Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sasuke is eight when he starts at the Academy, just as he should be, the same age as all his classmates (and not three years too young, the way Itachi did).

Three days after Sasuke starts at the Academy (three days after Itachi barely manages to wrangle their father into attending the entrance ceremony) Itachi finally gets to make good on his promise and pick his brother up from school.

(He’s tired, tired down to his bones. Tired in a way that he’s not entirely sure is healthy, especially considering the medic-nins at the hospital during his last checkup had mentioned he’s still due for another growth spurt.

ANBU is no small feat, no easy walk in the park, even for some of the adults in the village, and Itachi’s been in it for nearly two years now. He’s barely half the age of some of the members in his squad and six to seven inches shorter, which makes it practically a miracle that anybody listens to him as their captain at all.

For all his supposed youth, he feels old, feels ancient, not only in the way his joints are beginning to ache, but also in the way his heart rests heavy in his chest with each new layer of blood that coats his hands.

But if there’s still one thing in this war-torn, blood-stained world his life has become that can soothe the ragged edges of his soul, one goddamn thing left that brings him any scrap of joy or peace, it’s Sasuke.

Sasuke, with his puffed-out cheeks, with his hands that are still childish and clumsy, with his skinned knees and giggling breathy laughter.

Sasuke, who had looked so excited when Itachi had crouched down to his height and promised to try and pick him up from school once he got home from his latest S-rank mission.

Sasuke, who is-

Sasuke, who is tussling on the ground outside of the Academy’s open doors with a little blonde boy as both of them scream their damn heads off in a pitch Itachi isn’t sure human beings are supposed to hit.

God, Itachi thinks as he takes in the scene before him. God, I’m too fucking tired to be thirteen.)

Itachi’s slow even gait turns into a bolting run in an instant, despite the fact that before this moment he’d been unsure that his legs could hold up such an action, especially considering the pace they’d set in their haste to return to the village from his last mission. He ducks between a set of adults picking their children up from school, who are doing nothing but whispering uselessly between themselves, and skids to a stop next to the two boys. He kicks up dust as he comes to an abrupt halt, blinks down at the two children for a split second, and then, for lack of anything better to try, reaches down to yank Sasuke up into his arms like he’s a toddler again.

Only instead of getting an armful of one eight-year-old boy, Itachi finds himself nearly toppling forward under the unexpected weight of the two boys, who are so intertwined from their tussle that Itachi isn’t sure anything less than a crowbar could help him right now.

“Sasuke,” Itachi barks, more startled than upset by this odd turn of events. The screaming stops almost instantly, as does the shoving and wrestling in Itachi’s arms, and in place of the chaotic combination of movement and sound the boys finally seem to realize they’re not on solid ground any longer.

Both boys yelp like startled pups, squirming around to try and cling to each other as their heads jerk up to look at him and in the end their movements are too quick and uncoordinated, resulting in their skulls knocking together with an audibly painful noise. Sasuke hisses quietly in response, scrunching his eyes shut to hide the pain, while the blonde boy who has one hand fisted in Itachi’s shirt at the shoulder and the other arm locked around Sasuke’s throat roars.

“Hey,” he shouts, like the idea of volume control only applies to other people. “Put us down! Put us down right now!”

Itachi allows himself one moment of open-mouthed bafflement as his ears ring at the little boy’s volume before he pulls himself together, but even with all his wits regathered, he’s not sure he can put the boys down without dropping them both on their heads. Still, though, he tries, lowering all three of them to the ground and allowing the pair to tumble gently from his grasp. He half expects Sasuke to keep a hold of him and just for the blonde boy to sprawl free, but both boys go rolling instead, landing in a limp sprawl across green grass, legs still mostly tangled together like a couple of errant wires.

Hair mused and cheeks puffed out in irritation, the two little boys are oddly similar, for all that they’re visibly as different as can be. Sasuke is just as pale as he was when Itachi left on his mission, so pale that the pink of his flushed cheeks is easy to spot, framed as it is by ruffled strands of messy dark hair. The blonde little boy, however, is tan, tan enough that Itachi can’t quite tell if his cheeks are flushed or not, tan enough-

Tan enough, Itachi realizes, that he almost hadn’t noticed the three marks on each cheek, scars stretched there like little whiskers.

(Danger, a voice in his head oddly like his father’s spits at him as Itachi’s eyes take in the rest of the boy’s features, from his big blue eyes to the torn and worn way his too-big clothes hang off of him. He’s a skinny little thing, with scabs on his knees and a bandage peeling off his nose, blonde hair curling in uneven poorly cut lengths around his ears.

Danger, the voice starts to scream as the boy’s eyes dart up to his. He’s a danger to all! A danger to the village, to the clan, to-)

“Sasuke,” Itachi says, carefully pulling his gaze from the little blonde boy who flinches at the sound of his voice and jerks his head to the side to scowl at the ground beside him instead. Itachi considers rising from his crouch, but forgoes it, balancing on the balls of his feet instead.

Sasuke tenses on the ground before him, puffing up like a balloon, oddly ready to explode. Around him Itachi can feel the crowd collectively hold their breath, all waiting for what they know should come next.

(Stay away from him, their father would probably snap if he was here, looking at the whisker marks scarred on this little blonde boy’s face. Stay away from that dangerous monster, from that-)

“Sasuke,” Itachi repeats quietly, waiting until his little brother lifts his stubborn chin up and meets his eyes. “We don’t fight our friends like that.”

The crowd looming at his back flinches, their shock nearly a physical thing Itachi can feel recoil and lash up and down his spine. He ignores it, too tired to be bothered with the apparent unspoken politics of this moment, and meanwhile on the ground his eight-year-old brother all but wails, flailing his uncoordinated way to his knees to glower up at Itachi like Itachi’s just claimed tomatoes were tasteless mistakes from God.

(They are, but Itachi is going to try and go to his grave before his brother finds out he thinks such a thing.

Ah, Itachi thinks. The things we do for the ones we love.)

Itachi nearly startles at his brother’s uncharacteristic behavior, not used to Sasuke being so vivid and loud in a public place like this, but it’s almost refreshing to see, Itachi thinks, because it means Sasuke is coming out of his shell.

Or it’s almost refreshing to see, right up until Sasuke starts shouting in his face.

“Naruto said the Hokage was the coolest ninja ever,” Sasuke roars, with all the fury that his youth provides him. Itachi tries not to blink in bemusement, because he’d been braced for a rendition of he’s not my friend, Itachi!, but before he can really catch up to what Sasuke is saying, the little blonde boy re-joins the fray.

“That’s because he is,” the boy, Naruto apparently, shouts back, rolling viciously over to face Sasuke, and-

(Itachi can count on one hand the number of times he’d skipped out on training during his pre-Academy days.

The one that comes to mind right now was a sunlit day about a month and a half after Sasuke had been born. His mother had pretended to rope him into watching over Sasuke and Itachi himself had pretended he needed to be roped into such a thing, the two of them smiling secretly to themselves as she puttered around the kitchen, preparing for her friend’s visit.

He’d been further persuaded to stay where he was when Kushina arrived, letting the woman drop down on the couch next to him until they were squished together, his baby brother drooling in his arms while the redheaded woman curled up against the arm of the couch next to him, one hand absently brushing at his hair like he was the infant while the other rubbed over the swell of her stomach.

“He’s so sweet,” Namikaze Kushina had gushed that day, leaning down to coo at Sasuke’s sleeping face. “Oh, Mikoto, he’s even cuter now than he was last week! How does he keep getting cuter by the day, that’s not fair!”

His mother had laughed, leaning against the kitchen counter as water boiled for their tea. “I think his cheeks are even chubbier than Itachi’s were,” his mother had mused, grinning teasingly at him as she spoke. “Don’t you, Kushina?”

Itachi had felt his nose wrinkle, too young to decide if he was more offended at the idea that he’d once possessed such chubby cheeks or at the idea that Sasuke had taken such a frivolous title from him. Kushina, meanwhile, had lifted her head from her inspection of Sasuke to peer at Itachi’s own face, as if she had needed the visual to answer honestly, and her eyes had glimmered with a bright kind of light, sharp and warm. It had reminded Itachi of a fire, or of the way it feels to lean in against the heat when it’s cold out, and that resemblance had only grown when Kushina had beamed at him before ducking her head to his, lightning quick, to bump their noses together.

He remembers the way he’d chased that affectionate gesture, starved for that warmth, that gentleness that the redheaded woman had carried around her like a shawl and not at all ashamed of his own need for such a gesture, the way Fugaku kept trying to convince him he should be.

“I don’t know,” Kushina had said, leaning back against the couch and ruffling his hair with her hand as she laughed. “Itachi had the chubbiest cheeks of them all, from what I remember. The squishiest little cheeks too!”

His mother had snorted, the kind of noise she wouldn’t be caught dead making in front of the Uchiha family elders, and had shaken her head fondly at her best friend’s dramatics.

“But I’m afraid you’ll only get to hold onto that title for a little while longer, ‘Tachi,” Kushina had told him, shooting a wink at his mother before she leaned forward as if she were imparting a secret to him. “It’ll only be a few months more before Naruto takes it from you after all!”

His mother had really laughed then, a shoulder shaking kind of giggle as she bent over the counter in the kitchen, and Kushina had smiled at her with the widest, brightest kind of joy. Itachi, meanwhile, had ducked his head over Sasuke as the little infant shifted in his sleep, swallowing roughly once before he’d asked, “Naruto?”

Kushina had ruffled his hair again with one hand while she patted her round stomach gently with the other, explaining happily, “that’s gonna be his name! Minato and I picked it out last week – Namikaze Naruto.”

Itachi remembers mulling that bit of information over in his mind, feeling the woman’s fingers drift through his loose hair gently, absently. When he had looked up it had been to find both his mother and Kushina looking at him, both of their gazes fond and soft and loving.

“Do you think,” he had asked, his voice even quieter than normal as he glanced between the two women and then down at the infant in his arms. “Do you think that- that Naruto and Sasuke could be friends?”

He’d glanced back up just in time to watch something flicker across his mother’s face, something like surprise and something like grief – something that he thinks he still sees in his dreams to this day – but Itachi hadn’t gotten the chance to study the expression, because in the next moment Kushina had flung both her arms around him and dragged him bodily into her lap, infant baby, her own baby bump, and all.

“Oh, that’d be wonderful,” she’d shouted, as if volume control was something that happened to other people. “I’m sure they’ll be the best of friends and they’ll be the safest little boys ever, because they’ll have you looking out for them, won’t they?”

Itachi had been five – he had not yet started at the Academy, but he had mastered his family’s fireball jutsu and could hit all eight targets with his kunai at the same time.

He had been a child, and yet-

Sasuke had opened his eyes then, little infant lashes fluttering to reveal his big dark baby eyes. He’d been looking up at Itachi as he’d tried to make sure Kushina’s enthusiasm didn’t jostle the baby, quiet and at peace for all the noise around him, and he’d reached up to pat one chubby little hand against Itachi’s face, gurgling happily to himself as he did so.

Itachi had been five, but he had been aware at the time that one day he would have to be ready to lay down his life for his village.

But what would come first – what would come more naturally than anything else – was the knowledge that before the village, before the Land of Fire, he would first and foremost lay down his life for the little boy in his arms.

The thought of taking on one more life, of feeling this loving and protective over another little boy yet to come, hadn’t been daunting. It had felt simple, and easy, and right, like listening to his mother sing, like holding a kunai had before his life had become nothing but training-training-training.

“Yes,” he had whispered, leaning back against Kushina’s shoulder as he had lifted Sasuke up to touch his nose gently to the infant’s. “They will.”

Kushina had laughed again, a joyous bright sound like bells chiming in the wind, as Itachi’s mother had crossed her arms against the counter top and given the redheaded woman a smile, one that was soft and crooked and so, so fond.

Itachi remembers that day so vividly, all of it warm and soft, sunshine sweet.

He remembers it almost as well as the day his mother had sat him down, cheeks wet with tears, and had explained that the Fourth Hokage and his wife had died in the Nine-Tails’ attack on the village.

“What about Naruto,” he had asked, trying not to curl around little Sasuke, who was only three months old, who had no idea the depth of the loss tearing through Itachi as he played so happily with his big brother’s fingers. “Wasn’t she- wasn’t Kushina due soon? Did he-“

His mother’s face had crumpled, more tears streaking down her cheeks, and though he’d never gotten an answer, he had never asked again.

But it seems he has his answer now.

Somehow, even after eight years, the grief is still raw and awful, too large for his body even after all he’s grown.

Maybe if he finally hits that next growth spurt it’ll hurt less.

Maybe, but probably not.)

“The Hokage,” little Naruto is screaming, like- like volume control is something that happens to other people, his eyes bright and sharp, warm and light, like there’s a fire burning inside him just waiting to catch the world around him like tinder. He rolls Sasuke onto his back in the dirt, hands curling in his brother’s wrinkled and grass-stained t-shirt, and looms over him as he yells, “the Hokage is the coolest!”

“No, he’s not,” Sasuke shrieks, yanking on Naruto’s loose fraying shirt collar until the other boy unbalances and topples over, giving Sasuke the chance to crawl on top of him, all elbows and knees, still screaming. “Itachi is!”

“Ah,” Itachi intones quietly. He imagines that if Sasuke were rolling around with literally any other child in his class, the parents around him would at least be snickering about how ridiculous this argument is or shaking their heads fondly at the boys’ antics, but the crowd that has yet to disperse seems rooted to the ground with the weight of their horror and disapproval.

In the end Itachi sees only one option left to him, faced with his defensive shrieking sibling and the small skinny holder of the Nine-Tailed demon.

He scoops them both up, tugging one under each arm like a sack of wriggling groceries, and turns back toward home.

It takes them four blocks to figure out that they’ve been separated and three more to convince Itachi that they can walk on their own without ending up in the gutter wrestling about again.

They make it a block and a half before they knock each other sideways, Naruto determined to prove that Sasuke is just as ticklish as any other human being.

Itachi ends up carting them home over his shoulders like two terribly loud sacks of rice.

His mother is beside herself with bittersweet delight.

His father not so much.

(But oh, oh, if it doesn’t feel right, finally having both little boys he’d sworn to keep safe in one place. It feels right enough, in fact, that he finds the energy to look his father dead in the eye and say, “if you have a problem with this, kindly consider that I don’t care.”

His father’s scrunched up, lemon-sour face is entirely worth the headache Sasuke and Naruto had given him with all their screaming on the way home.

The headache he gains from their shouting at the dinner table, however, is another matter entirely.)

-

Things get more and less simple from there.

Sasuke and Naruto are eight years old and utterly inseparable, though Sasuke claims at his loudest volume – the one Naruto seems to have taught him, the one that says volume control is something that happens to other people – at every given opportunity that Naruto is not his friend, while Naruto claims at his loudest volume – which is still, somehow, even louder than Sasuke’s – that Sasuke is a lame bastard but also absolutely his friend.

This would all be a hilarious turn of events, Itachi is sure, if the boys hadn’t, somehow, within a week of knowing each other, become solely Itachi’s problem.

(Itachi still hasn’t spoken to Shisui, even though it’s been three days since the other found him for the sole purpose, apparently, of looking him deeply in the eye and asking him what in the world possessed him to let Sasuke interact with the fucking Nine-Tailed demon-brat.

Shisui, for his part, seems to be avoiding Itachi just as avidly, though that probably has something to do with the black eye he’d acquired by asking such a stupid fucking question.

“His name,” Itachi had snarled, some kind of previously-unknown but vicious and bloodthirsty nature crawling up his throat as his knuckles had split and throbbed with the force of his own punch, “is Naruto.”

His mother’s only response to the gossip among the family that Itachi had lost his goddamn mind and attacked his cousin was to kiss the top of his head and give him a small, wobbling kind of smile as she breathed out like a secret between the two of them, “she would be so proud of you, Itachi.”

ANBU captain though he may be, Itachi feels no shame in the way his eyes had burned with tears at those whispered words. He is still, after all, only thirteen, and grief is a heavy burden to bear no matter your age.

At least, that’s what the Third tells him, whenever they cross paths at the memorial stone out at the training grounds. Itachi isn’t entirely sure what to think of their Hokage sometimes, but that, at least, he can agree with.)

“Itachi,” Umino Iruka says, his tone sounding like he’s aiming for rebuke and not quite sure how to hit it. Itachi, for his own part, isn’t entirely sure how to feel being rebuked for anything, much less for something he didn’t do or condone. It’s certainly a new experience for him, one he’s not entirely sure he enjoys.

“Iruka,” Itachi answers blandly, blinking twice in quick succession and hoping that the older man can’t see the bafflement he feels trying to worm into his expression. “I- the messenger said you asked for me.” He drops his gaze for a moment to the two boys sitting crisscross on the floor behind Iruka, both of whom Itachi had feared might be hurt when the messenger had relayed the request and yet both boys seem to be whole and unharmed.

“Yes, I did,” Iruka says, crossing his arms over his chest. He seems to gather steam as he speaks, his voice falling into the lecturing tone of an adult in charge of unruly children, the likes of which Itachi has never truly had used on him in his life. The bafflement grows and grows as Iruka talks, hands gesturing wildly between them as the chunin informs Itachi in much more words than he thinks is necessary that, for some reason, Naruto and Sasuke decided to ditch their lesson halfway through the day.

“Now, I am beginning to expect this kind of behavior from Naruto,” Iruka snaps, planting his hands on his hips and glowering at Itachi, like he’s the one who suggested the two boys purposefully drop a smoke bomb that they stole from his room in the middle of the classroom just so they could escape out a window and snack on cookies in the bushes instead. “But Sasuke?! Considering your own reputation and the reputation of your family, the other teachers and I were hoping for better from him – “

Iruka’s words stutter to a halt in the next second, his posture going rigid as he suddenly attempts to lean back, away from Itachi. It takes a few seconds for the reality of what’s happening to sink in and for Itachi to realize that for the first time in years he’s accidentally channeled chakra to his eyes to turn on his Sharingan, emotions overriding his common sense.

I, Itachi thinks to himself as rage boils in his veins, am making a lot of enemies this week.

“Sasuke,” Itachi says quietly, working hard to keep the tone of his voice gentle, even when it wants to bite. “Naruto. Get up, please. I believe it’s time to go home.”

The two boys scramble up from the ground and launch themselves at Itachi in a carelessly trusting move that he’s beginning to become all too accustomed to. Today they’re aiming for his arms, which suits him just fine, and within seconds he has the pair of them hanging off of the limbs in question like two very heavy sacks of groceries, their heads both tipped up to peer at his face as their fingernails dig into the skin of his forearms.

It’s a stupid impulse and one Itachi regrets before he even finishes making it, but the second both boys have a hold of him, Itachi uses their grip on his arms to scoop them both up, balancing one boy each on his forearms as their knees dig into his sides. It’s an entirely unnecessary thing to do, since he knows both Naruto and Sasuke are completely capable of walking and that both are old enough to complain when people try and do baby-like tasks with them, but Itachi does it anyway, his heart pounding furiously in his chest as he does so.

The boys, in a stroke of luck, are completely silent as Itachi settles them in his arms, moving only to wrap their own arms around his neck to cling onto him just as tightly as he’s holding them. The lack of complaints is somehow more upsetting than having the boys squirm and shout, but Itachi tries not to focus on it, putting effort into turning off his Sharingan instead and keeping his breathing as even and steady as possible.

It’s incredible impolite of him, but he turns and marches out of the Academy without another word to Iruka, taking long, too-quick strides out of the classroom and down the hall. Heads turn toward him as they exit the front door, parents and children alike turning to watch as they make their way across the yard, but Itachi has long since learned not to care about the way people stare and whisper at his passing.

Three blocks away from the Academy, Naruto starts to squirm. Another block and a half later, Sasuke does too.

“Itachi,” Sasuke murmurs, shifting his legs and kneeing Itachi in his still-bruised ribs. It hurts, but Itachi is still too mad to think about putting the boys down and so he says nothing. “Itachi, you can put us down, you know. We’re not babies.”

Despite Sasuke’s words, Naruto’s fingers curl more tightly against the collar of Itachi’s shirt, something he can feel as the little boy’s nails scratch at the skin at the back of his neck. It’s a motion that in any other situation might have sparked fondness in the pit of Itachi’s chest, but at this moment only fuels the rage burning in his veins.

“Not now,” he answers, trying not to bite his words in two, trying to soften the edges of them so it doesn’t sound like he’s snapping at the boys. “Please, just hold tight for another few minutes.”

Sasuke sucks in a breath, a surefire warning that he’s going to argue back and whine again about not being a baby, but Naruto beats him to the punch, curling his head into the scant space under Itachi’s chin until he’s sure there’s untamed blonde hair stuck in his mouth.

“’Kay,” Naruto agrees quietly, more subdued than usual. And at Naruto’s agreement, Sasuke settles down too, leaning his head against Naruto’s until most of the lower half of Itachi’s field of vision is completely blocked by their hair.

It doesn’t matter. Itachi’s walked this route more times than he can count, could do it blindfolded or in his sleep. In a few minutes they’re once again safely ensconced in the compound at the edge of the village, where at least everyone is either polite enough to pretend they aren’t glaring at them or intimidated enough by Itachi’s recently acquired hobby of decking family members to look the other way for the moment. The house, once Itachi leans over to let Naruto pull open the front door for him and steps inside, is quiet and still, empty of any chakra signatures. With his mother gone and his father likely still at work, Itachi takes a deep breath and forces himself to unwind, lowering Sasuke and Naruto to the ground gently so that they can remove their shoes and step inside.

