[log] backdated → oh no you didn't
Characters: Itachi and Pein.
Date: The night of September 14 last year, directly after this log.
Location: Itachi's residence in Cena.
Rating: R for violence.
Warnings/Notes: Lol moar Itachi!torture. Fun stuff.
Summary: Itachi comes home with a broken hand. Pein is not at all pleased to see him.
Itachi stepped like a bird landing (wings extending wide, fanning out and flapping twice to touch down before stretching them just a second longer and folding them back down to the skin) and Takamoto's mutilated corpse hanging from his bedroom window by a cord tied to his leg was his welcome mat.
All in all, it was quite a spectacle - the man (always well-mannered) dangled limply like some girl's discarded rag doll, just catching the red of the lights by his angle. There was the black of shadows encroaching on every broken part of him save his face. Everything of any remote consequence to him had been destroyed - his mouth was bent and hanging open in a silent scream, only solidified by the onset of rigor mortis, and the blood spattered and dried across his face dulled the bright blank whites of his eyes; his chest was carved open in a completely hideous manner as if the person behind the sharp implement (or blunt as the case may be) had absolutely no regard for the easy-natural beauty of his innards; the ribs had been broken off in pieces, probably (Itachi thought) when the dead man above him was still conscious enough to scream in pain. (It was far more his style, after all - Sasori would be slightly appalled, Itachi was sure.) The chest cavity was empty, though, the organs spread out in a spider web and just the very tip of his large intestine left inside for it all to originate from (and back to).
All this, held and tied into the one angle that caught enough provided light for Itachi to see it clearly.
He made no distinctive motions after pausing to study it a few minutes, and then pushed off the balls of his feet and slunk sideways into the stairwell. He went up two flights and then sighed softly (audibly) as he took a step onto the row below the one Leader had conquered with his fearsome stature. It was very his style, the Uchiha had to admit.
"You don't change much."
Pein did not answer. He was completely still, restraining himself from movement so that his anger and desire for violence would not spill out just yet. His battle with restraint was forfeited a second later and he rushed at Itachi; his hands visciously enclosing around Itachi's pale neck. He used his momentum to propel the foolish Uchiha a foot off of the floor against the far wall. He tightened his grip until the swallowing and tremor of Itachi's throat became more prominent and an involuntary wheeze escaped from Itachi's lips.
Pein was torn with just strangling the other man to death with his bare hands and demanding a reason behind the Uchiha's mistake. He loosened his grip around the Uchiha's neck to slam him harshly back against the wall to satisfy his intense anger. The Uchiha has been useful. It wouldn't do to kill the man without getting the full story. Doing so left too many varibles that could become surprises later on. Pein hated surprises.
"Speak." He hissed.
"Difficult," was all the Uchiha hissed back at him. (As it was.) He spoke with a regarded calm that seemed to emanate from him and it was doubtless quite irritating (quiet and beguiling in it's own incredibly loathsome sort of way). He'd seen this coming a long way off (seen this coming with red hair extensions in his eyes and Curia's most militaristic Auror standing above him and looking down). He'd known exactly what he'd been getting himself into, and in the same way Itachi was narcissistic and obsessed with himself, Itachi hated the Akatsuki. (In the way he destroyed the Uchiha, Itachi would similarly destroy the Akatsuki, because they had become his new-)
-family.
(And he hated them.)
But he would never bring them down in such a manner.
It was not his plan. (And in truth their destruction would not factor into his plan whatsoever, and in a stroke of genius and apathy, he had eliminated them from the equation, that way.) Because it was Madara that Itachi really hated, and that was life as it would be that plagued him, and it was his cousin who he wanted nothing more than to strike down, to rip to pieces. (Your Highness.)
I'll tear you apa-
(Pein's fingers were tight against his windpipe.)
Pein wanted it to be difficult. He slammed Itachi back into the wall once again, marveling in how lovely the sound of Itachi's skull smacking against the stone wall was.
"Speak." He didn't bother to loosen his grip around Itachi's neck. Itachi could still breathe and that is more than enough leeway, in Pein's mind, for him. Itachi wasn't in the position where he could be allowed anything anyway. He deserved to be punished for doing the unspeakable. The one thing that Pein demanded from his Akatsuki above all other things was secrecy and Itachi had smashed that single rule to pieces when he decided to break into the capital, get captured, and tell the chairman of the military about the Akatsuki.
