had never said that to Itachi, which was why he still remembered it.
“Do you know what you need to do?”
Jinchuuriki bends over the bed, smelling gravely next to the fabric.
“Touch his chest first. Then act as Nekomata said.”
“Good.”
Nekomata? Itachi involuntarily slowed down the vision playback. How did this demon cat from the Sora-ku fortress get into the memories of the Cloud shinobi? Itachi couldn't even say for sure whether Nekomata had been already defeated by himself to that point — the time frame in jinchuuriki's head seemed so uncertain. In any case, it's best to proceed now. Perhaps more details will be revealed to him later.
The blood rushes to the eyes, and the picture fluctuates further.
Jinchuuriki pushes back the edge of the blanket. Sasuke's head rests on a pillow, dark hair scattered on it touches rounded cheeks. How old is he? Three years, four? He's just a little kid who hasn't earned the full recognition yet, but he has definitely deserved to carry the Uchiha surname.
Jinchuuriki pulls his hair away from his face and closes her eyes. Itachi catches phantom hand movements: she folds the seals, but he can't recognize their order. What is this, a chakra transfer technique? Or something else he had to keep in mind if he wanted to know about everything that was going to happen to his brother?
The vision, as though in spite, twitches again with interference strokes.
Itachi grinned, summoning the last energy to his head. He was already at the end, so it made no sense to concede to jinchuuriki in the final seconds. However, the flickering spot in front of his eyes continued to fade; at some point it was covered with a blueish veil, similar to the glow of a blue flame. Besides that, no matter how much Itachi strained his consciousness, he could not get anything more out of jinchuuriki's memories.
A new gap follows the blue fire, and in the next vision Itachi is already watching jinchuuriki holding her palm over Sasuke's collarbones. Although the darkness around is impenetrable, her eyes perfectly distinguish every little thing — including three rows of continuous script, which, like the seal signs, flare up brighter with every second on the chest of his younger brother. Itachi takes a closer look: the patterned lines of this script form a curved stripe. Like a necklace, it wraps around Sasuke’s neck in a semicircle, and on both sides of it, the steam symbols in the form of long drops flicker.
Under the girl's fingers, Sasuke winces through sleep, restlessly tossing and turning his head and shoulders. His skin shines with sweat, and his face becomes unhealthy pink — his body clearly responds to the actions of jinchuuriki with unpleasant feelings in it.
Despite this, Sasuke does not wake up. When she removes her hand from his chest, he gives a tremulous sigh and stretches out on the bed, after which he rolls himself exhausted into a ball.
“It’s done now. Go the same way you came.”
Itachi sees the images changing again. He hears a faint rustle, with which the partition moves aside. Jinchuuriki slips out into the corridor, sneaks silently to the canopy, jumps in one second, holding her folded hands in front of her, as if diving into the depths of the sea. Once outside, she straightens up and leans forward as she runs, so that the emblems along the stone wall and the facades of neighboring houses are now flashing again on the sides.
The night has been in its rights for a long time; the wide road is deserted, as no one from the Uchiha usually returns to the quarter so late. Itachi always noticed this if he stayed late in training. No one, only if it was not…
A tiny figure of a boy on the horizon catches jinchuuriki's eyes. With every second of movement, this figure grows, and at the moment when Itachi manages to see its owner, jinchuuriki rushes past without looking back. The world around seems to freeze, turns white and plunges into emptiness, keeping in itself just two silhouettes, around which a whirlwind of acacia leaves rises into the air.
In the boy on the jinchuuriki’s way, Itachi recognizes himself.
The fingers on the girl's forehead opened up by themselves. The hand fell down, and the vision dissipated immediately. Itachi stood as if stunned, and a whole swarm of thoughts raced through his head at the single moment.
Did he not notice her? But how? After all, she was definitely in his vicinity, he was walking home, probably from a late training session at the Academy, so how could he have missed her occurrence?..
The realization struck mercilessly from the inside: the same musk that bijuu Matatabi was talking about was a technique that hid the cat's chakra. Without feeling the chakra, he would have taken her for a ninja, and the protector was hardly distinguishable in the dark. There could be just no other explanation.
Jinchuuriki, still hanging on the crossbar, coughed violently, when Itachi took his hand away. The air came out of her with a whistle, as if from holey bellows, but as soon as she raised her head, he saw in her eyes a sincere mixture of despair and fierce contempt.
“Do you... believe me now?” the girl asked, continually choking with a wheeze.
Itachi looked past her. Accepting what he heard and saw was difficult, if not impossible, but not for him. The cold reason that dominated him even at critical moments pushed him to only one thing — the understanding that many circumstances had changed. When circumstances changed, the most important was to quickly decide on a further strategy.
And the further strategy depended on whether he should hurry.
“How much time does Sasuke have?”
“After thirteen years, cats turn into yokai. If he doesn't restore his chakra before he is sixteen... the yokai will take over his mind, and Sasuke won't come back.”
