Itachi
“Sasuke!” Itachi screams. He thrashes and yells his throat hoarse as they take his brother away. He could barely look at his mother after that. She’d allowed Sasuke to be taken away, had even been the one to hold him back from chasing after Sasuke. His sweet little brother who didn’t know anything of the horrors of the world was being sent to war. It would break him as it broke Itachi.
If he even came back.
And he did come back, in a box with two eyes missing.
Itachi cannot get the sight out of his mind. The sunken skin where Sasuke’s eyes once sat haunts him. All at once he hates the military law that allowed for children to be taken. He hates that his privilege as clan heir and the eldest son kept him safe at home. He hates that he wasn’t allowed to take Sasuke’s place.
So Itachi bides his time. He refuses to join ANBU and serve in the shadows. He takes on missions and climbs the ranks. He fully embraces his role as clan heir and the privileges that come with it. And finally, finally he gains access to information. Classified information during the war. Answers to what happened to Sasuke.
Instead he’s met with more questions. Incomplete reports, names not properly recorded and smudged writing from once wet papers. His only lead is a list of names in the original squad Sasuke was assigned to. From there, he begins painstakingly tracking down each and every one of them. Dead, dead and dead. All except one - Haruno Sakura. An academy student like Sasuke was.
Alive.
And she wasn’t in Konoha now. He bites back a curse and continues perusing the scout reports.
Found a fresh recruit with a pair of her teammate’s eyes running to camp.Teammates ambushed by Kumo-nin on return from mission.
Itachi breaks into Sakura’s home that day. He’s not afraid of getting caught, too skilled to be caught even in a building full of shinobi and with no fear for the owner’s return. Haruno Sakura was days away from Konoha even if she finishes her mission early. There’s bills piled up on the table, many of them late. He remembers the weird note in her files about taking detours during missions and it makes sense now, she was handing in bounties for money.
He doesn’t bother to linger, all he wanted to do was get a feel for the layout of the place. He could even have done without it for it was small. She’d clearly gotten the smallest available shinobi housing. The entrance led into the kitchen and then the bedroom and bathroom and that was it. Once outside, he summons a crow to look out for when the room’s owner returns then returns home himself.
—
He finds her disheveled. She hadn’t bothered to dry her hair before going to bed and the towel it lay on had come loose revealing pink hair. Her sleeping attire was old and worn out. It was almost pitiful how defenseless she seemed. He might have even felt sorry for her were she not his last clue as to what happened to his brother. As it were, she was.
So it’s years of cold anger that rears its ugly face when she does not immediately answer him. Were he thinking clearly, he would not have been so quick to raise his hand - never mind that they were in an illusion and Itachi would not have wounded her enough to cause her real harm. Instead, he forces her to relive the war.
Her memories are unstable. Her perception of the living so warped that they barely seemed to exist, disappearing altogether when he pushes her into camp. The dead on the other hand, remembered with far too much clarity. It is with no joy that he forces her to repeat the memory, forcing her to recall the faces of the living. At some point, her tears cease to flow, eyes becoming dull as she runs through the forest when he nudges her.
It is only when she recalls the face of the jounin she hands Sasuke’s eyes to that he stops the memory. Then he looks at her, really looks at her. He must have stopped for too long when her gaze shifts to meet his.
Waiting.
He startles in spite of himself and puts her into stasis, pausing her sense of time. Sasuke’s eyes seem to stare at him from the jar, as if passing judgment upon him. He knows exactly how messed up it is that he’s forcing her to relive the war. He may have never experienced it but he’s seen plenty of shinobi suffer the aftermath of it. And yet, hearing of it is nothing like seeing it.
Itachi is a shinobi, he’s seen and dealt death. But all his experiences does not make seeing Haruno Sakura running through a forest drenched in blood any less unsettling. It does not take away from the fact that Haruno Sakura was his brother’s age when she was sent to war, for the exact same reason he was. If only because they were in the same team, Sasuke had probably been her friend during the war.
He glances up at her. When had he sat down? Her gaze is frozen up where he had been standing, bloody hands still curled up where Sasuke’s eyes once sat. He presses his palm against his eyes and wills her to simply fall asleep, free of any dreams, nightmares or memory of the night.