Healing Heart
"Recovery is a process. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes everything you've got."
- Unknown
Naruto woke up with a headache, slumped over his dining table, smacking his lips. A piece of paper stuck to his face as he sat up and he peeled it off, dazedly stacking his scattered assignments in a pile to stuff in his bag. He was achey, but he thought that maybe he'd had a nice dream. Maybe. It was warm. Something about-
Sunshine.
His head throbbed.
He got up and drank a few glasses of water, remembering what his friend had said about staying hydrated. Checking the clock, he found he had enough time to swing by the orphanage and catch Daiki before he left. A smile split his face. They could walk to the Academy together instead of meeting outside it today. With extra pep in his step, Naruto finished getting ready, brushing his teeth for a whole minute and everything. He grabbed two bananas off the counter on the way out the door, one for him, one for Daiki.
The banana would go brown in his bag when Naruto didn't catch Daiki on his way to school. Because Daiki didn't show up. Not for a week.
-
Itachi was able to host Daiki for four days before being summoned before the Hokage.
Honestly, he was surprised it had taken as long as it had.
“Weasel, report.” Crouched with his head bowed and fist to his chest, Itachi did just that.
A show of deference, loyalty, and respect to a man listening from behind steepled fingers, his hat, a symbol of power and authority, casting shadow over his features.
“He has been different since waking. He seems-”
Unmoored. Listless. Vacant yet haunted.
“-to need more time to recover than originally anticipated.”
There was a childlike clumsiness to Daiki now, not only in his actions lacking their usual strength and surety but also in his demeanor. He seemed so unsure of himself, hesitant in a way Itachi wasn’t used to. Like a ninja binded from their chakra, yes, but more somehow.
Itachi felt the weight of the Hokage’s stare as he prepared to cast his judgment. The pointed silence was perhaps enough to send a weaker ninja scrambling, but Itachi couldn’t afford it. He wasn’t allowed to make his argument with words. Anyway that he phrased it, it would sound too much like he was questioning the village’s structure, perhaps even the Will of Fire. Thinking that he knew better for Daiki than the Hokage did. He was already one charge of insubordination deep with his interactions with Daiki being discovered. (Or at least acknowledged. He had suspected for some time that the Hokage somehow had been aware of his and Daiki’s interactions).
All he could do now is look as remorseful yet resolute as possible and hope the set of his shoulders, the angle of his eyes, made his case for him.
-
Hiruzen felt all his years keenly as he reworked the Uchiha prodigy’s actions into his plans, mapping out the possible routes before him and dismissing them in turn.
The child’s strong sense of familial duty obviously surpassed his loyalty to the village, but it would be best to save that trump card as leverage in future encounters. Hiruzen saw no true advantage in verbally dressing him down here. The downward spiral of the Uchiha clan had been on his mind more and more as of late. How to stop it, if it could be stopped, if it would benefit the villager more if-
But those were ruminations for another time. Itachi would play a leading role in quelling that issue.
Which would make granting his unspoken request favorable.
Orochimaru’s son. There had been a time when Hiruzen had thought of taking the boy in himself, as a study of what could have been done differently with his father. Barring that, entrusting the boy’s care to Danzo. Sage knew the man had fought for it over the years.
It had been part whim part plot to assign Itachi to Orochimaru’s son, wanting to know what had caught his councilman's attention so keenly, suspicious of the Snake Sanin’s involvement.
Never had Hiruzen expected the spawn of his erstwhile student to befriend his late successor’s son.
He further suspected nefarious intentions, pondering at the machinations that could be at play, watched for foul with his crystal ball-
And discovered nothing amiss.
It had the potential to be maddening if he had the time to truly devote his attention to the issue.
Cementing their loyalty to the village while they were still young could pay off in dividends. Seeds sowed and maintained properly bore the best fruit, after all.
“Carry on, Weasel. Closer surveillance of the subject would be wise, especially in this time of upheaval. We never know when Orochimaru might rear his head. The boy always had a talent for capitalizing on other’s moments of weakness.”
But never let Itachi forget just who he was inviting in, nor Hiruzen’s magnanimity in dismissing his insubordination. For now.
-
Everything was different without chakra.
Everything.
Normal things he'd done without thinking before, like walking and breathing, took effort. His ability to gauge his own strength was shot. He got cold more easily. It was difficult to stay on task or get motivated. Even Daiki's sight and hearing felt dulled, as though everything was further away than he was used to, harder to make out.