Pein was already planning on how to dole out Itachi's consequences and of course make an example of him to the other members. Cutting out the Uchiha's tongue was a nice option.
(Not that no one had ever thought of it before, but because no one had ever actually done it.
Which was regrettable.)
Itachi's eyes were blank, his face and form relatively motionless. (His skull pounded from the blow. It wouldn't bleed-) yet, (-and Pein's temper was quite the powerful thing, this much he knew very well, and if the two of them were both angry over this, angry over anything really, they could probably rip one another apart. Pein harbored quite a bit more raw power than he did, but if he had really wanted to, Itachi supposed he could've made up for his blindness-) He couldn't see almost anything, nowadays. (-with his speed.)
If he'd really wanted to.
(He didn't. So there was no use pondering it.)
And he wasn't angry.
(But he wasn't afraid either.)
Itachi knew he would not die here and so it was not necessarily vital to him that he fight his leader's grip. ("Leader-sama, Itachi-san." "I'll call him what I like.")
Impertenence.
But not-
(-imcompetence.)
"He wasn't there."
A blank statement.
(And a false one.)
Pein's eyes flickered back and forth over Itachi's face. His lipped curled slightly at the corner. Then without warning, he maliciously slammed the Uchiha back against the wall hard enough to insure that there will be a pounding headache and some bleeding for the Uchiha to experience later on. Pein added a punch to the jaw to round out the harsh treatment, irritated that the time he invested in getting the Uchiha's allegiance and cooperation may have set back his operation. He stepped back from the Uchiha.
"Tell me what was said."
"I told you."
Itachi's head rolls.
(His stomach roils and twists.)
"He wasn't there."
In the same way he is never there.
(Itachi hates Madara like Itachi hates no one else.)
"If I had seen him, I wouldn't have come back."
Cracks his neck experimentally.
Stares in his Leader-sama face.
His own-
(-half broken, but still elegant, still delicate prose in its own way.
How disgusting.)
-completely unphased.
There are some slight relief at the news that it wasn't Madara the Uchiha had run into but not nearly enough to dispel Pein's tempestuous mood.
"Tell me what was said." He repeated.
"Nothing of any real consequence."
Itachi's eyes meandered; he closed them, sighed as if he had just entered a new and different level of peace. (Living dead girl.) He reached up - twined brittle fingers through the dark strands of his hair. He looked sickly pale, far more ill than was usually like him, but it seemed neither to puncture his grace, nor to exentuate the terminal quality of it. (The ink neither stutters-)
Ave Maria.
(-nor fails.)
"You're really very predictable. You don't change at all."
Pein's nostrils flared. He didn't even have a molecule of patience in him at the moment. This was quickly turning into some kind of torture and interrogation. Which was fine for Pein. He certainly had enough time for it.
Pein threw a punch into Itachi's gut, propelling the other man backwards. Then with a smooth flick of his wrist, Pein brought out a knife from within his sleeves. It was a decent sized knife, the blade was about ten inches, and had certainly served him very well over the years.
"You were being foolish again." Pein clenched the knife in his hand tightly before spearing Itachi through the shoulder with enough force that the knife drove into the wall, pinning the Uchiha to it.
"Tell me what was said."
Itachi eyes were listless, though, in their lack of intensity. His presence, it seemed, was fleeting in most regards.
Blood (sleek and a dark, violently-wine colored crimson) soaked almost subtly out and around the blade; from knowledge and experience did he know that if he did not move, the cut would not widen and so would remain less painful, and would heal faster. (Itachi was not an incredibly slow healer, but he was not an incredibly fast one either - he was super-human in his abilities to disregard pain,) Pein? (it was true, but ability was not always enough.) It slid down his arms and pooled at the end of his fingertips - dropped slowly like rain to the cement beneath.
Maybe it would pool.
Maybe it would not.
"Revolution."
Dead eyes.
"Revolution like birds."
A wary eye brow raised.
"And nothing but."
