Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It begins with three teenagers—three war veterans—standing at the third training ground in front of the memorial stone.

Sasuke glances up at the cloudless sky above them. It feels like a mockery. The sun shines down on the grand stone, illuminating each kanji carved into the surface. Hundreds of names, dating back to the First Hokage’s reign.

Sakura stands on his right, her fingers intertwined with his. Naruto is at his left, their shoulders pressed together. It’s the bottom of the stone where they direct their eyes, where the carved names are the clearest; unlike the others, which have become weathered by time.

Slowly, Naruto kneels down in the grass. He reaches out a hand, running his fingers over one of the names. His blue eyes hold a familiar pain.

Jiraiya. Sasuke watches him mouth the name silently.

Sakura’s hand tightens on his. “It’s been nearly two years,” she whispers. “And it still hurts so much.”

Sasuke has no words to comfort her. All he can do is grip her hand back with the same fierceness. The war has left wounds on them all, many of them still open and bleeding. Some of Sasuke’s are over a decade old, and they still haven’t healed properly. He doesn’t know how to let them.

Time heals all wounds. Whoever said that clearly never experienced true grief.

“I’m glad that it hurts,” Naruto says. “It reminds me they were here. It keeps me from forgetting.”

Sasuke stares down at his best friend’s kneeling form, struck by how much he has changed. All of them have. They are no longer the three children that once sat in this same spot and were declared shinobi; they are older, wiser, wearier. Their hearts are covered with dozens of scars that weren’t there before.

Souvenirs of war. They are a product of the flames that burnt them, the anvil that forged them. The will that made them grow formidable instead of breaking.

Sasuke stares down at the names near the bottom of the stone. Phantom pain shoots through his missing limb. “I wish I could forget.”

Naruto turns to look at him, his lips pulling into a frown. “You don’t mean that.”

Sasuke thinks about a battlefield littered with corpses. He thinks, with an unbearable pain in his heart, of lifeless eyes identical to his. He doesn’t respond.

“None of it is fair,” Sakura says.

Sasuke is forced to repress an insensitive snort. He bites the inside of his cheek. “Of course it isn’t. This world takes. That’s all it’s ever done, and it never stops.”

Naruto glances up at him briefly, his expression pinched, before his gaze returns to the memorial stone. His eyes are distant, half in memory, as he takes in the names of their fallen comrades.

“So many lost,” he says, fingers tracing each individual kanji. “Asuma, Neji, Nagato… Pervy Sage…”

“Itachi,” Sasuke whispers.

His name isn’t on the stone, even though it’s the one that most deserves to be there. Sasuke experiences a sudden intense desire to pull out his kunai, to carve the name into the slab of rock himself.

Sakura shifts closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder. Her touch is a balm to his anger.

“Itachi,” she agrees softly, “and hundreds of others.”

His grief is bone-deep, down to the marrow. Sasuke breathes in the soothing scent of Sakura’s perfume. The sun is warm on his face.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s over. There’s nothing we can do to change it.”

Naruto’s fingers go still on the great stone slab, resting against the name Obito Uchiha, which Kakashi refused to have crossed out. Sasuke sees his shoulders stiffen, his face turned away from the two of them.

“Naruto?” Sakura says as the silence drags out. “What is it?”

Slowly, Naruto turns his head. His blue eyes are gleaming with something, an intensity that wasn’t present a moment before. “Maybe we can change it.”

“What?” Sasuke says, scowling. “What nonsense are you spouting now?”

“Sasuke… what do you know about time travel?”

★

Time travel is a roll of the dice. The dangers and uncertainties involved are innumerable, and they can’t take the risk of sending more than one person back. Not when there’s such a large chance of it going wrong.

In the end, they decide it’s going to be Sasuke.

He’s the obvious choice—either him or Naruto. No disrespect to Sakura, because she’s an impressive shinobi in her own right, but all three of them know without saying that she isn’t the best choice for this. Naruto and Sasuke were the spearheads of the Fourth Shinobi World War—it’s because of them that the world was saved. They’re the ones who are in the best position to make real changes.

Sasuke is of the opinion that Naruto is the best option. But then, his friend proposes a more specific plan: to take down the Akatsuki and dismantle Zetsu’s plans… by infiltrating them from the inside.

“It has to be Sasuke,” Naruto says. “He has the best chance. I’m the jinchuuriki—they’ll try to extract Kurama from me the moment I get near them.”

“And you think they’ll let me join? They’re an organization of S-Rank criminals. I’ll be a twelve-year-old kid.”

“Yeah, but you’re Itachi’s brother. That gives you an in.”

Sasuke’s chest tightens at his brother’s name—at the realization that he might be able to save him. He knows he’s supposed to be doing this for the sake of the whole world, but Sasuke has always been selfish in his desires. His heart betrays him, thinking of a forehead pressed to his.

(I will love you always.)

They don’t tell Kakashi what they’re attempting. As Hokage, he’ll be obligated to stop them. If something goes wrong, or if they are caught, it’s better for him to have plausible deniability.

“It still doesn’t feel right to keep this from him,” Sakura says, weeks later as they’re finalizing the plan. “He’s a member of Team Seven, too. He should be involved.”

“There’s no guarantee he’d agree with us.”

“He would.”

“We don’t know that for sure.” Naruto bites his thumb as he rolls up the scroll in his hands, using his blood to seal it closed. “Besides, if this works then the two of us won’t even remember this. Only Sasuke will.”

Sasuke catches the scroll as Naruto tosses it to him. “Naruto’s right, Sakura—as unbelievable as that sounds.”

“Hey!”

“What we’re trying to do is dangerous. We can’t rely on Kakashi to support us. He’s the Hokage now, not just our sensei. This has to stay between the three of us.”

Sakura gnaws on her bottom lip. “Fine,” she agrees uneasily. “But once we do this, you’re going to be the only one who remembers. You have to promise that you won’t forget us. That Team Seven will stay together.”

Sasuke looks up at her, at the fragility in her eyes. He reaches over to grip her hand. He doesn’t want to lose her—to lose either of them. It took him so long to let himself have this, for him to be able to admit that he wanted it. In whatever world he creates, he’s going to make sure they’re still standing next to him.

“We’ll still be together. I promise.”

★

It takes them four months of extensive research and planning. It’s a miracle Kakashi doesn’t cotton on to them during that time. But finally—finally—they’re ready.

Sakura hugs him tightly before she leaves Sasuke and Naruto to it. Her embrace is warm as she locks her arms around him, her shampoo invading his nose. Normally, her proximity would make him extremely uncomfortable. But this will be the last time he sees her—this version of her—so for once, he leans into the hug instead of away.

“Good luck,” she says, tears in her voice. “Find us again. Don’t you dare let us go.”

Sasuke finds his throat feeling strangely tight. With difficulty, he swallows the emotion down. “I promise.”

She leaves him alone in the empty chamber with Naruto. A few moments later, Sasuke is stripped to his waist, sitting cross-legged on the ground as his friend begins the task of painting the correct seals onto his skin. He has a brief flash of déjà vu, reminded of the time during the chuunin exams when Kakashi sealed his curse mark. Five years ago—it feels like a lifetime.

“It’s a good thing no one can see us now,” Sasuke says, a shadow of a smirk on his lips. “People would talk. What would Hinata say?”

Naruto huffs, his breath fanning against Sasuke’s bare collarbone. “Hilarious. But you’re not even my type. Sorry if I’m bursting any of your fantasies.”

Sasuke rolls his eyes, attempting to ignore the nervous flutter in his stomach about what they’re about to do. The feel of the brush against his skin makes him shiver. He can feel Naruto behind him, leaning uncomfortably close. He’s going painstakingly slow, and it makes Sasuke anxious to have someone this close to him—even someone he trusts.

“You’re sure I’ll go back with all of my abilities?” he asks.

“Jeez. Have a little faith in me, would you? I know what I’m doing.”

“It’s time travel, Naruto. None of us know what we’re doing.”

Sasuke hears Naruto sigh, and he once again shivers at the feeling of breath against his skin. “Look, we knew this would be dangerous. But we’ve prepared for weeks now. I wouldn’t let you do this if I wasn’t sure.”

Sasuke doesn’t say anything. Naruto is at the square of his back now, painting slowly down his spine. Sasuke decides to stay quiet. He doesn’t know as much about fuuinjutsu as Naruto, but he knows that there’s no margin for error. Everything has to be perfect. That’s why Naruto’s being so careful—even the slightest alteration, and Sasuke’s soul could end up shredded as it’s forced through time and into his previous body.

He knows the risks. But they’re worth taking. Especially if it means he has a chance to save—

Sasuke cuts the selfish thought off. This isn’t about Itachi, he reminds himself.

After a few more minutes of silence, Naruto speaks up again. There’s a hesitancy to his voice. “Hey, Sasuke… if this works, can I ask you to try and do something for me? Something you probably won’t like?”

Sasuke frowns. “What?”

“Save Nagato.”

Sasuke blinks. He nearly turns around at the words, before quickly reminding himself to stay still. “You’re kidding, right? You want me to save Pain? He’s the one who killed Jiraiya—"

Naruto flinches slightly. “I know. But what happened to him wasn’t all his fault. He wasn’t a bad person, he was just misguided.”

Sasuke shakes his head. Naruto’s compacity for empathy—for forgiveness—will never cease to amaze him.

“Even if that’s true,” he says, “I don’t see how I could change his mind. I’m not like you. I can’t make some impassioned speech to make him magically see the light.”

Naruto is quiet for a moment, continuing to draw symbols down Sasuke’s back. “I understand you might have to kill him,” he says finally. “I’m just asking you to try. Try to save him instead.”

“I’ll try,” Sasuke agrees reluctantly. He exhales quietly. “Next you’ll be asking me to save Obito, too.”

Naruto is suspiciously silent behind him. Sasuke’s eyes widen, turning his head to him.

“No,” Sasuke tells him sharply, astonished that Naruto would even think about asking that of him. “Absolutely not. I don’t care if he eventually changed his mind, he hurt way too many people before it happened.”

“The same could be said of you,” Naruto points out, not unkindly. “I thought you would want to save him. He’s an Uchiha, isn’t he? He’s your family.”

“He’s part of the reason they’re dead. Itachi was forced into it. But Obito was more than happy to help him slaughter them all—and if he hadn’t caused the Nine-Tails to attack, they might have never even tried to attempt a coup—”

Naruto winces. “Okay, I see your point. He’s the reason my parents are dead, too, remember? So I get it. But I was able to look past that.”

“Not everyone can be as forgiving as you, Naruto.”

Naruto’s face twists slightly. He knows the words are true, even if he wishes they weren’t. “Fine,” he says. “You can’t forgive Obito. I understand that. But if you won’t try to save him for his own sake… then do it for Kakashi-sensei.”

Sasuke pauses at the words. He recalls Kakashi’s grief-stricken face on the battlefield—and how familiar that expression looked. Like staring into a mirror. He recalls the man who once explained to him, in halting sentences and a guilt nearly two decades old, how he came to possess the Sharingan.

Kakashi reached out to Sasuke when he had no one—before even Naruto. He saw Sasuke’s anger, his pain, and tried to steer him away from it. Maybe he didn’t do the best job at it, maybe he said the wrong things most times, but he honestly tried. He offered Sasuke a hand, a rope to climb out of the darkness—and in return, Sasuke spat on him.

(Let go of revenge. You’ll only tear yourself apart.

Stop acting like you’re still my sensei.)

Sasuke winces at the memory—at the rush of guilt that accompanies it. It tastes like blood in his mouth and smoke in his eyes, lightning cracking at his fingertips.

Kakashi forgave Sasuke. For him, could Sasuke forgive Obito?

Sasuke ponders the question in silence. He isn’t Naruto—he can’t feel compassion for the person responsible for ripping his family away from him. Sometimes he wishes he was the kind of person who could—who could let go of his anger for the sake of another person. But he just isn’t.

Naruto completes the rest of the seals in silence. Neither of them speaks again, and finally, he finishes.

“Good luck,” Naruto says softly. “And brace yourself. This will probably hurt.”

Naruto presses his palms flat against Sasuke’s back, and light bursts from the seals on his skin. Sasuke gasps, fire roaring through his entire body. It’s agonizing. Flames are licking at his insides, raging in his chest. His soul is being pulled, torn apart, and his vision goes white. He can’t fucking breathe—

★

He wakes up with a gasp, his eyes burning.

He bolts uptight, the memory of white-hot pain lingering in his nerves. The room is dark, and there’s blood in his eyes, obstructing his vision. The sharp burning is dying down now, and Sasuke reaches up with a shaking arm to wipe his eyes.

Reaches up with his left hand.

Sasuke feels a jolt go through him. His Sharingan cuts through the darkness, and he brings his hand out in front of him, staring down at it. His breath catches as he curls his fingers into a fist, then allows them to go loose. He repeats the motion several times.

We did it, Sasuke thinks, reeling at the realization. We actually did it.

Moonlight spills into the room through the window. He’s sitting in his childhood bedroom, under the covers of his bed. He feels as though his breath has been stolen as he takes it all in—the Uchiha crest above the headboard, the photograph of Team 7 on his dresser.

His arm.

It’s so strange—to feel sensation in the limb instead of just the phantom pain he’s felt for the last two years. He stares down at both of his palms as he pulls back his sheets to stand up. His hands are slighter and less-calloused than he remembers, hands of a child rather than a hardened shinobi. There used to be a scar on the back of his right hand that isn’t there anymore.

Sasuke nearly falls when he attempts to stand up, quickly regaining his balance. This smaller body feels awkward, and he isn’t used to it. His bare feet pad across the wood floor, and he stares into the mirror above his dresser. His twelve-year-old self stares back.

We did it, Sasuke thinks again. It worked.

In the mirror, blood stains his face. The young boy that stares back at him has a right eye that burns bright with the Mangekyou—and a left that bears the Rinnegan.

It’s uncanny, seeing that legendary eye peer back at him from a child’s face. So Naruto managed it—he sent him back in his younger body, but with all his abilities intact. His right eye is the Eternal Mangekyou, not just the ordinary Mangekyou—Sasuke can tell by the three-edged shuriken shape inset in the blood-red star.

These aren’t Itachi’s eyes, so the how of it escapes him. But that’s not important.

He deactivates his Sharingan, then reaches up to reposition his bangs, moving his hair so that it’s covering his left eye. He wipes the blood from his face. The image in the mirror moves with him, and it feels like he’s staring at another person entirely.

There’s no curse mark on his shoulder—good. He was sent back early enough, before Orochimaru got to him.

For a moment, he falls back onto the edge of his mattress, taking the room in. He hasn’t seen it since he was thirteen; it was destroyed in Pain’s invasion, and he returned at seventeen to find the entire district reduced to rubble.

He takes every detail of it in—down to the slight dent in the plaster across from him. He tries to remember how it got there, but he can’t. Years have passed; some memories are still sharp, while other ones have blurred.

He turns his eyes to the picture frame on his dresser. The three of them are so young in the photo. And even Kakashi, who was already weighed down by the horrors of war when it was taken, looks lighter somehow. He’s smiling with his visible eye.

It’s the eyes, Sasuke realizes. That’s what makes them look so different.

It’s often said that the eyes are the windows to the soul. And in the years to come, Team 7 would collect dozens of scars on their souls, permanent and immutable. It would show in each of their eyes—the battles they’ve fought and the griefs they’ve suffered and the flames they’ve burned in.

Sasuke realizes, then, that those people are gone. That in travelling back in time, he’s erased them entirely. And in theory, he always knew that travelling back would mean this, but the reality of it hits much harder.

They aren’t dead, he reminds himself, as the sudden crushing feeling of loss threatens to overwhelm him. They’re still here. Different versions of them—but they’re still them.

As an Uchiha, he’s extremely susceptible to strong emotions—especially those concerning the ones he loves. It’s the curse of his bloodline, to feel too deeply, to lose yourself in it, and he struggles to quickly regain control.

He can’t sit around. They were successful. He needs to start moving immediately in his plans—in infiltrating the Akatsuki.

It’s night out. The moon and stars are the only lights in the sky. If he’s going to leave, this is his chance. Few people will be out on the streets during this hour, and the village’s Night Watch has always been extremely incompetent at their jobs. Last time he deserted, he walked right out the front gates and no one stopped him.

Sasuke doesn’t waste any more time thinking. He pulls out a backpack from his closet and begins packing.

He doesn’t take much with him—only what he can carry on his back. Clothes, weapons, provisions. He prepares himself before he goes, knowing he’s going to have a few fights coming up. He wraps his arms and legs in bandages to prevent muscle strain, and he stitches summoning symbols into his armbands. He wraps a few of his shuriken in wire-string before storing them away.

He doesn’t have his sword, which is annoying. He’ll have to steal one from somewhere along the way.

When he has everything he needs, he stares down at the photo of Team 7 on his dresser. After a moment of hesitation, he pulls the picture from the frame and folds it up in his pocket.

He will return to them. Once the Akatsuki are dead.

(Once Itachi is saved.)

He stands in front of the window in his room, his hands around the straps of his backpack on his shoulders, and stares down at the deserted street below. He’s hit with an eerie feeling of déjà vu, recalling the last time he stood in this position. But it’s different this time. He’s not walking into the den of a snake, driven by vengeance. He isn’t severing his bonds.

He thinks about his teammates now tucked away in their beds. Sakura sleeping fitfully, peacefully, still painfully naïve and innocent. Naruto haunted by the emptiness of his small, unkept apartment. Kakashi burdened by memories and ghosts, shaking awake from traumas over a decade old.

Sasuke slips his hand into his pocket, brushing against the edge of the folded picture.

I’ll come back for you. I promise.

He leaves one thing behind as he slips from Konoha, to tell what has happened to him. Pinned to the front door of his house with a kunai.

His Konoha headband, a line drawn straight through the middle.

★

The trek to Amegakure should only take him about a week—but before that, he has another stop.

He takes the familiar path to Oto, traversing the roads easily. He knows every inch of the Hidden Sound after spending three years living there. He knows which places to steer clear of and how to hide himself from sight. Orochimaru has spies everywhere, but Sasuke knows them too, and he’s well-practiced in ducking them.

It takes him a mere two days on foot to reach Orochimaru’s hideout. He has dozens of them scattered throughout the Land of Fire, and even in other lands, but this one is his home base. Sasuke walks straight up to the hideout’s entrance, dispelling the genjutsu that hides it from sight.

It’s an eerie feeling to walk these halls after nearly four years. And in this body, he feels just as he did the first night there.

He takes the stairs that lead deeper down, travelling deeper inside. Eventually he’s intercepted, by a flash of white hair and the glint of glasses.

“Excuse me,” Kabuto says. “But who the hell—"

Sasuke catches him in a genjutsu. He drops to the floor.

He walks the familiar dimly-lit corridor, and it’s like walking in his own shadow. He can feel the echoes in his memory of his feet taking the same steps—the anger and grief that consumed him, the darkness that slowly spread through his soul, freezing him solid.

He enters the room. Orochimaru turns to look at him.

“Sasuke Uchiha,” he says, teeth glinting as his lips curve up. “Isn’t this a surprise.”

“You know who I am?”

“Of course. I’ve been watching you for some time now. I never expected you would come to me.”

Sasuke wishes he was surprised by this, but he isn’t. It’s just like a snake to observe its prey before drawing it in. He wonders how long Orochimaru watched him before making his move during the chuunin exams—weeks, months? Years?

“I wouldn’t look so excited,” Sasuke tells him. “I’m here to kill you, not join you.”

Orochimaru fails to mask his surprise—and incredulity—at this bold declaration. He clearly doesn’t know what to make of this situation, of the object of his desires delivering himself to him and making threats. After a moment, he seems to settle on being amused.

“Kill me? You shouldn’t make threats like that lightly, boy. How did you find out about me?”

Sasuke ignores the question. He looks past Orochimaru, where the man’s old severed hand is displayed like some sort of zombified trophy. It’s the hand that he cut off to escape from Itachi’s genjutsu—and on one of the fingers is his old Akatsuki ring.

“I need a ticket into the Akatsuki,” Sasuke says. “I figure I’ll bring them that ring as proof of your death.”

Orochimaru frowns. “The Akatsuki? Is this about your brother? There are other ways to get to him.”

“Like offering up my body? Did that already. Not interested this time.”

The older man’s body shifts slightly, yellow eyes flashing. “Arrogant brat,” he hisses. “You think you could possibly stand against the likes of me?”

Sasuke unsheathes the sword at his hip. It doesn’t fit in his hand with the same familiarity as Kusanagi, isn’t balanced the same way, but it’ll do in a pinch.

“I killed you once,” he says. “It shouldn’t be too hard to do it again.”

★

With his current abilities, taking down Orochimaru is easy.

Sasuke stares down at the molted body of his former master—at the dozens of dead white snakes surrounding him, the blood painting the walls and floor. Orochimaru’s face is lifeless, blood still leaking out of him and staining the carpet.

Sasuke cleans the blade of his sword on the bedsheets. There’s a single smear of red on his cheek, and he swipes it away with his thumb. There’s no sadness as he looks down at the body, no grief. Orochimaru is a monster, will always be a monster, even despite the fact that he eventually came to stand with Konoha. He should have never been spared, and Sasuke gives him no mercy.

He pulls the Akatsuki ring from Orochimaru’s old severed hand. It’s a slate blue, where Itachi’s had been a deep scarlet. Parts of deadened skin are sticking to it, and Sasuke makes a face as he shoves it in the folds of the cloak he’s wearing.

Disgusting, he thinks, repositioning his bangs over his left eye.

Besides killing Orochimaru, the ring is really just a bonus to coming here—something extra to smooth his way into the Akatsuki’s ranks. What he really came here for is information. As a former Akatsuki member, Orochimaru has a wealth of intel on them—he has dossiers on each of its members. He also has records on their hideouts.

The only members he doesn’t have information on are Kisame and Deidara, who joined the organization after he left—which is why Sasuke had such trouble when he ran into Deidara in his pursuit of Itachi.

With Orochimaru’s compiled files, he has all the information he needs. Not that he didn’t already remember all of it, but it’s been years, and some of it has faded. He passes Kabuto on the way out, still unconscious on the ground.

He considers killing him—but in the end, decides to exercise mercy. He destroys all that is left of Orochimaru’s body, so Kabuto doesn’t infuse himself with his former master’s cells and return with a vengeance.

★

Briefly, as he’s trekking past the borders of Fire Country, Sasuke spares a thought for Team Taka. He feels a flash of guilt, but keeps moving. He doesn’t have the time for them now.

He’ll come back for them too, just like he’ll come back for Naruto and Sakura.

★

It takes him another few days to reach Amegakure. It’s raining when he arrives—a common occurrence—and Sasuke pulls up the hood of his cloak, protecting his hair and hiding his face from sight.

He knows where he’s going. He was once a member of the Akatsuki, after all, even if his time amongst them was extremely short-lived.

The tower where their headquarters are based looms above the entire settlement. The rain pelts down heavily, soaking Sasuke’s cloak. The chill has begun to sink into his bones, leaving him shivering.

It’s dark out—evening, the clouds in the sky blocking out what remains of the sunlight. Sasuke keeps his hand on the hilt of his newly-acquired sword as he approaches the tower, stretching out with his senses as best he can.

A chakra signature brushes against him, extremely close. It’s strong—but he isn’t a sensor, so he can’t tell more than that.

Sasuke’s knuckles tighten around the sword hilt.

The man that lands in front of him is familiar only from his picture in the Bingo Book. He has slicked-back gray hair with distinctive purple eyes, draped in the black-and-red cloak of the Akatsuki. He’s carrying a scythe on his back—three-bladed and red.

When he spots Sasuke, he begins laughing. “It’s a kid! Ha! Aren’t you just adorable!”

Sasuke narrows his eyes. Hidan. Partner to Kakuzu.

Orochimaru didn’t have much data on him—only that he was immortal and couldn’t die, not even by decapitation. Sasuke knows Shikamaru was the one to deal with him originally, blowing his body apart and trapping the pieces underground. Sasuke has no doubt he could defeat him, but it would likely get messy.

And killing him wouldn’t exactly endear Sasuke to the Akatsuki.

After ensuring that his hair is still hiding his Rinnegan, Sasuke throws back his hood and bares his face. The rain continues to pelt down, now hitting his head.

“My name is Sasuke Uchiha. I request an audience with your leader.”

A spark of interest crosses his face. “Uchiha? As in Itachi?”

Sasuke doesn’t answer. Hidan’s grin widens into something unsettling, and he swings his scythe down. It cuts through the air in front of him, imbedding itself in the dirt at Sasuke’s feet.

“I’ll be damned! You’re his spitting image! I thought he sliced up all of your kind! What do you want with Leader-sama, little Uchiha?”

Annoyance flickers through him at the form of address, as well as the words your kind. As if the Uchiha Clan were a breed of animal, not people.

“That’s between me and him,” Sasuke says.

Hidan observes him for a moment. “Huh,” he says. “You know, Leader-sama sent me out here to investigate the approaching chakra signal… but he never said anything about what to do with you. I’ve always wanted to fight with Itachi, but he never reacts to me…”

“My brother’s not the type to indulge idiots.”

Hidan’s eyes light up in glee. “Brother! I knew it! He just has that brotherly vibe to him, you know?”

Sasuke knows the persona Itachi adapted while a member of the Akatsuki, and he’s certain that there was nothing ‘brotherly’ about it. Unless brotherly was beating your younger sibling up and inflicting indescribable mental torture on them.

Hidan pulls his scythe out of the ground, brandishing it with a grin. “What do you say, Sasuke-chan? Want to play a bit?”

Sasuke sighs. The icy raindrops on his face are turning his cheeks numb. “I have no quarrel with you,” he says, even as he prepares to draw his sword.

Hidan shrugs. “Neither do I with you. I just think your blood will look pretty.”

And in a blur, he moves, the three-bladed scythe slicing down.

Sasuke’s sword is already there to block the blow, the loud clang of metal echoing in the air. Sasuke’s small, pubescent body strains beneath the force, his feet skidding back. His arms shake as he struggles to hold the weapon back.

For all the abilities he’s managed to retain, his physical strength is still that of a twelve-year-old.

Sasuke ducks under the scythe before he’s forced to yield. Hidan spins around, matching him strike for strike. Sasuke dances backward, avoiding each attempted slice, and Hidan dances after him. He’s grinning all the while, laughing. At one point, the edge of one of the scythe’s blades knicks Sasuke’s cheek; at the sight of blood, Hidan licks his lips.

Sasuke realizes that this man is quite insane.

It goes on like this for a while—Hidan laughing and chasing him, while Sasuke evades. He shouts all the while about someone called Jashin, which Sasuke manages to gather is some kind of deity that he worships and wants to sacrifice Sasuke to.

It would be easy for Sasuke to light him on fire. Immortality is meaningless against Amaterasu, which can reduce a person entirely to ash. But he needs to join the Akatsuki, and killing one of them won’t be making the best impression.

“Come on, Sasuke-chan!” Hidan laughs. “Let me cut you up! I’ll drain your blood from your body—do you think Itachi will cry—”

The taunts aren’t spoken maliciously or with any sort of heat—he’s having fun. Unlike Deidara, who targeted Sasuke specifically, Hidan seems in it simply for the pleasure of the kill. Blood and violence excite him. Sasuke has fought his like before, and there’s no rationalizing with them.

Sasuke backflips out of the man’s range. The scythe comes down on his head as he rises back up, and he intercepts with his blade just in time. Once again, the metals clash loudly.

Sasuke grits his teeth, his muscles straining. Hidan laughs again, a maniacal sound, and bears down on him harder.

Kusanagi, the blade Orochimaru gifted him with and that he’s been carrying at his hip since he was thirteen, is forged from an extremely strong metal. But unfortunately, this blade is not Kusanagi—it’s a random sword he picked up from a shop in Oto, not worthy enough to be given a name.

The blade is cheap. And as Hidan’s scythe pushes down on it, the metal begins to crack. Lines spiderweb outward, and Sasuke sees the red of his right eye reflected in the surface as the sword snaps—

Piece of garbage, Sasuke thinks viciously, as he’s left holding half a blade and a useless hilt.

The three-bladed scythe rips through Sasuke’s shoulder, through his cloak and across his chest. Sasuke gasps, his vision going white from pain, and Hidan is laughing, his face split in a mad grin. His eyes are glowing with bloodlust.

“Jashin-sama!” he proclaims to the sky. “This is for you!”

He brings his scythe down for a fatal strike, and Sasuke reacts instinctively. His Sharingan twists, as he pushes his chakra out, and his body is consumed by a purple glow. Susano’o rises up around him, first only bones, and then its muscle tendons growing skin. Its indestructible armor wraps around him, shielding him completely.

Hidan’s eyes widen, but he’s not fast enough to halt his strike. His scythe collides with the Susano’o, and he lets out a loud cry as he’s blasted backwards through the air.

Sasuke bends over, pressing his palm against his wound. The cut reaches from his shoulder to partly down his chest, and it’s shredded his black cloak. Blood slips through his fingers, and though the wound definitely isn’t life-threatening, it still stings like hell.

Especially with the rain still pouring down from the sky. Sasuke is completely soaked to the bone by now. The water has caused his hair to stick to his face, which is the only reason his Rinnegan hasn’t been exposed.

Wincing, Sasuke straightens back up. He moves slowly toward his fallen opponent, and the Susano’o moves with him, covering him completely.

Hidan pushes himself up, laughing. “Ha-ha! Would ya look at that! You’re Itachi’s brother for sure!”

The missing-nin bares bloody teeth in a grin. Slowly, strange markings begin to appear on his skin. His entire body becomes black like ink, with white markings on his face and outlining his ribs. He laughs under his breath as he stands, swinging his scythe down—

Chidori Eisou spears him through the waist, cutting him in half.

He lets out a cry of pain as his upper body and lower body fall in different directions. Blood splashes through the air and onto the cement ground. The lightning in Sasuke’s palm crackles and dies.

Hidan’s eyes are still open, his intestines spilling out of his speared body. “You brat! Kakuzu! Kakuzu!”

Sasuke turns at the sound of heavy footsteps. Another Akatsuki member—Kakuzu—is emerging from the entrance. He looks at his partner’s bisected body with a bored expression.

“Good grief,” he says in a deep voice, not paying Sasuke so much as a glance. He doesn’t sound at all concerned, only annoyed. “What did you do now?”

“Hey,” another voice says, also stepping outside the tower. Kisame, Sasuke recognizes immediately. “What’s all this racket about, huh? What happened?”

“My partner is an idiot,” Kakuzu says. “That’s what happened.”

“Ah, nothing new then!”

Kisame walks fully into sight, Samehada thrown over his shoulder. His white eyes dart down to Hidan, who is now screaming at his partner to help him, over to Sasuke. His eyes widen when he sees the Susano’o.

“Hey, isn’t that…”

Sasuke stands tense, frozen. Because wherever Kisame is, usually following after is…

Itachi steps outside after his partner. His eyes lock on his brother immediately. “Sasuke?” he says, sounding as if the name escaped his lips without his permission.

Sasuke feels like all the air has been punched from his chest. Itachi is standing in front of him, so achingly and hauntingly familiar, and Sasuke can’t breathe. He’s just as Sasuke remembers, with his pale skin and dark eyes. The crossed-out hitai-ate around his forehead, the Akatsuki cloak. His dark hair, now being soaked by rain—

Sasuke’s staring at a ghost. He thought he was prepared, but he isn’t.

(Forgive me, Sasuke. But this is it.)

Sasuke deactivates the Susano’o. His Sharingan fades, his right eye returning to black.

“What the hell is going on?” Kisame asks. He turns his head toward his partner. “Itachi! Who’s the kid?”

Itachi is staring at the empty space just occupied by the Susano’o, his eyes wide and shocked.

Somewhere behind them, Hidan is yelling expletives as Kakuzu drags his lower-half to his upper-half, beginning to stitch him up. To Sasuke, their voices are static. He can’t tear his eyes from his brother, who seems shocked into stillness, and the world around the two of them seems to blur until they’re the only ones in it.

Sasuke can taste the smoke on his tongue. Feel the press of two fingers against his forehead.

(Forgive me, Sasuke.) 

Something strange overtakes his body, and Sasuke moves without thinking. As if he’s actually the child he looks like, he rushes forward and throws his arms around his brother.

★

Itachi doesn’t smell like soil and death, like he did the last time they were together. He smells the way he used to when Sasuke was a child, like something uniquely Itachi, and for a moment Sasuke lets himself sink into it. His brother is solid against him, and Sasuke can feel the beat of his heart beneath his ear.

Itachi is too shocked to immediately shove him away. His body is as stiff as a rod.

It’s been twelve years since he last hugged him. Possibly longer.

Sasuke steps back quickly, before Itachi can push him off. He quickly regains himself, feeling a rush of embarrassment for his behavior. He’s not actually twelve, he’s nineteen.

“Sorry,” he says, straightening his back and attempting to look dignified. “I got blood all over your cloak.”

Itachi, for the first time in Sasuke’s memory, is at a loss for words. A part of Sasuke relishes in the reaction, taking pride in it. Not many people can say they’ve made Itachi Uchiha speechless.

“Sasuke,” Itachi says finally, in a carefully controlled voice. “What are you—”

A loud, strangled yell cuts his brother off. “Ow! Motherfucker! Stop playing around with my insides and just sew me up, you bastard!”

Sasuke turns his head at the colorful words. Kakuzu is still kneeling by his fallen partner’s side. He’s weaving the two halves of his body together with what looks like wire-string as Hidan writhes beneath him. He isn’t bothering to be gentle, and the ground beneath them is a mess of blood and guts.

“Don’t be a baby,” Kakuzu says, and Hidan lets out another string of curses.

The rain is beginning to let up. Kisame laughs quietly, before pulling his gaze from the pair of them. His eyes glance down toward Sasuke, taking him in.

“You got Hidan good,” he says.

Sasuke shrugs. “He was extremely rude to me.”

Kisame smirks. He turns his attention toward his partner with curious eyes, and Sasuke can see the way Itachi’s shields immediately slam back up. All traces of his shock or any other emotion disappear, and his face becomes utterly blank.

“Itachi,” Kisame says. “You know this brat?”

“No,” Itachi says immediately.

“I’m his younger brother,” Sasuke answers.

Itachi shoots him a deadly look.

Sasuke steps back, out of his brother’s range. He’s unsure of how Itachi is going to react to his presence. He knows his brother cares for him deeply—but he also knows the man has no issue with harming him to keep up his façade.

“Brother!” Kisame says with relish. “I thought you killed all your family!”

It’s only because Sasuke knows his brother’s true feelings that he notices the slightest tensing of Itachi’s shoulders. But for anyone who doesn’t know to look for it, Itachi doesn’t appear to react at all.

