Violence and expectations
The prince was suspicious. Something wasn’t right.
The word had gone out that morning that Itachi kun had murdered his entire family, and the physical evidence was compelling. The prince had been on cleanup duty and after years on the same team he knew Itachi’s work when he saw it. Whatever else had happened there was no doubt that Itachi had wielded the blade, he hadn’t even tried to hide it, had been brutally messily obvious in the way that skilled assassins only were when they were trying to make a point.
But the prince knew what it was to murder your own family, to burn the tree in its entirety, branch, leaf, and root. Knew how it felt to make that particular point from the inside. He knew what it took, the kinds of things that drove a young man to do that, and the kind of young man that could actually do it, and something just didn’t quite sit right.
Because if Itachi had snapped that way, the Prince would have seen it first, would have seen it before the knives were drawn. He would have known before anything had happened, and maybe he’d have stopped him, maybe he’d have helped because the Prince snapped over a lifetime ago and what was a little more blood shed to punish those who broke one of his. Because if Itachi had snapped that way there would have been a reason, there always was and it was never anything small or forgivable. But then there was the question. If Itachi had snapped that way, and the Prince had his doubts. He had never seen that kind of desperate violence in him.
Oh the Uchiha had been strict, there was no arguing that. They had placed Itachi under an unfathomable amount of pressure and taken it as only their due when he shouldered it, no hint of gratitude or apology. The Prince had seen the strain it had put on him, the weight of expectation, of duty, of work that Itachi hated to his bones and could see no way free of. The prince could name plenty of people that had shattered, and committed horrors for less. And yet still the question remained.
Because Belphegor had never once caught any indications that Itachi hated them for it, not a flicker of rage, not a hint of bitterness. In fact he’d never really caught any indications that Itachi hated anyone, not even the people it would be completely acceptable to hate. And massacring your own family, building a new path for yourself on their scattered bones, that took hate, Bel would know.
The thing was the prince had always rather liked Itachi. He was after all very competent, and extremely deadly, and Belphegor was Varia enough to appreciate Quality. In another life he would have dragged Itachi back to their castle refuge and let King Xanxus use that gift that all Skies had to steal his loyalty from the family that was so unworthy of it.
But in this life the situation was more complex, at least for now, and so the Prince had let Itachi make his mistakes, put his loyalty and trust where he shouldn’t, in the hope that if he was burned badly enough he’d find the strength to walk away.
Not fight back, the Prince hadn’t thought he had that in him, to fight those he had given his loyalty to, still didn’t think that, to be honest. Not for his own sake at any rate. Because the Prince liked Itachi but he also knew his limitations, and he knew that Itachi had no battle love, no bloodlust in him. Oh he faked it well, he was a Mist latent as he was and Mists faked everything well, but Belphegor knew bloodlust, it lived under his skin, ran right through his bones, kept time with his heartbeat, and so he knew that Itachi didn’t share it.
The only thing Itachi felt in a fight was a kind of tired grief, a despair held at bay only by the certainty that it was to protect those he loved that he killed. He spilled blood with merciless efficiency, for clan and kin and village, never for the sheer joy of violence and the way it made everything clear and alive and real because for Itachi it didn’t, was never anything but a horror. For him to have broken in such a way as to strike out at his family rather than himself, to have spilled blood and laughed…
The Prince didn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t sure how anyone did. But then, most of them hadn’t known Itachi nearly as well as they liked to think they did. They weren’t his teammates. They hadn’t taken the time to look beyond the expectations that he couldn’t help but try to live up to, to the quiet soul within. The Prince knew better, and Fran did too.
The Prince knew the annoying peasant saw the same thing as he did. A hand in the shadows wielding Itachi like a blade. The Prince wondered who could have driven Itachi to sacrifice his entire clan, who could have had the influence to corner Itachi so badly that he couldn’t even ask his teammates for help. The how was obvious. It had been clear enough that Sasuke had been the only survivor Itachi intended to leave, and that was in its own way the only proof they needed. If Sasuke’s life was under threat, well then there was no sacrifice Itachi wouldn’t make. Teammates knew these things. Just like they knew Itachi and Sasuke had been Sky and Mist, latent as they were, and with the bond shattered under the weight of grief and betrayal Sasuke would bear watching. That kind of thing left damage that made Skies turn dangerous.
And so the Prince kept an eye out, for Itachi’s sake, because Itachi had been his teammate, and Itachi had been willing to burn his own life to ashes for Sasuke’s sake, and the Prince felt that some consideration was owed there.