(no subject)
wow it's been a while since I've written something :\ have part one of a mafia!au itashi fic to make up for it?
title: a fairytale in pieces (part 1/?)
summary: the fall of one regime and the story of a second. there is a broken kingdom before them and a prince whose crown is more blood than gold
The first time he meet Uchiha Itachi, it is Monday. Outside, the rain falls in heavy sheets, battering the trees until the ground is littered in fragments of pink and green, tiny newborn buds drowning in muddy puddles. He shift uneasily, the tie looped around his neck too tight, the starched fabric of his shirt uncomfortably rigid against his skin, and one of the black-suited men lining the room frowns until he stands still once more, hands pressed against his legs. There is a certain tension in the air that even he, all of seven years old, cannot ignore; and his hands involuntarily curl up, bunching the neatly-pressed fabric of his pants. When the door swings open, he hurriedly attempts to smooth the wrinkles from his pants only for a warning hand to touch his shoulder. Today is important - historic, even - and he can read it in the weight on his shoulder, the way the man standing by the door stiffens and the friendliness melts from his face, replaced by pursed lips and the trademark Uchiha eyes.
The ceremony itself passes in a blur of red-black eyes and the stifling weight of centuries of formality embodied in old men with skin so thin he can see the blue veins running across the backs of their hands (and it would be so easy for him, for the man standing behind the straight-backed chairs, for the boy with blank eyes and fine-boned hands to just reach out and cut to kill - but there are hundreds of years of tradition in their blood and there is a reason why the Uchiha will never collapse inward). He remembers a boy more robotic than human as his eyes flicker from red to black to red again, always so empty that he thinks he could replace that quietude with death and never know the difference, and his mind conjures up fanciful images of the Uchiha as a clan of puppets on a string.
He is only vaguely aware of stepping forward and bowing, presenting himself to the new clan heir when the ceremony ends and the men begin to file out. The clan heir’s fingers, long and thing, scream fragile and he is reminded of birds and their thin hollow bones; but there is an unexpected strength in the boy’s grip. He walks away with the memory of centuries of bloody history staring at him from behind the vaunted Sharingan eyes, of a quiet sort of self-assurance not even Uchiha Fugaku has achieved (though the rumor is that the man tries and tries and tries so hard to grasp that quiet self-assurance in place of the arrogance he openly wears on his face).
Uchiha Shisui thinks of clan history (“Uchiha Madara forged a clan from warring factions of the bloodline and tempered it in battle against the Senju, building our glorious legacy with his bare hands” - but the teachers will never mention that when power was displayed before Madara, he grasped it and squeezed it, plucked the eyes of out his brother’s head and smiled a terribly hungry smile) and wonders if tiny fine-boned Uchiha Itachi will be the one to rescue a clan drowning in hostility and carry them to their rightful place in the sky. He will never admit it as long as Fugaku-sama still stands at the head of the clan, but he tells himself each night that it is Itachi, not Fugaku, who will rouse the sleeping genius of the clan and bring about the change they have spent the long years since Uchiha Izuna’s death striving for.
-------
One day, he wakes up to the sound of gunfire, men shouting orders and screaming as the walls shake from the force of detonating explosives. Smoke creeps under the door and he throws himself off the bed when a body crashes through the window, fingers scrabbling under the nightstand for the gun that fell out from under his pillow. Shisui spares all of a second to shoot (to execute) the man lying face-up on the floor before crawling to the dresser, fumbling fingers pulling out spare ammunition and extra weapons. The acrid stench of burning wood warns him away from the hallway and so he pulls on shoes in a hurry, staying close to the wall as he makes his way to the broken window.
