Itachi
There were days he imagined her dying.
Pale hands reaching for something in the unknowable distance, eyes glazed over, half-gone already, searching through the blurs for something only she'd know. He imagined her gasping for air, bleeding, mouth opening and closing, barely able to form his name. She was always in their home, strewn horizontally across the ground, bleeding trails under the nearby couch and matting that silky hair he loved into long clusters, fresh from a puddle bath of copper and red.
Those opalescent orbs he could never handle, still the same, despite the flecks of vanished life. And always, without fail, he'd be standing above her. A hair's breadth away. Not touching. Only watching. Distantly gazing at how easily the strings of life could be pulled and snapped and twisted away from his hands.
Humans were so fragile.
She was so fragile.
... And Itachi had so many enemies.
More than that, he had men after him simply for the sake of glory, for wanting the honor of having offed him; he had hate-filled women he'd never even glanced at obsessed with his every move and scornful of his wife. They were a dangerous bunch. Perhaps even more so than enemy ninjas. One typically didn't expect a civilian from their own village to break in and attack them. Itachi knew she could take care of herself. That she was a trained ninja and skilled in her own right, but... he also saw that as his job.
Itachi wasn't accustomed to failure.
So, whenever he was out on missions, he always hurried home. Finishing what he could as soon as possible and making certain that he gave it his all, so there would be no loose ends for him to burn. It increased his productivity and made his clan and village prouder than they already were of him. And so, they sent him on harder missions with even bloodier tasks.
Little did they know that each time a man fell before him, he'd imagine Hinata falling the same way, he'd dream of the victim's family knocking on his house's door for revenge so that they could plunge a knife haphazardly through his kind wife's chest. He thought of how the poisons he favored could blacken his wife's lungs, bile and blood clawing its way up her throat, only for it to stop halfway as spittle frothed around her mouth and she keeled over. Dead. Still warm. The poison slowly rotting her veins.
He'd had enough.
He remembered the way the older generations taught the academy children about the ninja way of life. From protecting one's village to defending teammates and the embellished history of the Hidden Leaf. They made it sound so noble. So wonderful and magnificent. No one talked about the night terrors, about the ache his entire being suffered from every morning. Phantom pains of injuries long since healed. Itachi had a body built by war; for war—and in his perfect mind, he never remembered anyone mention the tears of a four year old boy that just found out that the kind man carrying him away from the burning wreckage he once called home was the same man that brutally murdered his father.
No one talked about the disgust he felt in the mirror during his off days when Hinata's gentle presence wasn't there to reassure him. When she wasn't there to place those fingers he adored on his chin in a gentle caress, forcing him towards her, so that he stopped peering at his broken reflection, and instead into her loving eyes that accepted him for who he was and what he did every single day he left the village's gates. Or even what he did inside them, in those musky, underground tunnels where the interrogation units made their home.
The ninja way of life could barely be called a life.
It certainly wasn't one he was comfortable living.
Something as mundane as the scent of cleaning oils or the sizzling of frying pork could bring him back to a place in time that was filled with constant screaming. Cells lined with men and women he needed to squeeze information out of because the regular torture methods hadn't been efficient enough. But instead of his charges haunting him, his disillusioned mind would replace them with a struggling Hinata, caught in chains, gripping the side of her face like that one man he remembered slicing with a thousand tiny cuts before even asking a question. The incisions merely a precursor of pain to come.
That'll keep you on your toes, his cousin told him once, after he confided in him about his rampant imagination. And because Shisui understood him so well, he gave him a code to follow: Don't lose. Come back. Protect her.
Itachi repeated those words like a mantra whenever he was out on missions, whispering it under his breath like a prayer. Hinata was the physical embodiment of all the good inside of him that he was never allowed to express, of all the kindness he sought in the world, of everything he longed for and cherished. Failing to protect her would be a failure that would cleave what was left of his soul in two.
He hated imagining Hinata dying, but his thoughts were so vivid and backed by so much experience that he couldn't stop even if he wanted to. People were so focused on glory and life that they forgot that once the battle was over, there were no winners. Only the dead and the haunted.
Itachi hated killing.
He hated what it did to him. The way it eroded the virtuous man Hinata assured him she saw. The way it made him feel like nothing more than a monster whose time would soon come, and whose actions would be paid for by the blood of those he loved most.
But he'd continue to do it, to maim and mutilate and murder, so that the coming generation might not have to.
Everyday, he prayed...
'Let this cycle end with me.'