The little boys don’t budge from the spot he drops them though, shuffling in place with their heads angled toward one another. They’ve only known each other a week at most, possibly a week and a half, but they seem to have already mastered the ability to communicate with their eyes alone, because a few glances later have them both straightening to look at him, the same gleam of determination in their eyes.

“Next time,” the two boys promise in unison, “we won’t get caught, promise!”

Itachi blinks, opens his mouth, and then closes it with a sigh.

“That’s a start,” he murmurs, shaking his head a little as he reaches down to take off his own shoes. He debates saying more on the matter, like don’t do it at all, but he’s tired and his ribs hurt even more now that he’s carried the two little boys across town, and so he doesn’t.

“Come on, you two,” he says instead, herding the boys into the house proper once they’ve both squirmed out of their sandals. “Let’s see if there’s any snacks left in the kitchen, alright?”

“Alright,” Sasuke and Naruto chirp together. They jostle each other with their shoulders for a moment, Naruto scrambling upright after he trips, Sasuke pulling on his arm to help, and then they both tear off together, Naruto’s voice ringing out as he shouts, “last one there is a lame bastard!”

(It takes three more days of the village and clan alike whispering as Itachi passes for Shisui to drop out of the trees one day while Itachi is training. His apology could be better, Itachi supposes, but there’s something oddly soothing about the way his cousin looks at him, the fading edges of a bruise still around his eye socket matching the bruises still fading from Itachi’s knuckles, and says, “you’re going to need help if you plan on continuing to be a stupid bastard about this, you know that, right?”

Itachi can’t help the way he arches an eyebrow at his cousin’s blustering words, smoothing out the twitch in the corner of his mouth that wants to be a smile because that statement strikes him oddly Naruto-like in phrasing.

“I thought I was the gifted genius of the clan,” he muses aloud, crossing his arms over his chest for a moment, watching as Shisui’s face twists with disgust at the title the clan’s always thrown around over Itachi’s head as he’s grown up. “Since when do I need help?”

“Ha, ha, ha,” Shisui mutters, rolling his eyes. He goes to cross his arms for a moment and then pauses halfway through the motion, a visible decision being made in his expression before he loosens his posture and hangs his head, just a little.

“’Tach’,” he says quietly, seriously, “you know how the clan is right now. This could – it’s – shit, man, I’m just worried about you.”

The list of people who care about Itachi as a person and not an heir or genius or specialized ninja is very, very small. It’s only ever had three people on it and one of them died in the Nine Tails’ attack eight years ago.

Itachi isn’t so furious at his cousin that he’d risk losing one of the two people he feels he has left and so he feels himself soften at those words, just enough for Shisui to see it on his face.

“Oh thank god,” Shisui says, knowing he’s forgiven before Itachi even has to say the words. Itachi watches as his cousin sags in place for a moment, ridiculously dramatic even for a Uchiha, and bares the indignation of Shisui throwing his arm around his shoulders and reeling him in for a hug.

“Fuck, I was worried you were going to hold a grudge,” Shisui mutters into the small space left between them. Itachi smiles slightly to himself, patting his cousin’s shoulder as he pulls back.

“Oh,” Itachi says, smiling the same smile he’s seen his mother give the Uchiha family elders, the one that’s sharper than any blade and still manages to pretend that it’s kind. “I am. You’re coming with me to pick up the boys today and buying them both ramen for lunch.”

Shisui pulls back, his face twisting like he’s going to argue for a moment, and then sighs, his whole body deflating with the action.

“Fine,” he bites out, with less grace than the eight years old have displayed. “But if they demand piggy back rides, I’m out, alright?”

Hours later, on their way to the ramen stand, Naruto clings to Shisui’s back, legs kicking against Shisui’s ribs as they wind their way through the early afternoon foot-traffic in the village.

“Y’know,” Itachi overhears Naruto say to Shisui, in what the boy thinks is a stealthy whisper but really comes out more like a normal speaking voice, “you’re not as cool as ‘Tachi, but you’re not bad, Shisui!”

Shisui sighs a gusty kind of sigh at that statement, avoiding Itachi’s eyes as he hikes Naruto just a little further up on his back.

“Thanks, kid,” his cousin says, voice soft but genuine. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

Itachi snorts quietly to himself and hikes Sasuke a little higher up on his own back, tipping his head to the side so that he can pay closer attention to the mumbling relay of information his younger brother’s been trying to give him of their day at school.

All is not healed, that day. But damn if it isn’t a good enough start for now.)

-

Sasuke and Naruto have finished a quarter of their first year of schooling at the Academy, still both eight years old, when Itachi returns to the village after a mission and finds that the council of Uchiha elders and his father have, all at once and all of a sudden, stopped all talk of rebelling against the village.

It’s a relief more stark and sharp than Itachi thinks he can bear, but it’s a double edged blade as well, because the clan had been poised, balanced on the end of a chipped and worn kunai, ready to throw everything away and damn the consequences.

To have that stop, all of a sudden and without any outspoken reason why, is terrifying.

What’s more terrifying, to Itachi at least, is that he might have an inkling to the reason why, even if no one has dared hint as much to him yet.

“Hey,” Naruto says, loud and carefree from the place where he’s hanging off the lowest branch of the forest’s tree. Itachi peers up at him patiently, finding himself more and more familiar with the boy’s way of announcing that he has something to say long before he decides to say it.

At Naruto’s side, Sasuke makes a show of rolling his eyes, both of his hands and both of his legs wrapped carefully around the same branch Naruto is leaning so dangerously off of. Neither boy seems at all concerned that Naruto could fall, likely because they both know that Itachi would catch him before he hits the ground.

(In his head his mother tuts, softly and fondly and with an edge of mischief to her voice that Itachi hasn’t heard in full since the Fourth Hokage and his wife died.

“You’re spoiling them, Itachi,” she’d say, if she was here. “You’ve got to let them get their own scrapes and pick themselves up every once and a while. What are they going to do with themselves when you’re off on missions if you don’t?”

Itachi thinks that might be all well and good in theory, but the actual practical execution of watching a little boy fall out of a tree and not doing anything to stop him from crashing into the ground is well beyond his grasp. It’s one of his flaws, he supposes, and one that Shisui’s been pointing out more and more as the days of Sasuke-and-Naruto go on: Itachi is a soft-hearted pushover for these two, completely incapable of not caring for their bumps and bruises.

As far as flaws go, Itachi doesn’t mind this one so much. Sometimes, even, he thinks it might be a strength instead.)

“Yes, Naruto,” Itachi says, after the boy in question squints down at him, to make sure he’s listening. “What is it?”

Naruto ducks his head into his shoulders for a moment, a quick there-and-gone motion that Itachi can’t help but notice and abhor. He’s beginning to suspect that the boy isn’t used to people paying attention to him in a positive format and the thought makes his blood boil in a way that makes his family’s horrible plan of revenge against the village seem almost appealing. But before that emotion can take root in Itachi’s chest, Naruto’s infectious enthusiasm is back in full swing, both of his arms flailing in the air as he shouts down to Itachi like they’re hundreds of feet apart instead of five or six.

“Sasuke and I wanted to know if it was okay if I stayed the night?! Your mom said it was okay, but only if you weren’t going on a mission, so-“

(In his head, Namikaze Kushina’s voice echoes out, tone dropped into a furious, hissing whisper that Itachi had only heard once or twice before her death.

“Damn those elders and damn Fugaku too,” she’d snarl, if she was here to witness the way the clan politics are beginning to shift and arrange themselves around a boy too bright and innocent to be a weapon for anyone, and yet too powerful to be anything else in their eyes. “Damn them all to Hell and back again, if only so I can put them in the ground myself.”

He imagines the red of her hair, the blue of her eyes – imagines the agitated motion of her arms as she’d gesture, with the same biting fire that Naruto still carries around him to this day, inherited from a woman he will never get to meet, one Itachi finds harder and harder to picture completely as the days go by.)

“Come on, Itachi,” Sasuke adds, as Naruto flails his arms more and more energetically at his side. Itachi blinks, focusing on the boys above him instead of on the mess in his head, and the look Sasuke gives him is as haughty as his round little eight year old face can make. “You don’t have a mission tonight, do you? Dad agreed too, so you have to-“

Naruto’s flailing arms finally overbalance him and with a yelp that cuts off the rest of Sasuke’s sentence, the little boy goes toppling off the tree branch to hurtle toward the ground, headfirst and screaming as he falls.

(If Kushina were here, then likely this wouldn’t be a problem Itachi would have to deal with, or at the very least one he wouldn’t have to deal with alone. As it stands though, Itachi is alone, staring up at the container of the Nine-Tailed demon he suspects his family is plotting to control, and so he does the only thing he can.)

“Oof,” Naruto wheezes as Itachi swoops in and catches him, knocking the air out of both of their lungs as he cradles the boy to his chest and lets his own body fall backward against the ground. It wasn’t a long fall, not far enough to break a limb or anything, and so they’re only winded for a few seconds, which barely gives Sasuke any time to do more than suck in a startled breath above their heads.

Lying on his back as he is, Itachi has the perfect view to watch his younger brother lean out from the branch in the tree overhead and peer back down at them, his big dark eyes blinking owlishly as he does so. On his chest Naruto groans, curling his body further into Itachi’s as he trembles faintly for a moment, the implications of his own fall seeming to only just catch up to him now.

Sasuke is the first to speak as the silence drags on around them, calling out in the way only children can as he says, “you okay, idiot?”

Naruto blows out an expressive breath against Itachi’s shoulder in the same split second he throws himself upward, trying to roll around to face Sasuke with the same wildcat energy that had fueled the wrestling argument Itachi had first witnessed in the Academy’s yard.

“Yeah, I’m okay, you bastard,” the little boy yells back, knocking his elbow into Itachi’s throat once, twice, and then a third time before Itachi can manage to grab the arm still so squishy with baby fat and deposit him gently on the ground at his side. “Why wouldn’t I be? You’re the one who said Itachi wasn’t gonna let us fall on our heads, remember?”

Above them Sasuke turns a shade of pink that’s impossibly endearing, sputtering at the mention of his own whispered words, like there’d been any way Itachi, who’d been training to be the best and most dangerous ninja the Uchiha clan has ever seen since he could stand upright had missed them earlier that day.

“I didn’t say that,” Sasuke shrieks, as if having faith that Itachi would catch them is an act too childish for him to have considered. “Naruto, you-“

Itachi lays on the ground, letting the shouted words of the two little boys wash over him. His father, who’s made it no small secret his distaste for the blonde boy, has apparently approved a sleepover.

Itachi should be relieved that his father’s short-sighted prejudiced has likely been weathered and worn away, probably by his mother’s interference, but he isn’t.

The only highlight of this whole thing is that he can finally report back to the Third Hokage that his mission is unnecessary. That, at least, will be a weight off his shoulders.

(And if in its place he’ll bear the weight of his own suspicions on his clans’ plans for one Uzumaki Naruto, well- that’s okay with him.

He’s not about to let anything happen to the boy, not on his watch, and as long as those plans fall short of a full-scale coup de’ tau on the village, Itachi thinks he can manage them on his own without involving the Third or his council of village elders.

“Well,” he thinks Kushina would say if she could see him now. “They don’t call you a genius for nothing, I suppose. Though at this point I think ‘stubborn fool’ might fit you better.”

Genius or stubborn fool, whichever label they like – he doesn’t care what they call him, as long as Sasuke and Naruto are safe.)

“You know,” Itachi says, sitting up from the ground and dusting dirt off his hands as the two little boys’ argument comes to a screeching halt at his words. “I don’t believe I do have a mission tonight, so I suppose that sleepover of yours is in order after all.”

He stands up, arms lifted to catch Sasuke, who is all but shaking with joy as Naruto begins to dance with glee around him, and catches his little brother as he flings himself from the branch and down into his grip.

“Really, Itachi,” Sasuke asks, squirming around in his arms until he’s mostly leaning on Itachi’s right side, Itachi’s arm hooked under him like a swing’s seat as it holds the little boy up against his shoulder.

“Really, Itachi,” Naruto echoes, throwing himself at the two of them, his head knocking into Itachi’s stomach just before he starts to crawl, monkey-style, up his body. Itachi barely has any time to heft Sasuke a little higher and free his left arm before Naruto is clinging onto him, arms thrown around his shoulders as Sasuke shifts to accommodate him, so that they’re both clinging to him just as they were when they left the Academy that day several weeks ago.

(Itachi deeply regrets giving into the urge to scoop the two little boys up, because it seems they’ve taken that as an invitation to be carted around like two very large and unwieldy sacks of groceries whenever they damn well like.

Itachi is both endeared by their trust in him and horrified at the thought that one day the boys will be big enough that their attempts to crawl into his arms will likely knock them all over onto the ground.

He can only hope that the first time the boys attempt such a thing and he fails to hold them all up that no one they know will be there to witness such a thing. Shisui, for sure, cannot be there, because there will be no way Itachi will be able to survive the other’s teasing, especially when it will likely come hand-in-hand with Sasuke and Naruto’s heartbroken disappointment.

These days he’s looking forward to that promised growth spurt even more, if only because it will likely help him keep that disappointed heartbreak at bay for just a little longer.)

“Oof,” Itachi grunts as the weight of the two boys pulls at his arms, two sets of knees digging into his sides as he sways on his feet in the dirt. Naruto props his chin up on Itachi’s shoulder, but only after Sasuke does the same thing on Itachi’s other side, until the feeling of the little boys’ breaths dances against either side of Itachi’s neck in the most unsettling way.

“Really, Itachi,” they both say again in unison, squirming in his arms as they do so.

Itachi rolls his eyes to the sky, hidden as it is by the leaves overhead, and finds himself helpless to stop the smile he can feel building in the corner of his mouth.

“Yes,” he answers in exasperation as he begins to pick his way out of the forest and back toward the Uchiha compound. “Yes, really, really, really.”

Sasuke, at least, seems to have the common sense to try and contain his shriek of glee, remembering at the last second that his mouth is inches away from Itachi’s ear, but Naruto doesn’t seem bothered by this thought, if it occurs to him at all, leaning back against Itachi’s grip to holler up at the trees around them, his happiness a bright and burning thing, tangible and loud, just like him.

It would be annoying, perhaps, if the sound of Naruto’s whooping laughter didn’t spark an answering laugh in Sasuke’s throat as well, until both boys are giggling in his ears, rocking back and forth in his arms so much that he nearly trips over a tree root and sends them all sprawling to the ground.

As it stands, it’s not annoying in the slightest and Itachi, at least, wouldn’t have it any other way.

-

(A week shy of Naruto’s ninth birthday, the last big rainstorm of the summer hits the village.

The air is damp and humid, warm even as water pounds down from the sky, falling endlessly for hours and hours and hours without respite.

It’s late in the season, as far as the summer rainstorms go, but this summer has held on much longer than the last and therefore the one that everyone in the area instinctive knows is the last big one of the seasons tap-dances across autumn’s toes, carrying with it the promise of slightly cooler days if only they can get over the hurdle that is one more muggy, waterlogged week.

In the middle of the night Itachi peels himself from his bed, carefully pulling his arm out from under Sasuke’s head and stepping over Naruto’s legs, before taking care to shut his bedroom door as quietly as he can. The house is still and quiet around him, everything muffled and muted as the rain comes down in fat, never-ending drops outside, and so it’s easy to make his way down the hall and through the kitchen, easy to tug the shougi door open and step out onto the porch outside.

The rain covers the sound of his bare feet against the wood, swollen as it is with the humidity of summer’s last hurrah, and Itachi takes a breath once he’s on the porch, filling his lungs as deeply as he can.

It’s not enough, he can’t help but think, feeling a fuzziness at the tips of his fingers. It’s not enough, there’s still too much, too much noise in his head, too much static lying just underneath the first layer of skin. He’s wound up and aching, he’s tired and muggy-headed.

He needs a breath of fresh air, he thinks. He needs to breathe.

Itachi steps outside, out into the yard, into the pounding, pouring rain, and stands barefoot in the grass in the backyard. The rain is cool, but not cold, a relief from the heat still trapped in the air around him, but only just. It beats down against him, mats his hair against his skull and drapes his clothes flat against his skin.

It turns all the noise in his head down, just a little. It gives the static underneath the first layer of his skin an external reason for existing.

It could be ten minutes that he stands outside or two hours, Itachi isn’t sure. He just stands and lets the rain beat down on him, breathing in and out, in and out, forcefully steady and even and deep, and then, between one breath and the next, his mother is there, curling her hand around his arm and tugging him back toward the open shougi door.

Itachi stumbles after her, distantly wondering why his legs feel so unsteady. He’s fourteen and shaking as he follows her back up onto the porch, fourteen and silent as she reaches up to comb the wet strands of hair out of his face.

“Itachi,” she says quietly, her eyebrows furrowed and her words pinched with worry. “What’s wrong?”

Itachi opens his mouth, runs his tongue over the raindrops still clinging to his lips, and murmurs, “nothing, Mom. I just wanted some air.”

His mother looks at him like he’s lost his mind, just a little bit, but in the end, she doesn’t protest.

It’s better this way, he thinks, as she leads him carefully through the house and then starts a warm bath for him, no matter how much noise the pipes will make at this hour. Better, he thinks, than her reaction to him saying in a week, it will be nine years since she died.

Better, he thinks, and yet he still feels the static underneath the first layer of his skin.)

-

Two years and one month since Itachi found Sasuke and Naruto rolling around in the dirt outside the Academy, Itachi finds Shisui waiting for him to return at the village’s gate, framed by two very bemused chunin.

“Oh god,” Shisui says when he drops to the ground in front of him, flinching and swaying as the injury in his leg throbs with pain. “Oh god, ‘Tachi, you’re a mess. Fuck.”

“Fuck,” Itachi echoes back, ignoring Izumo and Kotetsu as they both whisper and mutter at the sidelines. He thinks, just for a split second, that they’re murmuring in concern, right up until Kotetsu snickers quietly under his breath, and then their true cards are on the table.

Mouthy little chunins, Itachi thinks sourly, the both of them.

(Itachi ignores the fact that they’re the same age. He’s an ANBU captain, one returning from an S-ranked solo mission, and they’re stuck with guard duty at the gate, the kind that only the most annoying chunin get as punishment.

Sometimes Itachi wonders what it would be like to trade places with them, to be able to goof off and take it easy for a bit as the village lies gentle and safe behind you.

But that’s only sometimes, usually only when he’s too concussed to forget why he shouldn’t wonder such things.

This, apparently, is bordering on one of those times. Maybe that Mist-nin had hit him harder than he thought.)

“Shit, come on,” Shisui says, grabbing him by the shoulder strap of his armor and using the few inches of height he still has on Itachi to haul him toward the guard’s office to the side of the gate. “There’s no time to get you medical attention, but if we hurry we should be able to make it before the damn thing starts.”

“My report,” Itachi tries to point out, but Shisui tosses him inside and throws a bundle of fabric at his head, brandishing his mother’s perfume like a weapon as he kicks the door shut on the now out-right laughing chunin.

“Fuck your report,” Shisui snaps, pulling a hairbrush from somewhere and holding it up like he’s considering the merits of smacking Itachi with it. “The Hokage is gonna be at this damn thing anyway, or at least that’s what Mom was saying earlier, so if you feel that strongly about it you can give it to him when we get there. Now get dressed, alright?” Shisui paces a little bit in the small space of the office as Itachi awkwardly starts to pull off his shoes and unbuckle his armor, trying to ignore the spikes of pain radiating from his shoulder and leg as he does so.

“Fucking hell,” Shisui mutters after another moment, wincing audibly when Itachi peels off his shirt to reveal a smear of blood and a gaping wound, bare inches from his last injury, which is still on its way to scarring nicely across his ribs. “Shit, man, your mom is right, you take too many dangerous fucking missions.”

Itachi ducks his head and shucks out of his pants as quickly as he can, not bothering to meet Shisui’s eyes when the blood-soaked fabric pulls away from the injury on his thigh in grudging bits and pieces.

(He doesn’t say so, but in some ways, he agrees with that statement.

Taking missions, however, is the only thing he knows how to do, the only thing he’s been taught and shaped for. It doesn’t matter how tired of them he becomes, because in the end he doesn’t know anything else.

And anyway, if he doesn’t take these missions, who will?)

“What about Sasuke and Naruto,” he asks instead as he fishes bandages from the top drawer of the office table and starts winding them around his leg. He’ll never hear the end of it if he gets blood all over his nicest clothes and while at this point it’s mostly inevitable, he also doesn’t want to cause a panic by bleeding out in the middle of the vows. “Are they-“

“They’re dressed and pressed and on their best damn behavior for your mom,” Shisui reports dutifully, shuffling over to slap at Itachi’s hands and steal the bandages so he can wind them around his shoulder for him instead. Quietly, he adds on, “actually I think they’d be better behaved if you didn’t show up, since they know you’re a total fucking pushover for them, but then Ami might poison us at our next checkup, so-“

Itachi grunts an agreement, smacks Shisui’s fussing hands away from the knot on his old bandages, and grabs for his clean clothes.