Shisui belatedly realizes, as he pulls himself up onto the narrow windowsill using his bed for leverage, that the corpse on his floor has Sharingan eyes. His fingers slip from the edge of the window and he tumbles down into the garden, where the thorny shrubs scratch at his arms and legs and face, and he curses his clumsiness before his brain registers - late once again - that the smoke billowing out his window is coming from the stick of dynamite that narrowly missed his head. He tells his brain to stop gibbering in fear and work (because goddamnit he’s not going to die here, under his own window, because someone was stupid enough to miss their mark) before he rolls to his feet and, abandoning the tattered vestiges of his dignity, runs until he rounds a corner. The sound of gunfire is louder now and his fingers curl tighter around the butt of his handgun as he peers around the neat line of sakura trees. His eyes bleed to red when he sees Itachi, dwarfed by the heavily-built men trying to corner him against a sliding door and he is in motion long before his brain catches up with the rest of his body, aiming and firing and ducking over and over until it is (temporarily) just him and Itachi and cooling bodies spread over the uniform grey stones of the rock garden. His shoulder throbs painfully and he can feel the blood dripping down his leg into his sock and he is steadfastly refusing to look down at the faces of the dead bodies between him and Itachi (but even then he can recognize that everything is all Uchiha dead and oh god the clan is tearing itself apart how will they defend against the Hyuuga, the vultures, and is that body in the corner his father whatishedoinghere) and he is quite certain that if he sees the eyes of the men he is fighting then he will never be able to shoot and -
“Are you coming?” Shisui blinks, startled, and he almost misses the flash of amusement in red eyes before Itachi’s face is schooled blank again. Thin fingers press a new gun into his hands and the boy (who is not really a boy, was probably never just a boy) he has (apparently) given his allegiance to walks out of the garden, stepping over bodies as though they were just so much trash scattered on the polished wood floorboards. He follows Itachi, uncomfortably aware of the fact that the dark splashes on color are probably blood, and pretends that he does not know the charred bodies heaped against the walls belong to his clan. (If he simply calls all of the dead “enemies” then is that much easier to swallow the bile that rises in his throat when he remembers his father turning, face twisted in a snarl, Sharingan eyes twisting and morphing into something strange and foreign, even as the blood bubbles up in his mouth from a shot to the lung - from his gun - when the man mouths his name.)
They stop outside the shoji separating the clan head’s quarters from the rest of the house and Shisui swallows hard when he sees the smears of blood on the paper, the long jagged tears where fingers broke through. Now more than ever, he is beginning to understand the magnitude of this (rebellionrevoltuprising) tragedy. He stops just before he runs into Itachi, mouth twisting into a pained grimace when he sees a tiny chubby hand poking out from a room to the side. Against his better judgment, he steps to the side and slides the shoji all the way to the left; he hears someone gasp and he pivots instinctively, bringing his gun to bear on a cringing doctor’s head. For a moment, white-hot fury runs through his veins and his finger dig into the butt of the gun dangling from his hand and his eyes bleed back to red and he wants to go hunt down whoever is responsible for this and hurt the perpetrator over and over and over because this is so much more personal now and that is his mother, slumped against the wall with a bullet between her eyes, and on the other side of the room is Mikoto lying face-down in a puddle of her own blood and the tiny corpse by his feet belongs to Sasuke, belong to the cheerful little boy who always hugged his legs whenever he brought messages for Fugaku-sama.
Someone coughs, breaking the uneasy silence. The doctor cringes even more and Shisui realises, rather belatedly, that his hands are trembling so much he is no longer aiming at the man. Itachi’s hand on his shoulder is a light weight, just enough pressure to remind him that the dead are just that (and you have a job to do Shisui-kun, or are you betraying me too?). His arms drop to his side and his reflection in the broken mirror on the wall behind the doctor’s head smiles a thin, strained smile. One side of his face is smeared with dried blood that flakes off whenever he moves his mouth; in comparison, Itachi’s fractured reflection is perfect (as usual). If he hadn’t seen the fighting for himself, he never would have guessed that the younger teen had been defending himself against family not even an hour ago.