Yokai shall take over Sasuke's mind? What did it all mean? No, why…
Indeed, his plan was thought out to the smallest detail. Itachi couldn't find a single flaw in it, not even the slightest blunder. How many sleepless nights he spent creating this subtlety, thinking out every step… And now — all these efforts were in vain overnight.
But there was no worth lamenting. He made an unfortunate miscalculation, allowing blind confidence to overshadow his mind. And now his duty — no, his mission! — was to return everything to the way it used to be.
“Why…” Itachi forced himself to pause. Even if his soul was in dismay, the confusion was only superficial. “Why did this happen?”
“This was a strategic decision in the name of the alliance between our villages.” Jinchuuriki straightened up a little, feeling herself more freely.
Itachi turned his distant gaze on her. So that was how…
“In the name of the alliance? Which alliance?” he asked again. The mention of an international union could indeed be profitable to him, but with only one condition: if this union would really exist one day. “And what made Cloud Village give up such a powerful weapon?”
Itachi did not oversee the arrogance with which the prisoner looked at him from the crossbar’s height. Normally, a harsh invasion of memory caused strong emotions in the victims, which almost drove them to insanity. People whose heads were treacherously broken into from the outside, unconsciously resisted this and became hysterical.
Itachi expected a similar outcome. Jinchuuriki, contrary to his assumptions, seemed to behave overly confident and even somehow cheeky. In other words, she kept herself amazingly lucid. So amazingly that even the tone of her hoarse voice sounded patronizing.
“Didn't you know? Our villages have signed a contract. We give the Two-Tailed One to Konoha for temporary use - and you provide Kumo with protection.”
Pulling out information was getting more and more fascinating. Over the years of the ANBU service, not even a grain of knowledge about this deal has passed through Itachi. It was also not flaunted either by distorted rumors or by artificial falsifications for distracting the eyes.
This girl obviously lied. Moreover, she lied brazenly, so branzely that he did not even want to ask about the reasons for this audacious lie.
If she was doing it consciously, then he would still have a chance to find out about the background information. If not…
Interrogating jinchuuriki would become similar to driving a carriage with the shafts facing north and the wheels facing south. No matter how powerful his abilities were, they all would be useless against the unconscious.
It only remained to hit straight.
“Who exactly told you to give the chakra?” Itachi repeated the question, which jinchuuriki waved off as not yet being gripped by his techniques.
The girl shuddered, showing a snarling smile again. The corners of her lips lifted threatenly, but Itachi foresaw: she was about to tell him what he had already heard.
He didn't have time to walk in circles.
“Think harder.”
Jinchuuriki froze.
Itachi made her imagine the figure and whisper the name with her lips. His strength was running out — reading memory depleted the active chakra reserves, and it would be too wasteful to involve its additional amount in such a trifle.
If his suspicions were not unfounded, Itachi would understand it through the answer alone.
And jinchuuriki's answer spoke for itself.
“In the name of the alliance…” she said helplessly, as if forgotten she had already said this a couple of seconds earlier. “To provide protection…” here she choked again, swaying on the chains, and shut her eyes.
The pain did not allow her to even breathe. A light-scarlet trail ran down the brown scab that covered her hair.
Jinchuuriki's ears were bleeding, and Itachi knew that it wasn't the result of genjutsu.
His illusion was obscurely deformed from the inside, condemning the girl to torment, which he did not intend to subject her to.
Itachi remembered the mental block that he saw in the thickness of jinchuuriki's consciousness. That was it. Now, everything was clear to him. Someone put a seal between her brain cells, so that whenever she tried to imagine a certain element, it caused an intracranial pressure jump, and she simply could not think further.
The key of this element was linked to its creator. As soon as Itachi calculated it, he would be able to remove the block, but for now…
It would be wisest to ignore the background. Sasuke and jinchuuriki were bonded somehow, and the latter was the only source of necessary information so far.
Itachi bowed his head, eliminating the compulsion. After jinchuuriki was not forced to think in a brutally requested way anymore, she let out an unwilled sigh.
Looking into her face, Itachi saw nothing but traces of blind lack of will on it. Had he tried to find out whether this girl remembered what she had just been asked, he would hardly have achieved a clear answer.
A connection with short-term memory was firmly embedded in any mental block - once touching it, the user erased even the slightest reminder of it.
When jinchuuriki came to her senses again, a misunderstanding arose in her eyes. It was natural: for her, their conversation broke off exactly at the point Itachi made her touch the mental seal. Now, as expected, she was in a stupid confusion.
“What... what’s up, Itachi?” How ridiculous this simple-minded question seemed now.
Itachi turned the katana around the axis, intently studying the thin blade with his gaze.
“I asked why... why was this alliance forged? The one you were talking about.”
Jinchuuriki grinned.
“Are Leaf shinobi not taught the copy-book maxims?” she snorted. “Any alliance, no matter by whom it is forged, always has one goal. The good. The welfare,” she paused to spit out blood. “The future of ordinary people, just like you and me.”
Itachi looked at her from under his brows again. Well, she was right about that.
Ninety-five percent of the matters in this world were decided by politicians, and only the other five - by ordinary people, one of whom he was once himself.