“Stop hovering,” Itachi tells him shortly, the fabric of his shirt muffling his voice a little as he pulls it over his head. “Or we’re going to be even more late to the wedding than we already are.”

“Oh, and who’s fault is that,” Shisui snaps back and despite his point, Itachi still considers smearing blood on his white shirt to shut him up.

-

When Sasuke and Naruto are ten years old, they attend their first wedding ceremony with Itachi.

It’s not Itachi’s first wedding, since he went to a handful of them as a too-smart-toddler hiding as much as he could at his mother’s heels, but it’s the first one he’s been to since Sasuke was born, so it’s his first wedding in a decade and the first one he’s been to where someone’s marrying outside the clan.

Uchiha Ami is the one getting married, which wouldn’t be an entirely remarkable thing, except that she’s the only granddaughter of the oldest of the Uchiha elders and it’s a well-known fact that she’s been his favorite since she was born.

This alone would probably mean that Itachi would have had to at least make an attempt to attend, except that Ami isn’t only a relative, she’s also a friend.

Or at least, that’s what Ami had declared when she’d snagged him outside the Hokage’s tower six months ago to invite him, winding her arm around his and leaning against his shoulder as she towed him toward the tea shop nearby to tell him the good news.

(Ami is five years older than him and a passable ninja, but her specialty has always been in stealth and precision instead of power or speed or overly complicated jutsu. Itachi had been assigned to her genin team for his chunin exams, filling in for their teammate who’d already been promoted in the last bout of exams. She’d been fifteen to his ten and her teammate had groaned loudly about having to babysit when they needed to be focusing on actually passing for once.

Her teammate’s tune had changed dramatically once the exam had actually started and by the end of it they had all but scooped Itachi up, trying to carry him around on their shoulders, whooping and screaming with glee that they’d all finally passed.

“This kid,” they’d told Ami loudly, gesturing at Itachi, who’d chosen to take the route most likely to keep him off anyone’s shoulders and tucked himself under Ami’s arm, at her side. “This kid’s incredible, holy shit!”

“Well,” Ami had said, lifting one hand to ruffle Itachi’s hair, a careless, familiar motion considering they’d never really interacted before this month. “He is the clan heir and a certifiable genius. Aren’t you, you little weasel?”

Itachi hadn’t been used to handling teasing, hadn’t known what to do when Ami had ducked her head down to his and grinned at him the way only Shisui had before, and so he’d said the only thing he could think of.

“I,” he had said, trying not to squirm, “am hungry.”

He hadn’t been sure what to expect in response to his statement, not even sure why that had been the thing he’d said, but Ami’s laughter had barked out a moment later, loud and jarringly bright, and she’d jostled shoulders gently before steering him away.

“Okay, little twerp,” she’d said, reaching up to ruffle his hair again. “Let’s get some food to celebrate our promotion!”

Itachi had half expected that to be the end of it, for it to be a vague comradeship and nothing more, but after that Ami had made an effort to seek him out, to wave at him as they passed each other to and from the Hokage’s tower, and soon Itachi had been forced to face the fact that he’d acquired two friends so far in life, both of them oddballs among the clan.)

The wedding is being held at the largest training ground near the hospital and Itachi and Shisui drop down among the wedding attendees seconds before the brides are introduced, stepping up to the back of the crowd to blend in as the music starts, relatively unnoticed.

Unfortunately, however, their arrival is only relatively unnoticed, despite all their skills combined trying to make it completely unnoticed. It probably would have been completely unnoticed, except for the fact that there are two little boys in attendance who have been honing their skills specifically to be able to find Itachi at all times.

“Itachi,” Naruto shrieks, and oh, oh, Itachi finally understands the phrase dying of mortification as everyone in the crowd jerks around to see who’s yelling, the music cutting off abruptly as Sasuke shouts out as well. “Itachi, you’re here!”

“Oh boy,” Shisui mutters quietly, audibly torn between amusement and sympathy, “brace for impact, man, cause-“

The warning is unnecessary, even unfinished as it is. Itachi has been shepherding Sasuke and Naruto around the village for two years now and is more than well versed in how they like to charge headfirst into everything, side by side, not a step out of sync. He’s bracing for impact before Shisui even speaks, bracing before he can even see Naruto’s little blonde head bobbing around between the shoulders of the other guests, and it’s the only reason he’s still on his feet when Sasuke and Naruto both burst from the crowd and throw themselves at Itachi in a full-tilt run.

Sasuke and Naruto jump at the same time, both dressed and pressed as promised in their nicest clothes for the occasion. Itachi only just manages to catch them, rocking back on his bad leg as their weight crashes into his chest, and the only thing that keeps them all upright is Shisui planting his hands on Itachi’s shoulders from behind and pushing him back up as he tips over backwards.

“O-kay,” Shisui says loudly, levering Itachi back onto his feet and then starting the process of trying to wrestle one of the boys out of Itachi’s arms, fully and singularly aware that Itachi’s too injured in this moment to hold them both. “As- as touching as this is, guys, we- we gotta settle down, so-“

The music starts again after a long moment, those around them shaking their heads and muttering among themselves as they turn back around to face the altar where the Third Hokage stands, looking wrinkled and quietly, privately amused by the ruckus the boys have caused.

“Alright,” Shisui hisses out, barely managing to pluck Naruto from the tangle of limbs he and Sasuke always become once they worm their way into Itachi’s arms, hoisting the ten year old up onto his shoulders since they’re in the back row at the moment anyway. “Everyone settle the hell down, this is a wedding, not a goddamn circus, for fuck’s sake. Naruto, if you kick me one more time-“

In comparison to his loud best friend, Sasuke settles on Itachi’s shoulders with barely a whisper of complaint, content to lock his legs around Itachi’s throat like a vice as he drums his fingers on the top of Itachi’s head.

“You almost missed it,” he kid-whispers, as the music builds around them and Shisui and Naruto’s argument gets cut off by a pointedly venomous look by one of the Uchiha elders further up in the crowd. “Did your mission go badly?”

“No,” Itachi promises, fighting to keep his voice even as Sasuke’s weight presses down on his shoulders and puts strain on the kunai wound hiding underneath his shirt. “It was just a little farther to travel than expected, that’s all. Now hush, Ami’s coming out.”

The wedding in itself has very few elements of a traditional Uchiha wedding, just the draping on the altar and the clan symbol stitched on the back of Ami’s kimono-styled gown. The concession toward a non-traditional wedding is due to Ami’s bride, an accomplished medic-nin herself who comes from the civilian family who runs the most popular bakery in the village. Itachi finds he likes this kind of wedding more than the others he’s been too, the ceremony itself less stiff and structured, the people around him loud in their joy and excitement when the two brides first see each other and both falter in their steps, tears springing to their eyes as they shuffle the last few feet toward each other in front of the altar and clasp hands.

It’s a moving ceremony, sweet and vibrant, and Itachi finds himself smiling along as everyone cheers when the Third Hokage clasps his hands together and announces you may now kiss the bride!, basking in the way Ami radiates pure joy as she cups her wife’s face, dragging the grinning woman forward into a kiss.

The wedding falls apart from there, the brides turning to face the crowd, waving and grinning from ear to ear as they lean into one another. Everything’s set up on the training ground so that they can roll right into the reception without pause, something Itachi can’t help but appreciate for its efficiency. He twists to remark as much to Shisui, only to find that the crowd’s movement around them has swept the other away.

“Hey, ‘Tachi,” Sasuke says, as Itachi peers through the crowd and tries to figure out a way to reach the rest of his family without collapsing. One of the older medic-nins in the crowd catches Itachi’s eye, giving him a flat, disbelieving look before glancing pointedly at the leg he’s beginning to favor more obviously, and Itachi resigns himself to a quick healing session, hopefully tucked out of sight from the crowd. Ami will have a cow if she realizes Itachi had come to her wedding instead of going straight to the hospital and her wife will not be much more pleased with him, being a medic-nin he’s worked with on the field before as well.

“Yes, Sasuke,” Itachi answers absently. He pats the boy’s leg when Sasuke swings his heels and knocks them into his chest, trying to convey please don’t do that as quietly and kindly as possible. Sasuke stops kicking his legs, but he does start leaning forward, twisting over Itachi’s own head to try and make eye contact with him.

“Ami married a girl,” Sasuke says, once they’ve sort of achieved the eye-contact Sasuke was apparently going for. Itachi’s more worried about Sasuke toppling over his own head than anything else, so it takes a few seconds for his brother’s words to sink in.

“Yes,” he answers dumbly, because she did, that much is obvious. “She did.”

“Do I have to marry a girl,” Sasuke asks plainly. Itachi blinks, more caught off guard than he probably should be at the line of questions, and does his best to study the small scrunch of Sasuke’s nose, considering it’s the majority of the boy’s expression that he can see at this angle.

“Not if you don’t want to,” Itachi answers honestly, and it’s a true answer as well – whatever the clan’s plans may be, Itachi is going to make sure that Sasuke gets to make every choice to his own happiness that he can. “You can marry anyone you like, Sasuke, or not marry at all. It’s all up to you.”

Sasuke peers down at him for a few long seconds as around them people move and laugh and shuffle out toward the banquet tables lining the side of the training grounds by the trees. Itachi does his best to be patient with his little brother, sensing, like an itch under his skin, that there might be more to this question than meets the eye.

“So,” Sasuke says quietly, his still pudgy cheeks filling faintly with a pink blush that alights within Itachi with a mixture of amusement and dread. “I can marry a boy then? If I want?”

(The world doesn’t quite come to a screeching halt around him, but by god if it isn’t close as hell.)

“Yes,” Itachi’s mouth says for him, his tone calm and even and nonchalant as possible, “if you’d like to, of course you can.”

“Oh,” Sasuke says, his body curling over Itachi’s head some more, so much so that Itachi can see the way his lips curve in a quiet but delighted smile. He ducks his head, knocking his forehead into Itachi’s jaw as he does so, and Itachi finds that all he can do in response is clutch at his little brother’s legs as Sasuke’s arms snake down to lock around his throat.

“Oh,” Sasuke says again and there’s no hiding the happiness in his tone, even though Itachi suspects that he’s trying. “Okay. Thanks, Itachi.”

“Of course,” Itachi says, squeezing Sasuke’s knees gently, leaning his head to the side into the little boy’s as it feels like a hand reaches inside his chest to squeeze at his heart. “Anytime, Sasuke.” He clears his throat after a moment as the same older medic-nin from before catches his eye more pointedly and nods their head toward the tree-line to the left.

“Now,” he says, nodding a little to the medic-nin before glancing toward his family in the other direction, trying to convey one second please with his eyes alone. “What do you say we go find Naruto? I’ve got to speak to someone for a second, but the two of you should be able to queue up for the buffet with Mother.”

Sasuke blows out an explosive breath against the side of Itachi’s face before straightening up from his curled position over Itachi’s head, leaning back recklessly, as if it doesn’t occur to him at all that Itachi might let him fall.

“Okay,” Sasuke agrees, easily enough for all that he’d nearly knocked Itachi on his ass and interrupted a whole wedding just to get to Itachi’s side. “But you better hurry! Naruto and I haven’t seen you in days and Mom said if we’re good you’d dance with us when they start playing music.”

Oh she did, did she, Itachi thinks, internally rolling his eyes at his mother’s ruthless nature in pawning the hyperactive boys off on their favorite plaything, i.e. him.

“Well,” Itachi says, steeling himself not to limp across the training ground, catching Shisui’s eyes across the way as he does so. “If Mom said so, I suppose I’ll have to.”

Sorry, man, Shisui mouths, gesturing up at the blonde boy still perched on his shoulders as if to say what can you do? Itachi shakes his head at his cousin before squeezing Sasuke’s legs one more time and stepping forward to join his family across the way.

It’s a good night, in the end – a fun and happy night, especially once Itachi can walk without swallowing back a wince as pain lances through his legs. He manages a dance with his mother first, then suffers through the indignation of having both Sasuke and Naruto cling to his arms and step on his toes through three different songs, and in the end finds himself nearly drooping with exhaustion by the time Ami finds him for one last dance.

“You look beautiful,” he tells her honestly, giving up control of the dance and letting her lead without a shred of self-consciousness. His feet still ache from the heavy, stomping steps Sasuke and Naruto had both favored in their dancing, and though his leg has been healed, his shoulder still aches. “You and Machi both, you suit each other well.”

Ami laughs, her face scrunching up until her nose wrinkles, much like Sasuke’s had earlier, and Itachi finds himself smiling back at her, helpless to stop himself in the face of her joy. When she peeks open her eyes, they’re glistening with tears, bright and sharp, and the look in her eyes as warm as a fire.

“Thanks, ‘Tach,” she says, her voice breaking with the force of her emotion as she tightens her hold on his shoulders. “I- I’m really happy. We both are. I- I didn’t think I could be this happy, but I am, and I’m so happy you could make it today.”

She pauses for a moment, her hands tightening on his shoulders, and there’s a flair of warmth over the space where his wound is hidden before the pain vanishes, all at once.

“Even,” she continues after a pointedly quiet moment, “if you only managed to do so injured, like a little fool.”

Itachi snorts, swallowing back as much of the sound as possible, and only hums to himself quietly as the song around them begins to draw to a close.

“Next time someone gets married, I’ll be sure to tell the nin I’m fighting to keep the injuries as superficial as possible,” Itachi tells her dryly. She smacks his arm gently, rolling her eyes as pointedly as possible, and then grins at him as the song fades out, only to turn around and deposit him right in the grasp of her new darling wife.

“Injured again, little weasel,” Machi asks in an exasperated tease, shaking her head fondly as she draws his arms up into a proper dancing position and begins to lead.

“Seems so,” Itachi answers, rolling with the punches, which is what he’s found works best when faced with Ami and Machi when they go into their fussy medic mode. “You know me, Machi, I’m a troublemaker through and through and I couldn’t quite help myself.” He shrugs, the motion made easier by the healing touch of chakra Ami had applied to his shoulder during their dance, and revels slightly in the shoulder-shaking way Machi snorts with laughter as his dry, blatantly incorrect joke.

“I don’t think you quite make the troublemaker cut, kiddo,” Machi says, shaking her head as she turns them neatly in a series of steps that Itachi can barely keep up with. “However, what you lack is more than made up for by little Sasuke and Naruto, so I suppose you could claim troublemaker by association. Though then again, Shisui might have been enough to get you that title all on his own, so maybe with Sasuke and Naruto’s help you are a full-blown troublemaker.”

At the side of the dance floor the two little boys in question are attempting to sneak sweets from the nearly-empty buffet tables, Naruto’s face smeared with chocolate while Sasuke’s expression twists in disgust, holding a cupcake cradled carefully, if distastefully, in his hands, likely for Naruto to eat later. Itachi can’t help but watch them for a moment over Machi’s shoulder, feeling that sensation like a hand closing over his heart again, and then he smiles.

“I suppose,” he murmurs quietly, “that shouldn’t be such a bad fate.” He pretends to contemplate it deeply for another moment, humming audibly to himself as he does so, and Machi presses her lips together to keep from laughing.

“I think it’s a good thing,” she tells him, a few moments later, after the song around them has run its course and it’s time for him to return her to her wife. He tilts his head, inquiring quietly after her meaning, and she smiles at him, squeezing his shoulder gently the same way he had squeezed Sasuke’s legs. “The boys’ influence on you,” she explains softly. “I think they’re good for you. You’re happier, when they’re trailing behind you. Being a big brother suits you, much more than being a ninja does.”

Itachi blinks in surprise, nearly tripping over his own two feet as he comes to a startled stop. He peers down at the pale haired woman in front of him, unsure of how to respond to such a remark.

“Thank you,” he says in the end and he pretends that the look Machi gives him isn’t shadowed with worry. He returns her to her wife and then steps off the dance floor, picking his way around the commotion winding down from the wedding until he reaches the place where Naruto and Sasuke are half tucked behind a table.

The cupcake, it turns out, is for him. Itachi tries not to be touched by this and fails miserably.

-

(Sasuke and Naruto are ten years old – they’re children, barely any coordination between the two of them. Naruto is a powerhouse that has trouble handling any kind of finite, delicate jutsus and Sasuke is a restless, reckless mess, easily swayed into blundering forward into a charge when all he needs to do is sit still for a moment and come up with a plan.

At their age, Itachi had already completed several B-rank missions, had already passed the chunin exams, had already killed someone and listened to the rattling kind of breaths people choke out when they die.

Sasuke and Naruto are ten years old and Itachi fears they won’t be allowed the chance to fool around and behave so joyously much longer.

But Itachi is going to do everything he can – everything he has to – to make sure they get every single moment they can to be as young and carefree as they want.

It might not be all he was shaped to do, as the Uchiha clan’s perfect heir and weapon, but it’s what he’s going to do regardless.

No matter the cost.)

-

Sasuke and Naruto are eleven years old – spring is just starting to touch winter’s chill before they start their last year of the Academy and set to graduate on track, no matter what the goddamn clan wants to say otherwise – when Shisui dies.

Itachi feels his best friend’s chest shudder with the last of his breaths, watches the light dim in his wide-open eyes. The forest outside the cave they’re tucked in is silent and still, holding within it the possibility of more enemies the same way it holds the possibility of backup and help.

Shisui’s heart stops in his chest, the motion of his breaths shuddering underneath Itachi’s hands, and the only terrible thought that goes through Itachi’s head is this:

No.

Not Shisui.

Not yet.

He’s managed to restart Shisui’s heart and keep it going with basic medical training, compressing his chest in time with the way his heart should beat, for an amount of time that feels like years but is hopefully only minutes by the time the medic-nins find them, successfully brought to their aid thanks to the raven summons he’d frantically sent back to the village for help.

Machi’s with them. Itachi focuses on this fact when one of the medic-nins push him aside, needing the space beside Shisui to attend to his health, to try and stabilize the heart Itachi’s barely managed to get beating again. He watches green chakra flare on their hands, watches Shisui’s body jolt in place as if shocked, and can’t bring himself to look away until Machi plants herself like a wall in between them, cupping his face and hiding it from view.

“Itachi,” she says, her voice terse but quiet as her companions shout at one another over her shoulder about how they’re going to lose Shisui again if they don’t hurry. “Itachi, stop it.”

Itachi doesn’t know what she’s talking about, doesn’t know what he’s doing that he needs to stop.

“Itachi,” she hisses again and this time she slides one trembling finger up to the corner of his eye, which is enough of a jolt for Itachi to finally focus on her face. She’s pale, as pale and wan as the moon itself, and her eyes are large and pained and wet with tears.

“’Tach,” she whispers, voice coming out rough, “you gotta turn them off, quick, or someone else is gonna see.”

The only clue to what she means is her trembling finger, just barely brushing the edge of his eye.

Oh, Itachi thinks, too far gone to wonder how in the world a baker’s daughter knows so much about the Sharingan.

Instead of wondering, Itachi closes his eyes, letting his head drop forward onto his cousin’s wife’s shoulder. He doesn’t move, barely even breathes, as her hands immediately fly up to cradle his head, fingers gentle and trembling, like a butterfly’s wings.

He doesn’t know how long he stays like that but the next time he lifts his head, the cave is empty save for Machi, himself, and the smear of blood where Shisui’s body laid.

-

Sasuke and Naruto are eleven years old – troublemakers through and through, though their mischief has fallen into something of a routine that hardly needs Itachi’s attention most days – when Itachi accidentally manifests the Mangekyou Sharingan.

Shisui dies under his hands and then is successfully revived and kept alive by Itachi’s frantic compressions long enough for the medics to come and stabilize him so that he can be moved back to the village for surgery.

He lives.

He lives.

He miraculously lives, despite the blood-loss and the heart-stopping moment where his heart literally stopped beating, Uchiha Shisui lives.

He’s a little more scarred than he was before, a little more quiet and shaken by the recounted tale of what had happened, but he’s alive.

Itachi expects the Mangekyou Sharingan to be gone once Shisui wakes, but it isn’t. Adding a little extra chakra to his eyes turns his normal Sharingan into a pinwheel, one that sends ice down his spine to see in the reflection of the mirror in the hospital bathroom.

He only shows it to Machi and Ami, just once, in the shadowed quiet of their apartment, all the curtains drawn and shut around them. Both women still at the sight before them, Ami swearing curtly and softly under her breath before she launches herself to her feet and begins to pace.

“Well, what do you know,” Machi says, a thin veneer of humor stretched over her words, like that will hide the way her shoulders have tensed as she stares at Itachi from the other couch. “Guess those old bastards in your clan have had it wrong this whole time, huh?”

All the Uchiha records, all the elders and family heads in the past have all only had one thing to say on the topic of the forbidden Mangekyo Sharingan: to achieve the Mangekyou Sharingan, you must kill the person you hold most dear.

Itachi loves Shisui, loves him with his whole heart, loves him enough that a part of him is still broken inside with the memory of the other’s chest going still under his hands as his breath faded to nothing at all. Shisui is his family, his first and best friend, and the thought of him dying is an agony that Itachi will carry as a fear for the rest of his life.

But he’s not the one Itachi holds most dear, and Itachi, for all his failings to save Shisui, was not the cause of his death, temporary though it was.

If Itachi were going to correct the records for the elders, he thinks he would write it differently.