(Shisui later tells himself that this is the moment he understands what it means to be the head of the clan - the man who can - who will - lead them from this tragedy with his head held high, using bloody hands to wipe out dissent. Much, much later, he privately acknowledges that perhaps this is when he begins to think of Uchiha Itachi as the beautiful man who will rescue them from their decline in a blaze of glory, instead of the breakable boy with fine bones, the boy who never quite seemed to fit in.)
----------
When Shisui follows Itachi into the room that was once Fugaku-sama’s study, he anticipates the body slumped in the black leather chair, the blood congealing on the bullet-ridden surface of the heavy wooden desk. Bile still rises in his throat when he sees brain matter splattered against the tall back of the leather chair and he knows he will still see (his boss, brutally murdered by family, the end of the Uchiha as he knows it) this when he closes his eyes each night. Seeing this hurts, even more so than seeing his father raising his weapon against the heir-cum-boss with angry red eyes, even more than seeing his mother’s corpse. This is what makes the failed rebellion official.
This is what proves that the Uchiha is weak, splintered into fractious groups that prowl all day looking for weaknesses in each other. Shisui knows (with the same certainty with which he knows himself) that in their current state, the Uchiha will be overtaken and crushed within a year.
The sound of movement against the hardwood floors alerts him to the man crumpled in the corner. Itachi is turning as well, but from his position Shisui can see the glint of polished chrome in the weak sunlight and he sees red.
He doesn’t stop shooting until he runs out of bullets. When Itachi’s long fingers curl around the barrel of his gun, forcing it down, he pauses in his one-handed fumbling for more ammunition and his cousin pulls the gun away from him, setting it aside on the desk.
It seems like an eternity before Shisui realizes that the bullet-riddled corpse, brain matter splattered against the walls and dripping down to the floor, is the man he killed. The realization that his Sharingan has only just deactivated strikes quickly after and then Itachi’s thin arms are folding around him as his cousin whispers in his ear “be strong Shisui-kun; I’ll need your help in rebuilding the clan.”
------------
... one of these days I'll finish this. preferably before the summer ends.
title: a fairytale in pieces (part 1/?)
summary: the fall of one regime and the story of a second. there is a broken kingdom before them and a prince whose crown is more blood than gold
The first time he meet Uchiha Itachi, it is Monday. Outside, the rain falls in heavy sheets, battering the trees until the ground is littered in fragments of pink and green, tiny newborn buds drowning in muddy puddles. He shift uneasily, the tie looped around his neck too tight, the starched fabric of his shirt uncomfortably rigid against his skin, and one of the black-suited men lining the room frowns until he stands still once more, hands pressed against his legs. There is a certain tension in the air that even he, all of seven years old, cannot ignore; and his hands involuntarily curl up, bunching the neatly-pressed fabric of his pants. When the door swings open, he hurriedly attempts to smooth the wrinkles from his pants only for a warning hand to touch his shoulder. Today is important - historic, even - and he can read it in the weight on his shoulder, the way the man standing by the door stiffens and the friendliness melts from his face, replaced by pursed lips and the trademark Uchiha eyes.
The ceremony itself passes in a blur of red-black eyes and the stifling weight of centuries of formality embodied in old men with skin so thin he can see the blue veins running across the backs of their hands (and it would be so easy for him, for the man standing behind the straight-backed chairs, for the boy with blank eyes and fine-boned hands to just reach out and cut to kill - but there are hundreds of years of tradition in their blood and there is a reason why the Uchiha will never collapse inward). He remembers a boy more robotic than human as his eyes flicker from red to black to red again, always so empty that he thinks he could replace that quietude with death and never know the difference, and his mind conjures up fanciful images of the Uchiha as a clan of puppets on a string.