“What are you doing here?” Itachi demands, still in that same level voice. “How are you able to use the Susano’o?”

Sasuke fights to steady his heart, which leaps into his throat every time his brother looks at him. He feels pinned beneath his gaze, and he can’t breathe.

(I will love you always.)

“The answer to that should be obvious,” Sasuke says. It’s not the answer Itachi wants, and frustration flashes briefly through his eyes. Sasuke turns to Kisame. “I want to meet with your leader.”

Kisame considers him for a moment, then he shrugs. “Sure. Any particular reason?”

“I wish to join the Akatsuki.”

Itachi’s eyes widen. “What?”

Sasuke ignores him. Mostly because he can’t explain at this moment, but also because looking at him hurts too much and he wants to stop the flood memories flashing behind his eyelids. “I’ve abandoned Konoha, and I want to align myself with your organization. To prove I’m powerful enough to be of use to you, I brought this.”

Sasuke pulls the blue Akatsuki ring from his cloak, wincing as the movement pulls at his wound. Itachi and Kisame’s eyes immediately lock on the object, both flashing with recognition.

“That’s—”

“Orochimaru’s,” Sasuke confirms, returning the ring to his cloak. “I killed him four days ago.”

Shock crosses Itachi’s face again, though less pronounced. Sasuke can see that he’s attempting to grab hold of his usual composure, is trying to settle back into the faux indifference Sasuke forced him to fall out of.

“In that case,” Kisame says, looking as close to impressed as Sasuke’s ever seen him, “I think our leader will definitely want to speak to you. What do you say, Itachi-san?”

Itachi doesn’t say anything, but the weight of his gaze is intense.

Kisame beckons him inside. “Come on, kid. I’ll go get him. Don’t worry about Hidan—he’ll be fine once he’s strung back together.”

Hidan yells again, but cuts himself off with a gasp as Kakuzu twists one of his organs. “Fuck! What the hell, man?!”

“Quit your whining.”

Sasuke walks forward to follow the former Kiri-nin, ignoring the bickering pair behind him. As he passes his brother, Itachi’s hand snaps out and wraps around his upper-arm in a bruising grip. He leans down.

“What are you doing?” Itachi hisses.

Sasuke doesn’t answer. Through the fabric of his cloak, Itachi’s touch burns.

★

He’s led into the large tower used as the organization’s headquarters. Kisame leaves him there to go fetch Nagato, leaving Sasuke alone in the room with Itachi.

His brother is moving the moment Kisame is out of sight, a familiar coldness in his eyes as he advances, grabbing him. Sasuke could evade him—has the speed to—but he lets it happen. Itachi isn’t likely to actually get physically violent with him, not unless Sasuke pushes him into it (like that day in the hallway what feels like so long ago).

“What game are you playing?” Itachi demands. The tone is harsh, but still calm. “You left Konoha? If this is some sort of ploy to kill me, you’re even more foolish than I thought, otouto.”

Sasuke winces. The words—the tone they’re spoken in, the expression on his face—bring up awful memories. Foolish little brother.

For all that Itachi loved him, sometimes Sasuke forgets how cruel he was when he needed to be.

“I’m not here to kill you,” Sasuke says. He grimaces as Itachi’s vice-like grip pulls at the wound on his shoulder. “Don’t be so full of yourself. Not everything is about you, Nii-san.”

Itachi is caught off-guard for a moment. Is it the use of the word Nii-san to address him? He drops his hands, stepping back. A flicker of a frown passes over his lips.

“You’re hurt,” he says.

There’s no concern in the words—it’s a mere observation. Playing the part of a heartless murderer.

Sasuke’s cloak is ripped at the shoulder and partly down his chest, but most of the blood from the injury is invisible against the dark fabric. “I’m fine,” he says. “Just a scratch. It’ll heal.”

Itachi’s mouth seems to pinch slightly, before moving back up to Sasuke’s face. “Why are you here? How did you come to possess those eyes?”

For a moment, Sasuke feels a flash of paranoia, thinking his brother has seen his Rinnegan. He means the Mangekyou, he realizes.

“I’ll tell you everything,” he says. “But only once you drop the act.”

Itachi’s eyes narrow. “Act? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“No lies, Itachi. I know everything. We’ve already done this. I’ve watched you fall at my feet—these eyes are yours.”

If Sasuke were a more patient, a more considerate person, he might attempt to ease Itachi into the fact that his twelve-year-old brother is a time-traveler. But he isn’t, so he doesn’t.

“I’m from the future—seven years in the future.”

There’s a long, drawn-out silence. Itachi’s face is unreadable, as he stares at Sasuke. A thousand emotions seem to swirl in the depths of his eyes, and Sasuke can’t read a single one of them.

“You’re what?” he finally says.

“From the future,” Sasuke repeats. Itachi’s tone is dripping with such disbelief that in a different situation, he might have found it comical. “There’s going to be a war in a few years—a goddess is going to try and consume all the chakra from this world. I need to stop it from happening, and to do that I need to kill Zetsu. And preferably the rest of the Akatsuki.”

Itachi doesn’t say anything. Sasuke doesn’t blame him for thinking he sounds insane. Time travel aside, sometimes Sasuke himself still can’t wrap his head around the entire Kaguya ordeal. It sounds like something out of a bad sci-fi flick.

“I know it’s a lot,” Sasuke says. “I can do it alone if I have to, but…”

But I’d rather do it with your help.

Itachi opens his mouth, then closes it again. His mouth twists in a complicated expression. “That isn’t—that’s impossible. Tell me what you’re really doing here now—”

Sasuke’s jaw clenches. “I fucking told you. If you choose not to believe me—”

“You expect me to believe you’re from the future? That’s ridiculous—”

“How else could I use the Susano’o? You saw it yourself! And I know about your damn orders—”

Itachi’s eyes flash. “That doesn’t—” He takes a calming breath, steadying his voice so it returns to its normal quiet volume. “Sasuke, you just… you just barged in here. Trying to get yourself killed…”

“I’m trying to save the world. Are you going to help me, or am I going to have to fight you?”

“You’ll lose.”

“I won’t.”

Itachi’s eyes narrow again at the clear confidence in his voice—but then, the sound of a door opening echoes through the room. Their gazes break, as they both turn toward the noise. Pain has entered the room, walking toward them with a purpose.

He stops less than a foot away. “Sasuke Uchiha,” he says. “Kisame tells me that you’ve requested to join our ranks. And that you’ve disposed of a traitor for us.”

Sasuke attempts to refocus, frustration still burning in his chest. He’d forgotten how his brother had the uncanny ability to rile him up every time they spoke; no one else had ever been able to make him lose his temper so quickly.

Sasuke brings out the ring again, ignoring the sting of pain from his shoulder. “I did. I had a personal score to settle with Orochimaru—he wanted to possess my body, the same as he once wanted with my brother.”

Next to him, Itachi stiffens slightly.

“This is not a surprise,” Pain says. He reaches over to take the ring, examining it closely. “Orochimaru has long coveted the Sharingan. It was that same greed that forced him from this organization four years ago. If it’s true you’ve killed him, you’ve done the Akatsuki a great service. And we will always welcome anyone to our cause.”

“He won’t be any use to us,” Itachi says. “His strength is little.”

Sasuke feels a flare of irritation. “Don’t listen to him. He’s just being overprotective.”

Itachi’s jaw tenses.

Pain turns to look at him. “If he really did kill Orochimaru—and fought with Hidan without being killed—then I fail to see how he could be as weak as you claim. I think he could be of great use to us.”

“He is a child.”

“He is a shinobi,” Pain corrects, “and not much younger than you were when you joined us.”

Itachi is silent. He’s already skating a thin line by protesting at all; to do so any further would reveal a caring that doesn’t match up with the persona he’s crafted.

Pain looks at the ring one last time, before looking down at Sasuke. “If you will excuse me for a moment,” he says. “I will return shortly.”

He pockets Orochimaru’s old ring, turning around and disappearing from the room with a sweep of his robes. Both of the brothers watch him leave.

“He’s going to talk with his leader about this,” Sasuke says, his lip curling at the thought of Obito. “Right?”

Itachi looks at him sharply. “How do you—”

“The future, remember?”

“Right,” Itachi says, in a tone of voice that clearly means you’re full of shit and I don’t believe you for a second.

Sasuke sighs, turning to look at his brother. “You still don’t believe me, do you?”

He doesn’t have time for this disbelief. He said he could do it without Itachi, and he meant that. He’s prepared to do this without his brother if he needs to—but he doesn’t want to.

“I can show you,” Sasuke says. “If that will make you believe me?”

He activates his Sharingan. Itachi looks at him uncertainly for a moment, before inclining his head in permission. He takes a small step forward.

Their eyes lock together. Sasuke delves into Itachi’s mind, opening his own up to him and establishing a link between them. He focuses on the specific memories he wants to show, careful not to let his mind wonder. He projects them toward his brother.

He thinks of a battlefield littered with dead shinobi. He thinks of the Ten-Tails rampaging. Madara Uchiha, now a jinchuuriki, rising into the sky—a blood-red moon shining down on all of them. Kaguya—the Divine Tree sucking the life out of every living soul—

Except that letting someone into your head is a fragile thing. The flow of a person’s thoughts is constant and changing. Itachi is so close, is alive, and Sasuke can’t separate himself from him. Unbidden, other memories flood through the link between them—

(Itachi’s hand wrapping around his throat, lifting him, pinning him to the wall. His voice at his ear and red eyes tearing into him—

—fingers digging into his eye socket, tearing out his eyeball. Blood in his mouth and fire on his tongue, the very heavens held in his palm. Lifeless eyes staring up—

—an orange mask and a single red eye—and truth, finally truth. And pain and grief and sorrow and hate—

I will love you always.)

Itachi jerks away from him with a gasp, his face as pale as a ghost. His eyes are shocked, horrified, his Sharingan activated.

Sasuke deactivates his own Sharingan, also stumbling back slightly. His heart is racing, the phantom emotions still echoing through him, the images flashing behind his eyes. He fights to regain his composure, to shove them away.

He closes his eyes and exhales slowly. I didn’t mean to do that.

When he opens his eyes, Itachi is still staring at him with red eyes. There’s a haunted expression on his face.

“Sasuke,” he says quietly.

Pain reenters the room. Itachi instantly schools himself, his expression wiped clean and settled back into cold indifference. His eyes are back to their natural black. It’s eerie, how instantly and easily he does it.

“Come,” Pain says. “The Akatsuki will make a decision now.”

★

Sasuke finds himself standing below eight figures who are all standing in a circle looking down on him. The entire Akatsuki called before him—except Zetsu and Obito (Tobi) who are missing from the line-up. Six of the figures are physically present, while Deidara and Sasori are only shadowy projections. Perhaps they’re currently away on a mission.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Deidara yells. “You want some brat to join us!”

Sasuke scowls, but doesn’t say anything. They are voting on what to do with him. Hidan is present as well, having been stitched up by his partner. He now looks good as new, apart from a few bloodstains.

“You weren’t much older than him when you joined,” Sasori points out.

“When I was forced to join!” Deidara corrects, shooting a hateful look in Itachi’s direction. He looks back at Sasori. “And whose side are you on anyway, huh?”

Itachi looks completely uncaring of the proceedings, no trace of the shaken man from mere moments ago. Sasuke wonders what’s going on beyond those blank eyes.

“Sasuke Uchiha,” a female voice says. Sasuke turns his head to be met with soft features and purple hair—Konan. “Deidara raises a point. You are very young. Exceptions have been made in the past for a few of our members, but that was only after they had proven themselves superior shinobi. If it’s true you’ve vanquished Orochimaru, then that is indeed a great feat. But how do we know you’re an asset to us?”

 “I think my bloodline can attest to my strength,” Sasuke tells her. “I am of the Uchiha Clan. I’m Itachi’s brother.”

There’s a silence around him at the words, all eight of the S-Rank missing-nin contemplating him. Deidara is practically spitting fire with his eyes. Pain considers him with purple eyes identical to the one Sasuke hides behind his hair.

“Well, I’m convinced,” Hidan says.

Deidara spins around to stare at him, his expression twisting in disbelief. “What?!”

Hidan shrugs. “Like he said, he’s Itachi’s brother. That’s good enough for me.”

“You’re kidding, right? He just cut you in half!”

“He did. It was very arousing.”

“Ugh, gross! You have some deep psychological damage—”

Kisame laughs. He bares his sharp teeth in an unsettling grin. “I say let him join,” he says. “It’ll sure make things interesting, that’s for sure. Why, I haven’t seen Itachi-san show so much emotion in the entire three years I’ve worked with him.”

Itachi shoots his partner a dark look, which only serves to make Kisame more amused.

Deidara is seething. “He’s a twelve-year-old kid!”

“Itachi-san was only thirteen when he joined.”

Itachi narrows his eyes at his partner. “Don’t bring me into this.”

“He’s your brother. It’s impossible for us to not bring you into this.”

Deidara growls. “The last thing this organization needs is another Itachi! Goddamn fucking Uchihas coming out of the woodwork—I thought they were extinct! Just because he’s Itachi’s brother, that doesn’t automatically mean he’s strong!”

“My sister was rather kick-ass,” Hidan says. “Of course, I killed her as a sacrifice to Jashin-sama.”

“Oh my god, get help—”

“Enough,” Pain says mildly, but with enough steel behind his tone to make everyone immediately go silent. “No more squabbling. Deidara, you have made your opinion known. I myself am in favor of Sasuke Uchiha joining us. Konan, what about you?”

“No,” Konan says with a frown. “He’s too young.”

“Sasori?”

Sasori shrugs. “I say let him join.”

“Betrayal!” Deidara yells. “From my own partner!”

He is ignored, as Pain turns toward the one person yet to voice their opinion. Itachi’s eyes glow an eerie red in the darkness of the large cavern.

“Itachi,” Pein says. “What do you say? He is your brother. I will take your opinion as having more weight than the others.”

Deidara makes a noise much like a dying cat, but no one pays him any mind. Sasuke looks up at Itachi, trying to read him, but his face is cast in shadow. His cold eyes give nothing away.

For a long moment, he says nothing at all. And when he finally does, he speaks reluctantly. As if the words are being pulled slowly from his throat.

“Yes,” Itachi says. “He can join us.”

Sasuke lets out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Pain inclines his head. “Very well. Then he shall become a member of the Akatsuki.”

Itachi says nothing, but his jaw is clenched hard. Sasuke thinks he sees his fingers twitching with repressed emotion.

Deidara screeches.

★

Afterward, the rest of the Akatsuki disperse. Konan lingers near Pain—Nagato—whispering something in his ear before leaving. Kisame also makes his exit, but not before saying something to Itachi that makes the man glare at him.

Soon Sasuke is alone in the room with only Pain and his brother.

“The goal of the Akatsuki is to bring peace to the world. To all nations,” the orange-haired man says. “But for this to happen, first the world must experience pain. Only then will the cycle of hatred come to an end. Are you prepared to carry out this will?”

Sasuke keeps his face blank, careful not to show the disdain he feels for the words. He remembers Naruto’s words about how Nagato isn’t a bad person at heart; he attempts to remember that as he looks into the eyes that remind him so much of Madara.

“I am.”

“Good,” Pain says. “Then from this moment on, reject the Hidden Leaf. You are now Sasuke Uchiha of the Akatsuki.”

Noiselessly, Itachi comes to stand by his side. Pain holds out his arm, handing over the spare Akatsuki cloak. In his hand, he also offers a ring—the slate blue one that Sasuke took from Orochimaru.

“Take it,” he says. “This ring and these robes will mark you as a member of the Akatsuki.”

Sasuke feels slightly nauseous. The idea of putting that cloak on brings back memories of the last time he wore it—back when his mind was spiraling, lost in his grief and his rage and his hatred. He never wants to feel that way again.

He glances at his brother next to him, so alive. A testament to all that he’s trying to save. Reluctantly, he reaches out.

“Fine,” Sasuke says, swiping the cloak and ring from Nagato’s hand. “But I’m not painting my damn fingernails.”

★

It’s been agreed that Sasuke will room with Itachi for the time being. Later, the two of them sit together on the bed, and Itachi prepares to clean the wound Hidan’s scythe left in his shoulder. They’re facing each other, their knees brushing.

“This’ll need stitching,” Itachi says quietly, pulling back Sasuke’s robes and examining the injury closely. He fetches a needle and thread, settling back down in front of him quickly.

Sasuke watches him silently. A lit candle is illuminating the room, casting their surroundings in a soft glow. Itachi’s brow is pinched slightly, and his thumb is warm pressing into Sasuke’s bare shoulder.

“All these extraordinary shinobi here,” Sasuke says, “and not a single one who knows medical ninjutsu?”

Itachi shrugs as he readies the needle and thread. “Sasori knows a bit of it, but only the basics. We don’t need healing often.”

His concentration on Sasuke’s shoulder deepens, as he begins to stitch the wound closed. He glances up at Sasuke as he first pokes the needle through his skin, but Sasuke doesn’t react to the pain other than a slight clenching of his jaw.

Itachi sews up his wound in silence. Sasuke can’t tear his eyes from his face. It’s been so long since he’s been allowed to observe his brother up close like this. Twelve years.

Itachi is young, Sasuke realizes. Of course, he already knew this, but it’s different to actually see it. Itachi always seemed so much older than him—always looked older than his real age.

He’s seventeen now. Two years younger than Sasuke.

“Sasuke,” Itachi says quietly, after a moment. He glances up at his brother hesitantly. “About what you showed to me…”

Sasuke stiffens. He knows immediately that his brother isn’t talking about the memories of the Fourth Shinobi World War. He’s talking about the other memories, the ones he hadn’t meant for his brother to see.

(Forgive me, Sasuke. But this is it.)

Sasuke’s throat tightens. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

Itachi looks at him a long moment, his face unreadable. “Okay,” he says. “That’s okay.”

Sasuke frowns. “It is?”

“For now… yes. I won’t make you talk about it.”

He goes back to stitching Sasuke’s wound. Sasuke feels something swell in his chest. Something about the easy acquiesce—from the person who has always controlled every one of his choices, refused to allow him a single one of his own—causes tears to sting at his eyes. Sasuke closes his eyes, forcing them away. Pull it together.

“I’ll help you,” Itachi says.

Sasuke opens his eyes at the words. “What?”

“You said you came back here to stop a war, right? I believe you. I’ll help you.”

Sasuke sucks in a quiet breath, not knowing what to say. Itachi isn’t looking at him. His movements are careful, his fingers gentle as he guides the thread. His long bangs are tucked behind his ear, and a single strand slips free, falling into his face.

“I’ve missed you,” Sasuke whispers, the words escaping before he makes the decision to speak them.

Itachi glances up, and his eyes catch Sasuke’s. The candle casts a gentle glow across his face, illuminating his features in startling detail. There’s something fragile about him in this moment, a quiet vulnerability, and it makes Sasuke’s heart ache with something unidentifiable.

“I’ve missed you too,” Itachi says softly, with the ghost of his childhood smile.

Chapter Text

Three days after the four of them return from the Land of Waves, Sasuke doesn’t turn up for training.

If it were Naruto, or perhaps even Sakura, then it wouldn’t be much cause for alarm; but this is Sasuke, and in the two months they’ve been a squad the boy hasn’t been tardy once. Taking that into account, along with the serious brush with death he just experienced? Kakashi finds himself seriously concerned.

Sakura chews on her bottom lip. “Sensei, you don’t think something’s happened to him, do you?”

“Pfft,” Naruto says, waving his hand through the air. “That jerk’s fine. He’s probably just sleeping.”

Still, beneath the blonde’s cavalier attitude, there’s a hint of anxiety. No doubt born from the events in Wave, from holding his teammate’s bleeding, seemingly-lifeless body in his arms.

“Stay here,” Kakashi orders. “I’ll go find him.”

He separates himself from his other two students, taking the path toward the outskirts of the village where the Uchiha District is located. It’s a different path than the one he used to take regularly to Obito’s house, the compound and all its residents relocated after the Nine-Tails’ attack. He hasn’t had much cause to go back there since then.

He’s been here on exactly two occasions. Once, when Team Ro was assigned a last-minute mission and he was tasked with informing Itachi. Again, no more than a year later, when his squad was the first to respond in the wake of the massacre.

Neither occasion is one Kakashi wishes to remember.

He winces as he passes the empty houses and shops. Even bathed in daylight, a shadow seems to hang over the place. Kakashi remembers how it looked under the cover of darkness, streets littered with bodies and running red with blood.

Sasuke really shouldn’t be living here—all by himself, surrounded by nothing but memories and ghosts. It can’t be good for the boy’s state of mind.

But then, Kakashi can’t exactly speak on this subject. He continued living in his father’s house for years after he found the man bleeding out on the dojo floor.

He thinks perhaps he’s being paranoid, worrying so much. Sasuke has had a trying week—they all have—and oversleeping would be uncharacteristic of him, but it would be understandable. Still, though he’s rather new to this sensei thing, checking that his student is okay sounds like the responsible course of action to take.

Minato-sensei would have checked on him.

Kakashi turns the corner, finally glimpsing Sasuke’s house. He frowns when he sees the darkened windows, and his feet carry him quickly up the steps, toward the front door.

His heart goes cold, dropping into his stomach like a stone.

No.

★

Kakashi slams Sasuke’s headband down onto the Third Hokage’s desk. There’s a long scratch going through the metal plate, bisecting Konoha’s symbol, and the blue cloth is torn where the kunai pinned it to the door.

“He’s gone. Sasuke is gone.”

Sarutobi’s face is white. Slowly, he raises his eyes to Kakashi’s face. “Are you certain? This doesn’t necessarily mean—”

“I checked his room, there are things missing—clothes, weapons. He packed a bag.”

The Sandaime’s expression tightens, staring down at the slashed hitai-ate. Kakashi spins away from the desk, his mind completely awhirl. He runs a shaking hand through his hair. Sasuke is gone—

“What could have prompted this?” Sarutobi asks. “Were there any signs of—”

“There was nothing,” Kakashi says, spinning back around to face the desk. “I just found it on his door. There was nothing to—I don’t understand. How could he even walk out of this village? Wasn’t anybody watching?”

The Third raises a hand to halt him as his voice begins to gain volume, carrying outside the office. Kakashi falls silent, wishing there was a chair he could sink into. He moves over to one of the windows, his hands braced on the window pane.

He doesn’t understand. None of this makes any sense to him.

Kakashi thinks back to yesterday, the last time he saw his student. The dark-haired boy was fine then, nothing at all amiss. Sullen and antisocial, yes, but just to his usual degree. Nothing out of character or to suggest he was being plagued with anything ill. So where on earth did this come from—and how could he have so utterly failed to see it?

Was this because of the events in Wave, somehow? Did the near-death experience leave his student much more shaken than Kakashi realized?

But he was fine afterwards. He seemed fine.

Seemed. He seemed fine. But how well can Kakashi claim to actually know his student? They’ve only been a team for seven weeks. The only time Sasuke has ever shared anything personal was their introductions on the rooftop, and Kakashi hasn’t exactly made any real effort to get close either.

He knows what Sasuke has been through. He was there in the aftermath, when that small boy was found amongst all of the bodies. This is a kid who has been through more trauma and pain than most shinobi twice his age. Can Kakashi really say, with certainty, that he’s ever been fine?

He seemed fine, yes. But Kakashi knows how deceiving a mask can be.

He stares down at the village beyond the office’s large glass window, bathed in bright daylight. Just another morning, the same as any other, and the people below are walking and laughing. No one cares that a young child is missing, because no one has noticed. For them, the world spins smoothly on.

Sasuke… what are you thinking?

Kakashi turns away from the window. “What are we going to do?”

Sarutobi raises a hand to his mouth. “Standard procedure for missing-nin is to erase them—”

“He’s twelve!”

The Sandaime pins him with a sharp look. “I am very aware of his age. If you recall, his brother was a mere few months older when he fled this village.”

Kakashi presses his mouth into a thin line beneath the mask. He’s right that age doesn’t account for much, not when you’re a shinobi. Kakashi was already a jounin at twelve, Itachi was an ANBU captain. But Sasuke…

“He’s a genin,” Kakashi says, looking toward the Third imploringly, “and beyond fleeing, he hasn’t committed any crimes. I don’t know why he would have done this, but whatever his reasons, he’s a good kid. We need to help him.”

Sarutobi doesn’t say anything. Kakashi waits for his verdict, and wonders what he’ll do if the man calls for Sasuke’s elimination. It’s true that the standard punishment for traitors is death; Kakashi is a loyal Konoha shinobi, and it’s a procedure that he agrees with. But these circumstances aren’t normal, and he won’t kill his student. He won’t follow an order like that.

The moniker Friend-Killer Kakashi still clings to him, even a decade later.

“You’re right,” Sarutobi says finally. “Sasuke Uchiha is a member of this village—and his home has already failed him horribly. I will give the order to track him, but he shall be brought back alive.”

Kakashi exhales a breath, his shoulders slumping. “Thank you.”

“Are you positive,” Sarutobi presses him, “that you have no idea what might have compelled him to do this?”

Kakashi shakes his head. “No, I don’t. I mean, he nearly died in the Land of Waves, so that’s bound to leave him shaken. But I don’t see how that could have triggered this.”

After Wave, Sasuke was more intense. Focused on training more than ever. Their confrontation with Zabuza really opened his eyes to the harsh reality of shinobi life, and how little his strength actually was. His intense desire to become stronger… to reach his goal… to avenge his clan by killing his brother…

Kakashi’s expression tightens. “Hokage-sama… do you think this could possibly have something to do with Itachi?”

Something flickers across the Sandaime’s face—an emotion too quick for him to catch.

“For his sake, I hope not.”

★

Each member of the Akatsuki has their own bedroom located somewhere in the base. Sasuke, for now, is rooming with Itachi; though there’s only one bed, so he has been relegated to the stone floor. Itachi has offered to switch places with him, but Sasuke refused the offer. He’s slept in worse places.

The morning after he joins the organization, Itachi approaches him with a small red bottle. Sasuke pulls a distasteful face the moment he sees it.

“This is ridiculous,” he says, as Itachi leans down to carefully apply the polish to his nails. “I can’t believe I’m letting you do this. I said no nail polish.”

“Sorry,” Itachi says, not sounding the least bit apologetic. “It’s part of the uniform.”

“I think you just want me to suffer.”

Itachi neither confirms nor denies this.

He’s sitting on the mattress with his legs tucked under him, his brother in an identical position across from him. It’s still rather startling to have Itachi so close—and for him to be sitting so casually, without the usual mask of indifference over his face.

“Stop moving,” Itachi tells him, as Sasuke shifts slightly. “You’re messing me up.”

“I feel like I’m at a fucking slumber party.”

“Language.” Itachi doesn’t look up from Sasuke’s nails as he speaks “Been to many slumber parties, have you?”

Sasuke huffs. “Not as many as you, apparently. And don’t tell me to watch my language. I’m nineteen years old.”

“You still look twelve, and it sounds wrong coming out of your mouth.”

Don’t remind me, Sasuke thinks. Being trapped inside the body of a twelve-year-old is strange and frustrating; even if he does have the chakra and abilities of someone seven years older, his physical state is still that of a child. He’s small and short, and his muscles are less flexible. He has less strength, less stamina. His voice sometimes cracks.

He has a left arm again, which is good, except he keeps forgetting it’s there. He’s still doing everything with his right hand, even though he’s naturally lefthanded.

“So what is the plan?” Itachi asks. He finishes with the nails on one of Sasuke’s hands, moving onto the other. A strand of hair falls into his face, and he pushes it behind his ear. “How do you intend to stop this Kaguya?”

“Well, hopefully I won’t have to. If I can kill Zetsu and stop the Akatsuki’s plans, then the Ten-Tails will never be formed and Kaguya will never be revived.”

“Easier said than done, otouto. Zetsu is slippery. And Obito…”

Itachi trails off, the space between his eyebrows creasing slightly. He’s still processing the revelation that the masked man isn’t Madara, but rather, Obito Uchiha, their third cousin twice removed. He’s processing a lot of things, but considering the circumstances, Sasuke thinks he’s doing a remarkable job at keeping it together.

“I don’t need you to tell me that,” Sasuke says. “I already know more about them than you do.”

Itachi glances up, quirking an eyebrow at him. “Well, if you know so much then why did you bother asking for my help?”

Sasuke shoots him a sharp glance. “Don’t ask stupid questions. I wasn’t going to let things go like last time. I won’t let you martyr yourself again.”

Itachi frowns, his eyes looking briefly troubled before he manages to hide it. Sasuke hates the way his brother is still putting up a mask between them—but he supposes it’s hard to break a habit that’s been so deeply ingrained. And Sasuke isn’t exactly being open about all of his feelings, either.

He thinks about the flashes of memory he accidentally fed to Itachi last night—that day in the hallway, his lifeless eyes, their final farewell. He knows they must be weighing on Itachi’s mind, but he hasn’t tried to bring them up again.

Something occurs to Sasuke, and with a sharp pang of worry, he asks, “Itachi, you’re not sick, are you?”

“Sick?” Itachi frowns, looking bewildered. “No. Should I be?”

Sasuke’s eyebrows furrow, the fingers of his left hand tapping against his thigh as the polish dries. “Then that means the illness must have developed later on. Perhaps it was caused by excessive use of the Mangekyou… How is your eyesight?”

“Poor,” Itachi admits reluctantly. “But nowhere near as bad as it could be. You’re saying it caused me to become ill?”

Sasuke shakes his head. “I don’t know. I know that you were sick—and dying from it. But I don’t know what caused it.”

Itachi doesn’t say anything to that, thinking it over. Sasuke, meanwhile, considers what to do about his brother’s eyesight. He can’t offer Itachi his own eyes—he’s going to need his Rinnegan, and even if he didn’t, it’s doubtful Itachi would accept the offer to exchange their eyes.

There’s always Shisui’s eye, but Itachi only possesses one of them. Perhaps Itachi can take Obito’s Sharingan after Sasuke kills him.

Itachi finishes up with his nails, returning the brush to the glass vial and twisting it closed. Sasuke scowls at the bright veneer on his fingernails, the color of blood. The color of the streets the night his world was ripped away from him.

“Why does it have to be red?” he complains. “I don’t even like red.”

“So sorry, would you rather it be pink? Then you and Zetsu can match.”

Sasuke frowns. “Zetsu has fingernails?”

Itachi’s lips quirk, the barest huff of laughter escaping him.

Sasuke has informed Itachi of everything—and by everything, he means the barest definition of the word. Itachi knows everything about the future that he needs to know to prevent the coming war, without any of the troubling personal details. This is not a heart-to-heart, after all; the two of them are on a mission.

He already gave his brother way more than he meant to when he let those memories slip through the genjutsu. If Itachi wants to know anything else, he can ask. Depending on the question, Sasuke might answer him.

But for as long as Sasuke has known him, Itachi has never been one to initiate a conversation involving personal feelings unless it is vitally necessary. What’s important now is stopping the incoming war, not whatever happened between the two of them in the future.

“It won’t be as easy as you seem to think,” Itachi says. “I can see that you’re strong, I don’t doubt that. But you’re still physically twelve. You really plan to take on the entire Akatsuki alone? That’s suicide.”

“I’m not alone. I have you, remember?”

“A half-blind Uchiha? You’re right. They don’t stand a chance.”

Sasuke glares. “I don’t remember you being this sarcastic.”

He doesn’t know why his brother is underselling himself so much; even with his impaired vision, he’s still an immense asset. He managed to push Sasuke to the brink during their final fight, and he was nearly blind then, his body ravaged by illness.

“You’re underestimating yourself. And you’re underestimating me.”

“Maybe,” Itachi admits. “But I find that caution is always preferable to overconfidence.”

His brother does have a point. Sasuke is confident in his skills when facing any of the Akatsuki one-on-one—excluding perhaps Pain. But with both Obito and Zetsu on the top of his hit list, there’s no way to kill one without immediately alerting the other. If the Akatsuki realizes his intentions and turns on him, he won’t be able to take on all of their members at once. Not even with Itachi by his side.

Overconfidence is dangerous. He went into his battle with the Eight-Tails that way, and he was nearly killed.

“You can’t beat them all,” Itachi says. “Not even with that left eye of yours.”

Sasuke blinks in surprise. His hand comes up to cover the dark bangs over the left side of his face. “How did you—”

Itachi rolls his eyes. “You’re hiding it with your hair, Sasuke. It’s not exactly an impenetrable disguise. You’re lucky no one else has seen it. If you’re trying to keep it a secret, cover it with a bandage at least.”

Sasuke feels his cheeks flush. “Shut up. Bandages are annoying. I’ll have to stop and take them off every time I need to use it.”

“Fine, don’t listen to me. But when a simple gust of wind blows your hair out of your face, just remember that I told you.”

Sasuke huffs. He combs his fingers through his bangs, making doubly sure that the Rinnegan is completely covered.

“How did you get it?” Itachi asks.

Sasuke winces, remembering the feeling of Madara sliding Sasuke’s own sword into his heart—but Itachi doesn’t need to know that. “The Sage of Six Paths gave it to me. Long story.”

His brother makes a curious noise, but he lets the topic go.

“I was thinking,” Itachi says, as he stands from the bed to put the bottle of nail polish back. He turns, leaning against the opposite wall and crossing his arms across his chest. “Your goal is to stop the Akatsuki’s plans. But what if you don’t have to kill all of them?”

Sasuke’s eyebrows furrow. “What do you mean?”

“Most of the organization’s members aren’t aware of what its true end goal is. I didn’t even know about the Infinite Tsukuyomi until you told me, and even Pain is being used. Obito, too—they’re all Zetsu’s pawns. This war will result in the end of all life on this planet. None of them will want that.”

“You think they would help us?” Sasuke asks doubtfully.

“I’m not saying we should trust them,” Itachi says. “Most of them have a complete disregard for human life—but even the worst of them will want to stop this, even if only to save their own skins.”

It’s a fair point. And Naruto has already asked that he attempt to save Nagato (and Obito, too, though the jury’s still out on that absurd request). Sometimes, with all the violence Itachi is capable of—all the violence he’s inflicted on him—Sasuke forgets that his brother is a pacifist; that he only resorts to being cutthroat so often because it’s usually what is needed.

Sasuke doesn’t understand it. His solution to a problem is to cut it down. He’ll keep the peace, but he can’t do it the way his best friend does. Naruto wraps his enemies in words, making them see the light, but Sasuke’s first instinct will always be to use his sword.

(Sometimes he wishes it wasn’t.)

“Sounds complicated,” Sasuke says to his brother. “I’d rather just kill them. It’s cleaner.”