To achieve the Mangekyou Sharingan, you must feel someone you love with your whole heart die. You must live through the shuddering breaths, the vacant eyes, and the complete quiet that falls around you as they leave you completely behind. You must grieve them, completely and wholly, and not succumb to the same fate as well.

And then, you must live with the memory of their death, forever.

“’Tach,” Ami says, abruptly coming to a halt in front of him, her pacing falling apart just as quickly as it started. Itachi blinks his eyes, deactivating both forms of Sharingan that he possesses now, and quietly hates how the corners of his eyes sting with tears.

“Are you going to tell them,” his cousin asks, her own dark eyes pinning him in place. Ami’s never activated her Sharingan past the first tomoe, never seemed to care for the blood-line’s secrets or abilities past the edge that the first stage can give her. He wonders, briefly, what she must think of his, what she must feel when she looks at the red and black pinwheels his eyes can now become.

Are you going to tell them, she’s asked. Are you going to tell the elders, the clan?

“No,” Itachi answers and his voice comes out a croak that he can’t control, rough and aching and strangely young, even to his own ears. “No, I’m- no.”

I’m already enough of their pawn, he doesn’t say. I don’t want to give them any more leverage over me than they already have.

Ami looks at him as Machi sucks in a breath from the couch, but Itachi doesn’t look away from his cousin to look at her wife instead. He just stares up at her, trying to convey everything he’s feeling, even when he doesn’t understand the depth of his emotions himself.

“Good,” Ami says, her voice brittle but her eyes bright and sharp, burning through him like a forest fire. She looks, very suddenly, like the kind of woman who the clan would have liked to control, strong and fierce and powerful, and Itachi wonders if it had been luck that had lead her out of the clan’s reach or if it had been a battle she’d had to fight her whole life, just to get here, to an apartment on the other end of the village with the woman she loved.

He doesn’t ask that question, but for the rest of his life, he wonders all the same.

-

(This time he stands in the frigid, humid darkness out in the lawn, letting the cold sink into his bones. He’s seventeen and shaking, seventeen and helpless, and he wants it all to stop so much, but he doesn’t know how to let go enough to find any peace.

He must not be outside for long, because his mother comes to get him before his fingers turn blue, pulling him inside with hands that grip his biceps too hard and a face as white as rice paper.

“Please,” she murmurs, pulling him in against her chest like he’s a child again, like he’s a boy a third his age with skinned knees and scuffed up hands crying about falling over in the dirt. He blinks, but he feels no tears trace tracks down his face, and so he wonders why she still looks at if as if he’s bawling against her shoulder. “Please, Itachi, baby – I thought we were going to have to bury Shisui, darling, please don’t make me bury you instead.”

Itachi opens his mouth and feels his lips start to crack, dry as they are, cold and chapped as they are. He licks them, winces a little at the pain that spikes through them at the motion, and then croaks, “I’m not going anywhere. I just wanted some fresh air.”

Something fractures in his mother’s eyes, something Itachi is too tired to identify or try to piece back together. He just stands there, barely more than a posable doll, as she drags him in against her, going with her tugging until his temple is pressed against her jaw, her warm breath stirring against his hair.

“Next time you want some air, you come get me,” she tells him, fierce and warm. He’s starting to get the feeling back in his limbs, the cold numbness receding, and it hurts, sharp and bright, like the touch of flame against skin. Her words are the same, brands against his heart, but instead of shying away, he leans into it, leans in her as she tells him, “you come and get me, alright, and we’ll open up a window. Promise me, Itachi, promise me that you’ll come get me next time.”

Itachi opens his mouth, winces as the split in his lips tears just a little bit more, and rasps, “I promise.”

I promise, Mom, he thinks, closing his eyes as she winds a hand into his hair.

I promise you won’t have to see me like this again. I promise I won’t hurt you like this again.

And it’s a promise he keeps. No matter the cost.)

-

Sasuke is newly twelve and Naruto is eleven-and-ten-months when Itachi swings into the Hokage’s office to report on his finished ANBU mission and finds them both in the middle of a hellish lecture by the man himself.

He keeps himself shadowed, for a moment, safe in the knowledge that his chakra is suppressed and the mask on his face hides his identity, but all his effort to go unseen is lost the second the Hokage glances up to the ceiling and snaps, “do you have any idea what your boys have done now?!”

Sasuke and Naruto both shriek, just a little bit, when Itachi drops down neatly between the two of them, both of them shuffling and rearranging themselves so that they’re side-by-side once more while the Third Hokage glares.

Itachi inclines his head, a silent question that he hopes conveys the are you a fool feeling he’s holding in his chest, but the Third Hokage just rolls his eyes, snapping his fingers at Itachi before waving his hand toward his mask impatiently.

Swallowing back a sigh and wondering why it seems like the whole damn village loses its mind every time he leaves for more than a week, Itachi reaches up and pulls off his ANBU mask, giving the Third Hokage a flat look as he does so.

The reaction is instantaneous – Naruto hollers, “Itachi!,” at the top of his lungs, volume control still everyone else’s problem, while Sasuke goes from looking bored and rather annoyed to looking queasy and a little shameful, hands balling up at his sides while he looks at Itachi like – like –

Itachi doesn’t know. He’s been gone three months, the longest mission he’s ever taken, and it’s worn on him in ways he doesn’t know how to explain. The group he’d been sent to investigate had been near impossible to track and exceedingly difficult to find information on.

Whoever the fucking Akatsuki are, they’re bad news brewing on the horizon, but Itachi doesn’t know what to do about it, short of setting up someone as a double agent and sending them out to the wolves.

(He pointedly does not think about how he’s going to leave that bit out of his report, mostly because he has a horrifyingly good idea of who exactly would be suggested for such a position and he is not interested, thank you very much.

He loves his village, he really does, but there is a limit to the bullshit he is willing to go through for them and anyway, taking such a mission would rob him of his chance to protect Sasuke and Naruto.

Nothing in the world is worth giving them up. Nothing.

Sasuke and Naruto and their future will be pried out of Itachi’s cold dead hands. He won’t give the universe any other options.)

“Sasuke,” Itachi says, his voice rough from lack of use. He’s been traveling for days, been silent for nearly two weeks, and it shows, not only in the tone of his voice but in the way the name comes out with a hitch, like he can’t remember how it’s supposed to sound outside his head. “Naruto,” he adds, taking his time looking between the two boys.

He doesn’t say what have you done now for a lot of reasons, but the primary one is that Itachi doesn’t care what they’ve done, because he has faith that it’s childish and harmless and probably a lot funnier than the Hokage is giving them credit for. He doesn’t voice any of these opinions, lest he be called a biased bastard again and unceremoniously sent on another exhausting mission as punishment for encouraging their tomfoolery.

“Where have you been,” Naruto yells and before Itachi can really brace for it, out of practice with this too apparently, the not-as-little-anymore blonde boy is barreling into his chest, beating his fists against Itachi’s collarbone in the time with his words as he shouts, “you’ve been gone forever, where have you been, Sasuke was so worried about you-“

“I was not,” Sasuke yells, voice climbing an octave as Itachi gives up the pretense of dignity and just slings his arms around Naruto’s frame, squishing him against his chest so he can’t keep smacking his fists against him. Naruto squirms in response, still yelling like he hasn’t even registered Sasuke’s words, and Itachi wonders what it says about him that after weeks of being on edge and hyper-aware of his surroundings, all it takes is Naruto and Sasuke’s indignant shouts to put him at ease again.

“Boys – boys,” the Third Hokage yells, as chaos breaks out in his office. Naruto is still squirming against Itachi’s chest, but now he’s yelling mostly at Sasuke, who’s successfully managed to get Naruto’s attention as they argue about whether or not either of them were worried about Itachi’s abrupt and lengthy mission. Itachi almost pities the man as the office around him rings and rings with more and more noise, but he doesn’t, not really.

You made this bed, sir, Itachi almost tells him, and now you get to lie in it. You should have let me hide on the ceiling in peace.

Eventually, though, even Itachi tires of all the shouting, and with a quick bend of his knees, he manages to scoop Naruto up in his arms, bouncing him up to let the startled boy wrap his legs around his waist. He’s gotten taller since Itachi was last there, both he and Sasuke have by the looks of it, but Itachi’s taller than his father these days and even with his mother’s delicate features and three months on a mission he has enough strength in him for this.

“Ah,” Naruto shrieks again, arms flailing in the air for a moment before he locks them around Itachi’s throat in a death grip. “Aw c’mon, Itachi, that’s not fair, I’m not a baby anymore –“

Itachi ignores Naruto’s wriggling and whining, turning his head to look at Sasuke from over Naruto’s shoulder. His brother is watching them with an expression somewhere between amusement and jealousy, his dark eyes flickering between Itachi and the Third Hokage as the other man puts his head in his hands and sighs.

“Come on Sasuke,” Itachi says, letting himself smile at the way his brother scrunches up his face a little at the realization that he might know where this is going. “Let’s go.”

“Itachi, I can walk,” Sasuke says, but despite his words, he shuffles closer, eying Itachi like in the time he’s been gone, Sasuke’s lost all faith that his older brother can carry both of them at the same time. Itachi would probably be insulted if he wasn’t wondering the same thing, return the stare and taking stock of the fact that Sasuke’s head comes up to the middle of his chest as Naruto’s weight is already forcing him to change his stance or fall over at the sheer energy behind his wiggling.

“Suit yourself,” Itachi says, shrugging a little in a way that makes Naruto complain about being jostled into his shoulder. He holds out the hand not keeping the blonde boy from falling on his ass, wiggling his fingers a little like Sasuke is two instead of twelve and tries not to smile when Sasuke’s expression sours even more.

But the unspoken bargain – take my hand or I’ll carry you out of here too – isn’t missed and so with a begrudging grunt that’s supposed to make him seem older and only really achieves the opposite, Sasuke reaches out and snags Itachi’s hand.

“I’ll come back tomorrow with my mission report,” Itachi offers, trying to phrase the statement as a question. The Third Hokage looks at him flatly, as if he’s not amused by the fact that they both know that Itachi is doing him a favor by taking the two boys with him, and then nods, short and to the point.

“Itachi,” the Third says, after Itachi’s already turned away and started for the door. Itachi pauses, Sasuke nearly shuffling into his shoulder as he does so, before twisting his head around to peer back at the man behind the desk.

Like this, framed by the afternoon sunlight, the Third Hokage looks oddly small, the wrinkles around his eyes and the whiteness of his hair more pronounced as he tugs off the hat that marks his station in the village and runs a knobby hand through what’s left of his hair. There’s something in his eyes too, Itachi thinks, something that reminds Itachi of the way the man can occasionally be found standing in front of the memorial stone still and silent, as if he too is a statue left to remember the dead and nothing more.

“It’s good to have you home, Itachi,” Sarutobi Hiruzen says, rubbing a hand over his eyes for a moment as he gives a wan smile. “You were beginning to make this old man worry.”

“See,” Naruto hisses, his volume still too loud to even pretend they can’t hear him, “even the old man was worried!”

“Shut up, dumbass,” Sasuke hisses back, just as loud. Itachi has a moment of intense fondness for the two boys, a warmth in his chest blossoming until it grows so large it feels like his lungs are being squeezed.

The expression on his face must mirror this soft fondness he feels, because the old man’s face softens as well, the corner of his mouth ticking up in a small smile that he tries and fails to hide with his hand.

“Thank you, sir,” Itachi says, nodding his head slightly in acknowledgment. “It’s good to be home.”

They turn and go then, winding their way through the halls of the Hokage’s Tower, Sasuke walking so closely to Itachi’s side that he continuously bumps into his arm as they go down the steps. They get a wide array of looks as they go, some of their onlookers watching with stony-faced disapproval while the rest seem to range from relief to amusement, with every mixture of the two in between. There are a wide number of reasons why they could be sparking these reactions in the people they pass, but Itachi’s willing to bet it’s a combination of relief that he’s finally home to curb Sasuke and Naruto’s shenanigans once more and amusement that Itachi’s still in full ANBU gear sans the mask, Naruto clinging onto him like a baby monkey despite his continuous loud protests while Sasuke follows along holding his hand like a baby duck.

They’re halfway across the village when Itachi finally remembers that the boys must have been in the Hokage’s office for a reason. He almost doesn’t want to ask, since he’s already decided he doesn’t care, but he figures it’ll probably come up with the Third tomorrow when he gives his report and it’s always better to have his defenses pre-planned for things like that. So with a quiet sigh, Itachi asks, “what did you two do to land yourself in the Hokage’s office?”

Leaning against his arm like he’s the one exhausted from a three month mission, Sasuke suddenly stiffens, making like he’s going to pull away before Itachi tugs him back flush against his side. Naruto, meanwhile, immediately starts snickering, his laughter building and building until he’s outright cackling in Itachi’s ear. Naruto’s laughter has always been infectious, but especially so for Sasuke, and after a few moments he can feel his brother shaking with a bout of suppressed giggles too.

It’s enough to make an exhausted kind of dread pool in his chest, because anything that the two boys find this funny is sure to get his ear chewed off (for some reason), but at the same time, having them both laughing so openly as they crowd in closer against him helps him shed the last of his stress from his long and unproductive mission.

“We did that,” Naruto says, taking one arm from around Itachi’s neck to gesture up and to their left. Itachi lifts his head to follow the direction Naruto’s pointing with his eyes and then almost immediately draws up short.

He was right.

It is a lot funnier than the Hokage is giving them credit for.

(By the time Itachi makes it to the Hokage’s office the next day, word has apparently gotten around town about Itachi stopping dead in the street and choking on his own laughter at the sight of the Hokage Rock painted over in crude lines and bright colors, because when he walks in the Third Hokage is nearly glaring at him with the weight of his disapproval.

Itachi isn’t sure the lecture he receives (for the second goddamn time that day) about how he needs to control those boys better before they end up as a disgrace to the village! is really worth the trouble, but the memory of Naruto and Sasuke’s smug, pleased faces as Itachi had fought not to wheeze with laughter in the middle of the street certainly is.)

-

When Sasuke and Naruto are both (finally) twelve, Itachi misses their graduation from the Academy by about ten minutes.

He plays catch-up with the Hokage after he relays the latest information he’s been able to scrounge up on the Akatsuki, stripping out of his ANBU gear right there in the office and pretending he can’t see the way the Hokage rolls his eyes at him for it. They trade information back and forth bit by bit and by the time Itachi’s filled in on the last month he’s missed (and by the time he’s dressed once more in standard shinobi wear) he’s been granted two weeks of leave and been thanked dryly for all his hard work.

(He can’t decide if the promised time off is a reward for the back to back missions he’s been taking or if it’s a form of apology from the Hokage.

It’s likely a 50/50 split, knowing the old man. Though the knowledge that Naruto had been targeted and attacked while Itachi was gone, by one of the teachers meant to keep him safe tips it toward an apology leave instead.)

I should stop by the school and speak to Iruka, Itachi thinks as he drops by the ANBU department to drop off his armor and mask. He nods his head at another squad gearing up to leave, lifting his hand in a wave in an absent-minded kind of way when someone calls his name. He managed to save Naruto’s life, get him past the final exam, and ease the news about the Nine-Tailed demon to Naruto. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do all of that for years now.

(Itachi doesn’t really envy Iruka for any of those things, because just one of them would have been a stressful mess and all three of them at the same time sound like a nightmare. But from the Hokage’s words and the chunin’s own report, it sounds like somehow it all managed to work out fine.

Still, though, despite the lack of envy Itachi feels, he does feel a certain amount of guilt for not being able to be there for Naruto, for keeping with the Hokage’s orders in the first place.

He should have been the one to break the news about the Nine-Tails. He should have been there to reassure Naruto that he has never been and will never be a monster.

God, Itachi misses so much of Sasuke and Naruto’s lives like this, only seeing them for a few days in between the days or weeks or months he’s gone on missions. He hates it, but the most recent information they’ve managed to collect on the Akatsuki says that they have an interest in collecting the tailed demon spirits, which means-

Which means they’ll be after Naruto.

Which means Itachi needs all the information he can find on them right now, because he is never going to let them take him.

So it’s a balancing game, one Itachi hates, one he’s not sure he’s very good at to begin with – he crams as much affection and reassurance into the few days he can manage with the boys, scrambles to find out as much as he can on the Akatsuki when he’s away, and then runs all the way back to the village afterward to do it all over again.

It’s killing him, slowly and surely, but if it means that one day Sasuke and Naruto will have the information they need to protect themselves, Itachi will do it, again and again and again.)

At least two worries taken off the burden on his shoulders, Itachi allows himself a moment to just breathe. But before he thanks Iruka for anything he’s done, there’s a stop he must make first.

-

Hatake Kakashi is a slumped, silver haired figure in the distance as he stands in front of the monument statue that he’s known to haunt, more walking memorial than man. His trademark orange book is nowhere to be seen when Itachi flickers to a stop beside him, but his ever-present mask is in place, forehead protector pulled low over one eye as he peers down at the names etched before him. He doesn’t turn to acknowledge Itachi’s presence, but in the six years since Itachi first met the man in ANBU, Kakashi has never once given off the air of someone who truly abides by everyone else’s rules.

“Itachi,” Kakashi greets after a moment’s pause. His mask barely moves with his speech, a trick Itachi’s never been able to figure out, even with his Sharingan. “Nice to see you back in the village.”

“It’s nice to be back,” Itachi answers, polite but honest. “I hear that you’ve been retired from ANBU for the moment. Congratulations.”

It takes all six years of Itachi’s experience in knowing this man to catch the way Kakashi grimaces, just for a split second, before he covers it with one of his cheerful, air-headed kinds of smiles.

“We’ll see if it’s a permanent retiring or a temporary one soon,” Kakashi says, faux-lightly. He turns finally to give Itachi an empty, mask-covered smile, his one visible eye crinkling in the corner, and then aimlessly and lazily starts to fish his book out of one of his vest pockets.

Itachi, however, manages to stop that motion dead in its tracks by reaching out and clapping his hand on Kakashi’s shoulder, marveling that at some point on one of his away missions he’s finally hit what’s probably the peak of the growth spurt all the medic-nins had promised him. Face-to-face he stands just about the older man’s height and like this there’s no way for Kakashi to miss Itachi’s grin, wide and shark-like as he can make it.

“It will be a permanent one,” Itachi promises, channeling a little chakra into his eyes and letting his normal Sharingan spin lazily to life. Kakashi, unused to any kind of emotion from Itachi, like most of Konoha’s populace, freezes much like the children he’ll soon be teaching when Itachi used to catch them practicing with their kunai after dark. “And if you value your life at all, it will be a job you take even more seriously than you took my first ANBU mission.”

He lets the implications of that statement sink in for a moment, the memory of his first ANBU mission and the three fractures, one broken bone, and multiple dozen-plus-stitch lacerations he’d acquired all while under Kakashi’s watch coming to the forefront of both of their minds.

And then, without a word, he lifts his hand and gives a cheery little wave, the kind Kakashi always gives when he’s being purposefully annoying.

“They’re your problem now,” Itachi intones and then he flickers away before Kakashi can say anything to the contrary.

Good luck, he thinks, in the privacy of his own mind. Sasuke and Naruto had been enough of a handful before they’d graduated the Academy – Sasuke, Naruto, Naruto’s new ability of make hundreds of copies of him, and a teeny tiny little girl with an anger problem are sure to make Kakashi wish swiftly for death.

-

(Sasuke and Naruto are – finally, Naruto intones in the voice of someone who has suffered the longest wait of their lives – twelve years old when they officially become ninjas of the Leaf Village.

Both boys celebrate their graduation with wild and carefree energy, Naruto yelling and shaking Sasuke around by his shoulders while Sasuke pretends he isn’t enjoying the act just as much as Naruto is. On their heads, shiny and new, their headbands gleam – both of them blue, both of them tied in secure little knots at the back of their heads.

His mother makes their favorites – tomato soup for Sasuke and ramen for Naruto – and Fugaku even manages to keep quiet about the eccentric way the smell of the two foods combines in the dining room as they eat. It’s a bright and incredibly loud night, one where Naruto and Sasuke grin at each other like the world is finally at their fingertips, ecstatic in the knowledge that they’re ninja now and quietly grateful that they’re together on the same team.

Sasuke and Naruto are finally, finally, finally twelve years old and when they crash out to sleep that night, both of them sprawled across the futons they’ve taken to keeping together in Sasuke’s room, Itachi stands in the doorway for a long, long time, just watching the rise and fall of their chests.

He’s been dreading this day for so many years, but despite all his fears, it’s still a joyous and bright kind of moment.

Tomorrow they’ll go and take Kakashi’s ridiculous test – tomorrow they’ll go and pass Kakashi’s ridiculous test, securing their place as genin and starting their journey to taking actual missions.

Tomorrow they’ll be ninja, be tools of the village, just like Itachi.

But tonight – tonight they sleep, chests rising and falling, blankets kicked free from around their legs and arms thrown out across the floor.

Itachi stands there watching them as the night creeps by and even after closing the door and heading for his room, he doesn’t sleep.)

-

Itachi’s promised apology leave lasts just long enough for him to get a few good laughs out of a horde of Narutos (and what a sentence that is) having a screaming match in the middle of the street with one cat-scratch covered Sasuke and then it’s back in the field, this time indefinitely.

