[Dream] [Week 5, Day 6]

[behindhiseyes]

R to NC-17 for sex, references to violence, adult subject matter.



It begins as an ordinary everyday miracle.

One month when he and Kisame are apart, and Itachi has been alone with his own thoughts, the event happens. And it is not memorable, save for the curiosity of the reactions and the questions they produce. There are, in the epoch of Akatsuki -- this time in his life -- moments when a strange culmination of coincidences will deliver fortune into Itachi's lap like a swift windfall.

Ah, but this is getting ahead.

Let us first describe the village. South-west of Amegakure, it is one of those villages which is a half-desolate, dessicated place, a ruin of poverty, but this side is concealed somewhat behind the rows of two-to-three-story buildings from which dangle lines of clothing and small skinny-legged civilian children run about and, sometimes, an adult appears, shielding their eyes against the sunlight which cuts through the cloudless yet grey abyss above. The steel sky, Itachi supposes, is a product of the village's proximity to Rain Country, the cold wet sometimes-sanctuary of Akatsuki. One could gather one's thoughts in the water that fell there. But here there is no rain. Nor even the promise of rain. The sky is a hanging slab of stone. The air is tinged with burnt paper remnants, burnt leaves, and the trees are black and sparse. Only that feeling in the air is not truly that of burnt paper -- that is merely what it calls to mind. The air is simply dark and weighted somehow, as if the particles have swelled. You may know of cities like this. Their air is polluted in no visible, tangible sense, yet the aura of degradation remains, and the sunlight struggles in the sky above, struggles over the trees and buildings below.

Vendors call through the streets, rickshaws run at human hands, and the red light flickers at the bawdyhouse, where the women suck winter cherries -- where the important medical jutsu are those which protect the body, or those which remove a child before it has become a child.

When night falls, men of the village move toward the alehouse, where they will fill themselves on rice wine, gamble their money away, or win money and use it to purchase time apart from their wives (who hate them) in exchange for time with other women (who also hate them).

Even a missing-nin is ignored in a village such as this.

No one cares from where you came or to where you are going, because they have come from nowhere and are going nowhere. Peasant stock, men selling pork cuts or medicine. Selling rice wine and beds to passers-by.

Itachi sits on the edge of one of the beds on the second floor of the inn and removes his rice hat.

He adjusts the ring around his finger and watches the fog rise over the banks of flowers, over the lake, where the boats return the sounds of voices.

You could disappear in a village like this.

Disappear forever, dipping your oar into the fog.

You could disappear, and this man did, but Itachi does not know him by sight at first.

It is daylight. Itachi twists his ring again, not making eye contact with those people going nowhere all around him in this village.

There is an encounter in the street. You understand how this goes: A fruit vendor and a potential customer exchanging harsh words. Then the customer has pulled out a blade, and you realize the customer is no customer at all, but rather a thief. Perhaps a murderer, come to rob the day's earnings. Itachi is reading a sign, and the encounter is off to his side. The sign informs him of the prices of crescent rolls, which are reasonably low in this place.

Out of the corner of one eye, he notices the murder-in-progress.

It is none of his business.

Itachi leans over, inspecting the buns.

The smell breaks through the dirty air. It smells as if the rain is dying to come. To wet the tissue wrappings and drown the warm scent of cooked bread. The grey sky seems so angry, so tense with the need to simply release. How many murders must occur in this weather.

Gasps accompany the lift of the sword.

Itachi removes his hat.

He does not know why he does it.

It must have been a whim. Or perhaps the sound of violence, the blood on the muddy ground, would simply have affected the nuances of his mood. Perhaps it would have been a source for irritation, such as the tense sky which follows him wherever he goes. Perhaps that is why. Perhaps there is another reason.

Whatever the cause, sword strikes kunai. Strikes, and does not turn aside, for Itachi stands between the would-be killer and the not-yet corpse, one hand pressed back against the booth of wares. In the second that follows, he takes note of the cry of geese on the nearby waters and the squawks of the chickens that run about below the villagers' feet.