Pein grabbed Itachi's face roughly, ripping open Itachi's mouth to take hold of his tongue. "Lose those cryptic words." Pein hissed, twisting the knife in Itachi's shoulder before extricating it to hold it against Itachi's still tongue. "Or your tongue will not utter another." Some blood began to pool at the knife's edge.
He shuddered. (Itachi did.) His eyes rolled back into his head a small ways and his whole body trembled, pain shooting through the right side of his mouth. His teeth were not enough to block out the lightning of its presence, and it clouds his senses. (The taste of his blood is metal and overpowering.) His eyelashes fluttered half effeminately (half sanely, half crazily, but which was which was so hard to tell) lost in the depths of him for some moments. It was a soft silence that ironically blessed that moment, a soft insane sort of silence where Itachi stared into the very back of his skull and Pein held a knife to his tongue.
(Itachi couldn't say anything, of course, with the Leader's fingers in his mouth like that and he was temporarily reminded of something dirty. He wouldn't speak around them though. Itachi was an Uchiha in the very depths of his nature, and Uchiha were nothing if not the contemporary form of dignity and narcissism. He would never stoop so low as to speak around another person's hands. Another person's mouth. Another person's-
But he didn't have an agent anymore.
So what did it matter?
Itachi was unemployed, as far as he was concerned.)
Crypts were what Itachi knew, and so he spoke them without thought. (With hours of thought behind every line. Because there was sometimes nothing else to do but plan the next days speech.) He jerked back, cracked his neck, his composition lax as if he had no personal investment in the blade held so near his pale face, no personal investment whatsoever. It was a nice rolling sensation that filled him, briefly, and he opened his eyes, smirking softly, expressionless even in his ivory-coated half-amusement.
"Crypts."
But Itachi doesn't laugh. Not often, and never really.
It is as if he has no understanding of laughter.
(But he has no knowledge of tears, either. So it makes sense.)
"I spoke of things other than crypts." He could've been doing his nails as he spoke for the interest he seemed to take in the statement. He spoke blandly. (No personal investment in anything, for that matter.) "Elsewise, you would not be here." He stared straight into him, unblinking.
The aching, bleeding void of his arm was excruciatingly painful.
"I told of our existence. That we would bring the End."
He didn't move.
(Didn't blink.)
"Nothing more."
"This is to the Chairman." Pein demanded, his mind rapidly analyzing every single possible implication. He knows of the Chairman. Of course, he did, considering the man controlled a large part of the government that may prove to be difficult to deal with. However, Pein was able to conclude that the Chairman would not be sharing the knowledge he was able to obtain from the Uchiha. Over the past few years or so, Pein was able to recognize the Chairman's treasonous ways. It was little discrepancies in the way the Arma would be spaced, the unexplainable distribution of provision trucks, and the subtle change in the Arma and Arceos' visage. The Chairman would keep the information to himself and Pein would not have any problems getting rid of him.
However, a question still tugged at Pein.
"What were you doing in Septum?" Pein asked slowly.
Itachi eyes were hard obsidian (but if you turned him in the light, it was a simple task to expose his Illness. To expose the way his irises covered their blindness, even with it still being there). Virtually no one who knew Itachi knew this, save for Pein and Sasori, and with them the knowledge was as predictable as a card game to the dealer. And, of course, most Uchiha had very little interest in card games, in games that required luck but virtually no skill at all. It was not in the Uchiha nature to happily venture forward into territory that they could not control. (They were controlling people, after all, and always had been. That was why, when Itachi had stared into a thousand Arma, Acreos light trained on him with his blade on the floor and his body slathered in the blood of his kin, he had not blinked. Had not even bothered to make an expression to wear on his face.)
And if he so much as thought the words "getting into trouble"-
"Research."
He stared Pein down expressionlessly. (Blindly.)
"Of what nature?" Pein hissed.
"To fuel and re-educate a Haunting that, until now, I did not believe myself capable or knowledgeable enough to deal with," Itachi said, voice flat and bland as anything, as if his arm were not bleeding and Pein did not still have control of a knife that could just as easily be wedged in his chest. "It was necessary that I seek the information I was looking for from a vault that was both void of eyes and trustworthy as a source."