(Itachi tries not to dwell on that word, on the way the Hokage had said indefinitely, half rigid order and half soft apology.

“I’m not sure when you’ll be able to come back to the village,” the Third Hokage had said, his fingers steepled under his chin and his eyes shadowed by the lip of his hat.

He hadn’t outright apologized for that. It was his duty to send Itachi out on this mission for the good of the village, just as it was Itachi’s duty to take this mission for the good of the village.

But still, all the same, Itachi had found himself hesitating, mask halfway to his face, thinking of the way Naruto and Sasuke had waved at him all the way down the road as they left for training earlier that morning, Naruto shouting loudly that they’d see him later.

“Itachi,” the Third had prompted quietly. “You have your orders.”

And that, as usual, had been that.)

From that point on he runs into the impressively unimpressive and self-proclaimed Toad Sage Jiraiya, finds himself trapped in a conversation that takes hours where he acquires nothing but unhelpful hints and a headache or three, and then hits the road again. He follows the trail of information he’s managed to gather thus far, adds to it the bits and pieces Jiraiya gives him that are actually useful, and then finds himself in Rain Country, where he very quickly develops a distaste for the never-ending deluge that beats down, carrying with it the stinging sensation of some asshole’s chakra encased within.

All in all he accomplishes next to nothing and spends four and a half months doing so. It’s miserable and isolating, trying to comb through rumor upon rumor to find a single seed of information about the damn group the Hokage is so set on him surveilling and once he does find something, the information turns out to be completely and utterly out of date.

Still, though, it’s something, and there’s no point continuing on without checking in with the Hokage, and so Itachi turns back to the village. His return journey should have only taken two days of non-stop travel, but halfway to Konoha he runs into Jiraiya again and has to suffer through that experience, complete with more alcohol than Itachi thinks someone as deep undercover as Jiraiya should be drinking which is all brought to their table by scantily clad women who continue to lean on him even though it should be fairly obvious he just wants to leave.

(Itachi contemplates throttling the man no less than fifty-six times and he only spends a day in the man’s company. He wonders absently if it’s some sort of record and then dismisses the thought because he honestly doesn’t want to imagine that Jiraiya could possibly be any more annoying than this.)

Somehow that single day puts Itachi back three, the time wasted chasing a lead for the daft old man that nearly gets him impaled by a spear, and then, to top off the entirely too ridiculous experience, he ends up carrying home with him a scroll that bears Jiraiya’s report to the Hokage of all the hard and tedious work he’s been doing for the village.

(“That man should be put down for the good of the village,” is all Itachi says on the topic of meeting one of the Three Great Sanin later when Shisui pokes and prods at least a few details of his time away. “Jiraiya and Orochimaru both should have been smothered in their sleep when they were teenagers. I don’t know how Tsunade ever put up with them and I don’t ever want to find out.”

“Oh c’mon,” Shisui says, shaking his head and laughing a little in disbelief. “He can’t really be that bad, can he?”

Shisui sings a very different tune about the quote-unquote legendary Toad Sage later on, after Naruto brings home stories of all the ridiculous and terrible things he suffered at the hands of the deranged bastard as his so-called student, but that’s in the future.

For now Itachi just looks at him, bearing what he’s sure is a glassy, dead quality to his eyes, and says, “yes, he can be.”)

The village’s gate is a sight for sore eyes by the time Itachi finds it amongst the trees of his homeland and as usual it’s manned by Izumo and Kotetsu, both of them tucked inside the little guard’s office to the left of the gate. They give him matching jaunty waves as he drops from the trees, unsurprised by his sudden appearance despite the fact that he knows he’s completely undetectable when he masks his chakra the way he is now.

“Hey, Uchiha,” Izumo calls out, hands cupped around his mouth as he shouts Itachi’s way casual as can be. Sasuke and Naruto have caused enough public mayhem over the years – and Itachi’s been called in to clean up enough of their public mayhem over the years – that while everyone still seems to respect him as the Uchiha family heir, there’s less of a hands-off approach than there might have been otherwise in regards to his person. Itachi isn’t sure if he misses the chance at emotional-distance from the populace of Konoha or not, especially since his longer and longer missions have left him entirely too rusty at the art of polite small talk.

“You just missed your little protégés leaving for their first C-rank mission!”

“Yeah,” Kotetsu calls out, cupping his hands around his mouth as well, even as Itachi wanders closer by the footfall. “They were kind of adorable, actually, all geared up with their backpacks fit to burst like that. We took a picture for you, if you wanna see!”

Abruptly and rather emotionally Itachi decides that the lack of emotional distance from the village is a very, very good thing. He’d deny it if he was asked, but he immediately picks up his speed a little bit, crossing the remaining distance between him and the open window of the guard’s office in three large steps. The two chunin are fishing around for their camera as he approaches, or at least Kotetsu is – Izumo, it turns out, is busying himself with a coffee machine in the back of the office. They turn to him as one despite their different activities, one brandishing a camera and the other a coffee mug, both of them grinning from ear to ear as they crowd back against the window, elbowing each other gently out of the way.

“Here ya’ go,” Izumo declares, handing over the coffee mug without being asked as Kotetsu forces the camera into Itachi’s other hand. “It’s a little stale and the screen’s a little small, but we work with what we have, y’know?”

Itachi blinks at them balefully for a moment before, as Shisui would say, rolling with the social punches. He takes a sip of the coffee, which is not only stale but burnt as well, and then thumbs open the menu on the camera to look at the last image taken on it.

A group shot with the open door of the village’s gate as the backdrop, framed in a very different way than Team Seven’s celebratory team photo had been on the day they’d passed Kakashi’s bell test. Sasuke, Naruto, and their pink haired teammate, the one Itachi can’t quite remember the name of, are all front center, Sasuke and Naruto crowding the poor girl in between them, with Kakashi hemming them in from behind, but that’s where the similarities stop. Unlike the Team Seven photo, however, Kakashi is twisted away toward someone off screen, stupid orange book held aloft in one hand, and he only seems to be paying a bit of attention to the photo as it’s taken, barely enough to throw up a lazy peace sign with his other hand. The kids, in contrast, are all looking right at the camera, Naruto smiling wide enough that Itachi’s cheeks nearly hurt in sympathy, both hands held up in enthusiastic peace signs. Sasuke and the girl look slightly less enthusiastic in comparison, but both are smiling still, hands held up in peace signs to match Naruto and their teacher. All three of the kids have overly large backpacks peeking out over their shoulders and Itachi feels a moment of fondness for the two boys as he recognizes the two brand new packs he helped his mother pick out before he left specifically for Sasuke and Naruto’s first overnight mission.

Itachi takes another sip of his terrible coffee as he studies the image, half tempted to activate his Sharingan so that he never forgets it. It’s cute and sweet, the sight of the team all cramped together and rearing to go on their first big mission, and Itachi feels a twist in his chest at the idea that he just missed seeing them like this.

(Hopefully the boys aren’t too upset with him for being gone for so long. Hopefully Itachi manages to catch them on his way back out as they return or even stay long enough to see them come home.

Hopefully, hopefully – Itachi lives his life wishing in one hand and trying not to die for the village in the other.

He doesn’t know any other way to live, but oddly enough that doesn’t make it any easier to bear.)

“Cute, huh,” Kotetsu says, crossing his arms on the window sill and propping his chin up on one palm. “They’re escorting some builder back to his home or something like that. Hokage could probably tell you more if you asked, but it seemed safe enough, barely C-rank. Kakashi still looked oddly wan and stiff, but we just kinda figured that was because he was carting your kids outta the village, y’know?”

“Yeah,” Izumo agrees, leaning on Kotetsu’s shoulder a little as Itachi lifts his head to look at them. “It seemed like the old man and Kakashi both put it off as long as they could, but Naruto’s been kicking up a fuss for weeks about wanting a ‘real’ mission, loud enough for the whole damn village to hear. He was so excited this morning I thought my eardrums were gonna burst, ‘cause he just kept yelling and yelling about how they were going to – how’d he put it?”

“Kick this mission’s butt,” Kotetsu answers with a snicker. Itachi feels himself make a face, half pained and half fond, and both Izumo and Kotetsu laugh, shoulders knocking into one another with the force of their snickers.

“Sasuke made the same face you just did,” Kotetsu says, gesturing a little with one hand toward Itachi’s face. “Poor kid, I don’t know how Naruto hasn’t turned him deaf yet. At one point he was just hanging off of Sasuke’s shoulders, shouting full volume like he has megaphones for lungs or something, and Sasuke was just standing there like he didn’t even notice.”

Itachi feels his lips twitch at that, very familiar with the habit Naruto has of dangling off someone’s shoulders and still talking at full volume like they’re ten feet away. He lifts his coffee back to his mouth, content to let the two chunin gossip about the boys for the moment, but Izumo has other ideas, gesturing with a flick of his fingers toward the camera once more.

“There’s two more, I think,” Izumo says, “and I think we even got a good shot of Naruto actively trying to kill your brother’s hearing like that.”

Itachi arches an eyebrow at the description, finding it to be less inaccurate than he’d like, and taps the side button on the camera to indicate he’d like to move to the next image in its memory.

The image is indeed of Naruto hanging off of Sasuke’s shoulders, mouth wide open as he’s caught forever mid-shout, but despite Izumo and Kotetsu’s description hinting otherwise, Sasuke doesn’t look at all bothered by Naruto’s presence or the loud volume Itachi’s sure he was speaking in. In fact Sasuke looks like he might be leaning back into the arm thrown around his shoulders, body twisted just a little bit toward Naruto as he speaks, a map held in one hand as he tips his head back to look at the blonde boy through his bangs.

(It’s a vivid and familiar image, one that’s framed closely enough to the two boys that it’s nearly like having them in front of him, loud and vibrant and alive.

It makes something in Itachi’s chest ache like he’s been stabbed, but at the same time he finds it reassuring to see evidence of them happy, the way he’d feared they’d lose once they became just another set of tools for the village to use as it sees fit.)

The image after that is very much the same, though this one’s taken from the same distance as the group image, zoomed out enough that Itachi can see Kakashi and the little pink haired girl in the background as the girl scowls up at her teacher and Kakashi in turns holds his hands out in defeat. Sasuke and Naruto are still the center framing point, however, and it’s easy to see why – both of their heads are bent together, map held out in front of them, one end in Sasuke’s grip and the other in Naruto’s. Naruto’s leaning over Sasuke’s shoulder, despite the fact that Sasuke looks like he’s managed to keep the inch-or-so height difference between them in his advantage, and both of their expressions are studious and serious, with furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips.

They look so young, like they did when they were playing at being ninja out by the lake, little foreheads furrowed as they tried to copy Itachi’s handsigns and only sloppily managed about half of them. They look so young, but also so grown, their new backpacks peeking over their shoulders, forehead protectors shining in the sunlight coming down from between the trees – everything about it is a contradiction and everything about it pulls at Itachi’s heartstrings, hard.

“Y’know,” Izumo says quietly and a quick glance up at the two chunin show that they’re looking at him with oddly soft expressions, their devilish grins eased into a pair of smiles that remind him, suddenly, that they would have been in the same Academy class, had his father not enrolled him three years too early. “They looked pretty capable there at the end, just before they left. Never seen Kakashi actually use a map before, so we figured you’d taught them that.”

Kotetsu nods before Itachi can confirm or deny that assumption, shrugging his shoulders in a move that’s probably supposed to be casual and comes off staged but kind instead. “They’re pretty good kids, when they aren’t storming the Hokage’s office or painting all over the mountain face. If I’d had a hand in raising them, I’d be pretty proud.”

Itachi stands there for a moment, oddly overwhelmed by the quiet, carefully hidden compliments in those statements, and then, for a lack of anything else to do, nods.

“Thank you,” he says, handing back the camera and half-drained coffee mug. Izumo and Kotetsu take both while sharing a bemused little glance, one that speaks volumes in a language Itachi thinks is as private and personal as the language Sasuke and Naruto share with their eyes. He scrambles for something else to say and, when he comes up with nothing, just nods again at the pair of chunin dutifully guarding the gate as always.

“Bye Itachi,” they both call out, just before he flickers off toward the Hokage’s Tower. “Make sure you take a break soon, okay?”

(Itachi spends one night in the village after giving his report, one night that’s spent talking with his mother about all he’s missed instead of sleeping.

He doesn’t think this is exactly what Izumo and Kotetsu had in mind when they called out after him to take a break, but Itachi doesn’t care.

Stories of Sasuke and Naruto’s adventures in D-rank missions are more important to him. Somehow he thinks the two chunin would understand, even if they wouldn’t exactly agree.)

-

Sasuke and Naruto are genin, twelve years old and only just out of the village for their very first C-rank mission, when they nearly die for the first time.

Itachi doesn’t hear about this mission first-hand for weeks. By the time he returns to the village their injuries are completely gone, leaving only a few already-silver scars behind as mementos. He probably wouldn’t have even heard about it at all if he hadn’t asked after the mission specifically, prodding the boys from more information when they both share a look and grimace at each other, stalling for time as Naruto drawls, “well…”

“Well,” Itachi says, reaching out to ruffle the boys’ hair as he does so. Naruto leans into the affection touch the same way he always has, like a stray cat starved for attention of any kind, while Sasuke squirms under his palm like he’s embarrassed to be treated so warmly, swatting at Itachi’s hand as he does so. “What’s the pause for? Don’t tell me it was such a long time ago that you don’t even remember, I’ve only been gone a few weeks.”

“Yeah, but they felt like forever,” Sasuke says, mumbling out of the corner of his mouth as he glances away. Itachi watches the boy’s shoulders hunch defensively and aches, wishing he could reach out and promise that he’ll never be gone so long for a mission again.

He can’t promise such a thing, though, and so he leaves it, turning his attention to Naruto instead.

“Kakashi told us not to tell you,” Naruto offers, shrugging his shoulders like he doesn’t really understand what the big deal is. “He said you’d probably kill him and that then we’d have to go back to the Academy ‘cause we wouldn’t have a teacher anymore.” He pauses for a moment, squinting a little as he looks up at Itachi, and then asks, “would you really kill him, ‘Tachi?”

Itachi blinks at the blunt question, weighing the pros and cons of answering it honestly. He’s always tried to be honest with the boys, at least when it wasn’t about mission details, and he’s found that most things in life go easier that way. “It would depend,” Itachi says, vague enough to give himself some wriggle room, “but possibly. Why? What happened?”

Sasuke and Naruto share another look, one that manages a whole conversation between them without a word, and then at once the two boys sigh.

“Well,” Naruto says again, this time gesturing with his hands a little bit in the telltale way he does when he’s getting ready to go on a lengthy and possibly embellished story. “It went like this, okay –“

Itachi doesn’t kill Kakashi. He doesn’t.

But only because Anko tips the lazy bastard off, giving him the head start he needs to get to the Hokage’s office before Itachi can get ahold of him.

“Ah,” Kakashi says, when Itachi drops down to perch in the windowsill behind the Hokage’s desk and glares at him after Sasuke and Naruto have finally wrapped up the tale of how they almost fucking died on a C-rank mission. “Itachi, hello –“

“The second you step out of this building,” Itachi tells Kakashi, who presses his back against the wall behind him like a goddamn coward, “I’m going to end your life.”

The Third Hokage doesn’t even look up from the paperwork he’s doing when he says, “no, Itachi, you won’t. And yes, before you ask, that is an order from your Hokage.”

Itachi weighs the pros and cons of killing both men for a long and utterly quiet moment. He thinks the direction his thought process takes must be a tangible presence Kakashi can feel, because for the first time since Itachi met the man six years ago, he can see the stupid pervert genuinely start to sweat.

“Sometimes,” Itachi tells them both, “this village makes wholesale slaughter look very appealing.”

The Third Hokage finally lifts up his head, turns around, and gives Itachi a look that very clearly says the one time you were told to wholesale slaughter, you didn’t, so don’t even try that shit with me.

The moment probably would have stretched out indefinitely, a two-way stalemate with Kakashi as the fretful onlooker, except that a few moments into trying to figure out just how difficult it would be to actually kill the Hokage, the door to the office bursts open and three twelve years old tumble into the room.

“Wait,” one of them, the pink haired girl, screams, “we can’t go back to the Academy, we need him!”

Sasuke, meanwhile, is shouting, “I’ll tell Mom! I’ll tell Mom!” over and over again, like their mother won’t wholeheartedly agree with Itachi once he tells her why he did it.

And Naruto, bless him, wriggles his arms from where he’s squished against the floor at the bottom of the three-child dogpile and says, oddly calm, “you can only kill him if you promise to take his place as our teacher, okay?”

Itachi considers it for a moment, imagines himself in the jounin vest with a trio of loud, clumsy genin trailing after him, and finds the mental image terrifying but oddly soothing. But just as he goes to open his mouth to agree, the Third Hokage stands up from his chair, drawing to his full and not-very-impressive height so that he can almost tower over the children piled on his floor.

“No one,” he says, his voice a crack not unlike a kunai splitting wood, “is killing anyone today.”

Itachi takes a deep breath, fights the fury raging in his veins back down to a manageable level, and then breathes out. “Alright,” he agrees, dropping down from the window sill and crossing the room easily enough. He leans down, helping Sasuke, Naruto, and their teammate to their feet with a few easy tugs on their elbows, and then looks Kakashi right in the eye just before he herds them out of the room.

“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” he tells him.

The way Kakashi goes pale, visible only in the small space around his lone eye, is the second funniest expression he’s ever seen on the man’s face.

The funniest is hands down the expression Kakashi makes of pure panic and dread when Itachi shows up at Team Seven’s training ground the next day on his way out of the village, fully geared up in his ANBU armor and mask with a kunai already drawn.

Kakashi lives through the experience, unfortunately, but at the very least Itachi hopes the man learns from it.

-

(It will take only a few months for Itachi to find out that Hatake Kakashi, for whatever reason, seems to be allergic to learning from his mistakes.

Now if only the bastard was allergic enough to have it kill him, Itachi thinks and despairs.)

-

Sasuke and Naruto are only-just-thirteen and still-very-much-twelve respectively when the chunin exams are held and Kakashi foolishly signs Team Seven up for them.

Itachi doesn’t know this at the time, nor does he know any of the details about the exams until the dust starts to settle after their rather messy conclusion. He’s somewhere near the Hidden Cloud Village in the Land of Lightning when a crow swoops down from the sky, its bright red eyes a sign that this is no normal bird but instead one of Shisui’s summons.

The bird has one short and utterly disturbing message to deliver: the Hokage is dead.

Itachi cuts a four-day travel down to two days, but he drains nearly all of his chakra to do so. The village is a mess by the time he arrives and every inch of it bears the marks of the attack it must have faced.

There’s no one at the gate to greet him, no Izumo or Kotetsu, no chunin fresh from the exams that should have been held – there’s just a weight bearing down on the village, the feeling that something terrible has happened here, something that can’t be undone. It’s a weight Itachi’s felt building in his own chest since the crow appeared in the sky above him and the more he looks at the village he swore to protect, the more he feels it pressing in on him, further and further and further until –

Until he feels his legs give out from underneath him, chakra finally completely spent.

-

Sasuke is still very newly thirteen while Naruto is very likely beside himself with still being twelve when Itachi opens his eyes to find himself in a darkened room in the Konoha hospital, crammed into one of the patient beds with two small bodies piled basically on top of him.

Everything in his body aches, his limbs too heavy while his chest feels very distinctly bruised, and that’s how Itachi knows he’s suffering from complete and total chakra deprivation, to the point where he very likely could have died.

His suspicions are confirmed when he opens his eyes for the second time and manages to keep them open this time, finding the darkness he’d glimpsed earlier replaced by the soft brush of dawn. This time, in addition to the two small bodies piled basically on top of him, a figure looms at the foot of the bed, head bent over a clipboard. It takes him a few blinks to figure out who it is, but after a few seconds, it clicks.

“Ami,” he says, his voice a rasping whisper in his sore dry throat. He knows if he were Shisui he’d have something clever to say, something like what, being related to hospital staff isn’t enough to get a guy the good drugs? or something equally annoying and flippant, but he’s not. All he can do is blink as his cousin’s head jerks up, trying and nearly failing in his attempts to keep his consciousness as the room seems to swim around him. “Ami,” he repeats, not sure how to convey hello and what’s happening and why are Sasuke and Naruto laying on me like a couple of drugged puppies all in one sentence, especially when his tongue keeps sticking to the roof of his mouth.

Ami, however, seems to have a better handle on her words than he does. She jerks up at the sound of his voice, her face wan with stress, and after a moment of staring at him, open mouthed and silent, she laughs, a noise that echoes in the quiet room with a breathless, tangible kind of relief.

“Oh thank fuck,” she says, her voice just as much of a rasp as his. He wonders what her excuse is, since his is probably almost dying, and after a moment he figures out that her excuse is probably the fact that her shoulders are shaking a little bit with the bastard child of both relief and grief.

“Fucking hell, you goddamn stupid son of a bitch,” Ami adds, clapping a hand over her eyes, as if that will hide the fact that they’re nearly overflowing with tears. “What was the point of getting to the village so quickly if you were just going to drop dead at the front door? Did you think that part out at all?”