Obviously no shinobi. Or if he is, this thief (whose eyes, Itachi sees, contain a tinge of yellow in the iris, and red lightning in the sclera) must not wear his hitai-ate, must not be high-ranking, because his forehead is bare and he snarls in surprise at the speed of the movement.

"Not here," Itachi says. "You have the opportunity to run. Run."

The laughter of the stranger is like the bark of a wild canine.

Sword and knife clang apart and, in a flash, Itachi sees the blade -- whetted, too shadowed by this slate sky to give reflection to his movements, and nicked at the edges.

"You have the opportunity to run. Run," he tries, again, but the sword comes down with persistence. Slices through one of the lantern fruits after Itachi has swung aside.

And, with the gush of purple-red from the swollen plant, the skull cracks.

Shatters, when Itachi's foot lodges the lower bones into the soft tissue of the brain, a one-kick conclusion that will (if anyone should examine the body) have them speaking of blood swelling and a cranium perfectly struck, jammed.

The kick was a swing of motion which, with the shove of his palm, twists him to the ground on his feet, a red and black pinwheel of limbs.

The shaken fruit falls.

Itachi catches it. Offers it, upturned, to the vendor, whose face is drained of colour.

"You -- "

"I will buy this." He indicates the halved fruit.

"Dead," someone says behind him. "Dead. Just like that."

Itachi reaches into his cloak with his free hand, produces the money, and passes it to the white-faced man, whose eyes, he realizes -- whose eyes are fixed on his hitai-ate. Fixed on the scratched symbol, as if it is something he recognizes. Which is impossible, for there are no shinobi in a place like this. Not here.

"Uchiha Itachi-san," he says, with the absent, floating tone of one who has voiced a realization he himself is only becoming aware of.

Money is shoved into a hand, pressed into a palm, and in the next moment, Itachi is gone, along with the fruit and the rice hat, now donned.

What a stupid mistake, Itachi thinks later.

Saving that man. Who was -- is -- nothing to him. And now, against all probability, someone has recognized him. Even here. If trouble comes for him, he will have to leave.

Itachi sits on the bank of the river, picking seeds from his teeth as one would pick knives from bodies, between the fingers, with his legs crossed and the eaten-out bowl of the fruit beside his lap. The setting sun is reflecting off the water, and he can hear the warbling water birds and the cries emerging from the bawdyhouse, from the house of drinks. The milling life of a village. His mind is stirred up now; stirred from the recognition in those eyes, and the weight of his own mistake. Perhaps, he thinks. Perhaps he will even need to kill the very life he saved.

The life who, he feels, is behind him now. Watching him. Who has tracked him down. Who is suppressing his chakra. Who is, impossibly (and Itachi is puzzling at this), a shinobi, and who therefore may not have been in so much danger as he seemed, before.

Before he has turned around, Itachi's mind is concocting strategies: Make an illusion of himself. Appear behind that person. Slit his throat. If he attempts anything.

Knife slips to his hand --

"Explain yourself," he says, still not turned.

"Uchiha Itachi-san."

"Missing-nin."

Masquerading as a fruit vendor.

"Ah, yes, I am one. Much as yourself." He sounds amused. "I removed my hitai-ate and have been living quietly in this place." He hesitates. "Are you going to kill me?"

Itachi does not answer. The silence itself threatens in his place.

"I only came to thank you, you know, Itachi-san."

Itachi's eyes narrow. He watches the water. "Unless two individuals are partnered, a shinobi does not place himself behind another unless he wishes to give offense."

"Yes, that is true, I suppose. I was never the best shinobi, however. And I left that lifestyle. I was from your village, you know? Konoha? Mmhm, well, you see."

Itachi turns. He cannot discern why this individual is continuing to speak to him.

"I have no friendly feelings towards that village anymore. When I take into account the conditions you left under, I can only suppose you must agree with me there. That is why I wished to talk with you. My name is Kobayashi Ryozo." An implied smile. "I left the village in disgrace."