Pein unflinchingly stabbed Itachi into the leg just deep enough to warrant a worry about bleeding to death. "I had asked a simple question. You do not need to dance around it." Pein twisted the knife slightly before sliding it out slowly. Pein decided to rephrase his question so that their conversation may get somewhere or else Itachi will have his own tongue for a meal. "What kind of information? Personal or business?"
Itachi grunted softly, face twisting a little around the pain. (It was almost impercievable, but he knew that Pein knew him and would be able to see it just fine, the way he closed his eyes just a little bit longer when blinking, the way his thin-lipped mouth tightened, the way embitterment had begun coursing through his jealous veins.) His hair hung over his eyes a little, bright red as they were without their contact lenses (but he had brought a second pair, a second pair he was wearing, and so the contacts were indeed there in full), and he stared into his leader's face (even with the slight emotion, like a pale watercolor, that was evidenced on his paler cheekbones).
Itachi was not a reckless person.
Nor was he easily malleable.
And they both knew that.
"There's a Creature in this building that has instilled in me some shadow of doubt, as to my ability to knowledgeably tamper with it." He spoke lowly, each syllable hitting his tongue with a deep, under-the-skirts ferocity. "If going north myself to learn more about the nature of weapons of its kind is any business at all, I would suppose it to be personal."
There was venom between his teeth.
"Be careful, Uchiha." Pein murmured, wiping the blood off of the knife with Itachi's shirt. "Personal endeavors have a way of getting into business. You will get to digest that superfluously verbose tongue of yours if it does." The Uchiha was more emotional and attached than he thought he was, Pein thought. The other man always seemed to be dealing with personal issues and personal relationships and the like. It was irritating to have that kind of threat hanging over Pein's plans but Itachi was useful. How much was often considered.
Pein's question was answered. Their business was over.
Itachi lingered in the hallway only a few seconds afterwards.
(And Tayuya was asleep when he got upstairs, and woke to ask him why he was bleeding in a crooked voice from straining at the belts he'd used to keep her against the bed and nowhere else. She was still insufferably angry with him and he was not bothered by it.
Not bothered by it at all.)
Even though the air hung loosely
as though someone should whisper
Amen.
Date: The night of September 14 last year, directly after this log.
Location: Itachi's residence in Cena.
Rating: R for violence.
Warnings/Notes: Lol moar Itachi!torture. Fun stuff.
Summary: Itachi comes home with a broken hand. Pein is not at all pleased to see him.
Itachi stepped like a bird landing (wings extending wide, fanning out and flapping twice to touch down before stretching them just a second longer and folding them back down to the skin) and Takamoto's mutilated corpse hanging from his bedroom window by a cord tied to his leg was his welcome mat.
All in all, it was quite a spectacle - the man (always well-mannered) dangled limply like some girl's discarded rag doll, just catching the red of the lights by his angle. There was the black of shadows encroaching on every broken part of him save his face. Everything of any remote consequence to him had been destroyed - his mouth was bent and hanging open in a silent scream, only solidified by the onset of rigor mortis, and the blood spattered and dried across his face dulled the bright blank whites of his eyes; his chest was carved open in a completely hideous manner as if the person behind the sharp implement (or blunt as the case may be) had absolutely no regard for the easy-natural beauty of his innards; the ribs had been broken off in pieces, probably (Itachi thought) when the dead man above him was still conscious enough to scream in pain. (It was far more his style, after all - Sasori would be slightly appalled, Itachi was sure.) The chest cavity was empty, though, the organs spread out in a spider web and just the very tip of his large intestine left inside for it all to originate from (and back to).
All this, held and tied into the one angle that caught enough provided light for Itachi to see it clearly.
He made no distinctive motions after pausing to study it a few minutes, and then pushed off the balls of his feet and slunk sideways into the stairwell. He went up two flights and then sighed softly (audibly) as he took a step onto the row below the one Leader had conquered with his fearsome stature. It was very his style, the Uchiha had to admit.
"You don't change much."
Pein did not answer. He was completely still, restraining himself from movement so that his anger and desire for violence would not spill out just yet. His battle with restraint was forfeited a second later and he rushed at Itachi; his hands visciously enclosing around Itachi's pale neck. He used his momentum to propel the foolish Uchiha a foot off of the floor against the far wall. He tightened his grip until the swallowing and tremor of Itachi's throat became more prominent and an involuntary wheeze escaped from Itachi's lips.