Itachi considers that question for a moment, fights through the fog in his brain and the weight in his limbs to do so, and nearly gets distracted when Naruto makes a soft noise in his sleep and rolls even more on top of his chest, flinging his skinny, childish arm out over Itachi’s middle until the boy can fist his hand in the back of Sasuke’s shirt.

“I – I wasn’t thinking,” Itachi admits quietly, having to swallow a few times to get the words out. “I just –“

Ami sighs before he can find the words to describe why he thought it would be a good idea to nearly kill himself trying to get home, because he doesn’t really remember why. All he remembers is holding the note Shisui’s crow had delivered and thinking, quite suddenly, of the way Sasuke and Naruto had looked the handful of times he’d come to fetch them from the Hokage’s office, both boys grinning sheepishly, their slight frames boxing in the expression of a very tired old man who was usually losing an internal battle with his own knee-jerk amusement at their antics.

All he remembers is wanting to be home, as soon as possible, no matter the cost.

“Good grief,” Ami murmurs, rubbing the back of her hand across her face to collect the tears she’s shed. She seems to be collecting herself, now that Itachi’s admitted he doesn’t really remember why he made such a foolish decision, wasting all his chakra running halfway across the world as he did, and Itachi watches quietly as she puts herself together, feeling his chest constrict with guilt at the fact that he’s added stress to an already stressful situation.

“You’re such an idiot sometimes, little weasel,” his cousin says, shaking her head as she drops the clipboard she’d been looking at the end of the bed, coming around the side of the uncomfortable bed frame until she’s looming over his head instead. “But I suppose you’re our idiot,” she murmurs, reaching out to brush some of the hair from his face, giving him a lopsided and tired smile as she does so. “And half-dead or not, I’m glad you’re here. Machi and I were starting to get worried we wouldn’t be able to keep these two on bed rest, but now that you’re here they seem to have settled down again. We couldn’t even get Aunt Mikoto to help corral them, since she’s been pulled from retirement to help shore up the border defenses for the moment.”

Itachi blinks at the thought of his mother pulled out of the retirement the Uchiha elders had forced on her, struck a little dumb by his own surge of worry and pride that clogs through his senses. Unable to sift through his own head at the moment, still too muddled from chakra depletion, Itachi shifts, as much as he’s able, worming his numb, too-heavy arms out from behind Sasuke and Naruto’s backs so that he can curl them loosely around the boys like he’s holding them to his chest, seeking the comfort their familiar forms bring him. He hasn’t fallen asleep like this in years, not since he started taking longer and longer missions away from the village, and it feels good to have Naruto’s snorts and Sasuke’s little mumbles fading together into a quiet, lulling, background kind of noise.

“How badly were they hurt,” Itachi asks, leaning his head up against the hand Ami still has against his hair so that he can look her in the eyes again. He doesn’t ask what happened because he has a feeling that story would be too long to tell right now, but this, at least, he has to know as soon as possible. Ami grimaces a little bit, seemingly at something in her own memory, but doesn’t begrudge him the knowledge she probably knows he needs.

“Sasuke was in pretty bad shape,” she admits quietly, “but Naruto was – he should’ve been worse, from what I hear, but I think the Nine-Tails’ chakra kept him going, healing what it could while he was still fighting. We healed both of them as much as we could, but there were a lot of wounded and not a lot of resources, so most of their injuries have been left for time to heal instead.” She gives the boys curled on top of him a fond, if exhausted, glance, shaking her head a little as she smooths a stray strand of hair back from his temple with an absentminded brush of her thumb. “They’ll need at least another week of bed rest and another couple of checkups to make sure everything’s healing right, but they’ll be fine.”

Itachi feels some of the tension leave his body at the news, even as his chest squeezes at the words he should’ve been worse. He’s never been particularly grateful for the Nine-Tailed demon, never felt Naruto a burden because of it but also never thought of the demon’s entrapment inside Naruto as a plus, but for this moment, at least, he’s grateful nonetheless.

“And me,” Itachi asks, blinking heavy eyelids up at his cousin as her thumb brushes soothingly against his temple once more. He watches the corner of her mouth quirk up in a smile, watches as the expression seems to take some of the tension and stress out of her face, until she looks more like she did at the end of their chunin exam eight years ago – exhausted down to the bones, but satisfied with the result.

“You’re staying here for at least a week, little weasel,” she says, “and then you’re on mandated sick leave for another two weeks after that. I’ve already sent word to your mom, since she should be on her way back from the border check, and Shisui about it, so don’t even try to argue, okay?”

Itachi considers pushing back against that statement, because the village has been attacked and the Hokage is dead, so by proxy they’ll probably need all the ninja they can spare on duty at the moment, but he doesn’t.

Instead he closes his eyes, fists his hands in the back of Sasuke and Naruto’s shirts as he pulls them just a little closer against his chest, and nods jerkily under his cousin’s hand.

“Ma’am, yes ma’am,” he murmurs, swallowing to try and ease the scratchiness of his throat. Ami’s laughter at that is soft but sweet and the sound of it mixes in with Sasuke’s mumbles and Naruto’s snores to ease him back to sleep.

-

Sasuke and Naruto are eight years older than Itachi was when they attend the funeral of the Hokage for the first time.

Itachi had attended at his mother and father’s side, little baby Sasuke bundled up in his arms. It had been an oddly chilly October day, with clouds but no rain and a wind that carried with it the promise of a dull and bitter winter.

The Third Hokage – still going by his name then, even though they had all known he would retake the position in the wake of what had happened – had spoken for the ceremony, honoring not only the Fourth Hokage and his wife, but everyone who had been lost battling against the Nine-Tails’ attack.

Itachi remembers standing there until his arms were sore from holding his brother, standing there until his eyes burned from the heat of the tears he wouldn’t let fall. It had taken hours and hours to honor everyone they’d lost, because Sarutobi Hiruzen had called everyone by name and told a small story about them, face wet with tears though his voice did not waver.

Most of the names spoken that day are lost to Itachi’s memory, if he’d paid any attention to them at all. He’d only been listening for one name, one story amongst the masses, and it had come, finally, as the second to last one told that day.

“Namizake Kushina,” Hiruzen had said, bowing his head just a little bit as his eyes seemed to search through the crowd. Itachi remembers his mother stiffening at his side, her hand squeezing Itachi’s shoulder like she suddenly needed the help to keep standing upright, and though it had hurt, Itachi remembers leaning into her grip as well, finding it even more difficult than it had been to keep the tears back.

“Kushina was a firecracker,” the old man had continued, laughing a little bit at the end of the statement like the memory was still good, even if it hurt to say. “She lit up this village like no one else I’d ever met. I swear her laughter was the only thing I could hear from end to end of this place and no matter how quiet she thought she was being, her voice – her voice always rang true. She loved just as fiercely as she fought, and I fear we will be adrift in more ways than one without her here with us.”

Hiruzen had cleared his throat then, lifting one wrinkled hand to wipe at the tears on his face. “I fear,” he had said, “that the world will seem a little more dim than it had before, without her light in it, hers and Minato’s. But we will have to carry on, despite that, and work to fill the world with the kind of light they would have wanted to see. That is, after all, the Will of Fire.”

The funeral for the Third Hokage is much the same as the Fourth’s, though this time it rains and rains and rains, as if the sky above is crying too. Itachi finds it hard to focus as the village elders speak on the Third’s behalf, his mind split between the past and the present – half of him is feeling the phantom bruise of the grip of his mother’s hand on his shoulder and the other half is feeling the very real crushing sensation in his hands as Sasuke and Naruto cling to him, their fingers tightening like pythons around his own, their bony shoulders digging bruises into his biceps as they huddle closer and closer and closer.

It’s an experience just as miserable as the first time he lived through it and he wishes with all his heart that it wasn’t happening now. He’d been caught up in the hospital about the invasion, about the chunin exams and everything they entailed – Orochimaru and his fucking curse mark, the Sand Village and their goddamned betrayal. By the time he’d been briefed on everything that’s happened, from a wide range of people starting with Anko and ending with his mother and her play-by-play recount of Naruto’s fight in the one-on-one round of the chunin exams, he had begun to believe that he couldn’t leave the village for five minutes without something falling apart.

But eventually, despite the rain and the droning voices of those old coots who just won’t die themselves, the funeral comes to a quiet and somber end. Itachi lets the boys crowd him up into the line of those paying their respects, falling into place with both of them sandwiched between Shisui and himself while his mother steps into the spot at his back.

(He feels her hand at his shoulder for a moment, gentle and ghost-like, and can’t tell where exactly he is, if it’s raining or if the wind is blowing sharp enough to chill him down to the bones.

And then, like a cloud over the sky, that moment passes.)

“Hey, ‘Tachi,” Naruto says later, when the boys have tugged him into following them to Team Seven’s training grounds. Their teammate is with them, her head bowed and her eyes shadowed with grief, but Kakashi, in contrast, is nowhere to be seen.

“Yes,” Itachi says, absentmindedly tugging free the hair-tie holding his hair together at the nape of his neck. The rain has finally tapered off, leaving with it the muggy feeling of humid air as the sun starts to peek out and warm the village around them, and it makes the back of his neck feel sticky with the beginnings of sweat.

Naruto picks his head up and catches Itachi’s gaze with his own and for a moment Itachi feels caught, ensnared just like a genjustu’s been cast by the brightness of the boy’s eyes, by the sheer force of the fire and determination painted blue around his pupil. He jolts a little bit more when he turns and finds himself caught in a similar way by Sasuke, who stands with his hands curled into fists at his sides, shoulders hunched and eyes wild.

“Train with us,” both the boys say, voices firm and yet soft. It’s a request and a demand, said in the way only Sasuke and Naruto can manage so well, and Itachi feels himself fall prey to it the same way he always has, whether it’s been for more dessert after dinner or kunai practice in the morning or a piggyback ride on the way home from school.

A quick glance at their teammate shows a similar look in her eyes, a fire catching in her expression like she’s just another piece of tinder in the growing wildfire that is Sasuke-and-Naruto, and for a moment Itachi finds himself oddly relieved by that, by the quick way the girl responds to the boys’ determination and hunger for more with a fire of her own.

“Alright,” Itachi agrees, glancing back over the pair of boys as he takes in the wet and muggy training ground around them. The three of them are still supposed to be on bed rest technically, but only for another three days – it shouldn’t matter now if they start training again, not when they were all but awarded a clean bill of health at their last checkups the day before.

He lifts his hands up, twisting his hair into a bun as best he can with the old hair-tie at his disposal, and then nods his head. “Let’s get started.”

Three near matching feral grins meet his statement head on and Itachi finds that faced with such bright and vibrant expressions the crushing weight of grief eases from his shoulders, just a little.

-

(By the end of the day their best pressed funeral clothes are ripped, torn, worn, muddy, and bloody, to the point where not a single one of them comes out unscathed, not even Itachi.

But by god – by fucking god, Itachi doesn’t care, because by sunset in the muggy humid air of a mourning village, one of his clones catches Naruto midair and manages to toss him out into Sasuke’s incoming attack, dumping them both in the lake.

He takes too long surveying the fruits of that particular move, standing with his hands on his hips on a tree branch above the water as his clone poofs into thin air and doesn’t pay attention to Sasuke and Naruto’s teammate the way he should. It’s a reckless and arrogant kind of mistake, one he’s too well trained to be making, but in his defense, he’s fighting a trio of genin.

It ends with him in the water as well, drenched along with the two boys, while the little pink haired genin on the bank stares at them with an expression somewhere between shock and smug delight, like she can’t really believe she managed to sneak up on Itachi the way she did and yet she’s still undeniably pleased that she has.

“Wow,” Naruto yells, while Sasuke nearly trips in the mud of the bottom of the lake with the force of his sudden braying laughter. “Sakura, you did it! You really did it, you got one over on Itachi!”

The little girl, Sakura, goes pink at the praise, even as she plants her hands on her hips and yells back, “of course I did! I said I could, didn’t I?!”

Sasuke laughs and laughs and laughs, hard and long enough that Itachi has to reach over and pull him back to the surface by his collar, just to keep him from drowning. Naruto and Sakura yell at each other across the water for another moment, both of them fighting back grins with all their might, and Itachi basks in it, in the trembling of Sasuke’s laughing shoulders, in the bright-eyed delight on Naruto’s face as he mimics the look of surprise he claims Itachi wore just as he fell in the water.

They catch hell for the ruined clothes – and breaking their assigned bed rest – but Itachi takes the blame for it all without a second’s pause, leaning down to kiss his mother’s cheek gently as she huffs out a sigh at the mud they track into the house even after they remove their shoes at the door.

“Sorry, Mom,” he murmurs, reaching up a hand to try and tuck his sopping tangled hair behind his ear. He fails miserably, fingers snagging on a particularly complicated knot for a minute, before giving it up entirely. “But I thought it was better for them to blow off steam then stew in it.”

His mother pulls back, the expression on her face winding and twisting through a series of emotions – exhaustion and love and heartache and grief and hope, all tied and tangled together – before she gives another soft sigh and her face settles into an expression of wry amusement.

“Somehow, darling,” she says, reaching up to successfully tuck his tangled hair behind his water-logged ear with a practiced and patient hand, “I don’t think they were the only ones who needed to blow off some steam.”

Itachi tips his head to the side, giving the thought a hum of acknowledgment, and then shakes his head as Sasuke and Naruto go tearing down the hallway, both of them shouting that they’re going to take the first baths since they won today’s spar, ‘Tachi, fair and square!

“Perhaps,” he allows quietly, as Shisui leans in from the kitchen, takes one look at his drenched state, and starts choking on his own laughter.

His mother smiles at him, soft and sad and fond, and lifts her hand to guide him down so that she can kiss his forehead gently.

“Our stubborn little weasel,” she murmurs against his temple, dropping back on her heels as she lets him go. And Itachi aches and aches and aches, but in a way that somehow still feels good.

“Go on,” his mother says, shooing him from the entryway and then turning around to swat at his still snickering cousin. “Go get clean before Sasuke and Naruto use up all the hot water.”

And in the years that follow, that will be what Itachi remembers most about the day of the Third Hokage’s funeral – not the rain or the empty look in the village’s eyes, the despair or grief or ruined buildings still present as a reminder of what was done to them, but Sasuke’s water-logged laughter and Naruto’s mud-covered hands, Sakura’s disbelieving pride and his mother’s wry affectionate and gentle worry.

It was a good day, Itachi thinks later, as he dries his hair on a towel, Sasuke and Naruto’s voices mingling with Shisui’s in the living room as his mother sings in the kitchen while she cooks.

A good day, despite it all.)

-

A week after the funeral Itachi stands at the gates to the village, barely repaired as they are, and tries to fight back the urge to step forward, sweep both boys into his arms, and refuse to let them leave with Jiraiya.

Itachi’s not entirely sure how Naruto found himself acquainted with the legendary asshole and monumental pervert, but he’s been trying not to think about it since someone mentioned it during his briefings on the chunin exams that he missed. But either way Itachi finds himself tugged out of the crowd one morning on his way to the Hokage’s Tower, Sasuke suddenly hanging off one arm as Naruto hangs off the other as both boys chant please, please, please! like their lives depend on it.

The please has a longer translation, which amounts to please let us go with Jiraiya on a reckless and dangerous quest to go fetch a woman who hasn’t been seen in the village in twenty years! and Itachi hates it almost before the two already-packed-to-leave boys are finished speaking. But there’s a fire in their eyes and a will of steel in them that Itachi had a hand in crafting and after the first time he says no, it turns out they weren’t asking permission as much as they were saying goodbye.

“Besides,” Sasuke points out, as Naruto shouts in the background about how unfair Itachi is being and how Pervy Sage won’t let anything happen to us, y’know when Itachi really, really doesn’t believe that for a second. “Jiraiya said that it’s either this or the council makes him Hokage and Mom said you’d like this option more.”

Itachi doesn’t know how to feel about that statement, exactly, except to suspect that Sasuke and Naruto have begun to learn how to out maneuver and manipulate him like a pile of wet putty.

“Well,” he says, because he has to say something to that remark, “our mother is a very smart woman.”

Sasuke’s bright enough to know what Itachi means by that, which loosely translates to I will concede on this particular ground, but I’m not entirely happy about it.

His little brother gives him a smile that’s gleeful and smug, all at once, before turning to fling his arm around Naruto’s neck and start to drag him backwards. “C’mon, dumbass,” Sasuke says fondly, voice warm and affectionate for all his words seem harsh. “Itachi’s gonna see us off.”

Naruto stumbles, staggers, and yet doesn’t fall, curling his own arms around the one Sasuke’s has around his neck as he lets Sasuke guide him backwards through the city. “Really,” Naruto says, squinting suspiciously at Itachi as they go. “You’re not gonna follow us at a distance, are you?”

Well, Itachi thinks quietly to himself. I wasn’t until you said that.

“Does that sound like something I’d do,” he asks quietly, instead of outright lying to the boys. Sasuke twists around just long enough to give him a disbelieving kind of look, but neither push the matter, too quickly caught up in their own excitement as the village’s gate comes into view, complete with an impatient, foot-tapping Jiraiya waiting there.

It turns out to be a good thing that Itachi is an overly paranoid and suspicious bastard (Jiraiya’s words, after the fiasco happens) because by the time night begins to fall on the first day of their journey, the Akatsuki have appeared in the same town they’ve stopped in.

Itachi doesn’t notice the chakra signatures until they’re nearly at the door and then by the time he’s body flickered into the building, it’s already too late – Naruto stands with his lips parted and his eyes wide with horror as a member Itachi’s never seen before in an orange swirling mask holds Sasuke up in the air by his throat.

After that everything is quick and messy and rough – Naruto shouts and tries to leap for Sasuke but the other Akatsuki member present, the ex-Mist nin Kisame, lunges in between the blonde boy and the masked man with his sword. Everything blurs together, a split-second’s work, and despite all his speed and all his skill, Itachi still can’t get there fast enough to keep Sasuke from being flung into the wall with a sickening sort of crunch.

It’s over in the same split-second fashion it begun with as Itachi pierces the masked man’s shoulder with a kunai while catching Kisame’s overly large sword against the flat of his own ANBU katana. The resulting standstill holds just long enough for the entirety of the hotel hallway to surge with chakra, the floor underneath their feet turning soft and pliant in a way that turns Itachi’s stomach.

“Naruto,” Itachi barks, shoving his katana back against Kisame’s sword just enough that he can duck underneath the blade. Naruto jerks up from the place where he’s hunched over Sasuke’s crumpled form and somehow, miraculously, knows what Itachi needs from him, just from a glance.

Naruto ducks even further over Sasuke, curling one arm around the boy’s waist as the ground beneath him turns into something horrifyingly like the inside of someone’s body, and then reaches out toward Itachi with his other arm.

Itachi grabs him, lightning quick, but it’s still not fast enough to reel both boys into the safety of his arms – the porous wall behind them tugs them in, even as Naruto’s fingers dig harder and harder into Itachi’s arm, and it leaves Itachi with no choice.

He throws his body forward, curls down over Naruto and Sasuke both, and lets the walls absorb all three of them together.

-

“If you ever do that to any of us again,” Itachi tells Jiraiya after the other man releases his fucking toad stomach jutsu, “I will end the miserable, pitiable existence you call a life.”

“Oh come on,” Jiraiya complains, like he wasn’t fucking around in a goddamn bar with women who had to be bribed to be near him when he should have been watching over Sasuke and Naruto. “That jutsu just saved you, you know, so you could stand to be a little kinder right now.”

Itachi pretends to consider that suggestion for a moment, turning his head to share a look with Might Gai, who’d shown up seconds too late to be any use with his Akatsuki warning, and then declares, “absolutely not.”

Jiraiya makes a noise of complete irritation, throwing his hands up in the air for a moment as he mutters something under his breath that sounds like even worse than Kakashi, at least that man has taste, which Itachi pretends not to hear, if only because Sasuke stirs at that moment, groaning softly in the back of his throat as he does.

Itachi’s by his side in an instant, crowding into the scant space left beside his brother by Naruto as Gai and Jiraiya continue to talk over their heads. Sasuke groans again, soft and low, the noise full of barely-stifled pain, and then he opens his eyes, first as a little slit and then fully.

“Naruto,” he murmurs, blinking as he works to focus on the room around him. Beside Itachi Naruto’s body gives a little twitch, his shoulders rising and falling gently, but the expression on the boy’s face never falters from a smile.

“Hey, bastard,” Naruto murmurs back, his voice bright and gentle and fond, like nothing in the world is wrong right now. Itachi startles, just a little, not having expected that level of emotional control or acting from the little blonde boy, even though he probably should have. “How ‘ya feeling?”

“Uh,” Sasuke says, shifting slightly only to stop with a wince. “Feels a little worse than Zabuza’s kick in the ribs did and I don’t think I can really move my arm right now.”

Itachi feels his stomach drop, both at the mention of his brother’s first C-rank turned A-rank mission and at the confirmation of his suspicions that Sasuke’s arm really is broken after that crash against the wall. He swallows, the motion rough against his suddenly dry throat, and gently reaches out to run his hand through Sasuke’s hair, trying to be as gentle as possible as he sighs slowly out.

“Don’t worry,” he promises quietly, as Sasuke turns his head just a little to look up at him. “We’ll get you home and get you fixed up no problem, okay?”

(Itachi has no idea why he thinks it’ll be that easy, but by god, he does.