He honestly felt half alive, if that. Like he'd been sucked out of the flow of his own body and made to be a bystander on the bank, watching the river go by when he knew he was supposed to be in the thick of it.
He didn't know how civilians did it.
This was all to say nothing about his empathetic abilities. In that regard, he felt like he was surrounded by ghosts, or that maybe he was the ghost. He kept catching himself in the act of reaching out to tug on sleeves, grip the tails of jackets, just to prove that he still could. That he wasn't as intangible as he felt. He'd resorted to pinching himself until Naruto caught him several times in one day and resolved to hold his hand to make him stop.
He'd been strangely protective since Daiki returned from his leave.
(He held Naruto's hand through lessons most days. He didn't know if the blonde knew how much it helped him, how it grounded him. He didn't know how to tell him.)
Daiki thought that without his help Naruto would start slacking off in his lessons and homework, stop taking notes and start playing more pranks as he got bored. He never could have predicted their current situation.
It was Daiki that was having a hard time staying present in lessons, now. Everything was a distraction. The overhead lights humming, people shifting in their chairs and clearing their throats, sniffling, pencils scratching, papers shuffling, quiet side conversations. It all built up like static in his ears until- Until he couldn't think and he began to get frustrated and then mad- He couldn't control it, push it down, pack it away-
A thumb smoothed over the back of his knuckles and he realized he was so tense that his hands were curled in fists and shaking.
"Iruka-sensei asked you what twenty-seven plus seven is," Naruto muttered under his breath, slowly straightening Daiki's fingers under the desk. Daiki's hands were clammy, the back of his neck hot, tight.
"Twenty-seven plus seven is-" Simple addition. Iruka-sensei waited with his back to the class, chalk poised to write Daiki's answer into the equation to calculate the trajectory of a kunai being thrown by a stationary ninja. Easy question. Twenty-seven plus seven was-
Daiki felt his throat grow tight. He was taking too long. Twenty-seven plus three was thirty. There was a lull in his brain as he subtracted three from seven. Thirty plus four was thirty four. What was the original problem again? Iruka-sensei only called on people like this when they weren't paying attention, he thought Daiki wasn't paying attention. It was twenty-seven plus-
"I-" Don't know. His ears grew hot and he felt a prickling sensation in his nose like he was going to cry. What was wrong with him? "I- Thirty-four?"
Iruka-sensei wrote the number in the blank without pausing, as though it hadn't taken Daiki almost half a minute to do a simple addition problem. He thought he heard someone snicker behind him. Daiki let his pencil roll out of suddenly limp fingers and pushed his notebook to the corner of his desk. He put his head down.
He obviously couldn’t participate in spars, much less chakra control exercises. While the other children practiced hand to hand, earning recognition from their peers and securing their classroom rankings, Daiki worked with a medical nin on his chakra therapy. Where he used to compete with Sasuke for the top spots in physical education and had no equal in theory, he now struggles to walk without tripping.
And now this.
He stared blankly at the paper in front of him, covered in red markings, so many- Daiki allowed his eyes to unfocus as they were recently wont to do. He felt-
He felt-
Iruka-sensei pulled him aside after class. He was in danger of failing. Him, failing. He came into the academy already having mastered a level of chakra control beyond most fresh genin, brain packed with knowledge gained from hours upon hours spent pouring over books in the library.
He felt…
Daiki bowed to his sensei more to hide his face than as any show of respect before fleeing the room without being dismissed.
-
Itachi found Daiki curled into a ball on the engawa. The wood creaked as the older boy sat and wrapped an arm around the younger’s trembling shoulders, pulling him into half an embrace. He felt the boy tense even further before relaxing minutely.
Daiki’s hair was wild compared to its usual pristine condition. He knew the boy preferred it neat. So unlike Sasuke, that way. Itachi began to set it to rights, detangling it as gently as he could.
He considered what his mother might do, what she might say-
"Itachi"
Itachi hummed in acknowledgment, hands not stopping their soothing ministrations.
"I'm sad." Itachi only held him tighter. There was no need to consider his response, it left his lips as the only true answer.
"I'm here."
Daiki took that as the permission it was. At once the frayed strings of pride and pretense holding him up snapped and he buried his face into Itachi's stomach. The storm that had been wreaking havoc within him since he woke up in that forsaken hospital bed raged on. He would be embarrassed if he had the capacity for it. He was lonely, angry, terrified, frustrated, jealous. He couldn't push the emotions away, wrap them in happy packages and disguise them. They demanded to be felt. He shook and keened, fell apart in all ways.
Itachi held him through it.
It was a start.