“It’s reckless,” Itachi says. “We don’t need to be impulsive about this. We can go about it more subtly. Play the long game.”

Sasuke’s lips curve up slightly. He’s never quite had the patience for the long game; Itachi, on the other hand, played it for over eight years. “You’re serious about this?”

“I’m saying it’s worth a try. This doesn’t have to end with us both stained in blood.”

Sasuke frowns at his brother. I already am, he wants to tell him. Wants to tell his brother he isn’t saving him from anything. His hands are just as soaked in red as Itachi’s, and there will never be any washing it out.

Instead, he lays back on the bed with a sigh. “Fine. We can try the diplomatic approach first.”

★

Itachi watches Sasuke on the other side of the weapons room, as he rummages through a chest filled with spare blades in search of a good-quality sword to replace the one he broke in his altercation with Hidan.

“What’s with all the katanas?” Sasuke complains, pushing aside another group of blades. “Over a dozen katanas, and not a single chokutō?”

“it’s not a very common sword type,” Itachi points out. “For a shinobi, at least.”

His younger brother scoffs and pushes another sword aside.

Itachi wonders, is the term younger brother even correct anymore? Physically, the boy is twelve years old, less than two months to thirteen; he’s a tiny four feet and eleven inches, barely reaching to Itachi’s shoulders. Mentally, he’s supposedly nineteen—older than Itachi’s less-than-one-month-to-eighteen.

Itachi looks at him now from across the room, and he can’t fathom it. He can’t fathom any of this.

He’s not one to be taken off guard by things. He plans for every possibility, or at least, he attempts to. But this—it was impossible to plan for this. Impossible not to be taken off guard by this. His brother—who he saw last five years ago, as a tiny, shattered seven-year-old with tears spilling down his cheeks and anguish in his eyes, surrounded by bodies and stained in blood not his own—bursting unexpectedly back into his life, claiming to be from the future. Seven years in the future, where all Itachi’s plans have come to naught and turned to dust.

All of them, useless and into dust, except for the fact that he’s dead. Except that he turned his brother into the sword upon which to throw himself.

Sasuke was never meant to learn the truth.

Itachi watches him now, grumbling under his breath as he pushes aside more unwanted blades. A ninjatō, this time. A tanto. A tachi. At least four more katanas. His shoulder is still bandaged from yesterday when Itachi stitched him up, the edge of the wrappings just barely peeking out from the red-and-black cloak.

Itachi doesn’t like the cloak on him. He doesn’t like the ring on him either—Orochimaru’s ring.

He doesn’t belong here. He belongs in Konoha.

“You can’t just use another type of sword?” Itachi asks. “It has to be a chokutō?”

“A chokutō was the type Orochimaru trained me to use.”

Itachi feels a shock go through him. “Orochimaru?” His brother doesn’t answer, and Itachi presses, “Sasuke—Orochimaru?”

“Yeah,” Sasuke says. “I deserted the village to train under him.”

“Why?”

“I really wanted to kill you. No one else was offering to help me.”

Oh, Itachi thinks. He lets that settle for a moment. Another way he apparently screwed up.

He recalls the images he saw in Sasuke’s mind, the ones his brother clearly didn’t mean for him to see. A flash of his own dead eyes, his own bloody face. And the feelings—oh, the feelings—

(I will love you always)

Oh. Oh.

A fraction of a second. Itachi felt the feelings—his brother’s feelings—for merely a fraction of a second.

And the force behind them nearly knocked him over.

Despite his appearance, Sasuke isn’t a child. He isn’t a twelve-year-old genin, and he’s certainly far, far away from the small seven-year-old Itachi walked out on five years ago. It’s there, in his eyes; it’s there in the way he moves and the way he speaks and the way Itachi can see his mind working.

There’s a weight to those dark eyes. A jadedness, a weariness and wariness, and it holds a certain age within it. There are scars there, left on his soul, shadows that have leeched onto his bones. And the massacre has left these too, of course, Itachi can see them—but the weight of his eyes isn’t that of a traumatized kid, it’s that of a scarred, battle-hardened shinobi.

Itachi knows the difference. He’s been both.

His brother has the eyes of a soldier. They’re the same eyes Itachi sees when he looks in the mirror, and he never wanted Sasuke to share them.

Where did I fail? he wants to demand. Please, please. Let me understand. Where did I fail? Where did I go wrong? Tell me, tell me, tell me.

Instead he pushes himself off the wall, and says with a placid expression that reveals nothing of his current turmoil, “Find anything?”

“No chokutō,” Sasuke says with a displeased curve of his lips. He wraps his fingers around the hilt of the ninjatō. “This one will have to do.”

“The ninjatō is the most similar to the chokutō,” says Itachi. “They’re practically the same weapon.”

“This one’s shorter.”

“True, but so are you.”

Sasuke throws a glare at him. “Hilarious.”

“Thank you.”

“I was being sarcastic!”

★

Across the large room, a game of cards is taking place between four Akatsuki members—Kakuzu, Deidara, Sasori, and Hidan. Leaning his body against the wall, Sasuke watches them with his hand on the hilt of his newly-acquired sword. Absently, his thumbnail chips away at the red polish on his fingers.

“I still think killing them is the best option,” he says.

Itachi glances at him. “Careful.” His tone is one only an elder sibling can master. Condescending—but genuine, as if the condescension is so ingrained it isn’t even realized. “Kakuzu has the hearing of a bat. Keep your voice down.”

Sasuke is tempted, once again, to remind his brother he isn’t actually twelve. He’s older than him, actually, and despises being spoken to as if he’s a child.

But he bites the irritation back. It’s worth it, he reminds himself, to have Itachi by his side again.

It’s surreal to witness four S-Rank criminals doing something so mundane as playing cards—and from how it sounds, making a disaster of it. Sasuke can hear the familiar sounds of Deidara’s indignant screeching from all the way on the opposite side of the room.

“You’re cheating!” the blonde accuses, standing up with his cards held protectively to his chest and pointing dramatically at his own partner. “You bastard!”

“Just because you’re losing, that doesn’t mean I’m cheating. It just means you suck.”

“You were looking at my cards!”

“I was not.”

“Yes you were!”

“I’m the one winning. Why would I bother looking at your cards—”

Sasuke finds one of his eyebrows has migrated farther up his forehead, the longer he watched the squabbling. “Unbelievable,” he mutters.

Still. It’s Deidara, so he supposes he shouldn’t be too surprised. He already knew from their fight that the blonde had a bit of a screw loose.

“They aren’t all idiots,” Itachi says, easily guessing his line of thought. “There are a few of them that possess a modicum of common sense.”

“How do you stand it?”

“Selective auditory attention.”

“You ignore them?” Sasuke translates, smirking slightly in amusement.

Itachi copies the amused quirk of his lips. “I ignore them.”

The two of them have discussed each individual Akatsuki member at length—which ones to approach peacefully and which ones to approach with a blade. Hidan and Kakuzu are too unpredictable; Hidan has no moral ground to speak of, and Kakuzu’s is too flimsy to rely on. Taking them off the board permanently is the best option; but later, when they don’t have to worry about suspicion being cast on them.

Itachi seems convinced that his own partner, Kisame, can be swayed to their side with the proper motivation. “He has a moral code,” he told Sasuke. “A strict one, though it doesn’t seem like it. This Infinite Tsukuyomi plan flies right in the face of it.”

“Do you trust him?”

“With my life? No. With yours? Definitely not. But I trust him to stick to his principles.”

Pain will be an important one. The most important one. He’s the most influential piece here. If they can convince him, then they might as well have convinced everyone else. If they can’t turn him from Obito—taking him out is going to be extremely difficult. Near impossible.

(Save Nagato, Naruto asked him.

Sasuke seriously doubts he’ll be able to. But he promised to try.)

“We need to speak to Konan first,” Itachi says. “She’s a huge influence on him. He confides in her. If we can convince her, then we’ve as good as convinced him.”

His voice is low, making it impossible for the four across the room to overhear. But they’ve dissolved into chaos, Hidan swinging his scythe around and Deidara threatening to blow him up, so Sasuke doubts it makes a difference how loud they’re speaking.

“Who said anything about we?” Sasuke questions. “I thought we agreed that I would handle Pain.”

Itachi frowns. “I never agreed to that.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need your permission anyway.”

A hint of irritation flickers briefly through Itachi’s eyes. “Sasuke—”

“No,” Sasuke tells him firmly. He turns, looking his brother straight in his identically dark eyes. “I know I look like a child, but I am not. And you do not have the right to order me around. You didn’t then, and you certainly don’t now.”

There’s a sudden, tense silence. Broken only by Hidan’s exclamation of victory and Deidara’s defeated screech across the room.

Itachi’s expression is like stone, and Sasuke prepares to have to fight with him. But then there’s a flicker of uncertainty—and something in those eyes shifts, softens. The missing-nin inclines his head to him, reluctantly.

“Very well. You are right.”

Sasuke blinks in surprise. Really?

“Thank you,” he says instead, rather than question his brother on it. He was prepared to argue with him, but is glad he will not have to.

They fall silent, gazes turning to the spectacle on the opposite end of the room: Hidan and Deidara yelling at each other, weapons flying through the air, while Sasori and Kakuzu ignore their antics completely, continuing calmly with their card game as if the other two aren’t there.

“You lost! Just accept it!”

“I. Never. Lose!”

Sasuke looks up at Itachi. “If I told him he lost to me in the future, how do you think he’d react?”

Itachi winces as a small blob of Deidara’s detonating clay explodes, searing the skin from Hidan’s face and leaving only grotesque bone and charred muscle behind. “Yeah, don’t tell him that.”  

“Would you knock that off?” Sasori growled at the blonde from his seat. “Leader-sama told you not to use those things in the base.”

“You can’t contain my art! True art is an explosion!”

“Not this again. You know nothing about true art.”

“And you do? You wouldn’t know what true art was even if I rammed this C-4 right up your—”

Kakuzu turns away from the bickering taking place, his eyes locking onto the pair across the room. “Itachi-san,” he calls out. “Care to join us for a round?”

Deidara’s bickering cuts off mid-word, his head snapping around. “What?! Kakuzu, don’t invite him over here! Get lost, Uchiha!”

Itachi doesn’t deign to respond to either of them, his eyes indifferent. Kakuzu shifts his gaze to Sasuke. “What about you, baby Uchiha? Fancy joining us?”

“Not him either, un!”

Sasuke scowls at the nickname. “I’d rather stab my eyes out with a pencil.”

“Well, there’s no need to be rude.”

Out of all people, it’s Hidan who says this. Hidan, who still has his scythe out from swinging it at Deidara. The blade is still stained with Sasuke’s dried blood from two days ago—or perhaps it’s someone else’s—and the time-traveler looks at him incredulously.

“Are you kidding?”  

Itachi’s lips quirk just slightly. “You heard him, otouto. Don’t be rude.”

Sasuke uses his short height to his advantage, ramming a bony elbow into his brother’s stomach.

★

On the first of the month, Konoha hosts its round of the chuunin exams. By then, Sasuke Uchiha has been missing for over a week. Kakashi is the only jounin-sensei who doesn’t put his students forward as nominees.

Hiruzen Sarutobi feels all of his sixty-eight years—older even, as he leans back in his chair behind a desk laden with a mountain of paperwork. Even the familiar feeling of the pipe between his lips fails to offer him any relief from his current anxieties, as he asks himself, How could this happen?

Another day has passed without any news on the whereabouts of the youngest Uchiha. He has jounin and ANBU squads both out searching, but the young genin has left no discernable trail. He is simply gone without a trace, with only the scratched headband left behind to show for it.

Sarutobi has broken his promise, and he dreads what will happen when Itachi discovers this.

Danzo has already been by to express his opinion on this matter. One rogue Uchiha was bad enough—but two? In that man’s opinion, both brothers should have been killed with the rest of their clan five years ago. They are too dangerous to be kept alive, his old friend claims, and Sarutobi has nothing but his own softhearted idealism to blame for their current circumstances.

He is both right and wrong, Hiruzen thinks. Wrong, to think those two children need to be killed when they have already suffered so. Wrong to think their judgement against the Uchiha was just.

But right, in that Sarutobi’s softhearted idealism is to blame.

And now, Sasuke has gone. The slash in his hitai-ate a testament to his severed loyalty. Sarutobi worries and worries and worries—he worries until he is sick—for Kakashi cannot fathom a reason why his student might suddenly decide to abandon Konoha; but Sarutobi knows a very good reason why he might make such a choice.

If that twelve-year-old child has somehow discovered the truth behind his clan’s annihilation, behind his elder brother’s defection, then he has a very good reason to flee from here indeed.

Sarutobi presses his fingers to his temples. He doesn’t want to even consider the possibility. If such a thing has happened, he can’t begin to make a guess at how. He wishes he had some way of getting in contact with Itachi; but in the two times they’ve briefly corresponded since the massacre, it was always the young teenager who initiated the contact.

Sarutobi can only hope that Sasuke is with his brother. Because if he isn’t, if he is in danger, if he is dead—then Itachi Uchiha has just become Konoha’s greatest threat.

Tap, tap.

The old man turns in his chair at the noise. There is a messenger bird knocking on the window. Sarutobi moves to let the animal in, and it flies onto his desk. He takes the rolled-up message from its back.

He recognizes the scratchy writing as Jiraiya’s. For a moment, his heart sinks, because he was hoping it would be news about Sasuke. But then he actually reads the message, and he stares down at it in shock. He falls into his chair, and he has to re-read the words several times.

This can’t be true.

Orochimaru has been killed—by a twelve-year-old boy wearing the Uchiha Clan’s crest.

★

Being a part of the Akatsuki is… an interesting experience.

Sasuke doesn’t know how else to describe it. It definitely isn’t what he expected. This isn’t his first time donning the organization’s colors, but it was different then. Most of the Akatsuki’s members were already dead when Obito ensnared him and Team Taka into their ranks after Itachi’s death, and it was only for a short time. Then Sasuke took Itachi’s eyes, and the war happened, and he met his brother again only to immediately lose him—

(Sasuke shoves away the memory of Itachi’s smile. I will love you always.)

Back to the point.

Sasuke doesn’t know how these people can possibly be the elite shinobi responsible for nearly ending the world. Half of them seem to possess no sense at all, behaving like foolish, rampaging children rather than adults. Did they really capture seven bijuu? It’s hard to imagine.

Hidan is a raving fanatic, obsessed with his strange deity and drawn to the slaughter. Kakuzu, unlike his partner, takes no sadistic pleasure in the sight of blood, but nor does he have any regard for life whatsoever. He is disinterested in Sasuke, unlike Hidan, who delights in poking and prodding him in an effort to make him snap.

Sasuke truly can’t stand him. Hidan is determined to fight Sasuke again, insulted by his previous loss against him. He’s taken to waving his scythe in the younger Uchiha’s face whenever he enters the room, demanding in his usual colorful fashion that the two of them do battle. He came a breadth from taking Sasuke’s head off the last time—at which point Itachi swept in, grabbed the weapon, and threatened to snap it in half if Hidan swung it near his brother again.

“I can defend myself,” Sasuke snapped at Itachi when it happened.

Itachi pointedly looked down at him. “You’re twelve.”

“I am not—”

The Akatsuki haven’t started on their hunt for the nine bijuu yet. The majority of them, Sasuke was startled to learn, don’t even seem to know why their leader plans to collect them. Just that it will eventually lead to the incredibly vague notion of ‘world peace.’ Over half of them don’t even have any interest in this goal of ‘peace’ Pain preaches; they just want to be somewhere where their violence and bloodlust is useful and deemed acceptable.

Sasuke has been here two weeks now. He hasn’t been on any missions yet.

“I’m going to speak with Kisame today,” Itachi tells him, fifteen days after Sasuke’s arrival.

Sasuke looks up at him—still extremely annoyed by his need to do so. “Are you certain that’s smart?”

“It’s smarter than your plan to just kill everyone.”

“Forgetting our clan so easily? Kill everyone was your plan, remember.”

He says the words unthinkingly, not intending them to have the bite behind them that they do—or perhaps he did intend it, subconsciously. Perhaps some part of him, deep down, is still secretly angry; has taken the opportunity to strike out without any conscious decision.

Regardless whether he intended it, Itachi goes instantly quiet. His shoulders stiffen and his expression goes blank.

Sasuke bites his lip, unsure if the metallic taste that floods his mouth is guilt or not. “I—didn’t mean that.”

“Didn’t you?” Itachi says, emotionless.

Sasuke doesn’t answer.

“I’m going to go find Kisame.”

Itachi spins on his heel. Sasuke listens to the sounds of his footsteps retreating down the stone hall, feeling quite terrible for something he isn’t even sure he should be feeling terrible about.

What are those few harsh words, compared to everything Itachi has inflicted on him? Does his older brother even hold the slightest right to be upset by them?

Sasuke doesn’t know. But the empty room seems suddenly much colder.

★

Itachi’s footsteps echo against the stone floor. The noise bounces loudly off the walls as he walks down the corridor, and he feels as if it’s bouncing off the inside of his head as well.

He should not have stormed off so abruptly, he knows. He should not have gotten upset. He holds no right to it, none at all, not where Sasuke is concerned.

It’s not his brother he’s upset with, anyway. It’s himself.

Forgetting our clan so easily?

Itachi clenches his jaw. Of course he hasn’t. As if he ever could, for even a fraction of a second. As if he ever will.

He has attempted to avoid thinking about them—the memories he saw. He knows Sasuke didn’t mean for him to see them; they were a breach of privacy he never intended. But they keep flashing through his head: the hand around Sasuke’s throat, his fingers tearing into his eye, the screaming—

The fear, complete and paralyzing.

Itachi doesn’t doubt the authenticity of the memories. He knows himself. He knows what he’s capable of, backed by the proper driving motivation. He understands his future actions, his future-self’s train of thought, perfectly.

But these memories were Sasuke’s. And in them, he felt everything as he felt it. His fear and his rage and his betrayal—his helplessness, and the burning self-hatred for that helplessness. His split-second of relief, of peace, as he looked down at Itachi’s lifeless body; then the complete and utter destruction of everything, every piece of him, his entire world—

The realization that Itachi loved him.

Itachi’s nails bite into his palms. Just recalling the memory is enough to make his chest feel like it’s tearing itself apart.

I’m sorry, Itachi thinks. It wasn’t supposed to break you. That wasn’t what I was trying to do.

And he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand, knowing all the cruelty he inflicted, how his brother can look at him now with eyes free of hatred. He doesn’t understand how Sasuke could want his help. He doesn’t understand how he could want to save him.

Why? Why?

He doesn’t deserve it.

Itachi stops when he reaches Kisame’s door. He buries all of his feelings with an ease born from years of practice, takes a steadying breath, then raises a hand to knock. “Kisame. Are you in there?”

The door swings open. “Itachi-san. Do we have a mission?”

“No. I need to speak with you about something. May I come in?”

Kisame’s eyebrows go up. “You’re asking entrance into my bedroom? Why, Itachi-san. Are you propositioning me?”

“I’m not into older men,” Itachi responds, straight-faced.

His partner blinks at him dumbly. Then a snort escapes him, followed by a laugh. “I never know whether you’re joking! Come on in.”

Itachi steps into the room, Kisame closing the door behind him. He’s never been in his partner’s private quarters before, just as Kisame has never been in his. They’ve worked together for three out of the four years Itachi has been here, and there is a certain level of trust between them—but trusting someone to cover your back in a fight and to not murder you in your sleep is wholly different than allowing them close to you personally. Both of them usually maintain a professional distance.

Kisame is a comrade. Itachi respects him for his strength and his loyalty. But he isn’t a friend—he can’t be. He’s a murderer and a criminal. He’s a traitor to his village.

So are you, a small voice in his head reminds him. How are you so different from anyone here?

He ignores it, as usual.

“So!” Kisame sits down on his bed with a grin. His giant sword is leaning against the wall next to him. “What’s so important? How’s your baby brother settling in with us?”

Itachi frowns. “This has nothing to do with Sasuke.”

The older man grins. “Come on, Itachi! Your little brother shows up out of nowhere for a brotherly reunion—when I thought you killed all your family! You can’t expect me to not be curious!”

“I expect you to mind your own business.”

Kisame looks at him for a moment, like a man trying to put together a difficult puzzle without even holding all the pieces. Something shifts in his expression. “Wow. You actually care about that brat, don’t you?”

Itachi’s back teeth grind together.

“Color me surprised,” the Kiri-nin continues. “I didn’t think you were capable of loving anything.”

“Kisame,” Itachi bites out. “Watch yourself.”

He feels the chakra migrate to his eyes. He feels the shift of his pupils, Sharingan twisting into the Mangekyou.

A warning. One his partner knows well. The older man raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay. I’m backing off. Don’t get the claws out.”

Warily, he deactivates his Sharingan. “Just keep Sasuke’s name out of your mouth. This isn’t about him.”

“Then stop holding me in suspense,” says Kisame. He leans against the wall next to his sword, raising an eyebrow. “What is it about?”

“The Infinite Tsukuyomi. How much do you know?”

★

Sasuke refuses to admit he’s sulking about his not-quite-an-argument with Itachi. Sasori seems to think he is though, since he tells him to stop depressing the tower with all his moping. Somehow, he manages to pull Sasuke into a game of shogi. He isn’t sure how he ends up agreeing, but now there’s a board in front of him and he finds the distraction is actually welcome.

Across from him, Sasori is free of his usual bulky armor. The puppet he’s wearing looks human, and is probably a close approximation of his real face. It’s sculpted to look younger than he actually is—a teenager, Itachi’s age, when Sasuke knows him to actually be in his early thirties.

“I should thank you for taking care of that traitor Orochimaru,” Sasori tells him.

“He was your partner,” Sasuke recalls.

“Yes. He was always very slippery. How did you manage to kill him?”

Sasuke shrugs as he reaches for one of the pieces on the board. “He was arrogant. Underestimated me.”

“You’d think he’d have learnt from his mistake with your brother.”

Sasori isn’t bad company surprisingly, for a terrorist. Perhaps he was too quick to judge; Sasuke, after all, was technically classified as a terrorist too, once upon a time.

On the older shinobi’s turn, he moves his piece on the board to capture Sasuke’s knight. An attempt at a pawn drop. Sasuke escapes by moving the knight down from 73 to 65. Sasori frowns down at the board for a moment, before moving his white piece and executing a bishop trade. Sasuke is quick to counter it.

“You’re good at this, kid,” Sasori says. “Where did you learn to play?”

Sasuke resists bristling at being called a kid. “My jounin-sensei,” he lies. “Kakashi Hatake.” The actual answer is Orochimaru.

Sasori’s head snaps up. “Did you say Hatake?”

He spits the name out the same way Sasuke used to snarl Itachi. Like each syllable is a jagged piece of bone, scraping against his throat as it’s pulled from him.

“…Yes,” Sasuke says carefully, sensing he’s trodden on a landmine. “Do you know him?”

Sasori’s jaw clenches. “Sakumo Hatake, the White Fang—he killed my parents. Who is this Kakashi?”

There’s an undercurrent of quiet, deadly fury in the man’s tone. A hint of killing intent spiking in the air. Sasuke treads carefully, understanding a single misstep here could cause a disastrous reaction.

“I’ve never heard the name Sakumo. Kakashi was only my jounin-instructor for two months—I hardly know anything about him.”

Sasori growls, a low, predatory sound. “My parents. They were—”

The door bangs open. Deidara rushes in, a gleeful look on his face. “I felt killing intent! What’s happening? Who’s Hidan killing now? Please let it be Itachi this time, please—”

He stops immediately when he sees Sasuke. “You!” he snarls. He looks between Sasuke, his partner, and the board on the table in front of them. “Sasori! What the hell? You traitorous scum, why are you fraternizing with the Uchiha?”

“Get lost,” Sasori says. He hasn’t taken his eyes off of Sasuke, and his killing intent hasn’t dimmed.

Deidara stops as he fully comprehends the state of his partner. He swallows slightly. “Sasori, my man. Let’s not lose our heads. You know if you hurt him, then Itachi will—”

“Since when do you care what Itachi thinks? I thought you weren’t scared of him.”

Deidara sputters angrily. “What—that—I’m not! As if I—scared—!”

Konan has also entered the room with Deidara, in a much calmer, quieter fashion. She settles a hand on Deidara’s shoulder. Sasuke raises an eyebrow as the enraged blonde calms immediately, his shoulders dropping and the furious set to his mouth disappearing.

“Deidara,” Konan says. “Relax. There’s no need to get worked up.”

Huh, Sasuke thinks as the Akatsuki member actually listens.

Sasori is still emitting killing intent. Sasuke holds his body still, and his hand moves instinctively toward his hip to rest on the hilt of his weapon.

“Kakashi Hatake,” Sasori growls at the two of them. “Have you heard of him?”

Deidara frowns and shakes his head—unaware that in just a few years, he’s going to lose an arm to said man.

“Copy-Ninja Kakashi,” Konan says. “He’s wanted in the Hidden Mist. They have a kill order out on him that’s years old. Why?”

Sasori scowls. Abandoning their match halfway through, he stands up and stomps from the room. He bumps purposely into Deidara as he does, and the blonde has to be steadied by Konan.

“Hey!” Deidara yells. “Asshole! Where are you even going?”

“To steal Kisame’s Bingo Book!”

Deidara watches his partner leave with an affronted expression. “What did I do? He always overreacts…”

Konan raises an elegant eyebrow. “A couple days ago, you tried to blow him up.”

“That was different! He insulted my art! ‘Art is something eternal,’ what a load of bullshit—”

Konan cuts him a sharp look, before sending a pointed look toward Sasuke. It takes Deidara a moment to understand what she means, then he rolls his eyes.

“He cut Hidan in half yesterday, Ane-san. I doubt he’s bothered by swearing.”

Sasuke is surprised by the form of address, though he doesn’t show it. It’s formal and polite, but it also demonstrates a close relationship. Sasuke doesn’t know much about Konan apart from the basics of her abilities, but she’s clearly well-respected within the organization. Which makes sense, her being so close to Pain.

Konan walks further into the room. She stops in the place where Sasori was sitting, offering Sasuke a kind smile. “Do you mind if I join you for a game?”

“What?!” Deidara yells.

Sasuke was hoping to retire to his room. But his room is also Itachi’s room, and due to his previous words to him, he’s feeling a need to avoid his brother. He doesn’t want to deal with it now. And Konan is here, in front of him, when they were just discussing how they needed to get her on their side. It’s a rare opportunity to get her by herself, away from her ever-present orange-haired shadow.

And if it annoys Deidara? Added bonus.

“Sure,” Sasuke tells her. Konan smiles, taking Sasori’s previous place across from him.

“Ane-san! Oh, not you too. I’m surrounded by fucking traitor…”

“Your grudge with Itachi has nothing to do with me,” Konan says, not unkindly. “Nor, for that matter, does it have anything to do with Sasuke. He’s done nothing to earn your dislike.”

“He exists, un! Him and his brother! And it’s not a grudge, it’s a seething hatred! He thinks he’s so much better than me!”

“Has Itachi said that?”

“He doesn’t have to, un! I can tell by the way he looks at me! Those damn eyes!”

Sasuke finishes resetting his black pieces, placing them all on the starting point on his side of the board. “It’s that coldness,” he says, without looking up. “The way he completely dismisses you? Like you aren’t worth his time?”

Deidara freezes, staring at Sasuke in surprise. “Yeah. Exactly like that.”

“He does it all the time. Annoying, isn’t it?”

“…He’s your brother.”

“Yeah, he is. That doesn’t mean I can’t think he’s a self-righteous asshole.”

Deidara stares at him with a dumbfounded look. Konan coughs lightly into her sleeve, but it does nothing to conceal the amusement in her amber eyes.

“Huh,” Deidara says. “You know, maybe I misjudged you, baby Uchiha. Maybe you’re not so bad.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Deidara leaves after a few moments, still processing the fact that he was possibly taking a bit of a liking to an Uchiha. Sasuke, overall, doesn’t much care what the blonde missing-nin thinks of him, but he supposes it’s better for his plan if Deidara doesn’t hate him. And it’ll result in less headaches.

“Why does he hate my brother so much?” Sasuke asks, reaching forward to move one of his pawns.

Konan responds immediately with a counter move. “I’m not sure, to be honest. Itachi is the one who forced him into joining the Akatsuki. But even if he didn’t want to at first, I know Deidara is happy here now. So it can’t possibly be just that.”

Konan captures his pawn, taking advantage of an unseen opening. Sasuke scowls.

“Why did you join?” she asks. “Itachi murdered your family, didn’t he? Yet you don’t hate him?”

Sasuke pauses. He remembers his hatred. The way he burned it into his own heart, scorched his own veins. Sliced open his own skin just to keep it burning, those words ringing in his head like the true north of a compass. Hate me, despise me, kill me…

He knows the basics of Konan’s own story from Naruto. The death of someone she loved—carried out by his own hand, to protect her. Sasuke thinks of Itachi’s lifeless eyes, and he understands. His heart twists with how deeply he understands.

Konan doesn’t know he knows. But…

“My brother planned to die,” Sasuke says quietly. He swallows back the memories. “He was willing to sacrifice himself… to protect me. He loved me enough to give up everything.”

Sasuke has a lot of issues with his brother’s actions as a whole—his deceptions, his manipulations. But this one thing cannot be denied: Itachi loved Sasuke enough to lay down his life. To die for him. It’s something that he honors.

Konan inhales slightly. Sasuke knows his words have struck the way he meant them to—have echoed the memory of her fallen friend, the one who died for her just as Itachi died for him.

“I tried hatred. I tried revenge. It doesn’t lead anywhere. It’s just more pain.”

He can feel her gaze on him as he reaches forward to make his move—moving in on her undefended king. He looks up, meeting her amber eyes.

“Sasuke Uchiha,” she says quietly. “You have a mature outlook on the world, for someone so young.”

“Not really,” Sasuke says. His gold general captures her king. “Checkmate.”

★

He and Konan play another game. It’s apparent that she was going easy on him in the first match, because this one is much more difficult. It lasts much longer, and each turn is interspaced with lengthy pauses as they seriously study the board.

Konan is pleasant to talk to. Sasuke is surprised when he realizes he actually likes her. It usually takes long periods of exposure to a person before he starts finding them tolerable, let alone enjoyable to spend time with. Sasuke honestly hopes he won’t have to kill her.

Sasuke combs his fingers through his bangs as he attempts to decide his next move, making sure his hair is still covering his Rinnegan. He’s so focused on the pieces in front of him, he doesn’t even sense Itachi’s chakra when he enters the room.

“Checkmate in four,” Itachi says, peering at the board over Sasuke’s shoulder.

Sasuke startles slightly, before looking back at the board. “What? How?”

Itachi is standing at his back, and he leans further over Sasuke’s shoulder to show him, but Konan shoots him a chiding glance. “No one likes a backseat player, Itachi-san.”

Itachi pulls back immediately. “You’re right. Apologies. Besides, I’m confident my brother can beat you without my assistance.”

After another near half hour, Itachi’s intuition proves to be correct. Sasuke beats Konan a second time. The older woman smiles as she rises.

“Impressive. Good game, Sasuke-kun.”

Only a few people have the honor of calling him by that familiar honorific. Sasuke’s instinctive response is to bristle, before he realizes that he doesn’t actually mind.

He turns to his brother as she leaves. For a moment, there’s an awkward, tense air between them. Sasuke swallows and starts to say, “I’m s—”

Itachi holds up a hand. “Are you actually sorry? Or did you mean it?”

“…I don’t know.”

“Then don’t apologize.”

The words aren’t angry or sharp. They’re gentle; understanding. Sasuke watches him, staring down at the shogi board with a strand of dark hair falling into his face. Hesitantly, he nods.

“Did you talk with Kisame?” he asks.

“I did. I didn’t tell him about you or the time travel, but I told him the truth about the Infinite Tsukuyomi.”

“And?”

“He’s agreed to help us.”

Sasuke blinks. “Seriously?”

“I told you I could convince him. No one wants the world to end.”

“Technically,” says Sasuke, “Kaguya doesn’t actually end the world. She comes extremely close and hundreds of people died, but we defeated her in the end.”

“Yeah,” Itachi says. “I didn’t tell him that part.”    

Sasuke huffs a quiet laugh. He begins resetting the shogi pieces on the board. “Want to play?” he asks.

Itachi circles around Sasuke’s chair to the vacated one on the board’s other side. A smirk pulls at his lips as he sits down. “Are you sure? I’ll beat you.”

“Like hell you will.”

★

Itachi beats him. But it’s an extremely long match, and Sasuke manages to impress him.

★

It doesn’t make sense, Kakashi thinks. How could his twelve-year-old genin kill Orochimaru? Why?

Naruto and Sakura are both attempting to walk on water. Kakashi watches from the dock as they repeatedly fall into the lake, soaking themselves from head to toe. They’re bickering with each other, but it doesn’t sound the way it should. There’s a voice missing.

Kakashi’s mind is distant, unfocused on the scene in front of him. Somewhere on the other side of the village, the second stage of the chuunin exams is starting. Naruto and Sakura are the only genin not participating.

Kakashi planned on enrolling them. But without Sasuke…

His heart twists painfully in his chest. Failure, that heartbeat tells him, repeating over and over like a drum. You failed, you failed, you failed.

It’s been a few days since news of Orochimaru’s death reached Konoha. Kakashi still wants to reject what he’s been told—because that intel is ridiculous. Sasuke is a tiny little genin, and he’s expected to believe that he murdered one of the Sannin? Impossible.

And even if he could, why would he? Does he even know who Orochimaru is?

It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense.

“Sensei?”

Kakashi blinks, raising his gaze. Sakura is walking toward him on the surface of the water, her chakra control perfect. Her pink hair hangs limply in her face, her clothes soaked.

“I did it,” she says, but there’s no sense of accomplishment in her voice. She just sounds tired. “Can I be done for the day?”

Kakashi frowns. “…Yes. You can go home.”

Both of his students have been different since Sasuke has left. Naruto has been angry and frustrated—he wants to go after his teammate, to chase him down and demand answers, to drag him back home. But no one knows where Sasuke is, and no one is letting him do anything, so he only grows more upset and combative as the days pass.

Sakura, on the other hand, has become listless. There are dark circles under her eyes. Her heartbrokenness is bordering on depression now, and Kakashi doesn’t know how to help her. Not when he can feel those same dark threads in his mind, stronger than they’ve been in a while, trying to drown him in defeat and self-loathing.

Why did this happen? Could he have stopped it?

“Kakashi-sensei,” Sakura says quietly. “Do you think Sasuke-kun’s okay? Wherever he is?”

Kakashi bites the inside of his cheek. He hates the fragile look in her green eyes. He looks past her, toward his other student. Naruto is still struggling, managing to stand on the surface for a few seconds before plunging back underwater.