Maybe he really is the idiotic fool Machi’s told him he is.)

Three hours later, after Itachi has experienced for the first miserable time in his life what it’s truly like to have both Sasuke and Naruto fighting him tooth and nail as he tries to get them to do something they really don’t want to, Itachi is forced to concede.

“Alright,” he says, too dignified to throw his hands in the air the way he wants to, at least in front of Jiraiya and Gai. “Fine!”

Sasuke and Naruto, who have been relentlessly arguing for Sasuke to continue on this damn mission despite his cracked ribs and broken arm, go still as one. They share a look, a mixture of suspicion and glee on their faces, and then turn toward Itachi like piranha scenting blood in the water.

Itachi sighs, feeling his shoulders sag a little as he does. “Sasuke can continue on this mission,” he agrees, over top of Gai’s surprised yelp of Itachi, are you serious?! and Jiraiya’s what the fuck’s wrong with you, I’m not taking them both! like neither man has said a word. “But only if you both promise me something, alright?”

The Sasuke and Naruto of a year ago might have agreed to that stipulation without hesitation, but the pair before him pause, sharing one of their silent conversations for a long moment before the two boys turn their heads back toward Itachi.

“What promise,” Naruto asks quietly, squinting at Itachi for good measure while over his shoulder, propped up against Naruto’s back as he is, Sasuke juts out his jaw with his most stubborn expression.

I feel like I owe both Shisui and Mother an apology, Itachi thinks as he studies the expressions of the two boys determined not to be separated. While watching over Sasuke and Naruto has never been a particularly easy feat, the boys have certainly made it easier on Itachi than he’d ever been aware of, going along with his instructions will as little fuss as possible. Now, however, they’ve dug in their heels, a fire lit inside their hearts that threatens to burn him to ashes if he stands in their way, and Itachi is helpless to make them listen, short of physically tearing the two boys apart.

(And he could never, ever do that. Tearing Sasuke from Naruto or Naruto from Sasuke would be like reaching out to take one of their hands for gentle reassurance and then wrenching their arms out of their sockets.

He abhors the idea of it and has every time it’s been suggested over the years that he separate the boys for their own goods. As long as Sasuke and Naruto wish to be at each other’s sides, Itachi is going to make sure they have the right to do that, no matter what it costs him.

He just never thought it would be something used against him like this. Never thought he would finally begin to understand the quiet murmuring way the Third had whispered maybe they’d be better off apart, and now that he does have the beginnings of an understanding, he hates himself even more than he ever has.

Sasuke and Naruto are a force of nature, even as genins, even bruised and half-beaten as they are. Itachi can’t interfere with that any more than he can stop mourning a loss that’s nearly thirteen years old or make his mother smile that soft, crooked sort of smile she only ever gave one person.

He’s helpless, in a way he’s never been before, but –)

Breathing as deeply and evenly as he can, Itachi drops carefully down to one knee, tipping his head back to look up at the two boys as he does. Like this they just barely tower over him, a sensation that none of them are entirely used to, if the two boys’ expressions of surprise and sudden uneasy are to be believed, and Itachi feels the corner of his mouth twitch in a brief smile as Sasuke and Naruto blink down at him as one.

“Promise me,” Itachi says quietly, “that you two will do everything you can to stay safe. That’s all I ask.”

Sasuke and Naruto’s expression shift in nearly the same moment, their lips parting quietly as their eyes widen in surprise. Silence hangs in the air around them, thick and sticky like the humid air around a hot springs, and then it shatters as easily as glass.

“Well,” Naruto says, his voice loud enough that Jiraiya and Gai both wince behind Itachi’s back. “When you say it like that –”

Sasuke, however, interjects quietly, his voice soft and wavering for all that his eyes burn with determination as he talks over Naruto, adding, “only if you promise us something too, Itachi.”

Naruto falls silent, mouth shutting so quickly there’s the muted sound of teeth clacking as he does so. Itachi studies the pair for a long moment, a feeling like bittersweet pride building through his chest as he takes in the slight curl of Sasuke’s fingers in Naruto’s shirt and the way Naruto’s hands are so steady and careful as they support Sasuke on his back.

“I believe I can manage that,” Itachi murmurs quietly, finding that his voice sticks oddly in his throat as he does so. He clears his throat as quietly as he can, watches as Naruto cranes his head to glance at Sasuke, and waits for the promise he’s supposed to make.

Quietly, without glancing at Naruto, Sasuke says, “promise that you’ll trust us to finish our mission.”

Itachi feels like he’s been stuck with a kunai, straight through the chest, just for a moment. And then, as if sensing his pain, Naruto adds brightly, “and promise us you’ll be safe too! We don’t wanna come back to the village only to find you got hurt too, y’know?”

Itachi closes his eyes for a minute, trying to steady his heartbeat and control his reaction to such requests, before he nods once sharply.

“I believe I can do that,” Itachi promises quietly. He opens his eyes, peering at the two boys who have been his whole world for the last few years, and breathes out quietly.

Sasuke and Naruto, however, don’t seem to be touched by the same near-grief Itachi is, because as soon as Itachi agrees Sasuke and Naruto both shudder, their faces splitting into the kinds of grins that have always gone hand and hand with Shisui groaning loudly and declaring everyone in Konoha is doomed, y’hear me, doomed!

Itachi, who has always felt the boys’ grins were a precursor to something good instead of something bad, can’t help but smile back a little bit as the two boys are suddenly filled with life as they talk over one another, babbling happily that they super promise, Itachi, really! We’ll be the safest people in the world, just you wait and see!

(It doesn’t make it any easier to watch a local medic splint Sasuke’s arm so they can set out, nor does it make the sight of their shrinking backs as they wander off down the road with Jiraiya a happy sight at all.

Itachi watches them go, feels the two boys slip further and further out of his fingers, and mourns the days where every bump and bruise, every scratch and little cut, were his to bandage and care for.

“Come on, Uchiha,” Gai says, after the trio have disappeared so completely from view that even Itachi’s Sharingan can’t see them any more. “Let’s head back to the village.”

Itachi nods, not saying anything, and then turns to leave.

The boys will be okay, he thinks. They’ll be safe.

(They promised, after all. And Itachi promised as well.

He trusts them and so they’ll have to be safe.)

-

Sasuke is thirteen-and-two-months while Naruto is twelve-and-eleven-months when they (somehow) successfully bring back the last of the legendary Sanin so that she can take the title of Hokage (and save the village from suffering through the indignity of having Jiraiya in charge of everyone and everything).

The (actually) legendary Lady Tsunade is exactly as the stories have always painted her and more, but Naruto, as usual, casts all those expectations aside by marching into the village just ahead of the woman and announcing at the top of his lungs, “hey guys, we brought Grandma back!”

Sasuke’s barely a step behind him, ducking his head to hide a smile as the blonde woman who can only be Tsunade herself immediately twitches in annoyance and hisses, “stop calling me Grandma, you little brat!”

Itachi’s spent the last month and a half nearly beside himself, running small missions for the village as the construction and rebuild process goes on around him. The village is stable, for now, but still decidedly weak – even ninja like his mother, who have been retired for more than twenty years, have been asked to assist in the backlog of requests piling up from the other villages and nations.

Itachi counts his blessings that he’s actually present to welcome Sasuke and Naruto home, especially since he’d only just returned from a scouting mission at the edge of the Land of Wind that morning.

“Aw c’mon, Grandma,” Naruto whines, ducking out of her reach and immediately dropping back behind Sasuke, who bears being Naruto’s human shield with a great deal of dignity that likely comes from practice. It makes Itachi wonder how often this has happened since they’d found Tsunade, makes him wonder what their trip has been like at all. “Don’t be like that, I was just –”

Whatever Naruto was just saying, it’s lost as Sasuke’s eyes scan the crowd gathered to welcome their new Hokage home, because it’s at that moment that he realizes Itachi is there, standing in between Might Gai and a handful of curious civilians.

The reaction is immediate – Sasuke jabs his elbow back into Naruto’s side, hissing something too low for Itachi to hear at this distance, and before he’s even finished Naruto’s head is snapping up, his bright blue eyes searching out Itachi in the crowd.

And then, like they’re little boys again that Itachi’s picking up from the Academy, they cry out, “Itachi!” and fling themselves forward.

Itachi catches their full weight against his chest like they’re one of the Akimichi’s Human Boulder techniques, but manages to stay up on his feet through a combination of practice and Gai’s arm generously propping him up from behind.

All at once the two boys start talking over one another, an excitable string of chatter like they’re trying to fill him in on the whole month and a half they’ve been gone when they’ve barely gotten farther than ten feet from the village’s gate, and Itachi lets it wash over him for a moment, the tightness that’s been living in his chest since he watched them leave with Jiraiya finally, finally easing.

“Hey, hey,” Naruto says suddenly, reaching up to give Itachi’s pony-tail an undignified tug where it hangs over his shoulder. “Are you listening to us, ‘Tachi? We’re trying to tell you important stuff here!”

Sasuke narrows his eyes at Itachi while Naruto outright squints at him and Itachi, caught out red-handed, can only hum and tug them just a little closer, to turn their loose grip on him into a hug.

“I’m sorry Sasuke, Naruto,” he murmurs, letting his eyes close for a minute and not caring if everyone’s staring at the scene they’re making. “I just got caught up in the moment, I suppose. I’m very happy to have you home.”

He opens his eyes to peer down at the boys still crowded against his chest and finds that they’re looking up at him two, both pairs of eyes, blue and dark, dark brown, glinting with a sheen of unshed tears.

“Well,” Naruto says, in a tone of voice that’s trying to be brave as he fights back a tide of emotion. Itachi is touched by the wobble in his words, even as bemusement settles in his chest at the contradiction Naruto makes of himself – too emotional now to steady his voice when before, when Sasuke was hurt, he could wrap it all up behind his eyes and never let it touch his words.

Sasuke, meanwhile, murmurs, “isn’t there something you should be saying to us then?”

Bossy little boys, Itachi thinks fondly, but he’s never been able to deny them anything, least of all a bit of comfort and affection.

“Welcome home,” Itachi breathes, lifting his hands to ruffle both boy’s hair gently. He ends up cupping the back of their heads afterwards, unable to bring himself to completely let go, and he’s swamped with a feeling not unlike heartbreak as Sasuke and Naruto immediately lean back into his touch, trusting and warm.

Sasuke and Naruto share a glance, heads tipping side to side as they communicate with half-expressions and arching eyebrows, before twin grins split their faces. Looking at them feels like looking directly into the sun, but Itachi can’t look away either, captivated by their joy as they chorus, “we’re back!”

Nothing can quite take the joy and peace Itachi feels in this moment away from him. Not event Jiraiya’s voice, drifting out over the crowd amassed around them, as the old bastard says, “oh sure, those two brats are all sunshine and innocence for Itachi, and yet when I tell them to do anything it’s shut up, Pervy Sage, we’re not doing that –”

Nothing can ruin this moment for Itachi, not when Sasuke and Naruto rush forward again, flinging their arms around his waist to press their faces against his torso and hide the sound of their own snickering voices chiming we kept our promise, Itachi, just like we said!

Not even that goddamn fucking bastard Jiraiya.

-

(The village under Tsunade is like a village made whole, but Itachi has a hard time finding any joy in it when Tsunade takes what feels like half the stack of missions allotted for the village and assigns them all to Itachi to complete.

“Take whatever team you need,” Tsunade tells him, rubbing at her temples at a desk that’s half buried in paperwork while the other half’s tacky with dust. “Take whatever resources you need. Your only instruction is to get these missions done and get them done fast. Understood?”

A part of Itachi, a very large part, wants to tell the woman where she can shove her stack of missions. Sasuke and Naruto have only just returned to the village, have barely settled back into rough-housing around the Uchiha compound since they’re still on mandatory bed rest, and everything in Itachi aches at the thought of leaving them, as it always has.

But Itachi is a Leaf village ninja and he has a duty, not only to protect the village, but to protect Sasuke and Naruto as well. He can’t turn down this order, any more than he can look the other way when Sasuke or Naruto is hurt.

“Yes, ma’am,” Itachi says, after a moment he knows is too long to be polite. Tsunade is watching him, her eyes sharp and curious, but she doesn’t say anything about his long silence and Itachi in turn doesn’t offer any information up.

“Good,” she says, nodding quietly to herself. “You can send word about the results of each mission you finish with a summons or with one of your squad members as you send them back, understood? I know this is a rather unreasonable and unorthodox request, but as you are the best we have, I felt it was the quickest way to get these missions out of the way.”

“Understood,” Itachi echoes, nodding his head once again. “Anything else?”

Tsunade looks at him again, studying him over top of her steepled fingers, and then smiles slightly with the corner of her mouth.

“Stay safe, Uchiha,” she says, nodding to herself once more as she begins to turn back to the paperwork cluttering her desk. “And I’ll do my best to keep those boys of yours out of trouble.”

Itachi tries to cover his surprise at the remark, unsure of who exactly has forewarned the woman about Sasuke and Naruto’s penchant for utter chaos when crammed inside the village for too long, but he’s not sure he manages to hide it all, considering Tsunade’s slight smile only grows into a smirk from there. He hesitates for a moment longer, blinking dumbly for a heartbeat, and then nods once more.

“Thank you,” he says quietly, and then he’s gone.)

-

Sasuke and Naruto are both thirteen and both still on probation from missions, as far as Itachi knows, when he receives a rather abrupt summons to return to the village as fast as he can by one of Tsunade’s slugs.

He’s only been gone from the village on his task to finish as many missions as he can for a month and the request is odd enough as it is, but halfway back to the village Itachi finds himself intercepted by one of Shisui’s crows, which bursts from the treetops like a bird possessed and starts immediately shrieking at him to get to Valley of the End like fucking yesterday, what are you waiting for, a goddamn invitation?!

He flings himself through the trees of the west edge of Fire Country even faster than before, turning north as he does, and a little ways across the border one of Inuzuka Hana’s dogs finds him, leaping through the trees and nipping at his heels as it does so.

The dog guides him, in a fashion that’s not unlike it’s master, slightly more aggressive than necessary, and before long one dog becomes two, becomes three, becomes the whole goddamn pack, specially trained for pursuit as they are.

Their presence should be comforting, but it’s not – it sets Itachi on edge even further with every step, until he’s pushing himself hard enough to overtake the whole team. They howl and yip at him, likely calling him the same nasty names their owner always throws his way during spars, but Itachi doesn’t care.

The sky is dark, holding the promise of a storm to come, and the sound of the waterfall is loud and deafening, enough that even the sound of Hana’s pursuit squad is lost in the thunder of water. But the sound of the rushing water can’t hide everything and it’s nearly child’s play to locate the two chakra signatures that Itachi’s spent the last few years coaxing to grow stronger and stronger.

He finds them crumpled on the ground next to the bottom of the falls, both waterlogged and bloodied. Sasuke is thrashing on the ground, his face twisted in misery and pain, and the closer Itachi comes, the easier it is to hear his screams and sobs from under the water’s sound. Naruto’s curled over Sasuke, wet and bloodied and trembling, though whether it’s from the force of his own emotions or from Sasuke’s thrashing, Itachi cannot tell.

Itachi drops down to his knees next to them, hands scrambling over their small, drenched bodies, trying to find the source of Sasuke’s pain. Naruto flinches as he realizes someone else is there, swinging his arm in a punch made uncoordinated by the force of his own sobs, and only seems to realize who it is when Itachi merely takes the hit, too busy staring in horror at the pulsing curse mark painting dark sinister lines across Sasuke’s skin to bother dodging.

“I-Itachi,” Naruto yelps, the force of his tears turning his shout into a hiccup. “Itachi, Sasuke, he – he lost control, they made the mark take over, but – but he got it back, he got control back, but he’s – he’s –“

Itachi reaches out, pressing one hand over the place where Sasuke’s hands are clawing at his own neck, and then swings his other arm out to catch Naruto and pull him desperately against his shoulder. “Shhh,” Itachi hushes, even as his heart nearly breaks in two as Sasuke’s voice cracks around the force of his screaming. “Shh, I’m here, it’s okay, you can tell me later what happened, it’s okay.”

Naruto sucks in a breath, one that shakes, damp and humid against the skin of Itachi’s neck as Naruto lurches forward and hides his face. The next sobs that shakes him is harsh and bone-deep, leaving Itachi no choice but to tighten that arm curled around Naruto’s shoulders as he drags him to his chest.

That leaves him Sasuke, still trashing under his grip no matter how hard he squeezes at his brother’s hands. He bends closer, tucking Naruto even more against his chest, and speaks softly, desperately, not paying any attention to the words themselves, just hoping that the sound of his voice helps somehow as he tries to figure out what to do.

Sasuke blinks his eyes open at the sound of Itachi’s voice and the dark color of his irises is bright and feverish, holding a near manic look therein. He’s even more pale than he usually is, leaving the smear of blood and the depth of the scrapes along his shoulders and face more noticeable than they might otherwise be.

“’Tach – ‘Tachi,” Sasuke gasps, his voice hoarse and wavering. Itachi watches, wishing he could pluck the pain from Sasuke and take it on as his own instead, and as he watches, tears pool in his eyes and spill out over his cheeks. “Make it stop, make it – make it stop!”

Too much is unknown about Orochimaru’s stupid curse mark – too much is at stake. Itachi hates the only option he can come up, but if it buys Sasuke enough time for Tsunade to figure out how to ease his pain –

“Hush, Sasuke, it’s alright,” Itachi murmurs, bending down until he can press his forehead gently against his brother’s. Naruto comes with him, his trembling, drenched frame boxing Sasuke in as well, and this close Itachi imagines that all Sasuke can see at this moment is Itachi’s eyes and little tuffs of blonde hair.

“It’s alright, it’s going to be alright,” he breathes, focusing on his own chakra for a moment. He’s exhausted from the trip here, more exhausted than is probably safe considering there’s likely enemies around, but he can spare some more chakra, if it’s to ease Sasuke’s pain.

Slowly, carefully, he feeds enough chakra into his eyes to activate his Sharingan and then –

“Sleep, little one,” Itachi implores, feeling his eyes sting with the promise of tears of his own as he uses his Mangekyou Sharingan to put Sasuke to sleep. “Sleep and when you wake, all will be well again. I promise.”

Sasuke makes one more soft, anguished sound and then goes limp, hands falling slack underneath Itachi’s grip, leaving him clutching at the still-pulsing curse mark all on his own.

Naruto shudders, lifting his head from Itachi’s neck to drop like a sack of rice on top of Sasuke, curling around him instead. Itachi leans back, just enough for him to do so, and then cuts off the chakra flow to his eyes.

Sharingan gone and Sasuke so deeply asleep he can’t feel the pain of the mark, Itachi takes a moment to study the boys, cataloging the way Naruto’s shirt is torn and scorched along his ribs (like he’s been bombarded with a series of fire jutsus or scraped by with Chidori) against the way Sasuke is covered in gritty little cuts that go straight through his clothes (like he’s been battered around with a series of wind jutsus or just one very strong wind jutsu in particular) and then decides that those details don’t matter right now.

Sasuke and Naruto are thirteen – they’re growing and gangly, their scrawny skinny limbs beginning to fill out with the muscle they’ve been gaining over their months and months of training. They’re too old and too big to be carried around at the same time like a couple of sleeping pups, and yet –

And yet Itachi doesn’t care.

“Come on, come on,” Itachi whispers, settling back on his heels to make this as easy as possible. “He’ll be alright, Naruto, I promise. We’ve just got to get him back to the village so Tsunade can help him, okay?”

Naruto shudders for a moment, shaking like a leaf in a thunderstorm, barely holding it all together, before he slumps backward and nearly knocks Itachi on his ass.

“Grandma’s gonna fix him, right,” he asks, his voice hoarse and near-hopeless. Itachi pulls him up to his feet as gently as he can, ducking down to press his face against soggy, matted blonde hair as he does so.

“Tsunade’s going to fix him,” he promises quietly. The unsaid part of that promise goes she’ll fix him, or I’ll kill her. Her and Orochimaru and anyone else who gets in my way. They’ll all pay for what’s been done.

Naruto sniffles, lifting one bloody and bruised hand to scrub at his cheeks, and then nods carefully against Itachi’s side. “’Kay,” he says, accepting Itachi’s words as easily as he did when he was a little kid. He gets to his feet, swaying with exhaustion from side to side, and clamors up on Itachi’s back with a minimal amount of coaxing.

“Hang on tight, alright,” Itachi instructs as he gathers Sasuke’s sleeping form into his arms. Standing like this isn’t easy, not with Naruto’s weight dragging him backwards and Sasuke’s weight threatening to pitch him forward, but Itachi does it all the same.

“Don’t worry, ‘Tachi,” Naruto mutters into the stiff material of his ANBU armor. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Itachi stands there for a moment, breathing in against the feeling of Naruto’s arms wound around his neck as Sasuke’s weight leans against his chest, and then nods.

“Good,” he says. He takes off once more for the forest and this time when Hana’s team of nin-dogs fall into line with him, Itachi lets himself be reassured by their presence.

The worst, he thinks, has passed.

(Or at least, he hopes it has. And if it hasn’t, he’ll make it pass.)

-

(Itachi is eighteen when his request to abandon his mission to get intel on the Akatsuki is denied.