The name stirs Itachi. A name he has heard on orders. A name he has known from ANBU. Yes, this man, this fruit vendor, as it were, was said to have gone mad, for -- in a fit of rage one evening, he had slaughtered his own wife and small son -- and, dredging forth this memory, now, Itachi wonders if --

No. He supposes that is unlikely.

Itachi stands, abandoning the fruit.

He will run past him like a breeze. Disseminate himself like a murder of crows. And strike you dead, should you lift a hand. For, the name, that name, he is already thinking that -- he has been instructed --

"Itachi-san," Ryozo whispers, when their faces are near, in passing. "It was the way you moved."

It was the way you moved.

The words had been all that stayed the knife from slicing cleanly through the body and out the other side. The confusion. The curiosity. Itachi had been curious. And Itachi had let this wave of momentary curiosity propel him forward, doing no harm in passing. The wind through the hair. The wind through the reeds. On the bank of the river.

It was the way you moved. Did you have a good look at the man you killed, Itachi-san? He had been a very large man with markings on his forehead, on his temples, which you crushed with your foot. Though these words did not come all at once. They came in parts. In pieces. For in the following days, when Itachi walked about the village, the man -- Ryozo-san -- would appear sometimes, would speak to him from nowhere, and Itachi, by this point, had decided he would permit him to do so, for he had assessed him the moment their faces passed one another beneath the setting sun.

"Why didn't you kill me, Itachi-san?" he had asked, and Itachi had answered,

"Because you are no threat to me."

"I want to be your ally," he had insisted. "You are Akatsuki. I could help."

"I have no need of further allies," Itachi had replied, "I have no control of who enters Akatsuki." It is beyond his jurisdiction. But no matter how he answers, this man seems to follow him. And Itachi is not certain to what end. If it becomes irritating enough, Itachi supposes he will strike him dead. He considers that perhaps he should do so, regardless. And likely, he eventually will.

Itachi is not certain for what reason he has not done so yet.

His hair is bright red, this stranger. His hair is bright red; he wears it cut strangely to one side, lopsidedly, and his eyes are a dark dull grey, like the sky about this place. He ties little pieces of string around his fingertips as a jittery hobby of some kind. He reads books that Itachi thinks are, in actuality, very poor quality, and he killed his family, as well, and it was said, also, that there had been no reason for this. And he, Ryozo-san, seems rather at ease with the world, but for the fact that he follows Itachi about. That he appears out of the corners of his eyes, here and there, and he wants to bring Itachi things. Like pieces of fruit. Bits of meat, until Itachi informs him that he rarely consumes meat. Itachi drinks his medicine in the night. He has no patience for such overbearing gratitude. But he is curious.

"I saved your life," he tells this man, who has found him in the streets again. "Take it and leave me be."

"I know, I must do that," Ryozo replies. "I find you fascinating, that is all."

He wishes to speak to Itachi, for some reason beyond his comprehension, about the manner in which he moved. The grace of his limbs. He is very fascinated with his limbs. With his hair, as well. Which his eye is always wandering toward. It is his eyes, Itachi realizes. Those dull eyes. How, at the sight of him, light fills them. Glints. That is what makes him curious.

It takes a while for Itachi to pin-point the look.

But, Itachi thinks -- remembering the bowl-like body of the lantern fruit in his hands -- that he eventually realizes what that look is.

You look at something in this manner when it is a thing you wish to bite into. A thing you wish to devour.

Bite open. Drink up.

Itachi is sixteen.

It twists inside of his stomach, sometimes. A feeling which bothers him the most when he wakes in the middle of the night, breathing quickly through his nose. Filtering the air in and out. His eyes flutter open, then close. His hands grow moist, as does his forehead. Most of the time, he ignores this feeling. Wills it away. It is easy enough, manipulating the emotions and the body. Easy enough by now. In ANBU, there had been days when adults -- superiors, people who were leading who were not so capable even as himself -- had come at him and had, essentially, explained about the feeling. They spoke of it primarily as an obstacle. A frustrating distraction.