He can’t let them down. He can’t let Sasuke down.

“I don’t know,” Kakashi says. He reaches forward, placing a solid hand on her shoulder and squeezing. “But I’m going to bring him back, Sakura. I promise.”

★

Three weeks as an official member of the Akatsuki, Sasuke is given his first assignment: an assassination of a missing-nin currently hiding somewhere within the Land of Earth. He’s tasked with tracking them down and collecting the reward money from Iwagakure.

He’s paired with Itachi for the mission. Temporarily, of course. Kisame is still Itachi’s official partner. But there’s nobody else to place him with, and he can tell Pain still isn’t one-hundred-percent certain about him. This mission is a test run, and Itachi is being tasked with keeping an eye on him.

“I think it was Obito’s idea,” his brother says.

“What was?” Sasuke asks.

“Pairing us together. It isn’t just a test for you, it’s a test for me. He wants to be certain my loyalties haven’t changed now that you’re here.”

The time-traveler frowns up at him. “He hasn’t tried to speak with you since I got here?”

“Not yet, no. I suspect he will soon.”

Kisame steps up to them as the rest of the members leave the meeting. He drapes a heavy arm around Sasuke’s shoulders, taking advantage of the boy’s short height to pull him close. “Hey, kid. I see you’re stealing my partner.”

Itachi tenses the moment the man touches his brother, eyes flashing in a barely-noticeable fashion. Sasuke glances his way in exasperation and Kisame grins in amusement. “Ease up, Itachi-san. I agreed to help, remember? I’m not gonna hurt him.”

“As if you could.” Sasuke shrugs the arm off his shoulders.

“Don’t talk about that here,” Itachi says to Kisame, eyes sharp. “Someone will hear you.”

“Sorry, sorry.” Kisame reaches out to ruffle Sasuke’s hair. “Good luck, mini-Itachi.”

Sasuke jerks back from his hand, as the curtain of his hair shifts and nearly exposes his Rinnegan. Kisame, fortunately, is already turning away; not having caught the brief flash of purple.

“I told you to cover that better,” says Itachi.

“Shut up. I told you to stop with the overprotective big brother crap. I’m older than you.”

“I was born first so you’re still younger.”

“That’s not how that works!”

“Yes it is.”

“Who says?”

“Me.”

Someone hits him on the shoulder, interrupting their bickering. “Hey, Uchiha,” Deidara says as he passes them, and Sasuke realizes the blonde is talking to him, not Itachi. “Try not to die out there.”

With that parting remark, he leaves—though not before remembering to shoot Itachi a look of utmost loathing.

The soon-to-be-eighteen-year-old looks at Sasuke incredulously. “Did you make friends with Deidara?”

He shrugs. “Possibly.”

“How?”

“We bonded over our mutual hatred for you.”

“…Wow. I’m flattered.”

★

The Land of Earth is just north of Ame. It only takes them a few days to travel there by foot. The country is desolate and rocky, and Sasuke hates it there. It’s bordered by a mountain range that cuts it off from most other countries, and hiking over it is exhausting.

They stop to rest in a grotto in the side of a cliff on the second night. Sasuke lays his cloak on the ground to rest on, staring at the picture of their target from a page ripped from Iwa’s Bingo Book. The wind blows outside, sending dirt and rocks into their makeshift shelter.

“You know,” Itachi says, “you don’t have to do this.”

Sasuke looks up. His bangs are tucked behind his ear, exposing his Rinnegan. Though he tries to hide it, Sasuke can tell his brother finds the eye unsettling.

“It’s fine,” Sasuke tells him. “I’ve killed people before. And this woman’s a rogue shinobi—she’s hardly innocent.”

Itachi says nothing to that, though his dark eyes are doubtful.

Sasuke drifts off to sleep against the cave wall. When he startles awake halfway through the night from a nightmare he can’t remember, his brother’s cloak has been draped over him like a blanket.

★

The next day, they reach the Land of Earth. It doesn’t take them long to track down their target, with the comprehensive intel they were given on her movements. She was born in the Land of Lightning, with a lightning chakra nature; Sasuke surprises her when he counters her Raiton-based jutsu with one of the same element.

“Chidori Senbon!”

Itachi raises an eyebrow at the variation of Chidori, as flashes of light pin the woman to the ground just as Itachi disarms her. Sasuke doesn’t hit any vital points, but the lightning current causes her body to go numb.

Sasuke steps up to her, drawing his ninjatō.

She is unable to counterattack. She raises her head. “Please,” she says, and Sasuke freezes. Her emerald eyes remind him of Sakura.

Itachi notices his hesitation and frowns. “Sasuke…”

Sasuke tightens his grip on the hilt of his blade. He’s killed many people before. This woman is no different. He reminds himself that she’s destined to die anyway. In a timeline where he never came back, never time-travelled, it would have been another member of the Akatsuki in his place.

But she looks so desperate, staring up at him. And Sasuke realizes she can’t be any older than sixteen. She’s a missing-nin, yes, but that doesn’t mean she’s a horrible person. Sasuke was a missing-nin, and sometimes there are reasons.

“Let me do it,” Itachi says.

Sasuke’s jaw clenches. “I’m not a kid.”

“I know you’re not,” he says quietly. His hand reaches out. “Let me do it, Sasuke.”

Gently, his brother pulls the sword from his hand. Sasuke lets him. The blade flashes through the air, and there’s a shrill scream, and Sasuke turns his head away.

★

After the mission is over and done, Itachi and Sasuke begin their trek back to Amegakure. They stop for one night to sleep and recover their energy. Itachi doesn’t bring up what happened, and Sasuke is quiet, terrible shame burning in his chest.

The fire they’ve built is warm, chasing away the chill of the late night air. Crickets chirp and the leaves on nearby trees rustle. Itachi is asleep on the ground a couple feet away, his Akatsuki cloak folded up and tucked beneath his head as a makeshift pillow. Sasuke can’t seem to make himself sleep, remaining wide awake with his back against the cave wall, poking at the fire with a stick.

He can’t get the events of earlier out of his head—how his brother needed to carry out the mission for him, like he really was some twelve-year-old genin instead of a war-hardened, experienced ninja. Sasuke has killed many people in his life, and rarely has he ever hesitated; some of them—the majority of them—were completely innocent. There’s no reason he shouldn’t have been able to do this.

But maybe that’s the problem, Sasuke thinks. In the two years after the war, he killed many people in order to protect and defend Konoha. But the taking of those lives were completely different from the ones he took when on his quest for vengeance—the people he cut through just for standing in his way.

He promised himself he would never be that person again. He hates that person. But now, once again dressed as a member of the Akatsuki, he feels closer to that person than ever. To that time after Itachi’s death, when his grief and anger threatened to burn him up—threatened to burn the whole world up with him.

If it is necessary, Sasuke will not hesitate to take a life. But to do it while wearing the Akatsuki’s colors… it feels too much like that boy he used to be. It feels terrible and sickening, like how Karin’s blood felt trapped under his nails.

So he made Itachi do it instead. Sasuke bites his inside cheek and clenches his hands, guilt once more rearing up.

He looks toward his brother. He’s never seen Itachi sleep, he realizes. Or if he has, it’s a childhood memory that has long since faded. He looks upon him now, and his heart twists, because with the fire casting a glow on his face, Itachi seems so young. He is young, and it’s so easy to forget by the way he moves and speaks.

He’s only seventeen.

That age used to seem so old to Sasuke. Now he realizes how young it actually is.

Sasuke still feels younger than his brother, despite being mentally older. He’s used to being the younger brother, automatically falls into that role when the two of them are with each other. But here, for a brief moment as he watches him in sleep, the lines on his face softened, Sasuke feels the two year difference between them. He feels older.

He pulls his legs up to his chest, wrapping both his arms around them and resting his chin atop his knees. It’s still strange, for his body to be so small; it’s still strange to have both his arms to move. Sasuke closes his eyes, allowing the heat of the fire to warm him.

When he’s finally beginning to drift off, he hears the slightest, quietest noise. His eyes snap back open.

Something has changed with Itachi. He has tensed in his sleep—close to unnoticeable. There’s a slight pinch to his mouth, and the hand tucked against his chest is slightly clenched. Sasuke realizes, with surprise, that the noise he heard was a cut-off whimper.

The sleeping Uchiha makes another noise; a harsh breath, eyebrows pinched in distress. Sasuke is paralyzed. He stares, not knowing what to do.

Is he… meant to wake his brother up? He’s clearly trapped in the throes of a nightmare.

Of course Itachi has nightmares. After everything he’s gone through, how could he possibly not? But Sasuke doesn’t… He’s never…

He holds his breath, hoping Itachi will relax on his own. But his muscles are still tensed and coiled, teeth and hands clenched like someone who’s taught themselves to bite down on their cries. Someone who has taught themselves to remain quiet, composed, even while trapped in terrible dreams.

Sasuke stands up and moves around the fire. He kneels down near his brother’s dark head, in his immediate eye-line, but at a far enough distance to avoid a possible strike.

“Nii-san.” He doesn’t shake him, instead only touching his shoulder and squeezing. “Nii-san, wake up. It’s Sasuke.”

His brother doesn’t startle awake violently, like Sasuke feared he would. His eyes snap open, and Sasuke automatically tenses, but he calms the moment he sees his younger brother. “Otouto,” Itachi says—so very unlike Sasuke, who has given his teammates’ bruises and has nearly slit their throats on occasions they’ve tried to wake him.

For most shinobi, it’s reflex. But of course Itachi has trained himself out of it.

“Hey,” Sasuke says. “You were having a bad dream, I think.”

Itachi frowns slightly. He pushes himself up into a sitting position, wiping at his forehead. Sweat has caused some of his bangs to stick to his skin.

“Are you okay?” Sasuke asks him.

“I’m fine. Did I wake you?”

“No. I was already awake.”

His brother nods. An awkward silence falls between them, interrupted only by the chirp of crickets and the crackle of the dying fire.

“Did you want to talk about it?” Sasuke ventures hesitantly, once the silence has stretched almost unbearably.

Itachi frowns. He stares down at his polished nails. The paint is chipping slightly, dirt and blood trapped under them. He seems to deliberate for a long moment, gaze not moving and eyebrows pinched. Finally he says, still not looking at him, “I just don’t understand… why you would want to save me.”

Sasuke blinks, honestly thrown by the question. “What?”

His brother glances at him quickly, sighs, then looks away again. “I saw your memories. You said you didn’t want to talk about them, so I haven’t asked. I know you didn’t mean to show me. But I saw them. I felt them. I felt how I hurt you.”

Sasuke’s throat tightens, reminiscent of his brother’s hand wrapped around it. “Itachi—”

“What I did to you—what I was going to do to you—you should hate me. You should hate me.”

There’s a pressure on his chest. He takes a shaky a breath and for a moment can’t say anything. He forces the feeling away, forces the bubble filling up his lungs down, and scoots forward.

“You didn’t do any of that,” he says quietly. “And you won’t do it, now.”

“But I would have. And it still happened to you. Regardless if I haven’t… I hurt you, and I planned to keep hurting you, and I felt it, I felt how I ripped you apart—”

“You didn’t do that—”

“I killed them,” Itachi says, so suddenly and bluntly that Sasuke’s mouth snaps closed and all his words die. “I tortured you. I lied to you and planned to make you my executioner. Those things I did do.”

Sasuke remembers bodies and a street stained in blood. He remembers the tearing through his mind, and sharp, cruel words that cut more than any blade.

He sets his jaw. “I know. I know you did. I hated you so much for it. I hated you so much I engraved the feeling into my bones.”

Itachi looks up. His eyes are suspiciously wet. Sasuke’s throat burns and he suspects his are wet, too. But he keeps going. He needs—he needs his brother to understand this.

“But I couldn’t keep hating you, Itachi. I couldn’t. I loved you and it was terrible, but hating you was the only thing worse, and I was tired of it. Yes, I was angry—yes, I’m still angry, I suspect I will be angry until I die. But I can love you and still be angry, I can miss you and still be angry, and I can forgive you without excusing what you’ve done.”

Itachi stares, speechless. A tear, clinging stubbornly to his eyelash, slips free and falls.

Sasuke’s chest clenches. He leans forward, wiping away the tear with his thumb. For the second time since he came back—the second time in twelve years—he embraces his brother. He wraps his arms around his shoulders, pulling him close.

“I forgive you,” Sasuke says fiercely.. “I forgive you.”

Hesitantly. Itachi’s arms come up to hug him back. “I don’t deserve it.”

“Probably not. But it’s the choice I’ve made. Deal with it.”

Itachi huffs slightly. He pulls back, tugging gently on the end of Sasuke’s hair. A familiar gesture he used to do when they were children to make him smile. “Well, if I must.”

Sasuke rolls his eyes, batting the hand away. But there’s a warmth in his chest that pulls at his lips.

★

“Are you sure about this?” Sarutobi asks.

“I’m sure,” Kakashi says.

The two of them are standing at Konoha’s gates, and Kakashi us dressed in his usual jounin uniform. The Hokage is in his official robes, his hat shielding his face from the piercing rays of the sun.

“I’ve sent squads after him,” the Sandaime says. “There’s been no trace of him. What makes you think your luck will be any better?”

“I don’t. But he’s my student. I have to try.”

Sarutobi stares at him for a long moment. Finally, he inclines his head. “Very well. I will make sure your other two students are looked after in the meantime. Good luck, Kakashi.”

Kakashi nods in farewell. He turns away, facing the open gates and taking his first steps out of the village. At his hip, a scratched-out hitai-ate is hanging.

I’m coming, Sasuke. Wherever you are… I’ll bring you home.

Chapter Text

Sasuke is dragged awake by the sound of voices. He identifies one of them as his brother’s immediately, by the equal feelings of fear and safety it triggers. The fear settles quickly, barely a fraction of a second, and Sasuke gropes blindly for the blanket to yank it over his head.

“Shut up,” he mutters, eyes squeezed tightly shut and burying himself deeper in the warm cocoon around him. “’m sleeping.”

The voices both stop. For a moment, Sasuke foolishly believes that he’ll be left alone and be allowed to fall back into sleep—but then the comforter is yanked abruptly off him, exposing him to the harsh light of the bedroom.

“Hey! Itachi!”

“Get up. It’s one in the afternoon.”

Sasuke groans. “Get fucked,” he mutters, rubbing at his eyes.

To the right of him, someone snickers. The other person who was speaking. Sasuke’s vision is still too blurry with sleep to see properly, but he recognizes the voice as Kisame’s when the man says, “Damn, Itachi. Your baby brother’s got quite the mouth on him, doesn’t he?”

Itachi sighs.

The former Kiri-nin is sitting on the floor with his legs crossed. The orange polish on his nails glints, wet and freshly painted.

Sasuke looks to his brother sitting on the edge of the bed. He pushes himself up. “What the hell is he doing in here?”

Kisame grins, showing off his sharp teeth. “Good morning to you, too. Or rather, good afternoon. And hey, I can actually see your full face for once! Nice Rinnegan.”

Sasuke’s eyes widen, panic going through him. His hands fly to his face, far too late.

“I can’t believe you were hiding that under your hair this whole time,” Kisame says. “Did you really think no one would notice?”

“I told you so,” Itachi says.

Sasuke fixes his hair back over the purple eye. He transfers his glare from Kisame to his brother. “Shut up.”

“What? I did tell you.”

Sasuke curses him in his head, wondering to himself why the hell he was so desperate to come back here to save him, as he struggles to shake off the last remnants of sleep. He turns to Kisame, fixing him with a hard look.

“If you—”

“Relax,” Kisame says. “I won't tell anyone.”

Sasuke narrows his eyes. He can’t find any sign the man is lying, but he’d be foolish to just take him at his word. “Why did you wake me up?” he asks his brother. He was sleeping soundly for once, without haunting memories invading his head.

Itachi raises an eyebrow. “Did you miss the part where I said it’s one in the afternoon?”

Sasuke scowls. “Seriously,” he says, jerking his chin toward the man on their floor, “what is he doing here, and why do I have to suffer because of it?”

He glares at the older missing-nin, making it clear he’s an unwelcome guest. Kisame just grins, wiggling his newly painted nails at him. “Your brother was just painting my nails for me. We were going to braid each other’s hair next. Did you want to join in?”

Itachi also gives his partner a glare. “I would kill you,” he says, “but you’re not worth the time I’d spend scrubbing the blood off the floor.”

“Ouch. Itachi-san, that’s cold.”

Itachi turns himself toward Sasuke, tucking one of his legs beneath him. “I was just explaining our situation in more detail. I didn’t have a chance before we left on our mission, and Kisame had some questions.”

“Yeah,” Kisame says. “Like how you know any of this.”

Sasuke exchanges a look with Itachi. His brother left out the time travel in the explanation he gave to his partner, which left their knowledge unexplained—not that time travel is an all-too-believable explanation anyway.

“We just do,” Sasuke says. “You don’t want to believe us, that’s fine. We’ll just kill you instead.”

Itachi pinches the bridge of his nose. “Sasuke.”

But Kisame only laughs. “I think I like him, Itachi-san. He’s like you, but with more bite.”

Itachi grows quickly tired of the useless conversation, redirecting it to more pressing matters. “You’re certain about Pain? I know I said we didn’t have to kill all of them, but…”

“No,” Sasuke says. “I’m not sure. But I promised Naruto. I have to try.”

He feels something clench in his chest at the thought of his best friend. He's been trying not to think about him—about any of them. About the fact that they’re gone.

Itachi sighs. “Alright. I trust you.”

Kisame raises an eyebrow. Such sentiment from his cold-hearted partner must seem bizarre.

“What about the others?” he asks. “Sasori? Deidara?”

Itachi scowls at Deidara's name. “Kill him.”

Kisame laughs. “You’re just saying that because he hates you!”

“I am not. He's unpredictable and unreliable. The best course of action is to take him out.”

“Because he hates you.”

“That has nothing—"

There's a sudden knock on the door. Itachi cuts himself off. The knob turns and, as if invoked by the sound of his name, a blonde head pokes through the open door without waiting for permission to enter.

“Deidara,” Itachi says. “What are you doing here?”

Deidara’s gaze pulls from Sasuke to look at Itachi, his expression souring. “Ugh. It’s you.”

“It’s my bedroom. Who were you expecting?”

Kisame snorts. Deidara flushes, his expression twisting in anger as he steps toward Itachi. “You—”

“Did you want something?” Sasuke asks, before a fight can break out. He can't believe he's the one playing mediator here.

Deidara pauses. He turns his nose up at Itachi, before turning to face Sasuke. “Leader-sama sent me to collect you. He wants to speak with you.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Sasuke sees Itachi immediately tense. “What for?”

The blonde turns his glare back on him. “Was I talking to you?”

Itachi's jaw tightens, a spark igniting in his eyes.

Sasuke places a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “It's fine. I'll go.” He stands from the bed.

Sasuke moves to leave. Itachi is faster, catching him at the elbow. Amethyst nails twist into his sleeve. “Sasuke.”

Sasuke meets his eyes. You’re doing it again, he tries to communicate. Let me handle myself.

A silent conversation happens between them. Reluctantly, Itachi releases his arm.

Sasuke follows Deidara out of the bedroom.

★

“Itachi is strange around you,” Deidara says.

Torches on either side of the walls illuminate the hallway as they walk down it. It reminds Sasuke, unsettlingly, of Orochimaru’s hideout—only without the familiar damp coldness of underground. Deidara’s words echo in the long, empty corridor, bouncing off the walls.

Sasuke looks up at him, a necessary action that still annoys the hell out of him. Why does he have to be so fucking short? “What do you mean?” he asks.

He already has an idea what the blonde means before he attempts to explain. “I don’t know. I guess… he’s never seemed alive to me. Never seemed real. I used to doubt there was even a heart behind his ribcage. But when he’s with you… he seems like an actual person.”

Sasuke swallows. He says nothing.

“He cares about you,” Deidara says. “I mean, really cares. It’s surprising how transparent he is about it.”

Transparent isn’t a word Sasuke would ever use to describe his brother. Yet, Deidara is undoubtedly right—looking at Itachi’s recent behavior since Sasuke donned the Akatsuki’s colors, Itachi has been exactly that. Tensing up whenever someone so much as makes a movement in Sasuke’s direction, sticking by his side like a personal guard dog, outright threatening to kill Hidan for going after him with his scythe…

Things have been better between them since the two of them talked. Since Sasuke looked at his brother, blood on his sword from the missing-nin Sasuke couldn’t bring himself to kill—since he saw him stifling his cries in his sleep, the tears in his eyes, and realized quite abruptly, how young Itachi was.

How human.

Perhaps it won’t ever disappear completely—the instinctive need to flinch away when he meets his brother’s eyes. Perhaps a part of Sasuke will always associate Itachi with pain, with anger, with fear, with grief; but there was also a time when he associated him with safety instead, with home, and Sasuke thinks he's starting to get that feeling back.

Truthfully, Sasuke’s forgotten what having an older brother feels like. He’s been without one for longer than he’s had one.

They walk in silence for a few moments. Sasuke attempts not to feel too anxious about what Pain could want from him. Perhaps this will be an opportunity to talk to him.

Though Sasuke has no idea where he would even start. Save Nagato—damn Naruto’s stupid bleeding heart.

“So why are you with Itachi, anyway?” Deidara asks. “Didn’t he, like, murder your entire family?”

“He had his reasons.”

“Still seems fucked up.”

Sasuke raises an eyebrow at him. “What, like you haven’t killed a whole bunch of people?”

“I mean, yeah. But not my own family. I’m not a psychopath.”

Sasuke's eyes snap up, glaring. “My brother is not a psychopath.”

Deidara falters in his steps for a moment, taken aback. He raises his hands. “Alright, alright. Sorry, jeez.”

Sasuke huffs, crossing his arms across his chest. They turn left, out of the long hallway.

“So,” Deidara says casually, after a stretch of silence, “have any embarrassing stories about Itachi?”

Sasuke blinks at the non sequitur. “Huh?”

“Itachi. Embarrassing stories. Come on, you have to have some. Surely he wasn't always so perfect.”

Sasuke stares at Deidara for a moment, deciding whether or not to entertain his childishness. But, well… an opportunity to embarrass Itachi? What kind of younger sibling would he be if he didn't take it?

His lips curl up into a smirk. “Well, there was this one time…”

Deidara bounces on the balls of his feet. “Yes! Tell me.”

“Our parents were out, and he was trying to cook us a meal. He'd never cooked before in his life, but he kept insisting he knew how to do it…"

★

Back in his room, Itachi sneezes rather suddenly.

“You know,” Kisame says, “in my village, they say that when you sneeze it’s because someone’s talking bad about you somewhere.”

Itachi rolls his eyes. “That’s ridiculous.”

★

 Deidara is laughing as they approach the top of the tower, bent slightly at the waist. “Seriously? On fire?”

A smirk pulls at Sasuke’s mouth. “Yeah, seriously.”

“But it was water. How the fuck do you set fire to water?”

“No idea. But he managed it, somehow.”

Deidara cackles in delight. Sasuke is suppressing his own urge to smile, recalling the old memory, as they stop in front of a door. The Uchiha sobers immediately, his back straightening. He can feel Pain’s presence, the man waiting just beyond.

Deidara doesn’t seem to notice Sasuke’s change in demeanor. He’s still laughing as he throws open the door and enters without knocking. “Leader-sama! I brought him to you just like you asked!”

Sasuke tenses the moment his eyes land on the figure across the room—the figure that clearly isn’t Pain. An electric jolt shoots down his spine.

Obito.

“Tobi!” Deidara yells when he catches sight of him. “What the hell are you doing here?!”

The orange-masked man flails around slightly where he’s standing by the room’s large open window. “Pain-sama is occupied! I’m supposed to wait here with Sasuke-kun until he arrives!”

Sasuke’s jaw clenches, at both the familiar honorific and the fake, childish persona. He wants to reach out and rip the mask from the traitor’s face, expose him for the imposter that he truly is. Instead he stays still and quiet, adopting the appropriate expression and keeping his chakra as tightly leashed to him as possible.

Deidara sighs. “Fine. Just be careful not to trip and fall off the tower, you moron.”

“Senpai! So mean!”

The door bangs closed as Deidara exits. Sasuke is left alone with the man who was the catalyst for everything—the man who made coming back here something that was necessary.

 (Naruto's voice attempts to remind him: he was a pawn, too.

But Sasuke doesn't care. Not when his dreams are haunted by war—when he remembers choking on blood and tripping over bodies.

Some people don’t deserve forgiveness.)

Obito's demeanor changes the moment Deidara is gone, dropping the act of the fool immediately. “Sasuke Uchiha. I’ve been meaning to make your acquaintance for quite some time.”

Sasuke raises his chin, playing the role of a thirteen-year-old boy attempting to pretend he isn’t intimidated. “And you are?”

“Why don’t we skip the part of this meeting where you pretend not to know who I am? I know your brother told you about me.”

His voice takes Sasuke back years—a cave lit by a single candle, ropes biting into his skin and Itachi’s blood beneath his fingernails. Sasuke fights not to fall into the memory, the moment his entire life fell off a cliff and smashed into a million tiny pieces at the bottom.

“Madara,” he says, jaw clenched.

Obito takes a moment to observe him. The man’s Sharingan isn’t activated, but Sasuke wonders what his chakra would look like under its inspection. Probably not normal. He’s already worried that Pain, with his sensory abilities, has noticed something off about it.

Obito takes a few steps closer to him. Sasuke doesn’t breathe as he approaches.

“You’re rather unafraid,” Obito notes, “for someone who knows who I am.”

Am I? Sasuke wonders. His heart rate has picked up.

But it’s true. He isn’t afraid. He’s looked the real Madara Uchiha in the eyes—has suffered a sword through the chest at his hand. Obito doesn’t frighten him, and the quickening from his heart is only out of nervousness he’ll be discovered. Not fear.

“You won't kill me,” Sasuke states confidently.

“Oh really? And why is that?”

“Because Itachi would kill you.”

“You think a threat like that scares me?” Obito asks, sounding unimpressed.

Sasuke shrugs. “I think there's a reason you haven’t attacked Konoha yet.”

Obito stares down at him for a long moment. “You’re a sharp one, aren’t you? I can see now why Itachi wanted you spared. But take care to remember who you’re talking to.”

Sasuke bites the inside of his cheek, going quiet. He isn’t scared—but any normal thirteen-year-old would be.

“I thought I was meeting Pain,” he says. “What do you want with me?”

“Itachi disclosed my identity to you,” Obito says. “He didn’t bother to consult me about it first. You can see why I might find that problematic.”

Sasuke shrugs. “Okay, then why don’t you take it up with him?”

“Because I wanted to speak to you.”

Obito takes a step closer. They’re about a foot apart now, and Sasuke has to angle his head up. Sun shines into the room from the open balcony.

“Itachi explained the truth to you about what happened that night. You know of my part in it—and unlike your brother, I wasn’t coerced. Yet, you agree to work beside me?”

Sasuke grits his teeth at the reminder. He wants to drive Chidori through his chest. Fortunately—or unfortunately—he has more self-restraint than that.

“I just want to be with my brother. I don’t really care about anything else. If that means working with you and the rest of the Akatsuki, then that’s fine.”

“And Konoha?” Obito asks. “Your brother made me swear not to harm the village. That’s a vow I’ll need to break eventually, if our goals are to be realized.”

“Itachi is still loyal to Konoha.”

“And his loyalty… you don’t share it?”

Sasuke considers his words carefully. “I respect my brother’s feelings. I won’t go against him. But to me… Konoha is the reason my clan is dead. Burn it to the ground if you want. I don’t care.”

Obito settles a hand on his shoulder. “Good. I was hoping you would see it that way.”

★

Sasuke’s on his way back to Itachi’s room when he runs into Konan. He’s so absorbed in his thoughts that he nearly walks right into her.

“Sasuke-kun! I’m sorry.”

Sasuke steadies himself. “It’s okay. It’s my fault.”

Konan smiles at him kindly. Though she was walking in the direction opposite of him, she does a one-eighty and falls into step beside him as he walks down the hall. Sasuke frowns slightly, looking up at her and asking, “You weren’t going to go do something?”

“It can wait a few moments. I heard you got back from your first mission a couple days ago. How did it go?”

Sasuke grimaces slightly as he recalls it. The young girl, eyes the same exact shade of green as Sakura’s. Itachi stepping forward and taking the sword from his hand, once again taking the burden upon himself.

Konan reads his expression. She places a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. It gets easier with time.”

“It wasn’t my first kill,” Sasuke says. “I’m a shinobi. I’ve—I have blood on my hands. I have for years.”

Konan looks sad, but not surprised. “No one should be forced into such a thing so young. But even now that the war has ended, it’s still happening. Children are still being forced to pick up swords, are still being taught how to kill, from the moment they learn how to walk.”

Sasuke looks up at her. She was one of the few who voted against him joining the Akatsuki. Too young, she claimed.

“Is that why you’re doing this?” he asks. “Trying to bring about peace?”

“That’s Pain's goal. Once the entire world is united beneath the same pain, the same hurt, peace can finally be truly achieved.”

That’s stupid, Sasuke thinks. He bites his tongue to hold back the words. He doesn’t exactly have room to talk, after all—he once tried to become a dictator to unite the world under their hatred for him.

(In his defense, it had been his brother’s idea first.)

“Isn’t that just more pain, though?” Sasuke asks. “More suffering?”

Konan pauses slightly to look down on him. “Yes,” she says. “But it’s a necessary suffering. This shinobi system—this world—is cruel. They must be made to understand that.”

Sasuke frowns. “By inflicting the same pain on them?”

Her face becomes slightly troubled. “That isn't—they killed my family. I know it’s difficult to understand—"

“I understand,” Sasuke says. “They killed my family, too.”

Konan goes quiet for a moment. Her expression softens. “It’s different. You still have someone.”

Sasuke thinks of Itachi, pressing their foreheads together. I will love you always. He thinks of Nagato.

“So do you,” he tells her.

★

In a sequence of events that Itachi never would have predicted, Sasuke and Deidara have been spending a lot of time together. Their favorite pastime, during these frequent hang-outs? Making fun of Itachi.

Itachi doesn’t appreciate this newfound friendship at all.

“Wait, wait. He did what?”

“Kicked her right off the dock and into the water. Then it turned out she couldn’t swim, and her father accused Itachi of trying to kill her.”

Deidara descends into laughter. Sasuke reaches forward to pluck a fry off of the plate in front of him, a smirk on his lips.

Itachi is glowering at them both from his stool. The three of them are sitting in one of the kitchens on the base, and Itachi’s one more embarrassing story away from murdering his brother.

“Seriously,” Deidara says, still laughing. “She tries to kiss you, and you throw her in a fucking lake?”

Itachi grits his teeth, fighting off a blush. “I thought she was attacking me. Sasuke, shut up.”

“To be fair,” Sasuke says with a shrug, “it honestly did look like she was attacking him. She sort of pounced on his face. It was disturbing.”

Deidara chokes on more laughter. He attempts to steal a couple fries off Sasuke’s plate. Sasuke slaps his fingers away. “That’s—That’s hilarious,” the blonde says. “Clan Killer Itachi, killer of men, women, and children. But can’t handle a preteen girl with a crush—”

Itachi flings a kunai at Deidara’s face. The younger man ducks with a startled yelp, the blade imbedding itself deep within the wall.

★

“Stop with the childhood stories,” Itachi says with a scowl, later that evening back in their room.

His brother looks up from the pages of the book Itachi lent him. “Why?” he asks with a smirk. “Am I ruining your fearsome reputation?”

“Yes.” Sasuke has the nerve to laugh at him, and Itachi glares. “I’m serious.”

“Fine,” says Sasuke. “Switch eyes with me and I’ll consider it.”

Itachi clenches his jaw. For the past several weeks, Sasuke has been intensely harping on him about this subject. Undeterred by Itachi’s continued refusals to entertain the subject.

“I already told you. I’m not taking your eyes,” Itachi tells him. “My own eyes are fine.”

“They’re not. You’re going blind.”

“They’re fine for now. They’ll last.”

“Not if we’re fighting the Akatsuki.”

Itachi sighs. He reaches over, stealing the book from Sasuke’s lap to make the boy look at him. “I can’t take your eyes. What about your Rinnegan? You’re going to need that, and I certainly can’t be seen with it.”

“Fine,” Sasuke says, “then we can switch the right one only. You have Shisui’s eye, don’t you? You can use his—”

“No.”

The word comes out immediately, like stone. Itachi feels nauseous.

Sasuke frowns. “Itachi…”

Itachi recalls five years ago, his best friend unflinchingly pulling his own eye out on that cliff. Blood slipping between his fingers as he offered it to Itachi. You’re the only one I can trust. Protect the village… Protect our home.

“No,” Itachi repeats, a metallic taste in the back of his throat. “Just… no.”

Sasuke looks frustrated, crossing his arms across his chest. “Oh, I see. So you’re fine putting it inside a crow, and then putting that crow inside my best friend’s mouth. But your own eye socket, that’s where you draw the line?”

Itachi blinks. “Inside—what?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

Itachi stares at him. Clearly his brother is speaking of something that happened in his future—but seriously, what the hell?

“So what’s our next move?” Itachi asks.

Sasuke raises an eyebrow. “You’re asking me?”

“You’re the one who planned this, aren’t you? And you told me to stop treating you like you couldn’t handle yourself.”

“Well, yeah.” Sasuke reaches over and snatches the book back. “I’m just surprised you decided to actually listen.”

Itachi grimaces. It’s one of the hardest things he’s ever done—agreeing to let his brother handle S-Rank criminals. Yes, he’s nineteen years old—but he looks like a child, so Itachi can hardly be blamed for seeing him as one.

He's twelve. And to Itachi, he seems so utterly breakable.

(Itachi remembers breaking him himself—remembers tear-stained cheeks and his body crumpling to the ground—

He clings to the words Sasuke spoke to him. I forgive you.)

“I’ll talk to Konan soon,” Sasuke says. “Try to see if we can get her and Pain on our side. If not… we'll have to move on to plan B.”

“Which is?”

“Kill everyone.”

Itachi sighs. “Lovely.”

★

The next day, Itachi and Kisame are given a mission assignment. Sasuke can tell by his brother’s expression how much he abhors the idea of leaving him behind.

“Go,” Sasuke tells him. “I can survive by myself for a few days.”

“Yeah,” Kisame says, knocking his shoulder against his partner's. “New mission, Itachi! Let’s go. I haven’t killed anyone in… god, way too long.”

Itachi ignores him. “Be careful, okay?”

Sasuke rolls his eyes. “Yes, Mom.”