Pein was torn with just strangling the other man to death with his bare hands and demanding a reason behind the Uchiha's mistake. He loosened his grip around the Uchiha's neck to slam him harshly back against the wall to satisfy his intense anger. The Uchiha has been useful. It wouldn't do to kill the man without getting the full story. Doing so left too many varibles that could become surprises later on. Pein hated surprises.
"Speak." He hissed.
"Difficult," was all the Uchiha hissed back at him. (As it was.) He spoke with a regarded calm that seemed to emanate from him and it was doubtless quite irritating (quiet and beguiling in it's own incredibly loathsome sort of way). He'd seen this coming a long way off (seen this coming with red hair extensions in his eyes and Curia's most militaristic Auror standing above him and looking down). He'd known exactly what he'd been getting himself into, and in the same way Itachi was narcissistic and obsessed with himself, Itachi hated the Akatsuki. (In the way he destroyed the Uchiha, Itachi would similarly destroy the Akatsuki, because they had become his new-)
-family.
(And he hated them.)
But he would never bring them down in such a manner.
It was not his plan. (And in truth their destruction would not factor into his plan whatsoever, and in a stroke of genius and apathy, he had eliminated them from the equation, that way.) Because it was Madara that Itachi really hated, and that was life as it would be that plagued him, and it was his cousin who he wanted nothing more than to strike down, to rip to pieces. (Your Highness.)
I'll tear you apa-
(Pein's fingers were tight against his windpipe.)
Pein wanted it to be difficult. He slammed Itachi back into the wall once again, marveling in how lovely the sound of Itachi's skull smacking against the stone wall was.
"Speak." He didn't bother to loosen his grip around Itachi's neck. Itachi could still breathe and that is more than enough leeway, in Pein's mind, for him. Itachi wasn't in the position where he could be allowed anything anyway. He deserved to be punished for doing the unspeakable. The one thing that Pein demanded from his Akatsuki above all other things was secrecy and Itachi had smashed that single rule to pieces when he decided to break into the capital, get captured, and tell the chairman of the military about the Akatsuki.
Pein was already planning on how to dole out Itachi's consequences and of course make an example of him to the other members. Cutting out the Uchiha's tongue was a nice option.
(Not that no one had ever thought of it before, but because no one had ever actually done it.
Which was regrettable.)
Itachi's eyes were blank, his face and form relatively motionless. (His skull pounded from the blow. It wouldn't bleed-) yet, (-and Pein's temper was quite the powerful thing, this much he knew very well, and if the two of them were both angry over this, angry over anything really, they could probably rip one another apart. Pein harbored quite a bit more raw power than he did, but if he had really wanted to, Itachi supposed he could've made up for his blindness-) He couldn't see almost anything, nowadays. (-with his speed.)
If he'd really wanted to.
(He didn't. So there was no use pondering it.)
And he wasn't angry.
(But he wasn't afraid either.)
Itachi knew he would not die here and so it was not necessarily vital to him that he fight his leader's grip. ("Leader-sama, Itachi-san." "I'll call him what I like.")
Impertenence.
But not-
(-imcompetence.)
"He wasn't there."
A blank statement.
(And a false one.)
Pein's eyes flickered back and forth over Itachi's face. His lipped curled slightly at the corner. Then without warning, he maliciously slammed the Uchiha back against the wall hard enough to insure that there will be a pounding headache and some bleeding for the Uchiha to experience later on. Pein added a punch to the jaw to round out the harsh treatment, irritated that the time he invested in getting the Uchiha's allegiance and cooperation may have set back his operation. He stepped back from the Uchiha.
"Tell me what was said."
"I told you."
Itachi's head rolls.
(His stomach roils and twists.)
"He wasn't there."
In the same way he is never there.
(Itachi hates Madara like Itachi hates no one else.)
"If I had seen him, I wouldn't have come back."
Cracks his neck experimentally.
Stares in his Leader-sama face.
His own-
(-half broken, but still elegant, still delicate prose in its own way.
How disgusting.)
