Chapter Text

I - Under the Same Awning.

It rains on the outskirts of Ame the way one breathes: without thought, without escape.

A waterlogged purgatory.

The rain does not fall. It strikes. It slips beneath collars, into sleeves, through the folds of the world. It shrouds the rooftops, draws ropes from the gutters, stretches into abstract rivulets across the windows.

It scours the alleys until they gleam, almost beautiful, as though the ghost town were trying to apologize for existing.

And yet, that evening, like every other evening, it is not the city that needs forgiveness.

It is him.

Itachi Uchiha stands beneath the overhang of an abandoned building, a shadow at the edge of the neon light.
His Akatsuki cloak drinks in the water, heavy with a rain that has no end.

There is the metallic tang of blood on his tongue, and death clinging to his skin. In his chest lies a weariness that does not belong to his body alone. Something older and silent stretches inside him, stretches and stretches, until it resembles an entire season.

He closes his eyes for a second.

Lets the rain soak him through, hoping it might wash him clean. Drown him. But the drops do not erase his sins.

The sound of the rain becomes a song, almost gentle. He catches himself listening the way one might listen to a voice one has no right to love.

Perhaps because, in this country, memories need no permission. They drift, swollen with water, and eventually come crashing down upon you.

Its inhabitants are castaways bereft of compassion.

He opens his eyes again.

A figure is making her way down the street, walking against the rain, refusing to let it slow her. Her hood is pulled low, her steps quick and purposeful. She neither runs nor hides, despite the hostile territory.

She crosses the flood, impervious to the mood of the place.

She stops beneath the same awning without asking his permission. For one second, they share that narrow strip of shelter like two drifting souls clinging to the same plank.

When she pushes back her hood, pink hair plastered to her temple, lashes wet, her green gaze cuts through him like a blade.

Sakura Haruno.

Sasuke’s former teammate.

The world, sometimes, has a cruel sense of humor.

He gives no sign of recognition and remains perfectly still. He betrays nothing—only the composure that has convinced so many people he is untouchable.

The mask has become so easy to wear that sometimes he forgets it is one.

She, by contrast, studies him the way one studies a wound before deciding whether to stitch it closed or let it bleed.

Whatever she is searching for in him, it makes her wrinkle her nose in disapproval.

“You’re paler than you look on the wanted posters,” she finally says by way of greeting.

Her voice is almost gentle, stripped of the characteristic fear carried by those who speak to him. There is no challenge in it either. It sounds like a clinical observation, almost as though she were taking the temperature of the place.

“Most of the posters are in black and white,” he replies.

A smile touches her mouth without reaching her eyes.

“That must be it. They leave out the color so Konoha can imagine its monsters in good health. Makes the nightmares more convenient.”

A shiver runs through Itachi, and he cannot pretend it is because of the cold. He stopped living in denial a long time ago.

It is because of the word. Monster. He should be used to it. He made it his own many years ago.

More than a decade.

Time passed. The pain did not.

His unease also comes from the way she speaks as though she has already faced things more frightening than an S-rank missing-nin.

Whatever she wants… he will have to lie, and the thought exhausts him in advance. Perhaps he should place her under a genjutsu, though he has always disliked initiating a fight.

The easiest solution would be to disappear.

He cannot bring himself to decide. He knows she has a good reason for venturing into the perpetual rain of Ame no Kuni, whatever that reason may be. So he does nothing and waits patiently for her to explain what the Hokage expects of him.

The last message he received from Konoha had been deliberately vague. It had put him on his guard, yet he had been unable to stop himself from obeying despite the sense of foreboding.

He looks at her properly. She stands straight, does not shiver, and presses her lips together as she returns his stare. His attention sharpens when he realizes how severely he has underestimated the kunoichi’s strength of character.

The image of the weak, naïve girl suddenly feels obsolete.

“You are a long way from Konoha,” he says quietly.

“I could say the same to you. You chose a charming spot.” She surveys the ruined streets, the overflowing gutters, and the mud staining the few meager patches not yet submerged. “I was sent to this hole.”

“They sent you alone.”

He is genuinely surprised, though he ensures his expression remains entirely blank. Only the inflection of his voice escapes him, partially revealing the question beneath it.

“Were you expecting Tsunade to hold my hand under an umbrella?”

The rain fills the silence, occupying it with great diligence.

“Why?” he asks.

She tilts her head slightly. He does not elaborate. She appears intelligent enough to understand.

And if she is not, then he is wasting his time anyway. He no longer has enough of it left to squander.

“Because, according to what we were told, you’ve been coughing up blood,” she says with a shrug, pointing out the obvious.

As though that alone were reason enough to send a medic-nin across half the continent.

He does not flinch. But a part of him stills: that fraction of a second in which he realizes that some of what he so meticulously concealed has been exposed.