Itachi scowls. “You’re not funny. Seriously, stay out of trouble. Don’t try and talk to Konan—not until I get back.”

Sasuke frowns. “But—”

“Not until I get back.”

“Fine! Gods.”

“Promise?”

“Yes! I promise—just go.”

Itachi hesitates for a moment, like he wants to hug him or ruffle his hair. He settles for poking him in the forehead.

“Ow!” Sasuke stumbles back a step, glaring. “Asshole.”

Kisame laughs.

★

Kakashi’s search for Sasuke begins the last place he was seen—Otogakure, in one of Orochimaru’s numerous hideouts. The place where Sasuke supposedly killed him.

Kakashi doesn’t believe it. Whoever Jiraiya got his information from, they must have seen wrong.

He isn’t dismissing the possibility that Orochimaru really is dead. The Sound Village has become a power vacuum, factions fighting for leadership and control. So clearly Orochimaru is gone—and his death seems very likely.

But Sasuke didn’t kill him—there’s no way. A twelve-year-old genin, against one of the Sannin?

(Why?)

Kakashi finds no body in Orochimaru’s hideout. No sign that his missing student has ever been there. But he does find something—a bespectacled young man buried deep in his master's work.

Kakashi takes him by surprise. In a matter of seconds, he has the shinobi on his back, arm twisted with a foot pushing down on his chest..

The boy’s eyes widen slightly. “Copy Ninja.”

“It’s always an honor to be recognized.” Kakashi feels a flash of surprise when he sees the Leaf headband around the boy's head. He increases the pressure on his chest. “You’re from Konoha. What are you doing here?”

Even as he asks the question, his mind puts the pieces together. Of course Orochimaru has spies in Konoha—isn’t that what Anko once was?

“Your name,” Kakashi says, when the shinobi doesn’t answer. “What is it?”

Brief hesitation. Then: “Kabuto Yakushi.”

“Orochimaru was your master.”

A flash of irritation—was it because of the word master or the use of past tense?

“I have many masters,” Kabuto says.

Kakashi narrows his eyes. The way he speaks, his specific body language when under threat—Kakashi is getting a strong vibe of ANBU from him. There’s no tattoo on his shoulder, though.

“You were here,” he says, “when Orochimaru was killed. You saw what happened. Tell me everything.”

Kabuto glares at him from behind his glasses, the frames glinting. “Why would I do that? What’s in it for me?”

The foot on his chest presses down harder. Something cracks, and Kabuto cries out. Kakashi's gaze is dark as he looks down on him.

“You get to live.”

★

Before Itachi left on his mission, Sasuke told him that he wouldn’t speak to Konan until he returned. He promised.

Itachi has broken hundreds of promises in the past. Sasuke doesn’t feel guilty for breaking this one.

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” Konan asks. “Everything you’re claiming—it makes no sense. It’s ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous,” Sasuke agrees. “That’s why it has to be true. Why would I ever make something like this up, let alone expect anyone to believe it?”

They’re sitting at a table in one of the many empty rooms in the tower. Sasuke’s bangs are pushed out of his face, baring his Rinnegan. Konan’s gaze keeps flickering to it, and there’s a subtle tremble to her hand against the surface of the table.

Sasuke has just finished telling her everything. Unsurprisingly, she’s skeptical.

“Itachi believes me,” Sasuke says, in response to her clear disbelief.

Konan shakes her head. “Itachi is blinded when it comes to you.”

“Maybe. But his mind is as sharp as it’s ever been—and he believes me. That must count for something.”

There’s a subtle shift in Konan’s expression, and Sasuke knows that it does. It has to. Konan knows how brilliant his brother is—they’ve played shogi several times throughout the years, and she hasn’t won a single match against him. Not even when he was only thirteen.

(Sasuke still hasn’t beaten him either—though the matches keep getting progressively longer.)

Konan’s lips press into a thin line as she contemplates everything he just told her—time travel, the Infinite Tsukuyomi, the rabbit goddess whose endgame is to drain their planet of all its chakra. Nagato, just a pawn for Obito Uchiha—who in turn is a pawn to Madara, who is a pawn to Zetsu.

All of their plans—never really theirs at all. They are all chess pieces to be used and discarded. No different from Yahiko—no different from Itachi, from Sasuke’s entire clan.

“How am I meant to trust what you’re saying?” Konan asks. “You have no proof of anything. You can’t expect me to just take everything you’re saying at face value. I’m not a fool.”

“No,” Sasuke agrees, “you’re not. You’re right—I have no proof. I could show you my memories, like I did with Itachi, but it’d be a genjutsu, so it could easily be an illusion I’ve crafted. It’s your choice whether to believe me or not. But if you let this happen, Nagato will die—the entire world will die.”

(So maybe Sasuke left out the part where him and Naruto actually defeated Kaguya and saved everyone—sue him. The end of all life on this planet serves as a fantastic motivator.)

Konan watches him. Sasuke feels her amber eyes lingering on his Rinnegan, her thoughts churning.

“I won’t give up our goals,” she says. “I won’t give up Yahiko's dream.”

This wasn’t his dream! Sasuke wants to scream. He knows all about trying to honor someone’s name in a way that’s blatantly wrong—he tried to honor Itachi’s, when in reality he was negating everything he died for, everything he lived for.

But Sasuke isn’t Naruto. For all that he’s come to agree with his best friend about the cycle of hatred, sometimes anger and vengeance still burn in his blood. He can’t be the hand that reaches into the darkness to pull someone out—that darkness is still a part of him and always will be.

So instead, he says, “I’m not asking you to. But you won’t accomplish it this way. Help me stop this—please.”

Sasuke can see her wavering, expression filled with indecision. She doesn’t want to believe him—but she fears what could happen if she doesn’t.

“Why me?” she asks. “Why is my part in this so crucial to you?”

“Because you’re the only one who can convince him.”

★

That night, Sasuke dreams of the war. Blood and bodies beneath his feet, reminiscent of the night of the massacre only so much more. He dreams of the blood-red moon and the Ten-Tails raging and the dirt that streaked his teammates' faces.

He dreams of Madara driving his sword into his heart—the world going dark and the shadow of Death closing around him.

He bolts awake in one of the kitchens, nearly falling from the stool where he fell asleep. His breath is heavy, hands going immediately to his chest as the echo of remembered pain lingers—Kusanagi's blade sliding between his ribs.

“What’s up with you?” Deidara asks.

Sasuke almost doesn’t recognize him. His hair is down from his usual ponytail. It’s soaking wet, the water turning its color a darker blonde. He’s wearing what seems to be an Akatsuki-themed bathrobe.

The sight is so bizarre that Sasuke immediately forgets his distress.

“What the hell are you wearing?”

Deidara crosses his arms across his chest, his face flushing slightly. “This is a judgement-free zone.”

“Since when?”

“Seriously, kid—”

“Not a kid,” Sasuke interrupts.

Deidara rolls his eyes. “Sorry, sorry. But really, what has you waking up screaming like that?”

Sasuke frowns. I was screaming? That’s embarrassing.

“If you woke up to a face like yours, you’d scream too.”

Deidara takes a breath, then slowly lets it out. “You’re provoking me. You’re provoking me to make me angry so you don’t have to answer the question, which is why I’m not going to kill you for saying that.”

“Yeah, and my brother would kill you.”

Deidara gives him an exasperated look. “Is that your go-to response to everything? ‘Touch me and Itachi will kill you'?”

“No,” Sasuke says. “It’s just the one I know will annoy you the most.”

“See! Because you’re deflecting my question!” Deidara leans forward, resting his chin on his folded arms. “Tell me—what were you dreaming about that made you so terrified?”

Sasuke shrugs. “Why do you want to know? You almost sound concerned.”

“Well, yeah. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Sasuke stops, blinking. He’d spoken the words in jest, expecting the blonde to take immediate offense at the suggestion that he was showing any sort of care. He certainly wasn’t expecting that genuine response.

Friends? He’d grown closer to Deidara these last couple weeks, commiserating over their shared frustration with Itachi. But friends? Sasuke can’t say he ever considered Deidara anything of the sort—nor had it occurred to him that Deidara would consider him one.

Sasuke looks at the missing-nin in front of him. He’s young. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. He didn’t seem so young back when they fought each other.

(But neither had Itachi.)

“Yeah,” Sasuke says quietly. “We’re friends.”

“Then you can tell me what’s up.”

The time-traveler looks into the teenager's eyes. It’s a reckless decision, one his brother will hate, and yet…

“You really want to know?”

Deidara rolls his eyes. “Duh. Would I waste time trying to pry it out of you if I didn’t?”

Sasuke hesitates briefly, prays he isn’t fucking everything up, then says, “Alright. I’ll tell you.”

★

Sasuke doesn’t know if his decision to tell Deidara is the correct one. Itachi said it himself, he's unpredictable. A loose cannon. Loose cannons can’t be relied upon.

But they can be used, when carefully guided to point in the right direction.

He doesn’t tell Deidara about the time travel. That’s an unneeded complication. He tells him exactly what Itachi told Kisame. That the man behind the Akatsuki is actually Obito Uchiha. That Zetsu is using them all, has orchestrated all of this—to return Kaguya to this plane of existence and end all life on this planet.

Deidara shakes his head as if clearing cobwebs from his brain. He’s standing up now, pacing across the kitchen floor.

“So that good-for-nothing lunatic Tobi… is actually the leader of the Akatsuki? No way, un. He’s such a coward. Once, I saw him hide from his own shadow.”

“It’s a disguise. A good one. He’s the one pulling the strings—or rather, he fully believes he is.”

“But it’s actually Zetsu? Trying to bring back this ancient lady named Kaguya?”

“Yes,” Sasuke says. “I have to stop that from happening. Will you help?”

Deidara’s eyebrows furrow as he thinks. “And if I do… you said the rest of the Akatsuki has to be taken out, too?”

“Some of them.”

“Great! I've been wanting to blow up these assholes for years! Dibs on Itachi—”

“Not my brother.”

“You’re no fun.”

★

Konan seeks him out that night, cloaked in shadow.

“I’m in,” she says. “I’ll help you.”

“And Pain?” Sasuke asks.

Her jaw clenches. “Give me more time.”

★

A huge part of how Sasuke decides to play this will depend on Pain—is he with them or against them? It’s a delicate situation, trying to nudge him over to their side without revealing their plans yet, just in case he chooses to oppose them. Sasuke tries to give Konan time, but he grows more and more anxious by the day.

Killing him would be less of a risk. But then Konan would turn against them.

(And Naruto’s request still rings in his head: Save Nagato.)

He finds himself longing for Itachi to return. He isn’t a child, needing his older brother’s reassurance for the actions he takes. But it would be comforting to have someone to talk things over with—someone he trusts.

When did he start trusting Itachi again? He isn’t sure. He just knows that he does now.

Sasuke is sitting at one of the dining room tables, scribbling down in a notebook as he tries to work out a strategy for taking down Obito (and possibly Pain, if need be), when he hears the loud sound of an explosion.

At first, it barely makes him blink. Deidara is always making things explode. After a month in the organization, Sasuke has grown used to the frequent sounds of his bombs going off at regular intervals.

But this is different. There seems to be an actual fight going on, more intense than the usual ones that often break out between members. A feeling swells up in the air—killing intent.

Sasuke is quickly out of his seat and moving toward the feeling, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sasuke demands, when he reaches the room where the noise is coming from. Deidara is battling with Hidan—and it’s not just a mock-fight, either. Both of them are already bloody. They seem to be fighting to the death.

Deidara nearly avoids Hidan’s scythe decapitating him. “You said to kill them!”

“Not now!” Sasuke yells. “Not without a plan!”

“This is a plan!”

Sasuke feels a flutter of panic fill him. With the killing intent both criminals are emitting, there’s no way they won’t draw all the others in their tower straight to their location.

“So you’re in on this, too?” Hidan asks. He grins widely, avoiding a small explosion from a clay bomb. “How fun! I’ll sacrifice you to Jashin-sama, too!”

“Idiot,” Sasuke mutters. At which of them, he isn’t sure.

Sasuke rushes forward, into the room and between their battle. He shoves his bangs back from his eye, power surging, and a portal opens in the air between them.

Deidara’s jaw goes slack. “Holy shit. What the—”

Sasuke grabs Deidara’s cloak and yanks him forward. They collide into Hidan, and the three of them go toppling through the portal.

★

Sasuke catches himself half a second before face-planting. Deidara isn’t so lucky; he gets a mouth full of snow as he crashes.

“What the fuck!” he yells, pushing himself back up and sputtering. He blinks as he takes notice of his surroundings. “Did you just teleport us? Where the hell is this, the Land of Snow?”

“Not quite,” Sasuke says.

“’Not quite'?”

“It’s a different world.”

“Different world? What are you even—what is this? Your eye was—”

With a sigh, Sasuke briefly pushes aside his bangs to expose his purple eye. “The Rinnegan. Like what Pain has.”

For a long moment, Deidara stares at it, a dumbstruck expression on his face.

“What the fuck,” he repeats, quieter this time. “You were hiding that under your hair the whole time? And none of us noticed? That’s—so incredibly stupid I can’t even—”

Sasuke scowls. “It worked, didn’t it? No one’s noticed it.” He drops his bangs back over the eye. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter now. I can’t believe you went after Hidan like—”

“You told me you were going to!”

“Not like this! You’re going to get us all killed if you just—”

Sasuke cuts himself off, barely glimpsing the swing of Hidan’s scythe in time to shove Deidara out of the way. Hidan grins at them, swinging the weapon around carelessly.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” he says, “but it seems like you’re working with Deidara on this one, Sasuke-chan. Trying to kill me? You have no sense of danger.”

He takes a swing at Sasuke. The Susano’o flares up in front of him—just a couple ribs, but still enough to shield him and deflect the attack.

“Are you forgetting what happened the last time we fought?” Sasuke asks. “I think you’ll find that you’re the one with no sense of danger.”

Hidan bares his teeth. “Then bring it, kid. Your blood will be delicious. A sacrifice to Jashin-sama!”

Deidara rolls his eyes. “Oh, would you shut up?”

The battle begins in earnest. Hidan doesn’t seem to care about their reasons for attacking him—he’s just happy for the opportunity to shed some blood. Sasuke would really like to not be fighting him right now—but it’s too late now, since Deidara apparently decided to wake up that morning and choose violence. All he can do is try to make his best of the situation.

Deidara summons his large clay beast—the one he used (will use) in his battle with Sasuke. He takes advantage of the open air, flying up high above them while Sasuke fends off Hidan’s attacks on the ground.

“Move!” Deidara shouts down at them, after over five minutes of trying to find an opening.

Sasuke recognizes what he’s trying to do immediately. He leaps away, out of range, as Deidara throws one of his bombs. As an extra precaution, he surrounds himself with the Susano’o to protect himself from the blast wave.

Hidan is consumed by a large explosion, smoke and wild flames rising into the air. But Sasuke isn’t foolish enough to believe him to be dead. He stands, waiting for the blast to fade and the air to clear.

Hidan comes rushing out of the smoke with a crazed war cry. His eyes are gleaming maniacally, a wide grin stretching his face. He leaps high into the air, swinging his scythe as he comes down.

He isn’t singed at all. From above, Deidara scowls in irritation. “Not fair! He’s completely unaffected by my art!”

Sasuke rolls his eyes. “What do you expect? You know his powers!”

“It should’ve at least burnt up his clothes! His powers don’t apply to them, un!”

Sasuke catches Hidan’s ankle as he lunges for him, tossing him behind him. He would’ve rather swung him around and thrown him back to Deidara, but unfortunately, this young body doesn’t possess that type of strength.

“So you’re saying you wanted him naked? I wasn’t aware he was your type.”

“Brat! You know that’s not what I meant!”

Sasuke uses a shunshin to appear in front of Hidan as he’s still flying through the air. Helped by his momentum, Sasuke doesn’t have to put much strength behind it as he kicks Hidan into the air.

“Deidara!” he yells.

Deidara reads his intention easily. His giant beast swoops forward, so he’s right above Hidan as the man flies at him.

“Jashin-sama!” Hidan exclaims. “This is for you!”

Sasuke’s Rinnegan locks on Deidara. And suddenly, he and the blonde have shifted spaces. Deidara is on the snowy ground, while Sasuke is standing on his flying clay bomb.

Sasuke steps around Hidan’s scythe as it swings at him. He grabs it by the handle, twisting it. The blade slices through Hidan’s shoulder, severing his arm.

“Sasuke!” Deidara yells from the ground. “What the fuck was that! How am I on the ground n—aaahhh!”

He cuts himself off with a scream as Hidan’s severed arm lands at his feet.

“Hey!" he yells. “Watch it! That thing almost hit me!”

Hidan lands on the ground a second later. Up in the air, Sasuke can’t see his expression. Blood is soaking into the snow at his feet.

“Deidara,” Hidan says. “I don’t know why you’re trying to kill me… but if it means providing more sacrifices for Jashin-sama, then I don’t really care why! So long as I get to spill your blood in this snow!”

“Tsk!” Deidara leaps back, dodging Hidan’s scythe as he swings it around. “Crazy bastard. The only blood staining the snow is yours!”

“For nooow! But how ‘bout we mix all our bloods together and make a pretty, pretty picture!”

“Pass. Not the type of art I’m into—oh, that’s disgusting!"

Hidan's arm is attempting to crawl back to him, to reattach to his body. Hidan grins, leaning down and picking it up to reattach it.

He lashes out unexpectedly. Deidara yelps, leaping away, but the scythe still slices him slightly across his chest.

Sharingan activated, Sasuke swoops down from the sky. He leaps from the clay bird, landing by Deidara and stepping in front of him.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, he only—” Deidara frowns when he notices his position. “Hey! What are you doing? I don’t need a thirteen-year-old kid shielding me!”

He pushes Sasuke aside with an irritated look.

Hidan lifts his scythe to his mouth and licks Deidara’s blood of the blade. He makes a face. “Too tangy. Not as good as the Uchiha’s blood. But I suppose you’ll still do.”

“Hey! What do you mean ‘not as good’? Take that back!”

Sasuke shakes his head. “That’s what you take issue with?”

Hidan begins drawing something in the snow at his feet with his blood—the same type of symbol as before, when Sasuke fought him when he first arrived.

“Aw shit,” Deidara says. “Not that! Don’t let him—”

Sasuke summons a pair of giant shuriken from the seals carved into his wristbands, sending them flying. Hidan ducks them, but Sasuke yanks them back with the thin wires connected to them. He forms a single handsign, sending lightning crackling down the wires.

He pulls. The shuriken reverse, the lightning current shooting through Hidan’s nerves and holding him in place. He’s impaled at the knees, one of his legs completely sliced through while the other remains, twisted and bone sticking out.

He falls immediately to the ground, soaking the snow in blood. His weapon slips from his fingers.

“You fucking brat!” Hidan screams. “You think this will kill me?! I’m immortal!”

Deidara tilts his head to the side, staring at the man’s collapsed form. “Wow. You’re kind of pathetic, aren’t you?”

Sasuke frowns. His Sharingan activates, the shape twisting. “Amaterasu.”

Deidara winces. Recognizing the black flames, he backs up a few steps.

Hidan begins screaming—sharp, bloodcurdling screams that remind Sasuke of being trapped in the Tsukuyomi. He fights back his discomfort, turning around.

“Come on. Let’s go before someone gets suspicious—assuming you haven’t already ruined everything, of course.”

Deidara scowls as Sasuke opens the portal. “Hey! I got rid of Hidan, this is a win for us!”

“You barely even did anything—”

There’s a hoarse cry from behind them. A misshapen shape leaps at Deidara—it’s Hidan, horribly charred, skin peeling back from his bones. He’s still on fire, and Deidara shrieks as hands grab onto him.

Sasuke immediately extinguishes Amaterasu before the black flames can touch Deidara.

“What the fuck!” Deidara screams—in a panic as he tries to shake him off. “Sasuke—!”

Sasuke grabs Hidan's scythe off the snowy ground, swinging it as he launches himself forward. Hidan’s head goes flying from his shoulders, blood spraying Deidara’s face. They land painfully on the stone floor, and the portal closes behind them.

“Ugh!” Deidara jumps to his feet. “Look what you did! There’s blood in my mouth!”

Sasuke rolls his eyes. “You’re welcome.”

As Deidara wipes the blood off himself with his cloak, Sasuke immediately focuses on the body at his feet. Blood is gushing from Hidan's legless and headless torso, and already Sasuke can see bone and tendon and muscle regrowing.

Sasuke steps on the intestines leaking from the stomach to stop them from regenerating. He reaches down and picks up Hidan’s head by the hair.

“Well,” Deidara says, still trying to catch his breath. “That was fun. Same time next Tuesday? Assuming we’re not dead by then, of course.”

Sasuke ignores him, pulling a kunai from his cloak. “I need to cut up his body before he regenerates. Then I’ll scatter the pieces through different portals. Here. Hold this.”

Sasuke tosses the severed head at Deidara as he kneels down by the body. He sets to work immediately, cutting through skin and muscle and bone.

Deidara catches the head on instinct, letting out a girly shriek. “Gross, gross! I don’t fucking want this! Take it back, un!”

Sasuke sighs. He offers the kunai to Deidara. “Fine. You cut up the body, then.”

“Fuck that! No way!”

“Then hold the head, stand there, and shut up.”

“Oi—!”

The door opens. Both of them freeze. Sasuke, in the process of sawing Hidan's arm off at the elbow, feels panic surge through him—but the person standing in the doorway is his brother.

“Sasuke?”

Itachi stares at the scene in front of him with wide eyes—his little brother cutting up a body with a dull kunai, Deidara covered in blood and holding up a severed head by the hair.

“What the hell are you two doing?”

“Not disposing of a dead body,” says Deidara.

Itachi sighs. He lifts his eyes heavenward, as if asking the gods why me?

Sasuke smiles. “Welcome back, Nii-san.”

★

“What were you thinking?”

Sasuke sighs as he enters the bedroom. He leans against the far wall, crossing his arms. “Missed you, too.”

“Don’t give me that,” Itachi says. “Sasuke, what the hell? I told you to stay out of trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble.”

“You killed Hidan.”

“I know. I was there.”

Itachi makes a quiet noise of frustration. He walks further into the room, sinking down onto the bed. He drops his head into his hands.

Sasuke sobers slightly upon seeing how weary his brother looks. His careless air becomes serious, and he walks over to sink down onto the mattress next to him.

“I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

Itachi sighs. After a moment, he lifts his head. “I’m fine. You just—Take this more seriously. I know we agreed we would take Hidan out, but we can’t afford to draw Obito’s attention. If he finds out—”

“He won’t,” Sasuke assures him. “The body’s gone. And he won’t suspect me—as far as he’s aware, I’m a thirteen-year-old kid. Not much of a match for anyone here.”

Itachi narrows his eyes. “Don’t underestimate him.”

Sasuke remembers a field of corpses—a blood-red moon covering the world.

“Trust me. I don’t.”

There’s an indecipherable look in Itachi’s eyes. He looks at Sasuke like that sometimes—like he doesn’t recognize the person he's looking at, and he’s trying to reconcile him with the little brother he knows.

Sasuke knows, most of the time, his brother looks at him and sees a thirteen-year-old—but there are small moments like this where it seems to strike him again that he’s not.

“You told Deidara about what we're doing,” Itachi says. “We never agreed to that.”

Sasuke shrugs. “I didn’t really plan it. But I saw an opportunity, so I took it.”

“You trust him?”

“I don’t trust anyone,” Sasuke says on reflex. Then he thinks of Naruto and Sakura—gone now, they’re gone—and he amends, “Well, most people. But he’ll help us.”

“It’s a risk.”

“This entire thing is a risk, Itachi.”

Itachi exhales quietly. “That we can agree on. Just… next time you’re going to do something like this, wait until I’m around? I know you’re not a child. I know you can handle yourself. But we agreed to do this together. You can’t keep going off on your own if you want us on the same page.”

Sasuke’s mouth tightens. “Fine.” He stands up from the bed to leave the room. Before he does, he turns back to look at his brother again. “By the way, I talked with Konan while you were gone. She’s on our side now, too.”

“You what?”

★

Itachi decides they all need to meet up—the five of them that now know the truth and are working toward saving this world. They should all be on the same page.

“Are you sure no one will find us here?” Kisame asks. “If Obito or Pain know we’ve met up like this—”

“I would sense the moment either of them came near,” Konan says. “I can sense them now—they’re both on the complete other side of the tower.”

“And Zetsu?” Itachi asks. “He’s the real mastermind behind all of this. You can’t sense him.”

The five of them—Sasuke, Itachi, Kisame, Konan, and Deidara—are sitting around a table in one of the Akatsuki’s numerous rooms. Out of those five, only Itachi knows the full truth. Kisame and Deidara remain unaware of the time travel. Konan knows about it, but she also believes that Kaguya won—that Sasuke’s time-traveling was a last ditch attempt to save a dying world.

“It’s true I can’t sense him,” Konan agrees. “But no one can. There’s nothing we can do but take the risk.”

Itachi looks troubled by this. Sasuke places a hand on his arm.

“How's it going with Pain?” he asks. “Do you think he's any closer to agreeing to help us?”

Deidara chokes. “Leader-sama knows?! How are we not all dead?!”

Konan gives him a calming look. “No. He doesn’t know. I’ve just been suggesting to him lately that perhaps Madara—Obito—isn’t sharing all his plans with him. I’m hoping he’ll come to realize he’s being used as a pawn. If he does, I’m convinced he’ll help. But he has to figure it out for himself first.”

Deidara relaxes. “Thank the gods.”

The purple-haired woman narrows her eyes at him. “I think the more pressing concern right now is what happened to Hidan. Deidara… what did you do?”

Deidara immediately points his finger at the chair next to him. “Sasuke killed him, not me!”

Kisame chokes on his drink. “You killed—Itachi, you didn’t tell me your little brother killed—”

“Sasuke only did that because Deidara forced his hand,” Itachi says, ignoring his partner to focus on Konan. He shoots Deidara an irritated look. “If Deidara hadn’t attacked him so impulsively—”

“He’s dead!” Deidara yells, leaning over Sasuke to glare at his brother. “This is good thing! You’re always trying to start shit with me for no reason!”

“No reason? You nearly got my brother killed. You attacked Hidan like a child throwing a tantrum, and he had to swoop in and clean up your mess—”

“Fuck you, asshole! And what have you been doing? Just sitting around acting all superior—”

Sasuke sees Itachi’s eyes darken, his hand clench slightly on the table. Sasuke tightens the hand on his arm, giving him a subtle look. Please don’t.

Itachi relaxes slightly, though his expression remains angry to those who know him well enough to be able to read him.

“Enough,” Konan says, raising her hand. “I believe I get the picture. Thank you, Sasuke-kun, for containing the situation before it could get out of hand.”

Deidara squawks indignantly. “Ane-san!”

Konan pins him with a look reminiscent of a disappointed mother or elder sister. The blonde quiets immediately.

“How did you do it?” Kisame asks eagerly, leaning across the table.

Sasuke frowns. “Do what?”

“Kill one half of the Zombie Duo! It must have been—”

“It’s not important,” Itachi says. Kisame rolls his eyes as he’s once again cut off. “Can we focus on the matter at hand? Deidara has rapidly accelerated the time we have to act. As soon as it’s known that Hidan is missing—”

“Kakuzu’s killed plenty of his partners. Couldn’t it just be assumed that he killed him?”

Itachi shakes his head. “Unlikely. The reason Hidan and Kakuzu could work so well as a team is because neither of them had to worry about accidentally killing the other in a fight. They might not have liked each other much, but they respected each other’s abilities. Kakuzu won’t be happy about this.”

Kisame shrugs. “It’s not like all of us live here full-time. Hidan fucks off on a regular basis. Sometimes he’ll be gone for up to a month. It shouldn’t be too strange that he’s gone—not yet.”

“Still,” Itachi says. “It’s a smaller time frame than I was hoping for.”

Konan sighs. “We’ll make it work.”

“We have to,” Sasuke says.

★

The first half of August passes. There’s no word of an attack on Konoha. No one in the Akatsuki is sent after Naruto.

The Third Hokage lives.

Sasuke sits in their bedroom on the bed, considering this. He’s no longer the type of person who believes the right thing to do is to kill the Sandaime—but he does believe that the man needs to be removed from his position. He’s ineffective as a leader.

“What’s on your mind?” Itachi asks, catching sight of his brother’s troubled face.

“The Sandaime.”

Itachi frowns slightly. “What about him?”

Sasuke looks at him hesitantly. When it comes to the village—more specifically, the people leading the village—he knows his and his brother’s views don’t quite align.

They haven’t talked about it at all. Sasuke hasn’t wanted to. It’s a complex issue, with so many layers to it, and they have a war to stop. Later, there would be time to dissect Itachi’s belief system—to try and explain to him why his blind loyalty, indoctrinated into him at such a young age, is wrong.

Later—after the threat is dealt with and Sasuke can be sure Itachi will live.

“He was supposed to die,” Sasuke says. “In an invasion orchestrated by Orochimaru. Since I killed him, that didn’t happen.”

Itachi frowns. There’s a book in his lap—The Mask of Command, which seems to be a philosophical commentary on wartime leadership. It looks incredibly boring.

“Isn’t that a good thing? He isn’t dead—”

“But he was supposed to be. Tsunade was supposed to take his place.”

Itachi raises an eyebrow. “Then doesn’t that mean I’m supposed to die as well? This is the whole reason you traveled back—to change things.”

“Yes, but… only certain things. Some things are better happening the way they were meant to.”

“You think the Sandaime dying is for the better?”

There’s a hint of sharpness in Itachi’s voice. Not anger, but enough of a shift in tone to show he’s upset. Sasuke thinks carefully about how to proceed, to explain in a way that won’t start an argument about a bigger issue.

“I don’t think he deserves to die. But he shouldn’t be leader of the village.”

Itachi exhales quietly. “I know what this is about. But what happened to the clan—he did the best he could. It was unavoidable.”

“It wasn't. You know it wasn’t. That’s just something you tell yourself to justify it.”

Itachi doesn’t say anything.

“He let Danzo live,” Sasuke says. “He let him stay in power. He wasn’t capable of making decisions himself, so he left them to Danzo, and the entire village suffered for it. It was dragged into darkness.”

Itachi’s jaw clenches. “You know I hate Danzo. I would’ve killed him myself if I could have—if it wouldn’t have just exacerbated the situation. But there’s a reason the Sandaime allows him to keep his position. Konoha needs—"

“He has a left arm full of Sharingan.”

Itachi’s head snaps up. “He what?”

“His arm,” Sasuke tells him. “It’s full of Sharingan. From their corpses. He desecrated them. Bloodline theft like that calls for death at least three times over, not even counting Shisui’s eye—yet the Third does nothing.”

Itachi doesn’t speak. His emotions are hidden away, but Sasuke can read his anger through the tight grip his fingers have on his book. His knuckles are white.

He doesn’t say anything else. He can see the way his brother’s thoughts are circling around, tripping over each other as he struggles with how he should feel. Sasuke waits for him.

“Fine,” he says finally.

Sasuke blinks. “Really?” That was quicker than he expected.

Itachi shakes his head. “Hold on. I’m not agreeing to anything like ousting the Hokage from power. But after this is done, I’ll agree to going to find Tsunade. We can see where it goes from there.”

Sasuke nods. “That’s fine. Thank you.”

“She’s been out of the village for years. Would you even know where to begin looking for her?”

“We’ll find her—it was originally Naruto and Jiraiya that found her and dragged her back. I know where she is.” And this time, there will be no Orochimaru to interfere.

“Naruto.” Itachi speaks the name with the same strange familiarity he did back then (or rather, will in the future?). “The Nine-Tails jinchuuriki. I saw him in your memories a couple of times… the two of you are good friends?”

Sasuke’s heart twists painfully. “We were. He helped send me back here.”

He thinks, for the hundredth time since arriving here, of that last moment he saw his best friend. Of the last time he saw Sakura, her arms wrapping around him. The smell of her shampoo.

Those people are gone now. Sasuke thinks of the younger versions back in Konoha right now. How have they reacted to Sasuke’s sudden disappearance? Is Naruto demanding they search for him, with the same determined zeal as before—or did he leave them behind too soon this time?

Sasuke bites the inside of his mouth. He shoves down on the grief rising in his chest.

“Tell me about them,” Itachi says.

Sasuke frowns, pulled from his thoughts. “What?”

“Your friends.”

Sasuke’s jaw clenches. “It doesn’t matter. They don’t exist anymore. They never existed—not here, not now.”

“They existed to you. They were important to you. Tell me about them.”

Sasuke’s throat closes up. His eyes sting. He blames it on this younger body—clearly, it’s just more susceptible to crying than his older one. That’s the only reason he’s having to blink the feeling away.

Instead of speaking, he pulls something from his pocket—the folded up picture of Team 7 he took with him when leaving the village. He hands it to his brother.

Itachi looks down at the photo for a long moment, expression unreadable.

“You don’t look happy,” is the first thing he says.

“I wasn’t,” Sasuke admits. “There wasn’t much I had to be happy about then. All I cared about was killing you. But there were moments…”

Itachi’s face pinches slightly at the reminder, but quickly smooths back out. “Like when?”

Sasuke lifts his gaze up, only to find his brother already looking at him.

And somehow, he finds himself talking. He talks about the small moments, in between the times when the anger and betrayal and grief were all he could see. The brief moments where he managed to forget, if only for a fraction of a second.

He talks about Naruto—his stubborn naivety and idealism, how he forced himself into Sasuke’s heart by sheer force of will. Sakura, whose care and love for him snuck up on him and twined around his ribs. Kakashi, who in his concern and his care, Sasuke had seen a shadow of his dear older brother.

He talks for a long time. Longer than he’s talked for years. Itachi doesn’t say anything. When Sasuke runs out of words, his throat is burning. His eyes are stinging and the weight on his chest makes it difficult to breathe.

For the first time since traveling back, he truly feels it. He misses them. He misses them.

“They’re not dead,” Itachi says quietly, comfortingly, and it takes Sasuke a moment to realize he spoke the words out loud. “You haven’t lost them. You’ll see them again.”

Sasuke shakes his head. “But they won’t be… them. They won’t be…”

“You have time. You can form those bonds again.”

“If I survive all of this.”

Itachi’s dark eyes harden. “You will.” He pushes Sasuke’s bangs back from his face, tucking them behind his ear. “Sasuke, you will. I promise.”

For a moment, Sasuke lets himself feel thirteen instead of nineteen.

★

Half a week later, Sasuke runs into one of the very people he was missing so badly. Literally runs into them, when turning a corner and nearly knocking himself over.