-completely unphased.
There are some slight relief at the news that it wasn't Madara the Uchiha had run into but not nearly enough to dispel Pein's tempestuous mood.
"Tell me what was said." He repeated.
"Nothing of any real consequence."
Itachi's eyes meandered; he closed them, sighed as if he had just entered a new and different level of peace. (Living dead girl.) He reached up - twined brittle fingers through the dark strands of his hair. He looked sickly pale, far more ill than was usually like him, but it seemed neither to puncture his grace, nor to exentuate the terminal quality of it. (The ink neither stutters-)
Ave Maria.
(-nor fails.)
"You're really very predictable. You don't change at all."
Pein's nostrils flared. He didn't even have a molecule of patience in him at the moment. This was quickly turning into some kind of torture and interrogation. Which was fine for Pein. He certainly had enough time for it.
Pein threw a punch into Itachi's gut, propelling the other man backwards. Then with a smooth flick of his wrist, Pein brought out a knife from within his sleeves. It was a decent sized knife, the blade was about ten inches, and had certainly served him very well over the years.
"You were being foolish again." Pein clenched the knife in his hand tightly before spearing Itachi through the shoulder with enough force that the knife drove into the wall, pinning the Uchiha to it.
"Tell me what was said."
Itachi eyes were listless, though, in their lack of intensity. His presence, it seemed, was fleeting in most regards.
Blood (sleek and a dark, violently-wine colored crimson) soaked almost subtly out and around the blade; from knowledge and experience did he know that if he did not move, the cut would not widen and so would remain less painful, and would heal faster. (Itachi was not an incredibly slow healer, but he was not an incredibly fast one either - he was super-human in his abilities to disregard pain,) Pein? (it was true, but ability was not always enough.) It slid down his arms and pooled at the end of his fingertips - dropped slowly like rain to the cement beneath.
Maybe it would pool.
Maybe it would not.
"Revolution."
Dead eyes.
"Revolution like birds."
A wary eye brow raised.
"And nothing but."
Pein grabbed Itachi's face roughly, ripping open Itachi's mouth to take hold of his tongue. "Lose those cryptic words." Pein hissed, twisting the knife in Itachi's shoulder before extricating it to hold it against Itachi's still tongue. "Or your tongue will not utter another." Some blood began to pool at the knife's edge.
He shuddered. (Itachi did.) His eyes rolled back into his head a small ways and his whole body trembled, pain shooting through the right side of his mouth. His teeth were not enough to block out the lightning of its presence, and it clouds his senses. (The taste of his blood is metal and overpowering.) His eyelashes fluttered half effeminately (half sanely, half crazily, but which was which was so hard to tell) lost in the depths of him for some moments. It was a soft silence that ironically blessed that moment, a soft insane sort of silence where Itachi stared into the very back of his skull and Pein held a knife to his tongue.
(Itachi couldn't say anything, of course, with the Leader's fingers in his mouth like that and he was temporarily reminded of something dirty. He wouldn't speak around them though. Itachi was an Uchiha in the very depths of his nature, and Uchiha were nothing if not the contemporary form of dignity and narcissism. He would never stoop so low as to speak around another person's hands. Another person's mouth. Another person's-
But he didn't have an agent anymore.
So what did it matter?
Itachi was unemployed, as far as he was concerned.)
Crypts were what Itachi knew, and so he spoke them without thought. (With hours of thought behind every line. Because there was sometimes nothing else to do but plan the next days speech.) He jerked back, cracked his neck, his composition lax as if he had no personal investment in the blade held so near his pale face, no personal investment whatsoever. It was a nice rolling sensation that filled him, briefly, and he opened his eyes, smirking softly, expressionless even in his ivory-coated half-amusement.
"Crypts."
But Itachi doesn't laugh. Not often, and never really.
It is as if he has no understanding of laughter.
(But he has no knowledge of tears, either. So it makes sense.)
"I spoke of things other than crypts." He could've been doing his nails as he spoke for the interest he seemed to take in the statement. He spoke blandly. (No personal investment in anything, for that matter.) "Elsewise, you would not be here." He stared straight into him, unblinking.
The aching, bleeding void of his arm was excruciatingly painful.