He is only vaguely aware of stepping forward and bowing, presenting himself to the new clan heir when the ceremony ends and the men begin to file out. The clan heir’s fingers, long and thing, scream fragile and he is reminded of birds and their thin hollow bones; but there is an unexpected strength in the boy’s grip. He walks away with the memory of centuries of bloody history staring at him from behind the vaunted Sharingan eyes, of a quiet sort of self-assurance not even Uchiha Fugaku has achieved (though the rumor is that the man tries and tries and tries so hard to grasp that quiet self-assurance in place of the arrogance he openly wears on his face).
Uchiha Shisui thinks of clan history (“Uchiha Madara forged a clan from warring factions of the bloodline and tempered it in battle against the Senju, building our glorious legacy with his bare hands” - but the teachers will never mention that when power was displayed before Madara, he grasped it and squeezed it, plucked the eyes of out his brother’s head and smiled a terribly hungry smile) and wonders if tiny fine-boned Uchiha Itachi will be the one to rescue a clan drowning in hostility and carry them to their rightful place in the sky. He will never admit it as long as Fugaku-sama still stands at the head of the clan, but he tells himself each night that it is Itachi, not Fugaku, who will rouse the sleeping genius of the clan and bring about the change they have spent the long years since Uchiha Izuna’s death striving for.
-------
One day, he wakes up to the sound of gunfire, men shouting orders and screaming as the walls shake from the force of detonating explosives. Smoke creeps under the door and he throws himself off the bed when a body crashes through the window, fingers scrabbling under the nightstand for the gun that fell out from under his pillow. Shisui spares all of a second to shoot (to execute) the man lying face-up on the floor before crawling to the dresser, fumbling fingers pulling out spare ammunition and extra weapons. The acrid stench of burning wood warns him away from the hallway and so he pulls on shoes in a hurry, staying close to the wall as he makes his way to the broken window.
Shisui belatedly realizes, as he pulls himself up onto the narrow windowsill using his bed for leverage, that the corpse on his floor has Sharingan eyes. His fingers slip from the edge of the window and he tumbles down into the garden, where the thorny shrubs scratch at his arms and legs and face, and he curses his clumsiness before his brain registers - late once again - that the smoke billowing out his window is coming from the stick of dynamite that narrowly missed his head. He tells his brain to stop gibbering in fear and work (because goddamnit he’s not going to die here, under his own window, because someone was stupid enough to miss their mark) before he rolls to his feet and, abandoning the tattered vestiges of his dignity, runs until he rounds a corner. The sound of gunfire is louder now and his fingers curl tighter around the butt of his handgun as he peers around the neat line of sakura trees. His eyes bleed to red when he sees Itachi, dwarfed by the heavily-built men trying to corner him against a sliding door and he is in motion long before his brain catches up with the rest of his body, aiming and firing and ducking over and over until it is (temporarily) just him and Itachi and cooling bodies spread over the uniform grey stones of the rock garden. His shoulder throbs painfully and he can feel the blood dripping down his leg into his sock and he is steadfastly refusing to look down at the faces of the dead bodies between him and Itachi (but even then he can recognize that everything is all Uchiha dead and oh god the clan is tearing itself apart how will they defend against the Hyuuga, the vultures, and is that body in the corner his father whatishedoinghere) and he is quite certain that if he sees the eyes of the men he is fighting then he will never be able to shoot and -
“Are you coming?” Shisui blinks, startled, and he almost misses the flash of amusement in red eyes before Itachi’s face is schooled blank again. Thin fingers press a new gun into his hands and the boy (who is not really a boy, was probably never just a boy) he has (apparently) given his allegiance to walks out of the garden, stepping over bodies as though they were just so much trash scattered on the polished wood floorboards. He follows Itachi, uncomfortably aware of the fact that the dark splashes on color are probably blood, and pretends that he does not know the charred bodies heaped against the walls belong to his clan. (If he simply calls all of the dead “enemies” then is that much easier to swallow the bile that rises in his throat when he remembers his father turning, face twisted in a snarl, Sharingan eyes twisting and morphing into something strange and foreign, even as the blood bubbles up in his mouth from a shot to the lung - from his gun - when the man mouths his name.)