Sasuke swears in surprise. Before he can fall, a hand snaps out and grabs the fabric of his shirt. The man, much taller and stronger than him, clamps a hand around his mouth and pulls him toward him—

Instinctively, Sasuke slams am elbow into the man's gut. He grunts, sucking in a strangled breath.

“…Sasuke.”

He recognizes the voice before even the face, but his mind rejects the information given to it. Impossible. What would he be doing in the halls of the Akatsuki’s headquarters?

“Kakashi?”

The man is standing back up to his full height, face still slightly pinched from the painful blow delivered to him. Sasuke looks at him, and for a moment it feels like an out-of-body experience.

He’s different from the Kakashi that Sasuke has gotten used to. The hitai-ate, slanted over his left eye. And there’s certain shadows to him—certain ghosts—that don’t cling so heavily to him in the future. That he’s learned to let go of.

His presence here is such an impossibility, his mind refuses to process it. When it finally does, a burst of panic goes through him.

“What are you doing here? You can’t be here—”

Kakashi reaches down and drops his hands on his shoulders. “I was looking for you. I’ve been looking for weeks. Sasuke—”

“How did you even get in?”

“I walked through the front door.”

Sasuke blinks. “Seriously?”

Kakashi frowns at him—the black-and-red cloak wrapped around him, the sword at his waist. “Sasuke, what… what is happening?”

His visible eye is hopelessly lost and confused. Sasuke’s heart twists, but he pushes down on his emotions. “We can’t do this here. I don’t know how you found me, but you need to leave.”

“I know Itachi is here. Did he cause this? Did he threaten you in some way—”

“No, he—I can’t explain this to you. I’m serious, you need to get out, now—”

Sasuke senses him before he sees him. A shiver goes up his spine. The faintest brush of something cold, murderous—

“Get down!”

Sasuke grabs Kakashi and tackles him down to the floor, just as a barrage of senbon comes flying out of the darkness. They’re barely visible in the dim hallway, the sound as they cut through the air the only thing that gives them away.

Sasuke hears them hit the opposite wall. He activates his Sharingan, his surroundings instantly becoming a thousand times more detailed. He can see the glinting needles, the spiderwebbing cracks in the wall.

He can see the chips in his nail polish. His fingers digging tightly into Kakashi’s arm. The specs of dried blood on the fabric, a slight tear in his vest.

He shoves himself up. “Sasori—”

Sasori jerks forward, into the hallway. His hulking form blocks the exit. He gives no response, opening his mechanical mouth and spitting dozens of more needles.

Sasuke’s sword is instantly drawn, but Kakashi is shoving him back. Kunai deflecting each attempted hit, he jumps between Sasuke and the unknown danger without hesitation.

One of the senbon gets past his defense, nearly slicing his cheek. Sasuke’s heart jumps into his throat.

“Kakashi—”

The jounin ignores him, stepping protectively in front of his student. “Sasuke, stay back.”

Sasuke wants to yell at him that he should be the one staying back. He has no idea what he’s dealing with, and Sasuke isn’t someone he should be concerned with protecting.

“Copy Ninja.” Sasori—no, Sasori’s puppet—practically growls the words. “How convenient that you should show up here. It saves me the trouble of hunting you down myself.”

Kakashi’s face pinches. “What?”

“Don’t engage with him,” Sasuke says. He forcefully pushes Kakashi aside—which is difficult when over half a foot shorter. “He has some sort of grudge against you. The why isn’t important, the point is that he wants to kill you and can—”

“’Not important’?” Sasori echoes. Angrily, he whips his scorpion tail at them. “Step aside, Uchiha-san. I don’t wish to kill you, but I will if you insist on protecting him.”

Kakashi attempts to push his student away, incredulous at the idea that the thirteen-year-old genin is the one supposedly protecting him.

“I don’t even know you,” Kakashi says. “I don’t know what this is about or what I’ve done to you—”

“Not you.”

“Not—then who?”

“Your father.”

Kakashi’s stance falters slightly. He exhales quietly. “Oh.”

He doesn’t sound surprised.

Sasuke needs to get Kakashi out of here. He knows better than to underestimate his sensei, but this isn’t the man he knows—isn’t the man who stood against Pein, Obito, Kaguya. This Kakashi isn’t even aware of his own Mangekyou.

And there’s no way a fight between them won’t draw everyone in the tower to them. He has to stop this.

But there’s no way to right now. Sasuke may be more powerful than Sasori, but he’s still a fearsome adversary. And Kakashi is making it impossible to fight and end this, when he’s constantly shoving Sasuke behind him and trying to protect him.

“Would you stop?” Sasuke snaps, as Kakashi pulls him out of the way of a barrage of senbon—an attack Sasuke was perfectly capable of avoiding himself, thank you very much. “Gods, you’re worse than Itachi. I’m trying to protect you—”

“You protect me?”

“Yes, moron!”

Kakashi doesn’t listen, of course. He takes advantage of Sasuke’s smaller stature and weaker physical strength to push him to the ground and lunge back into battle with the angry puppet master.

“Sasuke, get out of here!”

The time-traveler scowls at the words. Like hell I will.

“I’m sorry about your parents,” Kakashi says to Sasori. “But I didn’t kill them. It was the Second Shinobi World War, correct? I was barely a year old then. It had nothing to do with me.”

“He was your father!”

“It was a war.” Kakashi leans back to avoid the scorpion’s tail that whips at his face, ducking under it like a bar in a game of limbo. It misses him by less than a centimeter. “The only crime in war is to lose. You go for the throat, always—or your enemy goes for yours.”

“Cold words, Reiketsu Kakashi.”

“Same to you, Akasuna no Sasori. Don’t pretend as though your hands are clean.”

Sasori charges. There is no anger on his face—on the puppet’s face, the armor he wears that conceals his true self. Sasuke wonders what his real face looks like now, beneath it; is it as emotionless as this wooden one, or is it twisted up in rage?

Sasori has always seemed unemotional. Pragmatic. But perhaps that pragmatism and detachment is the same as Itachi’s—merely a mask used to hide from the rest of the world.

Sasuke knows Sasori won’t be able to hurt Kakashi so long as he’s standing next to him. If it comes to it, he always has the Susano’o to fall back on. There’s no way the puppet master is breaking through that. The only problem is, Kakashi seems determined to keep his student as out of the fight as possible.

Sasuke watches the two of them exchange blows, ready to move in between them the moment it looks like his sensei is losing ground. Kakashi’s hitai-ate has been pulled up, exposing his Sharingan. The eye tracks his opponent’s movements before he even fully makes them.

Sasuke’s teeth dig into the inside of his cheek. How do I get them both out of here?

Kakashi rolls out of the way of a particularly brutal strike. Sasuke yanks him to the side as the puppet’s tail swishes toward him—close enough to tear the fabric of his vest.

“Careful!” Sasuke snaps. “That thing’s poisonous.”

Kakashi narrows his eyes. “How do you know so much?”

“Not the time,” Sasuke says. He deflects a few of the senbon with his sword. Using his Rinnegan, he opens a portal in the air behind him.

Kakashi’s eyes widen. “What the—”

Sasori looks at the portal, then turns his head back to face Sasuke. “What is this?”

Sasuke ignores the question. He steps forward, shoving Kakashi behind him and facing Sasori. “Don’t do this,” Sasuke tells him. “It won’t end well for you, trust me. I won’t let you hurt him. I’ll kill you before I let you. Or you’ll kill me, and then you’ll have Itachi to deal with. Either way, you’ll be dead. And this will be a waste.”

Sasori hesitates. For a moment, Sasuke believes he’s listening. Then, he lashes out, scorpion tail swinging and needles flying.

Sasuke swears under his breath as he throws himself to the ground. He feels the tail pass over his head, close enough to disturb his hair.

That’s when two people burst into the hallway. Itachi and Deidara, who both look like they’ve been running. They stop dead at the scene in front of them.

Itachi takes a split second to read the room. His former ANBU captain with his Sharingan bared, his little brother on the ground, Sasori rushing at Sasuke with intent to kill, the portal open behind him—

He reacts instinctively, stepping in front of Sasuke and kicking Sasori into the portal.

The portal closes. Sasuke lets his hair drop back over his eye.

Deidara stares at the spot where the portal just swallowed his partner. “Is he okay?”

Sasuke takes a shaky breath, taking a moment to register the threat is gone. Itachi had moved so fast, even to Sasuke’s eyes he’d been little more than a blur. “Do you care?”

Deidara shrugs. “I mean… not really, but…”

“He’s fine. For now.”

Deidara looks like he doesn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

Itachi offers Sasuke his hand. Sasuke takes it, letting his brother pull him to his feet.

Itachi looks him over. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

After that assurance, Itachi turns toward Kakashi, properly taking in his presence. “Kakashi-san. What are you doing here?”

Deidara snorts. He looks at Sasuke with a raised eyebrow, mouthing ‘Kakashi-san?’ with an incredulous expression.

For a moment, Kakashi is too stunned to do anything other than stand there. Then, he quickly recovers himself. He steps immediately between Sasuke and his brother, pushing Sasuke behind him protectively.

“Get back,” he says to Itachi, muscles tensed for a fight.

Itachi’s face closes off, but Sasuke catches the brief pain that flickers across it. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Kakashi,” Sasuke says, pushing the man aside. “It’s fine. He’s not going to hurt me.”

Kakashi’s glare falters slightly as he looks down at his student. “What? Sasuke—”

“I know it sounds ridiculous. It’s a long story—and not one we can tell here. But trust me, I’m safe with him.”

“Safe is overstating things,” Itachi says. “Nowhere is safe here. How did you get inside?”

“Apparently, he walked through the front door,” Sasuke says.

“Seriously?” Itachi shakes his head in disbelief. “Nevermind. We need to get out of this hallway and talk somewhere else. He can’t be seen here.”

“Sasori saw him,” Deidara says. “We’ll have to kill him now. I can blow him up!”

Itachi raises a single perfect eyebrow. “You’re kidding, right? You want to kill Sasori less than a week after killing Hidan? Give it some time. Leader-sama will kill you if he finds out.”

The blonde smirks. “Aw, Itachi. I didn’t know you cared—”

“I don’t. But if you go down, then Sasuke goes down with you, and I’ll kill you myself before I allow that to happen.”

Deidara shrugs. “Kakuzu killed plenty of his partners in the past. He never got in trouble.”

“He was more valuable than you.”

“Hey! Go die, asshole—"

“Shut up!” Sasuke snaps. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I can’t believe I’m being the adult here. You’re both acting like children.”

Itachi crosses his arms. “I’m not doing anything. He’s the one who keeps attacking me.”

“You keep antagonizing him.”

“It’s not my fault he takes every word out of my mouth as a provocation—”

“Hey!” Kakashi yells. All of them fall silent. “Is anyone going to explain to me what the hell is going on?!”

All of them turn to look at him, remembering he's there. Sasuke can see Itachi’s mind working rapidly, trying to figure out how to deal with the situation they’ve found themselves in.

“I know you don’t trust me,” he says. “You have no reason to. But you have no idea what you’ve stumbled into. You can’t be here. You need to leave—now.”

Kakashi’s jaw clenches. “Not without Sasuke.”

Sasuke’s starting to grow paranoid as well, standing out here in the open so long. “Itachi’s right. We can talk later, but right now—”

“No. I’ve been searching for you for weeks, Sasuke. You don’t get to just dismiss me and not explain yourself. You abandoned the village—Orochimaru is dead, and Kabuto told me—”

Sasuke blinks. “Kabuto? You spoke to him?”

“He’s how I found my way here. He’s been spying for the Akatsuki as well as Orochimaru, so he knew where the current hideout—”

Sasuke holds up a hand, cutting the man off. “Kabuto's a spy for the Akatsuki?” After a second, he shakes his head. “No, why am I even surprised? I knew I should’ve just killed him. But instead I listened to Itachi and gave him a chance—”

Itachi frowns. “What?”

“—and now he’s messing up things again, like always. That’ll teach me to ever show mercy.”

His brother shakes his head. “What are you talking about?”

“What are any of you talking about?” Deidara exclaims.

Sasuke ignores him, struggling to think. Sasori is contained and dealt with—for now. But the disappearance of a second Akatsuki member, so soon after the first, won’t be something so easily explained away.

“I’ll deal with Kakashi,” Sasuke says. “I’ll take him somewhere away from here so we can talk. Itachi, go find Konan.”

Itachi frowns. “I’m not leaving you now when—”

“Nii-san.”

Kakashi isn’t going to talk to him with Itachi present. And the altercation with Sasori was loud—they need to be sure no one heard it.

He clearly doesn’t like it, but Itachi nods curtly. “I’ll find you immediately after. Watch yourself.”

“You too.”

Itachi hesitates. He steps forward and wraps an arm around Sasuke, pressing his lips to the top of his head. Then he’s gone, dragging Deidara with him by the collar of his cloak.

Sasuke's struck by a sudden feeling of foreboding. The warmth of his brother’s embrace lingers, and he attempts to forget the way he looked at him—as if afraid it would be the last time.

★

Over a month in this body, and Sasuke is still frustrated by how short he is. Kakashi towers over him in a way he hasn’t in years.

Sasuke grips him by the arm and drags him through the hideout. It’s late in the evening, and the hallways are mostly all dark. The tower is a large structure, and it’s very easy to go long periods of time without seeing any of its other inhabitants. Clearly no one else is nearby, or they would have heard the commotion, but he still wants to get his sensei out of plain sight as soon as possible.

Kakashi lets himself be dragged, even though Sasuke knows his physical strength is much greater and he could easily stop him. He finds an empty room far enough away from anyone’s bedrooms or where he can see any lights on, and he shoves the jounin inside.

Kakashi moves to flip the light switch. Sasuke slaps his hand away.

“Don’t do that! I don’t want anyone to know we’re in here.”

“It doesn’t look like there’s anyone nearby—”

“I don’t care, just keep it off. And lower your voice.”

Kakashi sighs, but obeys. He turns to look properly at him, his headband pulled back down over his left eye. “Sasuke, explain to me what is going on. Now.”

Sasuke doesn’t know where to start. He doesn’t even know if he should start. Kakashi isn’t supposed to be here. But he is, so now they have to adjust.

There’s a dull ache in his heart as he looks at his sensei. This man who is so familiar to him, but at the same time, is completely different from the one he knows. Sasuke has years’ worth of memories—of experiences—that this version of Kakashi doesn’t share.

They fought a war together. They bled together and sacrificed together. Trust was once shattered between them—only to be built up again stronger than it ever was. Finally, near the end of the world, they learnt to understand each other.

But with this Kakashi? That connection isn’t there, and the loss of it hurts.

“I can’t explain it all to you now,” Sasuke says. “I just need you to trust me.”

Kakashi shakes his head. “I need more than that.”

(Trust me.

In the future, Kakashi wouldn’t have needed anything more than that.)

Sasuke sighs. “Alright, fine. How much do you know about the Akatsuki? What did Kabuto tell you?”

“Not much. Just that it’s a criminal organization. That Itachi’s a member—that Orochimaru used to be, too. Whispers of the name have been heard before, but never anything concrete. Not until now.”

That tracks. If Sasuke’s remembering correctly, the first official confirmation of the Akatsuki’s existence was Kisame and Itachi’s visit to the Leaf Village after the chuunin exams—which hasn’t happened now.

“I came here to stop them,” Sasuke says. “And to find Itachi. Not to kill him—that part’s a long story and isn’t relevant right now, but he’s helping me take them down—”

Kakashi holds up a hand, visible eye wide. “Whoa, whoa. Hold on. You what? Take them down? Sasuke, you’re a genin. How did you even know they existed?”

“I’m telling you!”

“I’m telling you!”

“Not in any way that makes sense! What the hell happened? One day you were fine, and the next you were gone. I thought you’d gone running after Itachi—which I guess you technically did, but this doesn’t make sense—”

Sasuke represses the childish urge to kick something in frustration. “I don’t have time for this! I’m trying to stop a war. Can’t you just trust me?”

“I’m sorry,” Kakashi says, “but no. I can’t. You have to explain to me what’s going on, or I swear, I’ll drag you out of here.”

“Try it. I won’t let you.”

“I doubt you’ll be able to stop me.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Kakashi stares at him for a long moment. He looks him over, and something in his face shifts. He shakes his head.

“What happened to you?” he asks quietly.

Sasuke swallows the sudden lump in his throat. He averts his eyes, uncomfortable with holding the man’s gaze.

Truthfully, the depth of Kakashi’s concern—his relief at seeing him again—surprises Sasuke. It isn’t that Sasuke thinks his sensei doesn’t care about him. But this early in their relationship, he didn’t think any of his teammates would be as affected.

“I’m sorry for leaving,” Sasuke says. “I didn’t want to. But the Akatsuki… they need to be stopped.”

Kakashi takes a step forward, placing his hands on Sasuke’s shoulders. “And why do you think it has to be you? Whatever you’re dealing with… just tell me. I’ll help you.”

Sasuke bites his inside cheek. “It’s more complicated than you know. Kakashi…”

Kakashi frowns at the hesitancy in his student's voice, the look on his face. “What? What is it?”

“The leader of the Akatsuki… he's—"

Sasuke freezes as a feeling hits him—a presence. He feels a chill go down his spine, his heart skipping in his chest. He knows this presence, this chakra. It’s—

Kakashi frowns at his sudden silence. “Sasuke?”

Someone steps into the room. Instinctively, Sasuke steps in front of his sensei. The room is dark, but the orange mask is still visible. The blood-red eye.

Speak of the devil, Sasuke thinks, and he shall appear.

“Well, well,” Obito says. “Kakashi Hatake. Isn’t this a reunion in the making.”

★

Itachi can’t seem to find Konan anywhere. He bites down on his anxiety, desperate to get back to his brother as soon as possible. It feels like everything is slipping slowly out of their hands.

Deidara parted ways with him almost immediately. It had been mere coincidence that both of them had heard the fight with Sasori and ran towards it at the same time. Neither of them wants to spend more than a second in each other’s company.

Itachi sent him to go find Kisame. Normally, the blonde would never listen to a word from him—but Itachi could tell from his eyes that he’s worried for Sasuke, too.

The last few days have been a mess. And just when Itachi believed he was finished rearranging everything, another wrecking ball comes crashing through. He’s rearranging again. Determining threats and the correct ways to deal with them. Creating back-up plans for their back-up plans.

Hidan is dead. Sasori is out of the way, for now. Konan, Kisame and Deidara are on their side. That leaves Pain, Obito, and Kakuzu—the former two which are the most concerning and have the possibility of sending all their plans crashing down.

Find Konan, Itachi tells himself. She can handle Pain. If he can be talked around…

Itachi turns the corner, walking at a brisk pace. He’s just gone up several flights of stairs. He thinks of Sasuke, floors below him. If he’s in trouble, would Itachi hear it? Could he reach him in time?

He hears a noise somewhere far down the hall. Itachi freezes, listening closely. Is that… fighting? But it stops suddenly—too suddenly.

Itachi restrains himself from running, walking swiftly down the corridor and turning. He stops, eyes widening with his hand on the door frame.

The room is a mess. It looks like a mini-tornado took place inside of it. Weapons and scorch marks litter the floors and the walls. Kisame is standing in the center of it all, sword resting over his shoulder. There’s a spray of blood on his face, and he wipes it with the back of his hand.

And at his feet: Kakuzu. Dead.

Kisame looks up at him. “Oh. Hey.”

Itachi steps into the room, eyes not moving from the body. “What did you do?”

Kisame frowns, cocking his head to the side. Itachi’s instincts go off like an alarm, because something about the gesture, the expression, isn’t right. “Wasn’t this the plan?”

“Not like this,” Itachi snaps. “Were you even present when we talked last week? You’re behaving no better than Deidara. What were you thinking?”

He walks further into the room, stepping up next to his partner and looking down at Kakuzu. Blood smears the floor around them.

“Just… clean this up. I don’t have time for this, I have to get back to Sasuke.”

“Has something happened?”

Itachi doesn’t respond. This whole interaction—the scene in front of him—all of it seems off to him, but he can’t grasp why. It’s like trying to catch smoke.

Itachi looks down at the body at his feet. Why—?

Kisame’s grip on his sword handle tightens. Itachi barely catches it, the flash of black and red as the older man lunges forward—

His Sharingan twists—too late—

Pain explodes in Itachi’s chest. The chakra in his eyes instantly disappears—gone. Itachi gasps as he feels his ribs cave in—as he feels dozens of tiny scales pierce him from the inside.

Samehada.

He collapses, hand against the ground stopping him from falling over Kakuzu's corpse. Blood fills his lungs, rushes up his throat. He stares down at the gigantic blade piercing him with something akin to betrayal.

“Kisame…”

The name scrapes as it’s pulled from his throat. Hacking coughs escape him, his vision going white.

The sword is ripped out of him. Itachi bites clean through his lip. He can feel each tiny scale drag through him. The bloody hand in front of his face is blurry. It slips and the world spins—

Everything fades out. Colors and sounds blur around him.

He doesn’t understand what’s happening. His mind is moving much, much slower than normal, as if the gears in his brain are coated in mud. This doesn’t make sense.

Fact: He’s bleeding out. Fact: Kisame stabbed him. Why?

Kisame can’t have betrayed them. He has no reason to. Even if he is still loyal to the Akatsuki’s ideals, he knows now that all of it is a farce. This will only lead to his death and the death of everyone around him, so why—

Itachi let his guard down. Thoughtless. He let himself trust. Foolish. He never would have done so a month ago. He would’ve known better.

He had frozen his own heart at thirteen. But Sasuke’s reappearance in his life—he had let the ice in his veins begin to melt, he had let himself go soft.

Stupid, stupid, stupid—

Itachi takes a breath. He focuses on the pain, letting it draw him back to his body. He shoves away the encroaching darkness.

“Kisame!”

His partner turns his head slowly. Itachi can’t see any of his face. His usual damaged vision, paired with rapid blood loss, renders him effectively blind.

“Not exactly,” the man says, from somewhere above him.

With the blood seeping out of him, his mind fuzzy and addled, barely able to focus through the fog, it takes a moment for Itachi to figure it out, for the realization to click in his mind.

Panic surges through Itachi. No.

His nails scrape against the floor beneath him. He thinks desperately of his brother, fighting alone, but it’s useless. His vision is rapidly darkening. He can barely draw in breath.

With Sasuke as his last coherent thought, he blacks out.

★

“Susano’o!”

The spiritual weapon rises up and forms around them. Bones grow tendons and muscle, skin forming and then armor. It draws immensely on Sasuke’s chakra, pain surging in every part of his body, but he’s grown used to it.

It’s the only thing that’s keeping Kakashi alive.

Kakashi stares at it with wide eyes. “What the—”

“No time to explain,” Sasuke says. “Just don’t take your eyes off him.”

“Sound advice,” Obito says. “But you don’t honestly believe you’re getting out of this alive, do you? Your big brother isn’t here to save your skin.”

Sasuke bites back on his immediate retort. Kakashi steps in front of him, shielding him.

“You’re not going near my student.”

Obito laughs. The sound sends a shiver up Sasuke’s spine.

“It’s adorable that you think you could possibly stop me. Drop the Susano'o, Sasuke-kun. Or are you going to hide behind it like a coward?”

Sasuke's teeth clench, at both the insult and the familiar honorific. “Maybe if you tell me why you’re suddenly looking to kill me, I’ll consider it. What did I do?”

Obito’s eye flares red behind the orange mask.

“Foolish child. You really think I don’t know what goes on in my own organization? That I don’t know about you and your brother—scheming behind closed doors, conducting your secret meetings? That I don’t know it was you who killed Hidan?”

“That was Deidara's fault, technically—"

“I never should have let you step foot in this place,” Obito says, ignoring Sasuke’s interjection. “Your sudden appearance here—I knew from the beginning that something was off. You’re not what you seem.”

Sasuke scoffs. “Yeah, well, neither are you. Madara.”

Kakashi’s head snaps around. “What?! Madara?!”

“He’s not actually.” He looks at Obito. “Are you? You’re just a pathetic nobody playing dress-up. Why don’t you tell him who you really are?”

Sasuke is aware that he’s antagonizing him, and that it probably—definitely—isn’t a good idea. But Obito just invokes his anger. Yes, he was a pawn just as much as anyone else. But his choices were still his own—he chose to take out his grief and vengeance on innocent people—

(So maybe there’s a deeper reason to Sasuke’s dislike of Obito. Maybe there are more similarities between them than he cares to admit to himself.)

“What are you talking about?” Kakashi demands. His jaw clenches. “Sasuke, I’ve had about enough of this! If someone doesn’t explain to me what’s going on—"

“Enough!” Obito snarls suddenly. “Trash should keep their mouths shut!”

The jounin blinks, taken aback.

Sasuke’s face darkens. He steps in front of his sensei protectively. “Back off.”

Kakashi frowns. “Sasuke—"

“You want to protect him,” Obito says. “Isn’t that precious. But you needn’t worry. He’s a waste of my time.

Sasuke wasn’t a witness to most of Kakashi and Obito’s interactions during the war. But from what he is able to recall, Obito seemed to swing wildly between disregarding his ex-teammate and making him his singular focus. He’s disregarding him for now, but how long will that last?

Sasuke’s jaw clenches. “If he’s such a waste of your time, then let—”

He freezes, cutting himself off. A feeling crashes over him—a horrible, terrible feeling. He can’t explain it, but somehow he knows—

“Itachi,” Sasuke breathes.

The sensation hits him out of nowhere—a sudden unexplainable awareness. A bone-deep dread grips his heart. His breath leaves him. He doesn’t know how, but he suddenly knows with an unshakable certainty—

Something has happened to his brother. His brother is dying.

No, Sasuke thinks. He feels dizzy. He can taste blood in his mouth, smells smoke in the air. He sees Itachi’s bloody lips pull into a smile as he falls. No, not again. Not again.

The sensation is so startling—so alarming—that Sasuke’s Susano’o immediately dissipates. Obito takes advantage the moment he sees it flicker, lunging for his throat—

“Sasuke!” Kakashi yells.

Sasuke barely reacts in time. His Rinnegan swirling, the space between them distorts. He and Obito switch places.

Amenotejikara.

Previously standing next to Sasuke, Kakashi catches Obito’s blade with his own. The jounin risks a quick glance toward him, reading his face.

“What is it? What’s wrong? Sasuke.”

 He fights to focus on what’s happening in front of him. Everything inside him is screaming: Itachi, Itachi, Itachi.

“Itachi,” Sasuke chokes out. The feeling of wrongwrongwrong is pressing down on his chest, making it difficult to breathe. “He's—something's happened.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t—I just do. He's—"

A kunai impales Kakashi in the shoulder. Kakashi grunts in pain.

“Eyes on me, Friend-Killer.” Obito’s eye is like a sea of blood beneath the mask. “You can’t afford distractions in this battle.”

Kakashi grabs the handle of the kunai and yanks it from his shoulder. “Go,” he says to Sasuke, not taking his eyes off his opponent. “Find your brother. I’ll deal with this here.”

“What? No way—"

Sasuke can’t leave his sensei to fight Obito by himself. The Susano’o is the only reason he’s lasted so long. But everything inside of him is yelling Itachi, and despite his mind's refusal, his feet are already preparing to run—

Nii-san, he thinks, the panic swelling. Itachi’s dull eyes flash through his memory.

(Forgive me, Sasuke.)

If Itachi dies—if Sasuke loses him again—

“Sasuke,” Kakashi says, a rare current of steel in his voice. “Go.”

Sasuke doesn’t let himself think. He takes a last, lingering look at his sensei, praying this won’t be the final time he sees him—then he runs.

★

Kakashi forces himself not to look back as his student flees. Everything inside of him rebels against it—letting a child run off by himself into a den of S-Rank criminals. His feet try to pull him after him.

But he stays where he is, locked in battle against his mysterious opponent. He tells himself Sasuke is safer away from this fight.

Itachi will protect him, Kakashi thinks—but it’s more like a desperate hope, because despite Sasuke’s earlier words, he can’t bring himself to believe Itachi actually cares.

He doesn’t understand anything that’s going on.

The man in front of him in the mask—the leader of this organization, Akatsuki—who is he? He had mentioned a reunion upon seeing Kakashi. Did they know each other somehow?

And those powers his thirteen-year-old student displayed. The armored skeleton that protected them—the Sharingan that twisted into a different shape, a six-pointed star. The Rinnegan—

There’s no time to think. Sasuke's skeleton-shield-whatever isn’t here to protect him anymore. Kakashi is forced immediately onto the defensive, barely dodging each strike the masked man aims his way. All of his own hits just pass uselessly through.

Kakashi narrows his eyes. “Who are you?”

“Who I am doesn’t matter,” the masked man says. He leans around the kunai that cuts through the air, though there isn’t an actual need to.

“You know me.”

“Kakashi the Copy Ninja. Kakashi of the Sharingan.” The impressive titles sound like a mockery on this man's lips. “Who hasn’t heard of you, hero?”

Kakashi frowns at the tone. It’s way too emotionally changed for someone claiming they know him just by reputation.

The masked man doesn’t bother with continuing their conversation. “Katon: Hōsenka no Jutsu!”

Kakashi swears under his breath as the multiple balls of fire come arching toward him—phasing right through the man's mask.

Too bad he can’t do that. Gai never lets him forget that time he was eight and he forgot about his mask when performing katon.

Kakashi’s hands flash through seals, slamming against the solid floor.

“Doton: Doryuuheki!”

The wall rises out of the floor, shielding Kakashi from the fire. He can feel the heat of the flames as they strike the wall.

The wall rises high up, almost reaching the ceiling. It conceals Kakashi completely, and Kakashi uses the opportunity to unknowingly create a clone. He leaves the clone in his place, as he shunshins from the room.

Over the roar of the masked man’s second katon, he goes unheard.

Kakashi listens to the following events, hidden behind a thin wall. He hears the sound of metal clanging, but never any hits connecting—presumably, every strike Kakashi’s clone makes is slipping straight through the other man's body.

Kakashi shakes his head. What is that ability?

Then he hears the man's voice: “Kamui.”

Kakashi peeks out into the room just in time to see his clone pulled away. It looks almost as though the clone is being dragged into the man's eye.

Kakashi takes a quiet breath. His hands flash through the familiar seals. Chidori!

Kakashi appears behind him in a flash, hand crackling with blue lightning. In the middle of running, the chakra of the jutsu sharpens even further, becoming almost white, and Chidori becomes Raikiri.

He aims it straight at the man's face. He wants to shatter that orange mask and reveal the face beneath—but as he expected, his hit slips right through. Like trying to catch smoke.

Kakashi feels himself growing increasingly infuriated. How is he supposed to fight someone he can't even touch?

But something—happens. Kakashi doesn’t quite understand it.

Suddenly, the masked man goes flying back, as if from the force of a punch to the face—but not from Kakashi, his Chidori is deactivated, his arm lowered. And the mask he wore—it’s suddenly gone.

He's breathing heavily, crouched on the ground. Head ducked to hide his face.

Kakashi feels the moment his own clone is released. The memories rush into his head—being sucked into a strange space, the masked man's face appearing, his punch landing hard and the loud crack of the mask.

So the jutsu where he goes through things, Kakashi quickly realizes. He’s actually teleporting a part of his body to avoid being hit.

Slowly, the jounin steps closer. “Who are you?” he asks again.

The mystery man raises his head. Kakashi’s heart stops.

“Obito?”

Chapter Text

Sasuke runs faster than he’s run in his entire life.

The soles of his shoes slap loudly against the stone floor, the sound bouncing and ricocheting off the walls of the narrow corridor. There’s a sharp, stabbing pain in his side, in the space between his ribs, but he ignores it and pushes forward despite the lack of oxygen he’s managing to pull through his lungs. Despite his pounding heart, a part of it still screaming at him to turn around and go back.

Back to where Kakashi is fighting—his extreme skill and experience rendered practically useless against the likes of Obito Uchiha. There’s no way Kakashi can hope to best him, not without Sasuke to back him up.

He's going to die.

Sasuke bites the inside of his mouth, hard enough to taste blood. He wishes, just for this moment, that he could go back to when he was seventeen—back to when he didn’t care about anyone except his brother. It would be easier, that way. It would hurt so much less.

Sasuke owes Kakashi so much—for everything he’s done for him. But Sasuke has always been selfish, and so once again, he chooses Itachi. He’s always chosen Itachi over everyone else, even when Itachi hasn’t chosen him.

I’m sorry, Sasuke thinks. And prays, by some miracle, that his sensei survives.

He forces the guilt away—shoves it somewhere deep down in his chest where it can no longer influence thoughts and decisions. Instead he focuses on the desperate pull in his chest that is somehow guiding him. The one that’s blaring his brother’s name at him like a siren—

Itachi, Itachi, Itachi, Itachi—

Something has happened. Itachi is hurt somewhere, is dying, and Sasuke can’t explain how he knows this but right now he doesn’t care. All that matters is reaching him.

Sasuke refuses to lose him again. He can’t.

He skids sharply around the corner as he reaches the end of the hallway. He catches a flash of blonde hair and blue eyes widening, but he’s running too fast to stop himself in time—he collides with the person in front of him, a brutal smack followed by a surprised yelp, and both of them are knocked to the floor.

Sasuke catches himself on his elbows, wincing as the impact reverberates through his entire body. He blinks his vision clear.

Deidara is on the ground across from him, also blinking and grimacing in pain. “Ow! What the hell, man? Watch where you’re going!” He glances down at his arm, which got scraped up by the fall and is now bleeding sluggishly. He looks back up at Sasuke with a glare. “Look what you did!”

He shoves his bleeding elbow into Sasuke’s face. Sasuke shoves it away. “Where’s Itachi?” he demands.

The other Akatsuki member scowls at him. “’I’m so sorry, Deidara, for knocking you over. Are you alri—‘”

“Just tell me where he is! The two of you went off together to find Konan!”

“Yeah, and we split off from each other! Like I want to spend any more time than necessary with that asshole! Seriously, what the hell—”

With a scowl, Sasuke pushes himself to his feet. He ignores the new soreness throughout his body. “Which direction did he go in?”

Deidara looks ready to snap at him again, but something on Sasuke’s face must give away the seriousness of the situation. The indignation flickers, replaced by uncertainty and concern.

“Why? What's happened?”

“I don’t know, but he’s hurt—badly, I think.”

Deidara pushes himself off the floor, wincing slightly and brushing off his black and red cloak. “How do you know?”

“I just do. Which direction?”

Deidara looks unhappy with that answer. Most likely he assumes Sasuke is lying and not wanting to explain, rather than the truth that he genuinely has no idea how he knows. He just does. But Deidara presses his lips into a thin line and nods.

“Alright. Come on, this way. We’ll find him.”