"I told of our existence. That we would bring the End."
He didn't move.
(Didn't blink.)
"Nothing more."
"This is to the Chairman." Pein demanded, his mind rapidly analyzing every single possible implication. He knows of the Chairman. Of course, he did, considering the man controlled a large part of the government that may prove to be difficult to deal with. However, Pein was able to conclude that the Chairman would not be sharing the knowledge he was able to obtain from the Uchiha. Over the past few years or so, Pein was able to recognize the Chairman's treasonous ways. It was little discrepancies in the way the Arma would be spaced, the unexplainable distribution of provision trucks, and the subtle change in the Arma and Arceos' visage. The Chairman would keep the information to himself and Pein would not have any problems getting rid of him.
However, a question still tugged at Pein.
"What were you doing in Septum?" Pein asked slowly.
Itachi eyes were hard obsidian (but if you turned him in the light, it was a simple task to expose his Illness. To expose the way his irises covered their blindness, even with it still being there). Virtually no one who knew Itachi knew this, save for Pein and Sasori, and with them the knowledge was as predictable as a card game to the dealer. And, of course, most Uchiha had very little interest in card games, in games that required luck but virtually no skill at all. It was not in the Uchiha nature to happily venture forward into territory that they could not control. (They were controlling people, after all, and always had been. That was why, when Itachi had stared into a thousand Arma, Acreos light trained on him with his blade on the floor and his body slathered in the blood of his kin, he had not blinked. Had not even bothered to make an expression to wear on his face.)
And if he so much as thought the words "getting into trouble"-
"Research."
He stared Pein down expressionlessly. (Blindly.)
"Of what nature?" Pein hissed.
"To fuel and re-educate a Haunting that, until now, I did not believe myself capable or knowledgeable enough to deal with," Itachi said, voice flat and bland as anything, as if his arm were not bleeding and Pein did not still have control of a knife that could just as easily be wedged in his chest. "It was necessary that I seek the information I was looking for from a vault that was both void of eyes and trustworthy as a source."
Pein unflinchingly stabbed Itachi into the leg just deep enough to warrant a worry about bleeding to death. "I had asked a simple question. You do not need to dance around it." Pein twisted the knife slightly before sliding it out slowly. Pein decided to rephrase his question so that their conversation may get somewhere or else Itachi will have his own tongue for a meal. "What kind of information? Personal or business?"
Itachi grunted softly, face twisting a little around the pain. (It was almost impercievable, but he knew that Pein knew him and would be able to see it just fine, the way he closed his eyes just a little bit longer when blinking, the way his thin-lipped mouth tightened, the way embitterment had begun coursing through his jealous veins.) His hair hung over his eyes a little, bright red as they were without their contact lenses (but he had brought a second pair, a second pair he was wearing, and so the contacts were indeed there in full), and he stared into his leader's face (even with the slight emotion, like a pale watercolor, that was evidenced on his paler cheekbones).
Itachi was not a reckless person.
Nor was he easily malleable.
And they both knew that.
"There's a Creature in this building that has instilled in me some shadow of doubt, as to my ability to knowledgeably tamper with it." He spoke lowly, each syllable hitting his tongue with a deep, under-the-skirts ferocity. "If going north myself to learn more about the nature of weapons of its kind is any business at all, I would suppose it to be personal."
There was venom between his teeth.
"Be careful, Uchiha." Pein murmured, wiping the blood off of the knife with Itachi's shirt. "Personal endeavors have a way of getting into business. You will get to digest that superfluously verbose tongue of yours if it does." The Uchiha was more emotional and attached than he thought he was, Pein thought. The other man always seemed to be dealing with personal issues and personal relationships and the like. It was irritating to have that kind of threat hanging over Pein's plans but Itachi was useful. How much was often considered.
Pein's question was answered. Their business was over.
Itachi lingered in the hallway only a few seconds afterwards.
(And Tayuya was asleep when he got upstairs, and woke to ask him why he was bleeding in a crooked voice from straining at the belts he'd used to keep her against the bed and nowhere else. She was still insufferably angry with him and he was not bothered by it.
Not bothered by it at all.)
Even though the air hung loosely
as though someone should whisper
Amen.