It is not his finest moment, nor his most composed – it is not a moment that would make his clan proud, but, as Tsunade will tell him many, many years later, it is a moment that makes his mother proud when Tsunade tells the other woman, and that works to take the sting out of his wounded pride at the memory of his own behavior.

Still, though, just because he knows later down the line that Tsunade appreciates the genuine feeling and honesty in his words when he calls the village an ass-backwards sack of shit that only cares about people in the way that they can be used doesn't make them justified. Especially when that remark is followed by the comment and you’re no better than the rest, content to sit on your ass and pretend your decisions aren’t flawed, that you’ve never made mistakes while others suffer for your failures, that you always know best!

They’re emotional words, angry words, but Tsunade bears them with grace, her chin held high even as her eyes watch him, quiet and sad the same way the Third’s eyes always used to be. Itachi thinks of Sasuke and Naruto, of their crumpled, trembling bodies at the Valley of the End, and hates her with an intensity that nearly burns everything else away.

And then, just as quick as his fury flares up, Tsunade knocks it all away with a quiet admission.

“You’re right,” Tsunade says, finally ducking her head at his words. “I promised to keep those boys safe and I failed. You have a right to be angry with me, I’ll admit that. But if you want to keep those two safe, if you want to keep the village they love safe, then you’ll continue with your mission. One way or another, the Akatsuki will be after them, after Naruto, and there’s no one else as qualified to gather information on the bastards as you are.”

Everything in Itachi surges, boils up and over, begs to be unleashed in a tidal wave of righteous fury, but –

Itachi is a genius – he’d been taught to block an incoming kunai by two kunoichi who’d burned like wildfire on the battlefield, but kept their heads cool even in the heat of their own furious bouts of temper. He knew, underneath the pride and fury burning through his veins, that Tsunade was right.

All the training in the world wouldn’t help Sasuke and Naruto, not if there wasn’t a damn thing known about their opponent. If they’re going to survive to live long, long lives, Itachi is going to have to trust their training to other people for the moment and dedicate himself to digging up every dirty secret the Akatsuki has.

It doesn’t help ease the rage that threatens to consume him at the idea that he won’t be able to train Sasuke and Naruto the way he requested to, won’t be able to protect them the way he needs to, but he bites the metaphorical kunai and nods his understanding to her statement.

Life, sometimes, is about the silver linings. Somehow he thinks he and Tsunade both know this pretty well.)

-

Sasuke and Naruto are both thirteen when Naruto leaves the village with no idea when he’ll return.

Naruto leaves following along on Jiraiya’s heels, waving endlessly the entire time he’s walking down the road, arm held high above his head and voice echoing off in the trees until the landscape swallows him up completely.

Itachi stands next to Sasuke the entire time, smack in the middle of the open gate, knowing that Izumo and Kotetsu are somewhere nearby, quietly guiding everyone else trying to get through around the two of them so that they’re not disturbed. Itachi appreciates the sentiment behind the actions, though he doesn’t think that he’ll be able to articulate such a thing to the two chunin, considering his throat has closed over with the force of his own grief at watching Naruto leave.

Eventually, though, Itachi has to come to terms with it – Naruto is gone and standing in the way any longer will do no one any good.

“Sasuke,” Itachi murmurs, his brother’s name coming out thick and halting with the lump stuck in his throat. At his side Sasuke twitches, but does not budge. “Sasuke –”

And then, all at once, Sasuke spins on his heel, arms locked rigidly at his side, and marches away.

“Oof,” Izumo intones quietly, once Sasuke has disappeared into the crowd further in the village. Itachi can’t quite bring himself to look at the chunin, finding himself staring at the place where Sasuke’s disappeared with the same intensity he’d just been staring at the place where Naruto had disappeared on the road. “That’s rough, buddy. You okay?”

Kotetsu, meanwhile, groans and from the corner of his eyes Itachi sees the way the other chunin covers his face with his hands. “That’s rough, buddy,” he repeats in a slightly strangled tone of voice. “Are you an idiot, of course he’s not okay!”

“Hey,” Izumo says, followed by a squawk as he’s likely elbowed by Kotetsu in the side. “It’s called being polite, you idiot, you should try it sometime!”

Strangely Itachi finds the squabbling soothing, even as something in his chest tightens at the similarities between the way the two chunin are bickering and the way Sasuke and Naruto talk to one another. He lets the sound of their voices wash over him for a long minute before he sighs, shaking his head slightly at his own sentimental behavior.

“I’ll be alright,” Itachi says, trying not to smile at the way his voice seems to cut straight through the two chunin, shutting them both right up in an admittedly comical manner. “I’ll be leaving again on a mission soon, but first –”

Kotetsu cuts off Itachi’s statement before he can figure out how it ends himself, flapping one hand in the air as Itachi finally turns to look at them. “Yeah, yeah, we get it,” the chunin says, smiling wryly as he leans one shoulder against Izumo, who’s propped an elbow on the window sill to the guard office, chin resting in the palm of his hand. “If the Hokage asks, you left on time for this super secret, super long mission of yours, alright?”

Izumo grins at his partner’s words, lifting his free hand in the same cocky peace sign Naruto had given as he’d first stepped out the gates over an hour before. “Go after Sasuke, dude,” Izumo says. “We’ve got your back.”

Itachi takes a moment as he stares at the pair of chunin, wondering aimlessly if the two men would mind if he counted them among his friends, and then nods.

“Thank you,” he says, and then he flickers away, toward where he feels Sasuke’s chakra signature in the village.

-

Itachi finds Sasuke at the end of the dock by the lake, his pants legs rolled up as he lets his bare feet drift aimlessly in the water. As Itachi draws closer Sasuke seems to jolt, yanking one arm up to rub his wrist frantically across his face. Itachi slows his steps for a moment, giving his brother a chance to wipe all the tears from his face, before carefully moving to join him.

His ANBU pants don’t allow him to roll up the fabric, so he sits cross legged beside his brother, staring out across the calm water of the lake on the edge of town.

“It’s not fair,” Sasuke spits eventually, his voice stuffy with tears that the boy won’t allow himself to shed. “I – I should be going with him, shouldn’t I?”

Something in Itachi’s chest breaks, just a little, at the thought of Sasuke suffering through being left behind, not only by Naruto, but by himself too. He knows his brother, knows his hopes and his fears, and knows that more than anything, Sasuke aches to overcome, to stand out, to not be left behind.

He also knows that for all his scrambling to grow and succeed, Sasuke has no idea of just how powerful he really has become and likely will not be able to see his own growth if he keeps worrying about how much farther he has to go to surpass Naruto or the ghost of Itachi's own achievements their father holds over his head.

“I think,” Itachi murmurs, treading through this conversation with more care than any other he’s ever managed, “that Naruto would like nothing more than to have you at his side right now.”

“Then why can’t I go with him,” Sasuke yells, whirling on Itachi with his face scrunched up, eyes shining with misery and unshed tears alike. “If he wants me there then I should be there! This isn’t fair, Jiraiya can teach us both –”

“No, Sasuke,” Itachi says, interrupting his brother’s rant quietly, “he can’t. Jiraiya’s strengths are a bad match for your own, his teachings an even worse match. If you are going to grow stronger, strong enough to keep yourself and Naruto safe, then you will need a different teacher.” He hesitates for a second, weighing his words carefully, and then adds, even more quietly, “you will need to walk a different path, I’m afraid.”

Sasuke sucks in a breath, one that rings wet and anguished in Itachi’s ears, and then asks, wretched and strained, “why aren’t you teaching me then?”

Years and years of training to withstand pain cannot keep Itachi from flinching at that comment, nor can it keep him from ducking his head and closing his eyes. “I would like to be teaching you,” he confesses, clasping his hands together as a way to try and ground himself as his heart lurches with pain in his chest. “But the Hokage denied my request to abandon my current mission and do so. I – I wanted to train you and Naruto both, but –”

“But what,” Sasuke says, an audible sneer in his voice as he pulls his legs jerkily from the lake, the sound of splashing water ringing through the air. “The village is more important? Your mission is more important?!”

Itachi swallows roughly, once and then twice, before picking his head up and opening his eyes to look at his younger brother. Sasuke’s eyes are red and black, Sharingan activated with the force of his emotions, and they burn through Itachi like a forest fire, searing him down to his core. He looks, oddly enough, like their mother does when she activates her Sharingan, instead of their father like the members of their clan have always claimed, at least to Itachi – the curl of his lips, the slight scrunch of his nose, the way the tomeo of the Sharingan fit inside the shape of his eyes.

It’s all their mother, all Mikoto Uchiha, hellfire and brimstone, righteous and unstoppable when she gets going.

(Or at least, that’s how Kushina had always described her. To Itachi, his mother had always been soft and gentle, hardly ever sharp, barely even irate unless it involved his father.

But now, looking at his sweet, hurting little brother, Itachi finally understands what picture Kushina was trying to paint for him.

A force of nature, barely contained in human skin. That’s the kind of person his brother is, the kind of ninja he will grow to be, and Itachi is so proud that for a moment it steals his breath away.)

“You are more important,” Itachi says forcefully, feeling his voice scratch at his throat with the strength of his own emotions. “Naruto is more important. My mission, the one assigned to me by the Hokage, the one the Third first assigned me – it’s to track the Akatsuki, to find out as much information on them that I can.”

The admittance shuts Sasuke up, but only for a moment. He watches his younger brother’s face twist as Sasuke works to pick apart Itachi’s words and meaning, watches realization settle uneasily across Sasuke’s eyes as the Sharingan in them flickers and then goes dormant once more, leaving only dark, wary irises.

“The Akatsuki,” Sasuke repeats, halting and unhappy. “They’re – they’re the ones that came after Naruto and I that time, aren’t they? The sword guy and that one in the mask?”

Itachi breathes in, tries not to remember the sound of Sasuke’s bones breaking as he was thrown against the wall, and then breathes out. “Yes,” he answers quietly. “It’s top secret, as you can imagine, but –”

But I took the mission for you, you and Naruto both. As much as I’d like to handle your training myself, I can’t trust that anyone else would be as dedicated to this mission as I am.

Sasuke’s voice breaks through Itachi’s thoughts, blindsiding him with the force of his quiet, careful words as his brother murmurs, “you really did want to train us, didn’t you?”

Itachi blinks and finds that his eyes burn slightly in the corners, the tell-tale sign of tears coming. His next breath in is shaking and shallow, the breath after that even more so.

“Yes,” he answers quietly, closing his eyes. “More than anything in the world, I wanted to stay and train you.” He swallows, forcing his shoulders back down from the hunched position they’d taken on just a few minutes earlier, and nods slightly as he admits, “but you’re safer this way, the both of you. I don’t know anything about curse marks, not the way Anko does, and Jiraiya will be able to hide and train Naruto in all the kinds of places the Akatsuki won’t think to look, which will keep him safe until he’s strong enough to withstand being their target.”

Sasuke makes a small sound at the mention of his teacher-to-be, shuddering a little, possibly at the memory of meeting Anko during the chunin exams. Itachi has heard the story, both from the boys and from Anko herself, and he knows she mostly dials up the craziness of her own actions as a smokescreen to keep people on their toes, so he hopes, sooner rather than later, Sasuke will find himself a little more comfortable in the presence of the woman who’ll be teaching him for the foreseeable future.

(He knows, at the very least, that there is possibly no one else in the village who hates Orochimaru with the same intensity as Anko, who had adored the man, revered him as her teacher, and was betrayed so thoroughly that every bright and shining emotion she once had has caught fire into a bright and unending rage.

“Leave the kid in my hands,” Anko had said, catching Itachi outside the Hokage’s Tower the week before, when the whispers had first started going around that Naruto was going to leave and Sasuke would need a new teacher with Kakashi out in the wind as well.

Itachi hadn’t quite jumped at the sudden appearance of the rather bizarre woman, but it had been a close, close thing. “Excuse me,” he’d asked quietly, arching an eyebrow at the way Anko grinned at him, shark-like and purposefully deranged.

“Sasuke,” Anko had said, shrugging with her arms crossed over her chest as she leant back against the wall of the building. “You gotta know I’m your best bet to help him get that curse mark under control and I think there’s a thing or two I can teach him about poison that could help him even the odds in his favor. I might not have Kakashi’s knowledge of fire techniques, but with your mom deciding to stay out of retirement, I think she’ll be willing to take those parts of his teaching over instead.”

Some of Itachi’s anxieties had been soothed at that thought, even though he’d tried to dig in his heels and keep them close to his chest. His mother and Anko would be a force to be reckoned with, a good kind of force, and under their careful attention Sasuke could grow into the kind of ninja the boy had always wanted to.

But still – Itachi had begun to harbor the hope that he’d be the one to shape his little brother’s progress so carefully. To have to let that go hurt, but Itachi was self-aware enough to know that he was out of options.

“Pay more careful attention to him than Kakashi did,” is all Itachi had said on the matter, ducking his head in a nod as a rather feral looking grin overtook the woman’s face.

“Oh, like that’ll be hard,” Anko had laughed. She’d pushed away from the wall then and Itachi had thought their interaction over, right up until the moment she’d clapped him on the shoulder, batted her eyelashes at him in a manner he could only hope was over-the-top on purpose, and added, “and as a show of appreciation for this sacrifice of mine, you’re gonna buy me lunch!”

The lunch had been bearable, despite the fact that Anko had been quietly and breezily mocking him in between bites of food. It reminded him a lot of Ami and Machi, how carelessly and casually they handled interactions with him, and also of Shisui, never quite seeming to take anything at all serious on the surface of it all.

His only hope, as Anko had pushed the bill at him across the table with a smug look on her face, was that Sasuke would come to see and appreciate those same qualities in his teacher-to-be that Itachi had.)

“I still wish you didn’t have to go,” Sasuke admits, his words more mumble than anything else. “It’s – it’s bad enough Naruto’s gone, but now you’re going too –”

“I know,” Itachi answers, when Sasuke’s words falter and die. “I had thought to ask if I could bring you along, but I wasn’t sure that I could devote enough of my time to training you on top of my mission. I’m sorry, Sasuke. I wish there were another way.”

There’s a tightness in Itachi’s chest at his own admittance of weakness, a feeling not unlike fire crawling up his throat as he fights to swallow. He imagines their lives on the road, teaching Sasuke the merits of stealth he’s never quite managed to pick up with Naruto always yelling just over his shoulder, and despairs that he’s not strong enough to make that a reality.

He’s snapped out of his darker thoughts, however, at the feeling of Sasuke tipping over, the force of his brother’s head knocking into his bicep hard enough to make him startle with a twitch.

“Y’know,” Sasuke says quietly, with something that sounds like a smile pulling at his words, “Mom’s right. Even with being the clan genius and all, you can be kinda dumb, ‘Tachi.”

Itachi blinks blankly for a moment at the comment, unsure of how to take such a statement, before deciding that it doesn’t matter – if Sasuke’s smiling, then he’ll take the title of kinda dumb for the rest of his life.

“Mom is often right about such things,” Itachi remarks, twisting his head down to look at his younger brother. Sasuke’s turned around on the dock, knees crowded close to Itachi’s side, so that he can lean his forehead against Itachi’s arm, hiding his expression from view. Tentatively Itachi lifts a hand, carding his fingers carefully through his brother’s messy nest of dark hair, and feels his heart tremble in his chest as Sasuke leans into his touch with an absentminded kind of trust.

“I’m gonna miss you, Itachi,” Sasuke admits after an undefinable amount of time. Itachi blinks back the feeling of tears again, nodding as words fail him.

“I’ll miss you too, Sasuke,” Itachi finally manages, after a pause that’s long enough for Sasuke to draw back and look at him. Gently Itachi ruffles his brother’s hair, knocking his thumb against the edge of the boy’s headband, and then, rather impulsively, adds, “I’ll be back for your birthday, though, I promise.”

Sasuke stares at him for a moment, eyes red-rimmed with the obvious sign of tears once shed, before seeming to take Itachi’s impulsive and likely difficult-to-keep promise at face value.

“You will,” Sasuke agrees, with that same kind of childish worldview that’s always tugged at Itachi’s heartstrings painfully. And then, after a pause, “will you visit Naruto on his birthday too?”

Unprepared for it, Itachi can only stare, open-mouthed, at his brother’s rather absurd question. Getting back to the village at the end of July every year will pose it’s own challenges, Itachi’s sure, but finding Naruto every fall as he travels around, hidden with Jiraiya, will be near impossible to do.

But Itachi supposes fair is fair – if he can make such an effort for Sasuke, it’s only fair to do the same for Naruto.

“I will,” Itachi confirms, even though it would probably be better to say I’ll try. He nods to add to the statement, a corner of his brain quickly settling into trying to sort through a plan on how to make that reality.

Sasuke, obviously pleased by this statement, nods back. “Good,” his younger brother says, a small smile pulling at the corner of his lips. “Then, since you’ll see me first, will – will you take something back for him, from me? When you visit next?”

Itachi feels a little as if Sasuke’s punched him in the throat, but he nods his agreement easily, finding himself unable to help how his body tips sideways to pull his younger brother against his shoulder in a hug. “Of course I will, Sasuke,” he murmurs.

“Thanks Itachi,” Sasuke answers back in a soft mumble. They sit like that for a second, Itachi mostly holding Sasuke against his shoulder, before his little brother’s arms carefully and slowly wind around his waist.

Quietly, so quietly Itachi almost doesn’t hear, Sasuke asks, “can we stay like this, just for a little while longer? I know you’ve got to go, but –”

Careless of anything else, Itachi drags Sasuke into his lap, cradling his brother as if he’s still three instead of thirteen. He tucks Sasuke under his chin, twisting to lean back against one of the wooden posts of the dock, and murmurs again, “of course I will, of course – we can stay like this as long as you like, I promise.”

(Hours and hours later, when Itachi finally makes his way out of the village after a quick detour to return Sasuke home and wish his mother goodbye, Izumo and Kotetsu see him off at the gates.

“Here, man,” Izumo says, waving something small and white in the air at him. Izumo leans out the window, flapping the little thing around some more, before Itachi wanders close enough for the other man to slap whatever it is gently against his chest.

“These are for you,” Kotetsu adds, leaning over Izumo in the most cumbersome way possible, to slap something as equally small and white against Itachi’s chest, right beside where Izumo still has his hand pressed. Itachi opens his mouth, dumbfounded by the disregard for his personal space, only to flinch and scramble to catch the two little things as they begin to flutter and fall.

The two little things, he realizes as he catches them, are photos, and furthermore they’re photos Itachi recognizes.

“Oh,” he says, staring at the two photos Izumo and Kotetsu had taken for him what felt like an age before, Sasuke and Naruto forever caught in time, side by side and content as can be. He sucks in a breath that he’s not entirely surprised to realize trembles and then turns his gaze to the two chunin, who are watching him with pleased, expectant looks on their faces.

“Just a little something for the road, y’know,” Izumo says, shrugging with enough force that it jostles Kotetsu where he’s still leaning over his partner.

“We’ll do our best to keep our eyes on your family,” Kotetsu promises, giving Itachi a small smile. “And we’ll give Shisui extra hell next time we see him, just for you. Sound good?”

Itachi breathes in and out, swallows once and then twice, and then nods, the action more jerky than he expects from himself.

“That sounds – good,” he answers, once again wondering if the two men count him as a friend. He thinks he has the answer, but doesn’t know how to ask without sounding like an idiot, and so he says nothing. He nods again, the action just as jerky the second time, and feels both foolish and reassured by the way the two chunin give him two wide, beaming smiles.

“Bye, Itachi,” they chorus, as he steps back from their guard office window and turns toward the still open gate. They sit up, waving together as one, and Itachi allows himself a small smile at their antics, lifting one hand to wave back in a much more subdued manner. “Stay safe, man! We’ll see you later!”

Itachi pauses just once outside the village gates, to carefully tuck the two photos of Sasuke and Naruto into his bag, and then he heads off.)

-

(Itachi isn’t sure when the clan gives up on manipulating Naruto through Sasuke, but he’s pretty sure they admit defeat somewhere between the chunin exams and Naruto’s departure from the village.

Shisui can’t shed much light on the subject, having been kicked from the secret clan meetings around the same time the village started to realize he genuinely did care for Naruto, and the one time Itachi tries to bring the topic up to his father it starts a shouting match that nearly burns their whole house down, literally.

But whenever it happens and to what degree, even without confirmation from his father, Itachi feels a weight slide from his shoulders at the thought that while he was busy with other things, the clan seems to have realized there are bigger fish to fry than their petty grievances with the dead Third Hokage.

“I’ll keep my ear to the ground though,” Shisui promises quietly, the day before Naruto’s set to leave the village. “See if anything changes or they start pressuring Sasuke. I’ll give them hell for you, if I have to.”

“Thank you,” Itachi whispers. He reaches out, claps a hand on his cousin’s shoulder, and then carefully and gently brings him into a hug. “I appreciate it.”

Shisui laughs against his shoulder, hugs him back twice as hard, and then lets him go with a little shake to his shoulders. “I know you do,” he says, grinning from ear to ear at how awkward Itachi still manages to be, even in something as simple as a hug.

With that weight lifted off his shoulders and the knowledge that Shisui will be looking out for Sasuke in the clan politics, it makes it easier to focus on the mission ahead of him.

Still, though, Itachi worries.

He worries, and worries, and worries, but does his duty anyway.)