They turn around and begin going in the direction that Deidara just came from. They don’t run, like Sasuke was earlier, and Sasuke has to bite down on the desperation that makes him want to snap at the other man to hurry the fuck up. But they’re walking at a quick, urgent pace, Deidara’s longer legs causing his paces to be bigger than Sasuke’s. Sasuke is forced into something near to a jog.

“What happened to you?” Deidara asks.

Sasuke frowns. “What?”

“Your clothes—they’re ripped. They weren’t before, so it’s not from fighting with Sasori. Did you fight someone else?”

Observant of him. Sasuke clenches his jaw. “Obito knows.”

Deidara’s mouth drops open, panic in his eyes as he jerks to a halt. “What? Oh fuck—”

“Which is why we need to find my brother now! Okay? Because Obito knows he’s a traitor—he knows you are, too—”

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. This is all your fault, Uchiha. You’ve dragged me into your shit—"

“Me? You’re the one that attacked Hidan!”

“You killed him!”

“Because of you—!”

Sasuke cuts himself off as they round the corner. His breath leaves him, a sharp, choked gasp sucked through his teeth. His feet come to an abrupt halt as the blood in his veins turns to ice.

Beside him, Deidara freezes as well. Eyes wide. “Shit. Is that…?”

Deidara’s eyes are locked in the center of the room, where a broken, misshapen shape is barely visible in the dark. It’s Kakuzu, his body so shredded and disfigured that he’s barely recognizable. A bloody heap of flesh, surrounded by scorch marks and discarded weapons that tell tale of a battle.

But Sasuke—

Sasuke looks right past the sight. His eyes are on another body, a bit further into the room and more to the left. His Sharingan swirls to life, allowing him to see clearer in the darkness. Dark hair—purple, bloody fingernails against the gray stone floor—

Itachi.

It takes a second for him to fly across the room, for him to fall to his knees by his brother’s side. Something thick and wet immediately soaks through the fabric of his pants—blood, from the deep wound that’s sliced through his brother’s chest. The metallic, coppery scent is heavy in the air.

“Nii-san,” Sasuke says. “Nii-san!”

Itachi’s face is deathly pale. He doesn’t respond to Sasuke’s voice. Sasuke’s hands shake, his heart hammering painfully against his ribs, as he pulls the ripped fabric of the Akatsuki cloak back to get a better look at where the blood is all coming from.

He remembers two fingers against his forehead. Dragging a line of wet blood down his face.

(Forgive me, Sasuke. But this is it.)

No. No, no, no, no.

He’s on his side. One of his arms stretched out, fingers smearing blood against the floor, like he was trying to drag himself forward. Sasuke shifts his brother’s body slightly, his head lolling against Sasuke’s folded knees. There’s blood on his lips, and it makes another spark of panic go off in Sasuke’s chest.

Deidara drops down next to him. “God. Is he dead? Who did this to him? Kakuzu?”

There’s actually a thread of something close to fear in the blonde’s voice. Curious, considering how many times he’s expressed a desire to kill Itachi himself. Deidara cares, despite how vehemently he denies it, and any other time Sasuke would never let it go without comment—but right now it barely registers.

His trembling fingers shove Itachi’s hair aside to press against his neck. He finds a pulse there—slightly too slow, but undeniable proof of life.

Sasuke releases a breath. “He’s alive. For now. Help me stop the bleeding.”

“With what?” Deidara demands. “I don’t carry a medical kit with me! Fuck, fuck, fuck—"

“Shut up!” Deidara’s panic is only making Sasuke’s worse. The momentary relief that Itachi is alive is quick to fade, the previous fear returning as he takes stock of the situation—of Itachi’s injuries, probably too serious for them to treat even with the proper supplies.

Sasuke strips off his Akatsuki cloak. He balls it up and presses it to Itachi’s chest in a pathetic attempt to stem the blood flow. “Who here knows medical ninjutsu? Anyone?”

Deidara grimaces. “Sasori.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s not usually an issue! Konan knows a bit of battlefield surgery, I think—Leader-sama, too—but this might be too much even for that. And we still don’t know if Ane-san’s managed to get him on our side, so he might be trying to kill us too…”

Great, Sasuke thinks. The only person with the capability to possibly save Itachi’s life in time is the same person that Itachi kicked through one of Sasuke’s portals less than half an hour ago.

He takes a breath. Looking down at his brother and resisting the urge to flinch at the blood on his lips. Unless Itachi bit his tongue or sliced the inside of his mouth on his teeth, that blood meant internal bleeding. Likely a punctured lung.

He brushes the bangs from Itachi’s face. “It’s okay,” he says shakily. “You’re going to be okay. I won’t let you die again, I promise.”

He turns his head to look at Deidara.

“I’m going to retrieve Sasori. I need you to stay here with him while I do.”

Deidara’s mouth drops open. “Wh—Me? No way!”

“It’ll only take a few minutes. I’ll be right back.”

“But what if he dies?!”

“Then make sure he doesn’t!” Sasuke yells back. Leaving his brother is the last thing he wants to do—but unless Sasuke can get him help, there’ll be no saving him. All Sasuke will be able to do is sit here and hold his hand while his life slowly fades away.

No. Itachi will live this time. He has to.

Deidara grimaces. He looks down at Itachi’s bleeding body, then back to Sasuke. “Okay, okay, fine! Just—hurry the hell back, you brat!”

Sasuke slides out from under his brother. His bloodstained hands, holding the wadded-up cloak tightly against Itachi’s chest, are replaced by Deidara’s. He stands up, pushing his hair out of his face and the rings in his left eye whirling as the power activates.

A portal opens up in mid-air. Beyond, Sasuke can see miles upon miles of desert—the same plane of existence where he trapped Sasori. Taking one last glance at Itachi, sending up a prayer, he steps through the portal and leaves the two of them an entire dimension away.

His feet land in the sand. The portal closes behind him.

★

“Obito?” Kakashi breathes.

The Copy Ninja looks like he’s seeing a ghost—which from his point of view, he is. He stands there, staring, Sharingan on display and both eyes blown wide in shock. On the stone floor between the two of them, the orange mask lays in fractured pieces.

Obito stares back with an identical Sharingan eye, feeling unbearably exposed. It’s been so long since he’s heard that name—a relic from an entirely different life. He doesn’t associate himself with it anymore, hasn’t for years, and hearing himself be addressed by it feels like how the world might comprehend the syllables of a long-dead language.

Obito.

It’s a foreign word to him now. Yet, when spoken in that voice, hauntingly familiar.

The name echoes in his memory, along with that voice, despite how hard he’s attempted to bury it. Stop crying, Obito. You’re not even trying, Obito. You’re such a loser, Obito.

Hold on, Obito. Stay with me, Obito.

The memories crash over him like a tidal wave trying to drag him under. They all come flooding back. Obito fights to rise above them.

Kakashi has fallen out of his battle stance. He takes a small step forward, then another. “Obito,” he repeats, his hands shaking. “Is that—is that you? How? I don’t understand…”

Obito steels himself, keeping his face blank and absent of emotion. Pretending that looking into his old teammate’s face—the same face as the teenager whose hand punched through Rin’s chest—doesn’t shake something loose inside him.

“You can call me by that name if you like. It doesn’t matter to me.”

“What? But you… you… Obito, you’re alive.”

Obito clenches his jaw. He didn’t prepare for this. He prepared for everything else—for Itachi joining hands with his brother, for the two of them slowly pulling the others to their side one by one—but he didn’t expect Kakashi Hatake.

“I don’t understand,” Kakashi repeats helplessly. “Why… If you were alive this whole time—if you survived—why wouldn’t you tell anyone? Why wouldn’t you come home?”

Obito’s lips curl back from his teeth. “Obito Uchiha is dead. He died fifteen years ago in a rockslide.”

He died when he watched your arm push through Rin’s chest.

That boy, the idealistic fool he used to be, died with Rin. Not because he loved her so much that the entire world turned black without her in it—although he did love her, always will love her—but because her death opened his eyes to the truth he’d been so blind to before.

He knelt in that sea of blood, soaked in red, and cradled her in his arms. This is Hell, he remembers thinking to himself—remembers realizing.

The world didn’t become a hell when Rin died.

Her death made him realize it always was one.

And Kakashi—Obito looks at him now, and he is overwhelmed with equal parts of hatred and pity. Fury and compassion. He isn’t at fault, a part of his heart insists. He never meant to kill Rin. He has watched him mourn at her grave, has watched him break down—has watched, hidden out of sight, as he fell to his knees in front of the memorial stone and pleaded for a forgiveness he didn’t believe he deserved.

And Obito aches for him—wants to tell him it’s okay, that he doesn’t have to fight anymore. But he also remembers the hole he punched through Rin’s chest, how he left him behind to die—and he wants to slash a blade across that piece of trash’s throat and watch his eyes go dull.

The rage, he thinks, is the feeling that is winning. The sanctimonious tone of Kakashi’s voice during their fight—as he struggled and failed to keep the Uchiha brat behind him—

“None of this matters,” Obito says. “You don’t matter. Not to me. I wouldn’t even be wasting my time with you, but I know once you leave here you’ll report everything you learned back to Konoha like the good dog you are. I can’t have that. It’s too soon for the Akatsuki to be stepping out of the shadows.”

Kakashi shakes his head—still clearly in shock, still clearly trying to gain some grasp on what’s happening. “What? I don’t—I just came here to get my student back—”

So Sasuke Uchiha is his student? That’s quite a coincidence. But irrelevant.

“Your student came here of his own will. Perhaps you should ask yourself why.”

A part of Obito wants to tell him. He wants to tell Kakashi the truth of the Uchiha Clan’s massacre, the blood soaking Konoha’s ground—wants to watch the man’s face as he reveals it all. Would his faith in his village and the world break, like Sasuke? Or would he cling to his loyalty with the pathetic desperation of a broken child, like Itachi?

Kakashi swallows. “Obito,” he says again. His voice is fragile, and it breaks over the word.

Obito is more affected by it than he’ll admit to himself. He hardens himself against it. “I will fix everything. This world will finally know true peace. I’m sorry you won’t be able to be a part of it.”

Kunai twirling in his right hand, he brings his arm up and lunges.

★

“Nagato, please. We’re all being played. You’re not stupid—you know it’s true.”

Dark red fingernails, the color of blood, drum agitatedly against the stone edge of the window. From the very top of the tower, the ground can’t even be seen, obscured by clouds and heavy fog. Pain’s eyes are transfixed on it, but clearly unseeing, while Konan’s eyes are fixed on him.

He doesn’t reprimand her for using the name, though Konan knows he dislikes when she does it. It isn’t even him she’s talking to, not really—just a body he controls, separate from his own.

A body molded out of Yahiko’s image, had he lived to reach such an age.

She’ll never tell him how much it hurts her to look at him.

“And I should just believe this outlandish story?” Pain asks. “Simply because Sasuke Uchiha told you so? What makes his word so trustworthy to you—that you are so immediately willing to abandon our plans, without even being offered a speck of proof?”

Konan’s lips become a thin line. She has been trying, for an entire week now, to convince him of what Sasuke has revealed to her—that both she and him are nothing more than chess pieces in a much larger game. Pawns, who will soon be discarded once they have served out their use.

As discouraging as his words are, she thinks she’s actually making progress. His tone isn’t as strong as it usually is as he counters her. It sounds half-hearted.

No. Not half-hearted.

Distracted.

Konan’s eyes narrow when she notices this. The unfocused gaze, how his eyebrows are slightly furrowed in thought and he hasn’t even glanced at her once since she entered the room.

“What is it?” she asks. “Something is bothering you.”

There’s a moment of silence. “There’s an intruder in the tower,” Pain says finally. “And something is happening below us.”

“What?” Konan says, feeling alarm flash through her.

Pain doesn’t say anything else, his frown deepening.

“Who is it?” she asks.

“I don’t know. But our leader wanted them let inside.”

Konan’s brow furrows. Madara? she thinks in confusion, before correcting herself in her own head. No. Obito. That truth is still sometimes hard for her to grasp, after spending so many years believing the man behind the mask was someone else.

And if he hasn’t been truthful to them about his identity—has anything he’s ever said to them been truthful?

Konan longs to tell Nagato. He isn’t who he’s claimed himself to be. But she can’t. Not until she’s sure that Nagato will side with them, and that Itachi and Sasuke won’t both be killed when he reveals to Obito they’re plotting treason.

Her thin mouth curves into a frown. Pain doesn’t seem concerned at all by whatever is happening below them. Has something happened with Sasuke and Itachi? Has Deidara jumped the gun again and attacked someone? Has one of the other members figured them out?

“I’m going down there to see what’s going on,” Konan says.

Pain doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t protest either.

Konan looks at him for a moment, silently. Then, with the pinch of her mouth the only sign of her frustration, she turns and walks from the room.

She tries not to grow too worried as she makes her way down the tower’s steps and through its many halls. She stretches out her senses, urging them to lead her in whatever direction the conflict is taking place. The sound of her footsteps echoes off the stone walls.

It's that exact same echoing that alerts her to the fact that she is being followed. A second pair of footsteps suddenly not too far behind her, the sound also bouncing off the walls in tandem with hers. There doesn’t seem to be any attempt from her follower to conceal them.

She spins around. Turning the corner and stepping out of the shadows, into her vision, is Kisame.

She blinks in surprise. He is standing there, large sword resting on his shoulders. The corridor is dark, but—Konan has sharp eyes. There is something dark and red that is slicking Samehada’s tiny blades. A smear across his right cheek.

Konan tenses. “Kisame. What happened?”

He tilts his head, and even that small movement looks wrong. “Hm? What do you mean?”

“You have blood on you.”

“Oh,” Kisame says. “This?” He takes a finger and wipes it across his right cheek—not ridding his face of the blood, just smearing it more. Then his tongue flashes out and licks the blood from his hand.

Konan feels a jolt go down her spine. Wrong, wrong, wrong, all her instincts scream at her. She tries to hide how unnerved she is, but she doesn’t think she succeeds.

Kisame smiles, a grin that is horrifying and far too wide for his face. His shark-like pupils disappear, eyes rolling back to become completely white.

Realization slams into her.

“Zetsu.”

★

Deidara never thought, even in a million fucking years, that he would be fighting to keep Itachi Uchiha alive.

He still remembers the day he first met him—the day he was forced into joining the Akatsuki, held captive and helpless under those eyes that burned red with blood and power. They were so dead, those eyes, like there wasn’t even a person living behind them. They froze Deidara still.

In all these years, those eyes have never changed. And Deidara has never stopped hating them.

But then—Sasuke Uchiha.

That small, slip of a boy walked up to their front door like he belonged there. And Itachi’s dead eyes changed to something alive.

Deidara’s hands are shaking as he presses Sasuke’s Akatsuki cloak against Itachi’s chest. The cloak is soaked in blood; it stains his hands and is smeared up his arms. There’s a lump in his throat, his heart hammering frantically against his ribs.

He recognizes the emotion pushing at his lungs and trying to crawl up his throat, even as he’s in disbelief that it’s there. Fear. He’s afraid for Itachi Uchiha. He doesn’t want him to die.

How the fuck did that happen? When did that happen?

The face below him is deathly white, leeched of all color besides the blood on his lips. Deidara clenches his jaw.

“I swear,” he mutters, “you better keep fucking breathing, asshole. If you die before he comes back, he’s gonna kill me.”

His eyes rise up, settling on the empty air where Sasuke just disappeared. He bites the inside of his mouth. You better hurry back.

The stone floor is hard beneath his knees. Deidara presses the balled up fabric tighter against Itachi’s chest, watching with a grimace as the blood continues to slip through his fingers. He’s so focused on his own hands, bloody and shaking as he struggles to keep the body below him alive, that he nearly jumps out of his skin when a hand wraps around his wrist.

It's Itachi. Wide eyes snap to the older shinobi’s face. His eyes are open, barely, unfocused and cloudy with pain. Clinging to consciousness by a thread.

“Itachi,” Deidara breathes in shock.

The hand around his wrist tightens—the grip surprisingly strong, bruising even, for the amount of blood the Uchiha has lost. A raspy, rattling breath is pulled between bloody lips, and dark eyes struggle to lock on Deidara’s face.

“Sa…suke,” Itachi chokes out, each syllable like a chunk of glass scraping up his throat.

“Sasuke’s okay,” Deidara quickly reassures him. “He’s gone to get help for you. He’s coming right back.”

But rather than looking relieved by the words, those dark eyes seem to spark with a renewed urgency. Nails scrabble at Deidara’s wrist. “Kisame,” he says, coughing. Blood trickles from his mouth.

Deidara grimaces at the terrible sight. “I don’t know where Kisame is. But I’m sure he’s—”

“No,” Itachi spits out. “He’s—he’s—n-not Kisame.”

The blonde feels his mouth fall open. With renewed eyes, he looks over Itachi’s injury. Then behind him, to the bloody mess of flesh that used to be Kakuzu. Kisame did this, he realizes, now recognizing the slashes of the wounds as caused by a dozen tiny brutal blades. But why…?

There’s a loud crash from somewhere outside the room, not too far away. Deidara startles violently, head snapping up and blue eyes wide as he partly twists around toward the doorway. He feels Itachi’s hand fall from his wrist.

“What the hell was that…?”

His question is answered not even a moment later when Konan comes bursting into the room. She’s bleeding, her Akatsuki cloak ripped and purple hair in disarray. She’s breathing heavily, and golden eyes widen when they land on him kneeling on the bloody stone floor feet away.

“Ane-san?!” Deidara exclaims. He would’ve immediately jumped to his feet, if he wasn’t preoccupied with keeping Itachi from bleeding out completely. “What’s happening?! Are you alright?!”

Konan opens her mouth to answer, but then processes the sight in front of her. “Oh my god,” she says.

She catalogs Kakuzu’s body and accepts his death, moving on to the body that still has a chance at survival. She rushes over and falls to her knees, mirroring Deidara’s position.

“Kisame?” she guesses, looking across at Deidara.

Deidara swallows. “Yeah. But it’s not him, it’s—”

“Zetsu.”

“How’d you know?”

“He just attacked me, too. I barely got away.”

“What?!” Deidara yells. “Are you okay?! Is he coming here?! How—”

Konan places her hand over his. “I’m fine,” she reassures him. “Nothing serious. I managed to lose him a floor up. Before we deal with him—let’s deal with this.”

The younger shinobi nods. He looks down at Itachi. Panic bursts behind his ribs when he sees that the Uchiha is no longer conscious. His eyes have slipped back closed.

“Shit! Itachi?! Itachi, don’t you dare die you fucker—”

“He’s still breathing,” says Konan. “But not for long.”

“Can’t you do something? You know battlefield surgery, don’t you?”

“It won’t be enough for this. Where’s Sasuke?”

“He went to find Sasori,” Deidara says. “Figures, the one guy we need is the one he kicked through his weird magic portal—”

Purple eyebrows furrow in confusion. “What?”

“Well, technically it was Itachi who kicked him, but Sasuke—”

Konan holds up her hand. “Okay, stop.” Deidara’s mouth snaps closed. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We need to do everything possible to get Itachi stable. He’s losing way too much blood. Do exactly what I tell you to do. And then you’re going to explain to me exactly what happened.”

Deidara nods. “Okay.”

“First. His lung is clearly punctured. It’s filling up with blood, and that’ll kill him faster than the blood loss. We need to create an airway—”

★

It takes Sasuke far too long to track Sasori down.

The dimension he trapped the Sand ninja in is nothing but a barren, empty desert—sun bearing down from above with its scorching heat. There’s nowhere to hide, and he can’t have journeyed far in the twenty or so minutes it’s been since the portal closed on him. Sasuke finds his footprints in the sand, grateful there’s no wind to wipe them away, and he follows them.

All the while a sharp fear in his chest, screaming at him that he’s going to be too late.

Please, Sasuke begs. Stay alive. I’m coming back, I promise.

When he finds Sasori, the man has discarded his outermost puppet. He now walks tall instead of hunched, a young man who looks to be in his late teens but is actually in his thirties. The sun glints off his synthetic hair and skin, so lifelike no one would ever guess the appearance isn’t his real one.

“What do you want, you brat?” Sasori sneers. “Here to finish me off? It won’t be so easy.”

Sasuke bites down his irritation at the antagonistic tone. “My brother needs your help. I’m taking you back with me.”

“And why would I do anything for you?”

“Fine,” Sasuke snaps. “Stay stranded here and die of dehydration instead.”

Considering the exact nature of Sasori’s body and existence, Sasuke isn’t even sure if something like dehydration poses a threat to him. Still, the notion of being trapped here until he slowly dies—or doesn’t die, and merely wanders for an eternity—is enough to give the Suna-nin pause.

“I’ll agree to help you,” Sasori says. “But afterwards, I’m taking your sensei’s head.”

“Go ahead,” Sasuke tells him. He has no time for this—no time to argue that the sins of Kakashi’s father aren’t his to pay for. “You can give it your best shot. After you heal Itachi. Fail to do that and you’ll wish I left you here, understand?”

He still looks unhappy, but the older shinobi nods in agreement. He’s being more cautious with Sasuke than he was before—treating him like someone he should actually be wary of, after witnessing his display of power, unlike before when he saw him as a mere thirteen-year-old genin.

“Good,” Sasuke says. “Then come with me.”

He grabs Sasori by the arm, ignoring the man when he makes a disgruntled noise and tries to yank himself away. He pushes back his bangs, exposing his eye as he feels the chakra in his body pull, and the same portal from earlier opens in the air in front of them. Beyond it, he can see the stone walls of the Akatsuki’s tower.

“After I do this,” Sasori says, “you’ll also explain what the hell is up with your eye.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

He drags Sasori through the portal with him.

Sand turns to stone and sweltering heat turns to cool air. Sasuke’s feet land on the hard floor with a dull thud, and Sasori stumbles next to him as he lands. Sasuke releases him the moment he feels the portal close behind him, and he almost falls before regaining his balance.

Across the room, Deidara’s head snaps up. “Sasuke! Oh, thank fuck.”

Konan is beside him, leaning over Itachi’s body. She looks up as well, her appearance disheveled. There is urgency in her eyes, then a relief that mirrors Deidara’s when she sees him standing there with Sasori just behind him.

Sasuke is across the room in an instant. Passing by Kakuzu’s mangled, broken corpse and falling to his knees on the blood-soaked floor. His heartbeat rams against his ribcage, and his breath catches in his throat when he sees dark eyes staring up at him—gazed, unfocused, but open.

“He’s been going in and out of consciousness,” Deidara says, frowning. “I don’t know how much he’s aware of—if he’s aware of anything.”

“Itachi,” Sasuke says. “Itachi. Hey. Are you with me?”

He hears Sasori kneeling down beside him, but doesn’t glance away from his brother.

Those eyes, after a bit of a struggle, focus on him. One of Itachi’s hands twitches, fingers searching, as if it wants to latch onto him but has no strength. Sasuke immediately grasps the hand in his own.

“I’m here. I’m right here.”

Itachi’s hand is cold. Too cold.

“Sasuke?” Itachi chokes out.

There’s a terrible rattle in his chest when he forces the name out. Sasuke sees Konan’s face, across from him, pinch in distress at the sound. The fear that bolts through Sasuke’s chest mirrors the expression, and his grip on his brother’s hand tightens.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice cracking in a way that he would’ve found embarrassing if he wasn’t so beyond caring. “It’s me. I brought Sasori. He’s going to heal you. You’re going to be fine.”

Itachi tries to speak again—but the words get caught, blood escaping past his lips and choking horribly in his throat.

“Sasori!” Sasuke snaps, knuckles bone-white against Itachi’s hand.

Deidara jumps at the abrupt change in his tone, from soft to harsh and commanding.

Sasori scowls, but leans forward and obeys the barked order. He moves his hands so they hover over the harsh wound in Itachi’s chest, his insides shredded by dozens of Samehada’s tiny blades. Sasuke grits his teeth at the sight, rage momentarily rising over the fear. When he gets his hands on Kisame…

He must have spoken the half-formed threat out loud, because Deidara tells him, “It wasn’t Kisame. It was Zetsu. He was possessing him, we think—or something like that.”

Sasori’s hands light up with a familiar green glow, the same he’s seen from Sakura’s hands dozens of times.

“I alleviated some of the pressure on his lung,” says Konan. “It was collapsed, and he would have suffocated otherwise. But I wasn’t able to do much more than that, I’m afraid.”

“Ane-san, you did your best.”

Sasuke ignores them, attention completely focused on Sasori’s glowing hands. On his brother’s wounds, still deep and bleeding, not appearing to be getting any better. His gaze snaps back up to Sasori’s face, the intense concentration there and the slight furrow that has appeared in his eyebrows.

“What’s wrong? Why isn’t it working?”

Sasori frowns, the corner of his mouth twisting. The green glow grows brighter, and there’s a bead of sweat glistening on the Suna-nin’s forehead, but still nothing changes. “I… can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“The damage is too much. There’s nothing I can—”

“Keep trying!”

Sasori withdraws his hands, the green glow fading from them. “It’s not that simple, Uchiha. This isn’t a matter of effort or willpower, it’s a matter of skill. Skill I don’t have, understand?”

Panic presses at Sasuke’s ribcage, trying to swallow him. “I don’t fucking care!” he snaps at him. “He’s dying! I told you, if you didn’t heal him—”

“No one could heal this!” the older shinobi snaps back. “Not unless they were Tsunade Senju herself, and maybe not even then! It takes time to repair this type of damage—over an hour, at the least, and your brother has minutes at most!”

He turns back to the elder Uchiha, the anger in his expression softening to something close to sympathy. “I’m sorry, Itachi.”

Sasuke’s lips curl back from his teeth. His right eye flashing red, the rings in his left swirling, he grabs the man with his free hand. “No. He is not dying! You’re going to fix him, or I swear by the gods themselves I’ll make what happened to Kakuzu look like a mercy—”

The hand clasped in his own tightens, nails sharp against skin. “Sasuke.”

Sasuke looks down and meets dark eyes, identical to his own.

There’s resignation there, on Itachi’s face. A sad acceptance. It’s an echo of the last smile he once gave—two fingers jabbing at his forehead a final time, blood on his mouth, as he leaned forward and fell.

Sasuke can’t breathe. It’s like all the air has been sucked from the room.

“No,” he repeats. “No. Not again. Not again, I won’t—I can’t—”

No, no, no, no, no, no, no—

He can see Itachi’s dead eyes staring up at him. Taste the blood and smoke in his throat. Present bleeds into the past—or the past bleeds into the future—and suddenly he isn’t here. He’s sixteen, collapsing next to his brother’s dead body. He’s sixteen, and the entire world around him has frozen and broke—

The back of his throat burns. His eyes sting, as his brother’s face in front of him blurs.

“I was supposed to save you,” Sasuke says.

His voice breaks over the words. He feels a tear slip free and slide down his cheek.

Deidara and Konan are there too, just across from him. But for this moment, they cease to exist. It’s just him and Itachi, as his brother raises his arm with what appears to be the last of the strength he has left in his failing body.

He brushes the fallen tear from Sasuke’s face with his thumb, leaving blood on Sasuke’s cheek. And Sasuke is once again reminded of those two fingers poking him in the forehead for a final time—trailing a line of blood down his face as he fell.

“Oh, otouto. You did.”

Itachi’s bloody hand falls. Sasuke watches it, experiencing double vision—half of him here, now; and half of him back to then, his back against the wall as his brother’s body tilted forward, arm dropping—

Forgive me, Sasuke. But this is it.

Itachi’s chest stills. His eyes go dull.

Sasuke leans forward and buries his face against his brother’s chest. He sobs.

★

Pain feels the exact moment it happens. Itachi’s chakra signature, weak and fading, flickers out and leaves nothing but a void in its place.

He’s gone.

Pain feels a slight weight on his heart—not grief, not heavy enough, but the shadow of the feeling. He lets it pass over him for a second, then moves forward from it. He has no use for such emotions. Certainly not for Itachi—not now that he’s been officially confirmed to be a traitor to their organization.

Sasuke Uchiha, too. Though that one doesn’t come as a surprise.

He descends from the top of the tower, about ten minutes after Konan also descended it. He does not move in the same direction, however. He can sense her, along with Deidara, Sasori, and the turbulent storm of anguish and rage that is Sasuke Uchiha, all gathered around the emptiness where Itachi’s life just flickered out—but he turns in the opposite direction, where he can sense Madara and their mysterious intruder locked in battle.

His footsteps are echoing and purposeful against the stone floor. He ignores the emotions trying to sneak their way into the spaces between his ribs.

Itachi’s death is irrelevant. An unfortunate loss for the Akatsuki moving forward, but inconsequential to the reaching of their goals.

He was never truly theirs, anyways. He was always Konoha’s.

The deep-rooted loyalty of an indoctrinated child soldier. Pain knows it well—he used to share it, an entire separate lifetime ago.

With his abilities, he can sense everyone in the tower and pinpoint their exact positions. He felt Itachi die. He felt Kakuzu die, horribly and painfully, in the same room feet away. He felt when Sasori’s chakra signature abruptly vanished from his radar—then twenty minutes later when Sasuke’s vanished as well, only for both their signatures to reappear.

He sensed when the intruder entered the tower. He sensed them long before that, the rain falling from the clouded sky tracking their movement as they approached.

It was Madara who told him to let them pass. To let them slip inside the tower, believing themselves to be unnoticed.

Pain’s sure steps falter slightly against the stone floor, when he feels another chakra signature snuffed out—this death much quicker and abrupt than Itachi’s slow fading. The intruder is dead. Pain can sense it from less than a floor away now; Madara’s chakra calming and settling, now that the battle is over.

Pain frowns. His steps pick up again, quicker this time.

He reaches the room of the tower where the battle was taking place. He can sense Madara just inside. Knowing his presence is most likely expected, he opens the door and enters without formally announcing himself.

Madara is standing with his back to the door. Pain can see nothing but the black-red of his cloak and his dark hair. And the large hole in his sternum—an empty circle in his body, dripping blood onto the floor. As Pain watches, the large wound heals and disappears, as though it was never there.

“Nagato,” Madara greets. “Come in.”

Pain doesn’t react, though inwardly he twitches at the name. Do not call me that, he would have commanded anyone else. Anyone else but this man.

He steps inside the room. He sees, by his leader’s feet, the body of the intruder. Silver hair, Konoha headband, and features familiar from his page in the Hidden Mist’s Bingo Book.

Kakashi Hatake. The Copy Ninja, and one of Konoha’s best.

And to the left, there is an orange mask broken into pieces.

Oh, Pain thinks, as the reason for the man refusing to face him suddenly becomes very clear.

He has never seen Madara’s face before.

Though he cannot deny the curiosity in him, Pain stays where he is at the man’s back and doesn’t try to get a different angle on him. “What was the Copy Ninja doing hunting us?” he asks. “Do you think Itachi fed his village information on us?”

“Despite his disloyalty, I don’t think Itachi has given his village much concrete information at all on us,” Madara says. “His main goal as a member of the Akatsuki appears to have been solely to act as a deterrent against us moving against his home.”

Pain keeps his gaze steady on the man’s back. “He’s dead. Zetsu killed him, just minutes ago.”

“I know. I was the one to give the order.”

His voice is blank. Utterly devoid of emotion. His chakra is the same, calm and without any ripples.

Pain feels uneasy at the cold callousness in which he dismisses the death of one of their own. It’s an irrational feeling, and he attempts to shake it off. Was he not just doing the same thing? Itachi wasn’t one of theirs—he was a traitor, and his death shouldn’t be considered a loss.

“Sasuke is still alive. He won’t take this laying down.”

“No,” Madara agrees. “I suspect he’s on his way to hunt me down right now.”

Pain can still sense Sasuke’s signature. Stationary, in the same place, but a violent storm. He isn’t hunting Madara down in this exact moment; but doubtless, he will be soon.

Pain doesn’t understand what is going on. He doesn’t know what Madara is planning with this. How can that be? How can he know so little, be so blind? This organization is meant to be his. It was Yahiko’s, to build a peaceful world. But now—

He remembers Konan’s words. He’s using you. He’s using both of us. Can’t you see that?

“I’ll go deal with Sasuke Uchiha,” Madara says. He casts the body at his feet a look, and Pain gets a partial glimpse at the left side of his face—skin rough and hardened, covered in scar tissue. “You take care of the trash.”

A portal of empty, black space opens up in the air. He moves to step through it. But before Pain has made a conscious decision to do so, his hand snaps out to grab the man by the arm.

“Wait.”

His hand goes right through the Uchiha’s body. But it gains his attention, and he pauses. “Yes?”

Pain hesitates for a moment before speaking. “Whatever you’re doing, promise me it’s all in pursuit of our goals. All in the result of true peace. You swore to me that we both wanted the same thing—swear to me again that hasn’t changed.”

Silence. Then—

“Of course it is,” Madara says. “Of course we do.”

He steps into empty space, disappearing from the room and leaving Pain’s sharp eyes fixed on nothing.

It’s a lie.

It’s always been a lie.

★

Sasuke wipes away the tears that streak his face. His hands are shaking, as they slide down his brother’s face to close his open eyelids.

I was supposed to save you.

Oh, otouto. You did.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there. Time loses meaning, falls away from him. The body against his knees is turning cold, and Sasuke’s heavily red hands are clenched tightly in wet fabric. There’s a fog, an unrealness, that settles over everything. He digs his nails deeply into his palms, and the pain cuts through it like sharp static.

“Sasuke,” someone is repeating. “Sasuke. Sasuke!”

Deidara. His image swims into focus, blue eyes wide in his face as they stare at him.

Sasuke blinks. The world snaps back into place like a rubber band. Anguish slams into him, so hard it steals his breath, it twists up his lungs. His hands clench in the fabric beneath him, Itachi’s Akatsuki cloak soaked in blood.

He can’t be dead. He can’t be dead, not again. Not again, not again, please please wake up—

A pale, bloody hand covers his own.

“Sasuke,” Konan says gently. Her thumb rubs soothing circles into the back of his hand. “Sasuke, breathe.”

Her calm but firm voice compels him to follow her words. She lifts her hand to push his hair from his eyes, to cup his cheek in her palm. Her touch is so much like a mother’s, so much like a touch he's been bereft of for years, he can’t help but instinctively lean into it. She repeats her instructions slowly, patiently, until the world stops spinning and his chest stops feeling like it's on fire.

She drops her hand, still looking at him with deep amber eyes. Deidara, too, is looking at him—looking at him like he’s trying to find some sort of words, but is coming up empty. There’s the barest sheen of tears in those blue eyes—for Sasuke? For Itachi?

Sasuke looks down. His brother’s lifeless hand is still clasped in his own.

A familiar sound cuts through the silent room. The whoosh-roar of a portal opening.

Sasuke’s head snaps up, in unison with Deidara and Konan’s heads snapping around.