He underestimated Jiraiya’s perceptiveness. He will have to adjust the plan.

“You are not supposed to possess that information,” Itachi says slowly, allowing a thin thread of killing intent to leak into the air.

She merely raises an eyebrow, her smile widening. “I’m not supposed to do a great many things. And yet here I am, a few miles from the heart of Ame, soaked to the bone and talking to the most notorious deserter our damned village ever produced. Nothing is ‘supposed’ to happen once you start from that premise.”

A drop falls from the awning and bursts between them. A punctuation mark.

The shower’s gentle melody does nothing to soothe the ache caused by the words our village, slipped so innocently into the sentence.

It is something no one has offered him in years.

With a swift gesture, she pulls a small sealed, waterproof scroll from beneath her cloak and holds it without opening it.

“I didn’t come here to capture you,” she announces without mincing words. “Or beg you to come back. Or lecture you. I’m not a damned priestess.” She pauses, then adds with a touch of humor, “Or Naruto.”

He could almost laugh, if his chest did not weigh as much as wet sand.

“Then what? You accepted willingly?”

She meets his gaze without flinching. “You’ve been gone a long time, but I doubt you’ve forgotten how difficult it is to refuse a direct order from the Hokage.” She exhales and runs an irritated hand through her damp hair. “But I would have come anyway. I’ve had enough of pointless grief.”

The word grief hangs between them, sodden and grave, perfectly misplaced in his case.

“That may be the most naïve reason I have ever heard,” Itachi says, weighing the words as carefully as he would kunai.

“Probably. You can make fun of me once you survive,” the girl replies without taking offense.

Itachi senses, without wanting to admit it, that this is the moment everything begins sinking toward the abyss. Because of one sentence capable of compromising everything he has so carefully orchestrated.

He notices again, and for the first time in a very long while, that she appears unaffected by the threatening aura surrounding them. He wonders what grants her such confidence. What force has taught her to stand so straight in a country where the deluge only ever bends shoulders.

The Will of Fire. A concept he buried long ago beneath the murky puddles of his conscience.

A flash splits the distance: lightning, followed by a roll of thunder like a drum beneath the skin of the sky.

Sakura follows the light for a moment before turning back to him. “I’m not going to stand under this awning much longer playing out this little charade,” she says. “If you’re going to kill me, do it quickly. If you’re going to run, do it now. Otherwise… we move, and you let me do my job.”

He ought to feel insulted that she dares address him this way. The truth is that he feels strangely relieved. To hear the choices stated plainly, without another lie being required of him, feels almost unreal.

“What does that involve?”

Apparently reassured by his answer, she edges farther beneath the awning. Not close enough for him to reach her. But close enough for the rain streaming over her face to become more visible. Her cheeks are red from the cold. Her lips barely tremble, but he sees the effort holding them still.

A kunoichi and a medic-nin. A woman who has undoubtedly learned to keep her hands steady while everything collapses around her. He knows very little about her.

“Your eyes,” she begins, listing everything with ruthless precision. “Your corpse-like complexion. Your breathing, which sounds like an orchestra tuning up. The way you overcompensate to spare your left side. And the way you insist on standing as though falling down would somehow be beneath you. Oh, and the shadows under your eyes. Though those are probably more a symptom of your state of mind, aren’t they, Uchiha?”

Itachi feels his throat tighten. The rain suddenly tastes different, as though it has begun falling inside him as well.

Acidic and relentless.

A familiar sensation. Somewhere between burning, drowning, and suffocation. Something he has learned to live with.

The dark veil consuming the edges of his vision is familiar too.

She falls silent and watches him with the practiced patience of someone waiting for bad news to settle.

He wants to swallow. The metallic taste has intensified. He resists. Then says, “You speak as though you know me.”

“Oh, no. I refuse to play that game. I don’t know who you are—not as a man, I mean—and it doesn’t matter. But I know pain when I see it,” she replies, clicking her tongue. “And yours no longer fits inside your body.”

A laugh escapes him this time. A short, sardonic breath that turns into a cough.
The fit folds him forward, and the blood comes, hot and brazen, against his lips.

Sakura does not panic. She pulls out a cloth and offers it to him, her gaze devoid of pity. He realizes how accustomed she must be to bodies coming apart.

“See?” she says calmly. “That is exactly why…”

He wipes his mouth, breathes, and attempts to reclaim the control slipping away from him in small pieces. In tiny red drops.

“You have no business being here,” he murmurs.

“That isn’t yours to decide,” she says, watching the ripples spread across the nearest puddle while he cleans the blood away. “Right. I need to determine whether you’re dying of an illness… or something else.”

He jerks his head up, the rain drawing lines down his cheeks like disciplined tears.

“And if it were both?”

Sakura remains silent for a moment. Then she exhales, as though delivering a joke meant for her alone:

“Then I’ll have to be very good. And for the record, I am.”