They stop outside the shoji separating the clan head’s quarters from the rest of the house and Shisui swallows hard when he sees the smears of blood on the paper, the long jagged tears where fingers broke through. Now more than ever, he is beginning to understand the magnitude of this (rebellionrevoltuprising) tragedy. He stops just before he runs into Itachi, mouth twisting into a pained grimace when he sees a tiny chubby hand poking out from a room to the side. Against his better judgment, he steps to the side and slides the shoji all the way to the left; he hears someone gasp and he pivots instinctively, bringing his gun to bear on a cringing doctor’s head. For a moment, white-hot fury runs through his veins and his finger dig into the butt of the gun dangling from his hand and his eyes bleed back to red and he wants to go hunt down whoever is responsible for this and hurt the perpetrator over and over and over because this is so much more personal now and that is his mother, slumped against the wall with a bullet between her eyes, and on the other side of the room is Mikoto lying face-down in a puddle of her own blood and the tiny corpse by his feet belongs to Sasuke, belong to the cheerful little boy who always hugged his legs whenever he brought messages for Fugaku-sama.
Someone coughs, breaking the uneasy silence. The doctor cringes even more and Shisui realises, rather belatedly, that his hands are trembling so much he is no longer aiming at the man. Itachi’s hand on his shoulder is a light weight, just enough pressure to remind him that the dead are just that (and you have a job to do Shisui-kun, or are you betraying me too?). His arms drop to his side and his reflection in the broken mirror on the wall behind the doctor’s head smiles a thin, strained smile. One side of his face is smeared with dried blood that flakes off whenever he moves his mouth; in comparison, Itachi’s fractured reflection is perfect (as usual). If he hadn’t seen the fighting for himself, he never would have guessed that the younger teen had been defending himself against family not even an hour ago.
(Shisui later tells himself that this is the moment he understands what it means to be the head of the clan - the man who can - who will - lead them from this tragedy with his head held high, using bloody hands to wipe out dissent. Much, much later, he privately acknowledges that perhaps this is when he begins to think of Uchiha Itachi as the beautiful man who will rescue them from their decline in a blaze of glory, instead of the breakable boy with fine bones, the boy who never quite seemed to fit in.)
----------
When Shisui follows Itachi into the room that was once Fugaku-sama’s study, he anticipates the body slumped in the black leather chair, the blood congealing on the bullet-ridden surface of the heavy wooden desk. Bile still rises in his throat when he sees brain matter splattered against the tall back of the leather chair and he knows he will still see (his boss, brutally murdered by family, the end of the Uchiha as he knows it) this when he closes his eyes each night. Seeing this hurts, even more so than seeing his father raising his weapon against the heir-cum-boss with angry red eyes, even more than seeing his mother’s corpse. This is what makes the failed rebellion official.
This is what proves that the Uchiha is weak, splintered into fractious groups that prowl all day looking for weaknesses in each other. Shisui knows (with the same certainty with which he knows himself) that in their current state, the Uchiha will be overtaken and crushed within a year.
The sound of movement against the hardwood floors alerts him to the man crumpled in the corner. Itachi is turning as well, but from his position Shisui can see the glint of polished chrome in the weak sunlight and he sees red.
He doesn’t stop shooting until he runs out of bullets. When Itachi’s long fingers curl around the barrel of his gun, forcing it down, he pauses in his one-handed fumbling for more ammunition and his cousin pulls the gun away from him, setting it aside on the desk.
It seems like an eternity before Shisui realizes that the bullet-riddled corpse, brain matter splattered against the walls and dripping down to the floor, is the man he killed. The realization that his Sharingan has only just deactivated strikes quickly after and then Itachi’s thin arms are folding around him as his cousin whispers in his ear “be strong Shisui-kun; I’ll need your help in rebuilding the clan.”
------------
... one of these days I'll finish this. preferably before the summer ends.