A man in a familiar mask steps out of empty space and into the room. Different to how Sasuke’s Rinnegan works—instead of a swirling, purple vortex, there is just blank space as the masked man appears. The mask is different, white with markings like a target, two eye holes instead of just one—the same mask he wore during the onset of the war, rather than the orange one he donned as Tobi.

Konan straightens up immediately. “Madara-sama.”

“Oh shit,” Deidara mutters. “We’re so fucking dead.”

He grimaces the moment the words leave his mouth, realizing how massively callous they are, eyes shooting to Itachi’s still body.

Sasuke isn’t looking at them. He barely hears them, their voices underwater echoes. There is ice in his chest—a calm, cold, deadly rage. So unlike the rage he’s used to feeling, wild and consuming like fire. His Sharingan activates, power surging in his veins and chakra sparking at his fingers. He tastes it in his throat, the same way he can sense an oncoming storm in the air.

He lifts his hand from Itachi’s. Gently, he lifts the body off him and settles it on the stone floor as he stands.

“Obito,” he says, walking closer. Walking past Deidara and Konan, who are still knelt on the floor with held breaths. In his thirteen-year-old body, the man is over half a foot taller than him. Two eyes stare back at him from behind the marble mask—one an ordinary brown, and the other a crimson red.

“You did this?” Sasuke asks.

Those mismatched eyes glance behind him, to Itachi’s body. Then return to Sasuke. “Yes.”

Sasuke’s hand flexes at his side, heavy with his brother’s drying blood. He can still feel Itachi’s hand beneath his own.

“In that case,” he says. “I no longer care about trying to save you.”

His Rinnegan activates, his bangs flying back from the left side of his face. He catches Obito’s eyes, flashing with pure shock, but it’s far too late for the man to move as—

“Planetary Devastation.”

The room tears itself apart.

Large pieces of stone rip themselves from beneath his feet. The walls around them do the same. All of the pieces pulled toward the large, black sphere of energy now floating above them. Sasuke hears Deidara’s familiar screeching, but he doesn’t concern himself with it—he and Konan are both S-Rank criminals, far too skilled to be felled by something like falling debris.

Instead, Sasuke focuses on Obito. The man has leaped into the air as the room falls apart around him, his feet landing on one of the larger pieces of debris. He steadies himself on it, using it to surf through the air and bending to avoid other wild projectiles.

Sasuke’s eyes narrow on a piece of rock falling just in front of him. Chakra pulling from his left eye, he switches places with it—appearing an inch from Obito’s face. He tackles him, or attempts to—

He slips right through his body, as expected, and the world warps around him as he’s suddenly transported somewhere else. He hits solid ground hard.

Obito’s pocket space. The one he transports people to, the one he transports parts of his body to in order to avoid attacks. Sasuke hears the sound of it opening again, and he doesn’t give himself any time to process his surroundings. He pulls his sword from his belt, spins around, and jams it forward the moment Obito swirls into existence.

The blade slams straight through the single Sharingan eye. Obito screams.

Sasuke feels the blade go straight through. Through the eye, through the nerve tissue behind it, through the brain and the back of the skull. It hits something hard, then the steel creaks warningly. The metal is cheap, nowhere near the quality of Kusanagi, so Sasuke stops before the blade can shatter against hard stone.

He has Obito on the ground, pinned by the sword through the hole of his mask. His Sharingan mangled, rendering it useless and him unable to teleport away.

Sasuke steps on his hand, grinding the heel of his shoe into it. He feels the bone splinter beneath its weight.

“Shut up,” he snaps, when the man yells and continues writhing beneath him. “And stop moving. You’ll kill yourself faster, and I still have business with you.”

Surprisingly, he agrees and stops writhing. A single brown eye, clouded with agony, stares up at him with utter loathing.

“Did you kill him?” Sasuke asks.

“Itachi?” Obito croaks. His voice is strangled, mouth invisible beneath the white mask now stained in his blood. “I… told you, I—”

“No. Kakashi. Did you kill him?”

Silence. Then—

“…Yes.”

Sasuke closes his eyes.

He already figured it, the moment Obito appeared in front of him. He resigned himself to it, when he was forced to leave his sensei behind for his brother—but he still hoped, against all likelihood, that Kakashi would find some way to survive. Find some way to win.

He feels that tiny bit of hope die now, as it’s added to the giant, gaping wound in his chest that is Itachi. His brother’s last breath, his brother’s blood on his hands, his brother’s eyes going dull for the second time.

Sasuke’s jaw clenches. Rage sparks in his chest, and his hand tightens around the handle of the sword as he rips it free.

Obito screams again. Blood pours from his skewered eye, as the harsh removal of the blade sends the mask flying. His bare face is exposed, twisted and scarred and bloodied.

Sasuke changes the angle of the weapon, places the edge of the blade against his throat.

“He was your friend.”

Obito’s single good eye glares at him hatefully. “He was trash!”

“He was better,” Sasuke says, “then you will ever be. They were both better than you will ever be. You didn’t deserve them.”

There’s a burning in the back of his throat. His vision blurs with tears.

He looks down at this man—this man who betrayed everyone and everything he stood for, this man who tried to rip the world apart for his selfish anger and vengeance, this man who left the ones who loved him begging and bleeding—and he hates him. He disgusts him.

He disgusts him because he looks down at him and sees himself.

You didn’t deserve them.

Sasuke takes a steadying breath. It does little to quell the storm in his chest. He remembers Naruto, in their last moment together before he sent Sasuke back, asking for him to show Obito mercy. He’s an Uchiha. He’s your family.

He's the reason Sasuke’s family is all dead. He’s the reason Itachi is—

“You know,” Sasuke says quietly, looking down at the man’s broken, bloody face, “Naruto wanted me to save you. You murdered his parents, you ruined his life—and still, he wanted me to give you a chance. He chose to forgive you, and he wanted me to, too.”

Obito stares up at him, barely aware. But Sasuke sees the flash of recognition on his face amidst the confusion.

Does he remember Minato? Kushina?

Does he care at all about the kind of life his actions condemned their son to? A life where he was abandoned, abused, hated, unloved?

“I was going to try to save you,” Sasuke tells him. “Not for you. But for him, because he asked me. Because he lost his family, just like me, and he didn’t want me to lose any more of mine. But you’re no family. You’re no Uchiha. You murdered my brother, and for that—”

Obito chokes on the blood in his throat. “Sa…suke—”

“—For that you can go straight to hell.”

Obito’s undamaged eye widens, fear flashing through it, and a sharp inhale hisses through clenched teeth—as Sasuke presses down on the sword kissing the man’s neck, and the blade slices deeply through.

Blood  sputters from the wound. A strangled noise escapes his throat, before his face turns still and lifeless. Just like Itachi’s.

Sasuke’s hand shakes as he pulls the blade out of his throat. It feels too simple. It feels anticlimactic.

His hands are still covered in his brother’s blood. He doesn’t feel better.

★

Sasuke burns the body to ashes, just to be sure. He doesn’t understand how Zetsu works—he doesn’t think anyone does—but the last thing he wants is that alien freak of nature pulling the same thing it (he?) did during the war.

He stands up, sheathes his red-streaked blade, and then uses his Rinnegan to portal himself out.

Black Zetsu watches from behind Obito’s dead eyes—as Amaterasu’s deadly flames eat through skin and bone and organs. The otherworldly creature sinks into the stone floor, connecting with the part of itself that watches from outside this small plane—that dwells behind the eyes of Kisame Hoshigaki, attaching itself to the man’s heart and brain like a parasite.

This, it thinks to itself, is not ideal.

★

Sasuke stumbles when he exits the portal. There’s nothing to catch himself on, so his knees hit the floor and his hands scrape against rough, cracked stone. The impact rattles through his entire body, his vision swimming as darkness encroaches on it and tries to drag him under.

He's completely exhausted his chakra. In this small, weak body, he shouldn’t have been able to use anywhere near as much as he has.

His limbs are heavy, like cement, and the act of moving them feels like a monumental task. But he looks down, at the back of his hands—at the dried red on his skin, thick and flaking. A wave of despair crashes over him, so heavy he can’t breathe. But he forces the threatening unconsciousness back, shoving himself to his feet. He needs to find—

Itachi.

The blood on his lips. His gentle smile as his eyes dulled.

I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Why can’t I ever save you?

The room is almost entirely demolished from the jutsu Sasuke used. The stone walls have collapsed, and what was before an enclosed space now bleeds into the hallway and the other rooms that are neighboring it. Pieces of the floor and ceiling are torn away, creating a view above and below of other stories of the tower. The stone is broken and crumbling, large pieces of debris obstructing him and dust falling from the crumbling holes above his head.

Sasuke has to weave and swerve around the gaps in the floor, the places where the stone is cracking and looks in danger of giving beneath any sort of weight. Ahead, he spots them, much farther off than they were before—Konan and Deidara, both kneeling on the ground.

And dark hair, barely visible. A body pillowed against Konan’s thighs, unmoving.

“Sasuke!” Deidara says when he spots him. “What happened? Are you okay?”

Sasuke doesn’t answer him. He sinks down to the floor with them, his eyes locked on his brother’s dead face.

He looks up at Konan. “Can I…?”

Konan’s amber eyes are sad. “Of course,” she says, and Sasuke can hear the grief in her voice. Quiet, somber; unlike Sasuke’s that rips through him like a violent, vicious storm.

With the utmost care, as if he were something fragile, Konan transfers Itachi to Sasuke. His hands curl around Itachi’s shoulders, the bloody fabric of his clothes. They brush against his skin, far too cold.

“Nii-san,” Sasuke says softly. He repeats it again, those two syllables suddenly the only ones his tongue seems to know. “Nii-san.”

His eyes burn. His shoulders shake. With an anguished, choked noise, he leans down and buries his face in his brother’s shoulder. He feels his hair prickling at his face, matted with blood, and twists his nails into Itachi’s ruined cloak.

Neither Konan nor Deidara says anything. Sasuke doesn’t know how long he stays there, unmoving. He feels Konan move so she’s beside him, a hand settling on his back. Comforting him like he’s the thirteen-year-old genin she believes him to be.

He isn’t, but he can’t bring himself to reject the touch.

There’s no anger to channel his grief into now. No vengeance. Just the terrible, crushing realization that he failed. That his brother is dead, again, and now Kakashi is too. He came back to fix things, but all he’s done is make things worse. All he’s ever done is make things worse.

It should have been Naruto to come back, not him. He doesn’t know how to fix things, only how to break them.

“Sasuke,” Deidara says hesitantly, after who knows how long. “What happened with Tob—I mean, Obito? Is he…?”

“He’s dead,” Sasuke tells them.

He hears the catch of Deidara’s breath, but Konan is the one to speak. “Dead? Are you sure?”

“As sure as I can be.”

“And you killed him?”

Her disbelief is understandable. Konan knows Sasuke has time traveled here from the future—but despite that knowledge, he still looks like a child to her. He can tell by the way she looks at him, she still sees him as one.

“What about Zetsu?” Deidara asks, before Sasuke can repeat himself to her.

“I don’t know,” the time-traveler says. A bolt of fury goes through him at the mention of the creature. “He might still be possessing Kisame.”

“Wonderful,” Deidara mutters.

“We need to go after him,” Konan says. “We can’t let him escape.”

“He likely already has,” says a new voice from behind them.

Sasuke would have leapt to his feet, sword drawn, were Itachi’s body not still resting on his lap. Instead his head merely snaps toward the voice, in unison with Konan’s. Deidara is the one to shoot to his feet.

“Leader-sama!”

The blonde still refers to him by the title, even though he knows full well by now that the man is nothing more than a figurehead. Pain acknowledges him, expressionless, purple eyes identical to Sasuke’s left one sweeping over him. Then that gaze falls down to Konan and Sasuke—to Itachi.

“Nagato,” Konan says quietly.

Sasuke is tense as the orange-haired shinobi approaches. He’s prepared to call up the Susano’o at a moment’s notice to defend them, despite knowing he barely has the chakra for it. He’ll force it if he has to—and pray it doesn’t kill him.

Pain makes no move to attack any of them. The mask-like expression he wears is built from the same blankness Itachi often builds his with. But Sasuke doesn’t know him the way he knows—knew, he corrects himself—his brother. He can’t see through him and find the cracks, the way he eventually learnt to do with Itachi.

“Stay away from him,” Sasuke warns, an arm wrapped protectively around the body in his lap.

“I don’t intend you any harm.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Sasuke.” Konan speaks up again, her voice still careful and soft. But she isn’t looking at him, her eyes remaining locked on Pain in front of her. “He’s telling the truth. I can tell. Trust me.”

Sasuke hesitates. He doesn’t trust her—not by any fault of her own, it’s simply something he knows better than to risk doing. His entire life has been a lesson on it. But out of the three of them here, Konan is the only one who actually knows the man in front of them. Who would be able to read him.

Sasuke doesn’t relax the arm around his brother. But he pulls back slightly on the sharpened hostility in his voice. “What do you want?”

“Only to help you,” Pain tells him.

He sounds earnest, from the little emotion that can be parsed from his voice. He speaks much in the same way as Itachi, as well. Like someone who has been detaching himself from his emotions for so long, he no longer knows how to wear them correctly when attempting to let them be seen. Still, Sasuke watches him with narrowed eyes as he lowers himself down on a single knee. Dirt and blood stain the once-clean cloak.

He's looking at Itachi’s still face, and something softens in his expression. His gaze moves up to settle on Konan.

“You were right,” he tells her. “About everything. I’m so sorry.”

Konan looks back at him, the expression she wears so gentle that it feels like he’s witnessing something private. He feels like an interloper, an invader, as she reaches forward to take the man’s hand in her own. “Nagato, it’s okay.”

“No. It isn’t.” Pain turns his gaze from her to him instead. “Sasuke-kun. This never should have happened. I never should have allowed it. Please, allow me make amends and fix what I can.”

Sasuke’s jaw clenches. “My brother is dead. You can’t fix that.”

“I can.”

It takes a moment for it to click in Sasuke’s mind—for him to realize what the Akatsuki leader means. Konan gets it before he does, her body stilling next to him and her eyes widening. Horror fills her expression. “Nagato, no! You can’t! I won’t let you—”

“It’s not your decision.”

Their voices sound strangely echo-like to Sasuke’s ears. He can’t process what the man is offering—is afraid to. “You’d…” He swallows, fingers tightening in his brother’s bloodied cloak. “You’d really do that?”

“I would,” Pain says. “You need only ask.”

Rinne Tensei. The same technique Pain used after his attack on Konoha—giving his own life to resurrect the shinobi lost in the battle, sacrificing himself as a way of making amends, of fixing what he had broken. And now—he kneels before Sasuke, offering to do the same thing.

There’s a hope pushing at the edges of Sasuke’s heart. But also, something horrible and heavy.

He looks Pain directly in the eyes. “You’ll die if you do this.”

“I know. But I’ll be giving my life to something that’s worth something. I think Yahiko would approve.”

Konan’s mouth is open to voice another protest—to beg him once again, please don’t do this. But it snaps closed at those last words, a stricken expression crossing her face. Tears well in her eyes, but don’t fall.

“Whoa, whoa!” Still standing near them, Deidara takes a couple steps forward. “Hold up, fill me in! What am I missing, huh? The fuck are you guys talkin’ about?”

Konan blinks, trying to compose herself. “It’s a jutsu,” she says quietly, with what looks like great effort. “One that only someone with the Rinnegan can perform. It’s called Rinne Tensei, it can return dead souls to their bodies. But it has a cost, it—it requires the user to—”

“It costs the user their life,” Sasuke finishes for her.

Deidara’s eyes are wide. “Oh,” he breathes, looking over at Pain in realization. “You mean he wants to…”

The room is silent for a moment, the somber reality of Pain’s offer sitting in the air.

“You have a Rinnegan too,” Deidara says. “Can’t you do it?”

He sounds confused. The question asked out of a genuine lack of understanding, not because he actually wants Sasuke to take the other shinobi’s place.

“I—” Sasuke swallows, then shakes his head. “No. My Rinnegan doesn’t have that ability. Or if it does, I don’t know how it works. If I could—”

He cuts himself off, looking down.

If Sasuke could have offered his own life in exchange for his brother’s, he would have done it years ago.

His trembling fingers twist even tighter in the Akatsuki cloak beneath them. I can have Itachi back, he thinks, looking down at his still face. Bloodied lips, a deathly white face framed by dark hair.

Sasuke would sacrifice his own life to get his brother back. But he would also sacrifice the lives of others.

Because he’s a selfish person. He’s always been a selfish person, especially when it comes to those he loves. He has a very small selection of people he cares for, and for them he would do anything. For them, to keep them safe, he would burn down the world.

Itachi was the same. So was Fugaku—because for all the constant ways they used to disagree, Itachi was always far too similar to their father than he was ever willing to see. Perhaps it’s an inherently Uchiha trait, to love whole-heartedly and sparingly and selfishly.

And because of that, Sasuke already knows what he’s going to choose. No matter how terrible, how guilty, it will make him feel.

Pain—Nagato—doesn’t deserve this. Sasuke promised Naruto he would do everything he could to save him this time around. Konan doesn’t deserve this either, to have her precious person taken away just so Sasuke can have his back. It’s selfish, so selfish, the choice Sasuke is going to make—but he’s lived without his brother once, he won’t survive it again—

Nagato must read the guilt on his face. “Please,” he says. “Let me do this for you. For your brother.”

Sasuke swallows, looking into purple eyes. “Naruto will never know you.”

Nagato smiles. “You can tell him about me. Jiraiya can tell him about me.”

Konan ducks her head with a quiet, bitten-off sob.

Sasuke doesn’t ask how he knows about Naruto. Sasuke has mentioned him to Konan—so perhaps Konan mentioned the young boy to Nagato in an attempt to sway him to their side. Perhaps Nagato already knew of his long-lost relative before then, due to his status as the Nine-Tails jinchuuriki. It doesn’t matter.

Sasuke closes his eyes for a moment. Hating himself for it, he opens them again and says, “Save my brother. Please.”

“Of course,” Nagato says.

He sees the rings in Nagato’s Rinnegan shifting. “Wait!” he says, straightening. “My sensei—Kakashi Hatake. Madara said he killed him.”

“Yes. I saw the body.”

“Can you bring him back, too?”

Nagato nods.

“Thank you,” Sasuke says. He exhales quietly. “I can’t ever… I wish I could have saved you.”

I’m sorry, Naruto. I’m sorry for being selfish again.

★

Alone in the empty room, Nagato’s true body—emancipated, disease-ridden—sits against the large stone chair and exhales. The Outer Path feeds him information from the puppet’s eyes, so vivid and clear that it feels like he truly is kneeling in front of Sasuke and Konan.

“I’m sorry, Konan.” His voice comes out harsh and rough, like sandpaper. It pulls painfully at his chest. “Forgive me. But this is my penance.”

He closes his eyes. He interlaces his fingers and presses his palms together. He calls upon his chakra, upon the ancient power inside him.

“Rinne Tensei.”

Konan’s amber eyes are the last thing he sees.

★

Sasuke watches, a heavy and terrible weight on his chest, as Pain’s fake body crumbles away. Similar to the way the reanimated corpse crumbled in front of him years ago, after the reanimation jutsu was released and Itachi’s soul rose up into the heavens—he decays and rots like a corpse fast-forwarded through time, becoming nothing more than dust on the stone floor in front of him.

A loud sob escapes Konan’s lips. Her hand flies to cover her mouth, trying and failing to hold it in. Shoulders shaking as she spins away from them to hide her tears.

Sasuke does her the courtesy of pretending he doesn’t see. He’s the last person she would want comfort from right now, and clearly she considers her tears to be a weakness. It’s one of the shinobi’s most basic, ironclad rules after all—do not show tears.

Succumb to emotion in private, where no one can see.

Sasuke has already broken that rule more than once today.

Deidara is the one to walk over to her and lower himself down. Though clearly very uncomfortable, unpracticed in offering comfort, he pulls her in and lets her cry on his shoulder. It’s a testament to their close relationship that she doesn’t try to hide from him too, and instead accepts the comfort he’s attempting to give.

Sasuke blocks them out of his mind. All his attention is on the body in his lap, as he holds his breath and waits. Praying to gods he long ago lost any faith in.

Please, please, please…

It feels like an eternity that he waits—fear that it hasn’t worked, that something’s gone wrong, lengthening each second unbearably. In reality, it’s actually only about half a minute. Itachi’s body is enveloped in a soft green glow, similar to medical ninjutsu.

Sasuke’s breath catches in his throat. He can feel the warm bleed back into his brother’s cold corpse, sees the moment color returns to his face. Dark eyes snap open—and Sasuke barely avoids being head-butted as Itachi lurches up.

“What—”

His brother’s voice is filled with panic and confusion, instantly prepared for a fight as his eyes dart in every direction. Sasuke is quick to grab him and stop him from jumping up.

“Itachi! Itachi, it’s me! You’re fine!”

Itachi goes still the moment he hears his voice. Awareness bleeds slowly back into his expression, as he processes his position and surroundings. The demolished room, Konan and Deidara’s hunched forms feet away; Sasuke’s exhausted, bloodied appearance, eyes red and puffy from tears.

He looks down at himself then frowns, glancing back up. “Sasuke? What—”

His words cut off in surprise when Sasuke throws his arms around him. It’s a rather awkward, uncomfortable position, since he’s still half in Sasuke’s lap. And in his thirteen-year-old body, Sasuke is much smaller and slighter than him. Sasuke doesn’t care, holding his brother in an ironclad grip as he buries his face in his shoulder.

“Don’t ever,” he says, voice muffled and trembling, “ever do that again, you bastard.”

Hesitantly, Sasuke feels an arm circle him as his brother returns the embrace. A hand settles on the back of Sasuke’s head, stroking his spiky hair down. “I’m sorry…? Hey, it’s okay. I’m right here.”

He still sounds bleary and confused. Sasuke pulls back slightly, wiping at his eyes to rid them of their shine, and sees the eighteen-year-old looking at him worriedly, mind working to catch up and understand what has happened. He reaches out to brush the bangs from Sasuke’s face, frowning at the red on his own hands.

Sasuke leans into the touch. “Don’t apologize,” he says. “Just don’t—don’t ever do it again, understand? Promise me.”

“Promise,” Itachi says immediately, automatically. Sasuke’s shoulders fall, his body relaxing slightly as he exhales. Itachi hesitates a moment before asking, “Uh. What is it, exactly, that I’m promising to never do again?”

★

Itachi’s memory is jogged pretty easily once Sasuke begins explaining. Sasuke witnesses the realization come over his face as he recalls his last breaths. He sobers, now that he properly understands his younger brother’s deep distress, and he apologizes to him more genuinely.

“I didn’t mean to do that to you again,” he says. Because, of course, he’s seen Sasuke’s memory of how he died originally. He’s felt the pain it caused him.

Sasuke tells Itachi about Pain—no, about Nagato. Guilt settles heavy in Itachi’s dark eyes, as he turns his head to the woman sitting beside them.

“Konan…”

“Don’t,” Konan says.

Itachi frowns.

“Don’t apologize. Don’t you dare. It was his choice. Don’t dishonor it.”

Itachi clearly wants to disagree with her. Clearly wants to continue to protest. I wasn’t worth it, he wants to say. Sasuke can see it on his face. Damn, but his brother has become exceeding easy for him to read. It seems strange it was so impossible for him before.

He doesn’t say anything. He swallows whatever words he wants to speak and nods.

Then his eyes fall to Deidara next to Konan. “What are you doing here?”

The blonde’s face twists. “Asshole! Is that any way to speak to someone who tried to help save your miserable life?”

“He was actually quite upset when you died,” Sasuke says, causing Itachi to quirk an eyebrow.

Deidara flushes. “Shut the fuck up! I was not!”

It’s surreal—this relieving feeling, like it’s all over now. Obito is dead. The Akatsuki is ruined. Did Sasuke really, truly do it? Did he really accomplish what he came here to do? And Itachi—Itachi is alive. He doesn’t think his brain has fully processed this fact yet.

Still, it isn’t all over. Zetsu got away. Sasuke won’t be satisfied that he’s diverted Kaguya’s plans for the Infinite Tsukuyomi until he hunts that creature down and ends him completely.

“It seems unlikely he’s still here,” Konan says when Sasuke mentions this. “Nagato didn’t seem to sense him in the tower at all. He’s likely fled.”

“He was possessing Kisame’s body,” says Itachi. “We need to find him.”

Sasuke frowns. “Zetsu could still have control over him.”

“All the more reason to find him.”

Sasuke despises the thought of leaving Itachi’s side so soon—especially with the thing that killed him possibly still wandering around. Especially with his blood still staining Sasuke’s hands and clothes, a sharp, terrible reminder of how close he came to losing him. That he did lose him, felt his corpse go cold. But—

“I have to find Kakashi,” Sasuke says. “I have to make sure…”

He feels a horrible tightening in his chest at the thought of his sensei still being dead.

Understanding flickers over his face. “Okay. Okay, we’ll go find him. Konan and Deidara will go looking for Kisame.”

Deidara blanches. “What?! I will not!”

Konan grabs him by the arm. “Let’s go.”

He sputters as she drags him up from the floor and past them.

Itachi doesn’t mention Sasuke’s fear of leaving his side, for which Sasuke is grateful. But he’s clearly clocked it, or else he would have suggested separating from Sasuke to go looking for Kisame himself. He stands up from the broken, dusty stone floor, grimacing faintly at the bloody state of his clothing. He holds out a hand for Sasuke to grab, and Sasuke does.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s get this finished.”

★

Kakashi is alive. Extremely confused, exhausted, and upset—but alive. He knows the true identity of the man in the mask, begins demanding answers immediately, and Itachi grips Sasuke’s shoulder in silent support as he’s forced to tell his sensei that Obito is dead—that Sasuke killed him.

The Copy Ninja is very quiet after that. He doesn’t ask anything else, even though he must have over a dozen more questions.

Kisame is alive, too. He rejoins them with Konan and Deidara, no memory of anything that happened. Itachi’s face relaxes just barely when he sees him—relief his partner is okay, hardly visible to anyone who isn’t Sasuke. When Kisame looks at his torn, bloody clothing, he demands, “What the fuck happened to you?!”

Itachi tells Kisame he stabbed him—without telling him he was possessed by Zetsu at the time.

Sasuke bites his lip to stop his laugh at the face the man makes.

“I stabbed you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Fairly. I was there.”

“No way, that doesn’t sound like me. Well, okay. It actually does sound like me, but still—”

“Don’t think to hard,” Itachi tells him, at the Kiri-nin’s puzzled, scrunched up forehead. “You’ll break something.”

★

When everything is over, Deidara proposes a celebration. A victory party. Sasuke wrinkles his nose in distaste in the proposition, and Konan agrees with him. Surprisingly, Itachi does not—the introverted, antisocial eighteen-year-old agrees with Deidara, and the blonde is so shocked that he drops one of the explosive devices he’s working on and nearly blows himself up.

“It’s decided, then!” He grins after he recovers. “Party! I’ll get Sasori to help!”

“What?” Sasori says, frowning and head snapping in his partner’s direction when he hears his own name. “Wait a fucking minute. I never agreed to—”

Deidara drags him off.

Sasuke spends most of the evening speaking with Kakashi, explaining what he can while still leaving out a lot. He talks to him about the truth behind the Uchiha massacre—and it hurts to see the man look at him with such disbelieving eyes, to hear him speak to him as if he’s a naïve child being helplessly manipulated, taken in by tall tales out of a desperate need to believe in the kind brother he once knew.

But Sasuke reminds him of the surveillance his clan was placed under. Danzo and his dark machinations. Go back to Konoha, Sasuke urges him. Ask the Sandaime. See what he says.

Later into the evening, after Kakashi has gone, Itachi finds him alone in one of the tower’s rooms. Sasuke is looking out the open window, up at the millions and millions of stars in the night sky. He’s barely tall enough to rest his elbows on the ledge.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Itachi says. He comes to stand next to him, settling his arms on the ledge next to him. “The others are celebrating downstairs. You don’t want to join?”

“What’s to celebrate?” Sasuke asks. “Zetsu is still out there.”

“We’ll find him.”

Sasuke grimaces and doesn’t respond.

Neither of them speak, instead standing there together in silence. Sasuke can feel his brother’s concerned eyes on him. Sasuke wishes he could relax, simply bask in the moment, in their victory—but his mind is racing, unable to stop thinking of all the things ahead. What he still needs to deal with.

“Hey,” Itachi says after a couple minutes, eyes narrowed. He’s spotted the glass of alcohol resting on the window edge a foot away. “Where did you get that?”

Sasuke glances at him and arches an eyebrow. “Downstairs?”

“Okay. And who do I need to lecture about serving alcohol to children?”

He huffs when he realizes his brother’s issue, rolling his eyes. “Itachi, I’m nineteen.”

“Technically, that’s still not old enough for you to drink.”

“Yeah? Well, neither are you then.”

Itachi frowns. “I’m not drinking.”

“You had a glass earlier. I saw you.”

Itachi frowns, and can’t refute this. He did, indeed, have a drink earlier in the evening—Sasuke saw it before he retreated from the celebrations. Kisame gave it to him, in what looked like an attempt at an apology for stabbing him.

Sasuke picks up the drink—previously forgotten—and takes a large gulp of it. The alcohol burns sharply down his throat. Itachi’s mouth thins in disapproval, but he doesn’t try to stop him from finishing off the glass.

“Just don’t get yourself drunk,” he says.

“Please. I have higher tolerance than that.”

“You’re in the body of a child. You have zero tolerance.”

Sasuke scowls, but he finds his head actually is a bit foggier than before. So annoying.

“After this,” Sasuke says. “I’m going after Tsunade like we talked about. Danzo needs to be dealt with, and getting Sarutobi out of the way is the first step to doing that. He’s useless in the position, anyway.”

He can practically see Itachi biting his tongue—forcibly stopping himself from defending the man. But he is stopping himself, which means a lot. Means that his brother is actually considering that Sasuke’s words are possibly true, despite his instinct still being to protest and deny.

“Not alone,” Itachi says. “I said I’d come with you, remember?”

The corner of Sasuke’s mouth curves up. “I remember.”

Before either of them can say anything else, someone comes running into the room. Loud footsteps smack against the floor, and both Uchiha turn to see Deidara slide and nearly slip on stone. His blonde hair is falling slightly out of its tie, a pink flush high on his cheekbones.

“Hey! There you are, un!”

Itachi frowns at him. “Speaking of being drunk.”

Deidara bristles under the older shinobi’s judgement. “Shut the fuck up, asshole. Who even gave you permission to exist?”

Itachi says nothing, yet somehow manages to choreograph his complete disdain in a single flat look.

“I was looking for you,” Deidara says to Sasuke. “Why did you leave the party?”

“Not really the party type,” says Sasuke. “And I don’t see much to celebrate about.”

The blonde sobers slightly—metaphorically. “You mean Nagato.”

Sasuke catches the guilty shadow that passes over his brother’s expression.

“Yes,” Sasuke tells him. “And Zetsu.”

“You’re going after him, aren’t you?”

“We are.”

Deidara goes quiet at these words—uncharacteristically so, even more so with the alcohol causing him to be even more exuberant than normal. He looks uncertainly between the two Uchiha, then asks awkwardly, “You think, maybe, I could come with you guys?”

Itachi blinks. “…What?’

But Deidara is addressing Sasuke, not paying the other teen any attention. “I mean, I don’t really have anywhere to go after this… and hunting down Zetsu sounds fun. I’ve been working on some new explosives, I’m just dying to test them out—"

“Sure,” Sasuke says. “Why not?”

Deidara cuts himself off, blue eyes going wide. “Wh—really?!”

Itachi turns to look at him in utter betrayal.

“Great!” Deidara says, grinning. “I’ll go pack my stuff and then we can go!”

Sasuke frowns. “It’s nearly midnight, we’re not leaving now—”

But Deidara has already spun around, tripping and stumbling slightly as he bolts from the room.

Itachi spins on him the moment he’s gone. “We are not taking him with us.”

“He could be useful.”

“In what way?” Sasuke doesn’t respond to the question, and dark eyes narrow in response. “You’re just taking him to annoy me, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“I hate you.”

Sasuke smiles at the words. One of the most blatantly untrue statements he’s ever heard in his life, and Itachi knows it.

Silence falls between them again. Calmer this time, more peaceful, rather than taut with Sasuke’s worried thoughts on the future. The air is cool against Sasuke’s face, as he looks up at the star-filled sky above them. It’s a beautiful view—it’s been a long time since Sasuke’s looked up at something and simply stopped to admire the beauty of it. He’s never really felt the contentedness required to do so, not since those rare, one-of-a-kind nights where Itachi used to drag him outside with their sleeping bags.

Itachi must have read his mind somehow. Or perhaps he, just like Sasuke, has never felt this sort of peacefulness since then either. Because he glances at Sasuke with a soft smile and says, “This reminds me of those couple times I dragged you out to sleep under the stars. Remember?”

Sasuke copies the smile. “Yeah, me too.”

“I wish we could have done it more often.”

He bites the inside of his cheek. “Maybe we will now,” he says hesitantly.

The curve of his brother’s lips becomes more pronounced. “I’d like that.”

Sasuke expects that to be the end of their conversation, and turns his head back to the night sky. But he can feel Itachi’s eyes still on him, can see something intent in his gaze like he’s sitting on something he’s trying to find the words to give voice to.

“What is it?” Sasuke asks.

“Nothing,” Itachi replies. “Just—I never thought…”

The older Uchiha trails off, either unwilling or unable to finish the thought. His dark eyes move from Sasuke, to gaze up at the star-filled sky. A lightness and serenity to him that Sasuke can’t remember ever seeing on him.

“I know,” Sasuke says quietly. “Me too.”

He leans to the left, his shoulder pressing against his older brother’s upper arm.

“We did it.”

“No,” Itachi says, and for the first time in Sasuke’s memory, there isn’t a shadow lurking behind his smile. “You did it. Sasuke, you saved the world.”

Sasuke wants to protest the words. He didn’t, really. They still have lots of unfinished business to deal with. And even if they manage to wrap those up—Sasuke isn’t deserving of the admiration in Itachi’s voice. This wasn’t the selfless, altruistic act he seems to think it was.

Sasuke didn’t do this to save humanity. He did it so he could have this—the simple feeling of the arm pressed against his.

“I didn’t do it for the world,” Sasuke confesses.

He waits for the possible reprimand—putting his own selfish desires, putting one life, above the fate of an entire world. But Itachi looks down at him, eyes filled with an overwhelming affection, and he leans further into him. He tilts his head so it rests against the top of Sasuke’s.

“I know. Thank you.”