Perhaps it was on them why she tried to pretend that Sasuke's fate worried her no less than his older brother. And it was on them that she couldn't say everything she had to now.
In the end, finally, even Itachi himself underwent the destiny of becoming a worthless pawn in this failed political game. So he knew it for sure.
But the circumstance that he saw in jinchuuriki's memories… It gave her a certain power.
And he would absolutely not want her to turn to this power.
“Ordinary people…” he repeated and, turning his back to jinchuuriki, closed his left eye again. “We don't know what kind of people we truly are until the very last moment before our deaths.”
She tensed noticeably; the waves of fear that had emanated from her before were especially obvious now.
Itachi slowly turned around, slightly lifting his right eyelid.
“You said you weren't afraid of death. But as death comes to embrace you, you will realize what you really are. That’s what death is, don’t you think?”
The rich red light faded under the overpowering black flame. Its surges flooded up in a swarm, encircling the base of the cross and crawled higher, devouring and corroding any obstacle on their way. Jinchuuriki shook as the fire began to lick her heels. It rose from the feet to the shins, knees, wrapped around the hips, easily burning through clothes and reaching the skin.
The scorched meat could be smelled. The girl jerked on the chains in horror, then screamed at the top of her voice — she was burning alive, her body was melting like a piece of butter in a furnace, and she felt unbearable, excruciating, devilish pain.
“No! No, no, no!” she howled, unsuccessfully trying to escape from the ring of deadly flames. “Stop it!”
Itachi watched indifferently as her skin was charred. As the flesh beneath it shattered in scabs and crumbled in shreds, as her mouth had fallen in a suffocation cry, as her eyes furiously protruded.
Whatever did anyone say, but in the face of death, people were all the same. The fear equated everyone, no matter how desperately they denied it.
“Please!.. Have mercy…”
The Amaterasu fire could not be quenched. If she knew it, her death agony must have been twice as terrible.
The fire spread to the hair, covered the face, neck, shoulders. The body faded under it along with its clothes, revealing an unsightly view of bones blackened by soot, tendons dried up in flames, and ruptured joints. Its crackling was drowned out by a helpless raucous wail, jinchuuriki suffocated in the smoke, and her figure was not to distinguish at all behind the dense wall of fire.
“Now you know which death awaits you if you try to frighten me with what you did to Sasuke.”
Itachi turned his head. Jinchuuriki, suspended by her wrists on the wall, stared blankly at the place where, in the illusion, her charred corpse fell apart into pieces, swallowed by black fire. There was an animal terror in her eyes, and the narrow pupils shivered on the whites, splotched with blood vessels.
The light of the scarlet moon went out, the sparks, like the ashes remains scattered in the air, and the conflagration place, over which a terrible flame had just raged, gradually vanished, leaving only a terrible echo in consciousness.
The colors returned, the illusion disappeared, and they both found themselves again in a cramped cave with a low vault.
Itachi looked at the fire. It had burnt out completely.
Of course, he made sure that the death scene was firmly imprinted in her memory. He did not need an unexpected betrayal at the most important moment. Jinchuuriki glanced straight ahead for a long, lost moment. Covered in blood, exhausted both mentally and physically, she was already at the limit of her power and looked so pathetic that she could hardly be mistaken for the skillful kunoichi.
Her clothes, cut and tattered, hung on her in rags, almost hardened due to a blood scab. Instead of a human body, scraps of meat were visible under them, and only dark holes on the place of eyes were visible on a bleeding face through her pinkish disheveled hair.
“I... I'm already by a cat's whisker from death,” jinchuuriki croaked when the horrifying images of her own death faded slightly before her eyes. “Even if you don't kill me, without your help, I... will die of my wounds sooner or later.”
However, even now Itachi couldn't believe her. She survived the fight with Hidan and Kakuzu, then Tsukuyomi, she was restrained by chakra suppressing handcuffs, but she still had the ability to speak. The power of jinchuuriki was truly limitless.
He himself used genjutsu for a minute at most, but he spent a good three quarters of the total amount of internal energy on it. If he had no opportunity to recover, its temporary reserves would cover only a couple of times by a clever chakra distribution.
Well, he would be extremely careful. He would keep a very close eye on the jinchuuriki. He had already come this far, but for Sasuke's sake…
He would make it so that she shall become his last test.
He would go even further.
A kunai whistled through the air. There was a short clang, sparks flashed, and jinchuuriki fell heavily on the stone floor of the cave. Her wrists were still cuffed, but now, only short stumps of chain links stretched from them.
Itachi hid the kunai into his bosom and lifted his straw hat.
“There's only one key, and I'll give it to you when I know more.”
Jinchuuriki measured him with a look of powerless indignation, but did not say anything. With a visible effort, she rolled onto her knees and hugged her stomach. Her appearance and state clearly left nothing to be desired, but it was the last thing Itachi cared about right now.
“Try to stay out of the way,” he called over his shoulder, heading for the exit to the cave corridor. “We'll only have a few minutes.”