Sex. Itachi contemplates the manifold connotations of the word. Sex: An obstacle to ANBU. A distraction to young boys. Sex: His parents, their bodies in the bed at night, mostly obscured. Sex bringing them together. That had created him. That had created Sasuke. An act of creation. But an obstacle. A thing he is told most stringently that he is to take care of. Sex is commerce. Men purchase sex from women. Speak of women as if they are there to provide sex. The commerce of sex.

Houses of prostitution. There is one in every village. Spending money to experience the trade of sex. Itachi considers this. Considers his parents. How is this the same sex? Is it? Is it the very same act?

He does get this feeling sometimes. This feeling he associates with sex.

It is somehow like being angry. Like wanting to bite into someone. Or be bitten into.

He has had it before. Sex. A few times. Has wondered about it here or there. But never fully understood it. For it seemed so powerless and so powerful, simultaneously. And each time Itachi had it -- sex -- he was certain he was not having it, for this was not the sex that others spoke of, but each person spoke of sex differently, so Itachi always wondered if the sex he had had, when he had it, was the true sex, or if there were some more accurate sex to be had.

When his mother spoke of "sex," she did not use the word, and that had confused Itachi very much, as had her anxiety, although he had gradually come to realize this was because sex was embarrassing for her, and it was embarrassing because, she impressed upon him, it was very important, and very special, and this is why it should be embarrassing. And this he had not understood. Embarrassment. Why nude bodies caused such feelings. Dead bodies did not cause such feelings. But a live nude body -- Itachi realizes that such a thing causes others to wish to cover you. So they will not see. They do not wish to look at your life. For it is too special to see. That is how his mother makes it sound, in some respect.

And yet it is not embarrassing, and it is not meaningful. It is nothing so warm as she has described -- for what she has described sounds like a home-cooked meal, and nothing he has had has felt like such a thing. But the sex his mother articulated when she refused to use the word, when she refused to use the details of the bodies she seemed to fear, was apparently not the sex of others. Had that truly been sex, all along? Or something besides?

Gradually, Itachi begins to wonder if sex is an expression of dislike.

This does not match the descriptions he has heard, for he has heard sex spoken of with reverence, but in reality, he cannot divorce his mind from the sense that much sex is a method of showing how much you dislike a thing. For the men who go to the houses of prostitution speak of the women as though they are refuse, and the women hate them. Sex causes scars, illness. Children removed before they become children.

But sex also produced Sasuke. And himself.

A violent, destructive act of creation.

"You want to have sex with me."

This night, Ryozo-san has insisted he go to the wine shop, and he drank rice wine before Itachi's eyes, although Itachi refused to drink; he merely watched the other man's eyes grow foggy and his hair fall out of place. Now, he is pushing it back from his face. Laughing.

"Itachi-san, you are so blunt," he says.

And Itachi does not know why he says that, because he has figured it out already, from the looks at his body and the talk of his hair and his movements and the odd reverence which is not as such, not truly. Why did this man not simply say he wished to have sex with him before? Why did he say so many other words? And why did he seem focused upon alcohol? To what extent do people believe alcohol is necessary for sex?

Itachi has already decided that they will likely have sex. For he does not know this man, or especially like him, and there seems to be no necessity to know or like someone with whom you have sex. He has been waking up in the night again, lately. Perhaps it is his nearness to the bawdyhouse -- his realization of what occurs there. The sex that drenches the dark air of the village. Perhaps it is the eyes on him, that want to bite into him.

The eyes that remind him that somewhere, he has a nude body unto himself.

Eventually, the man understands that he can brush Itachi's hair back, so he does.

Though he seems displeased when Itachi does not relax at the gesture, and says, relax, Itachi-san, relax; I am going to fuck you. Oh God, how I have wanted to fuck you. But Itachi does not relax, for the hot, angry feeling is back. For he is being bitten into.

For he is being kissed. Clumsy-drunk kisses. Which cut the edges of his mouth. The tongue which crawls inside him and wriggles. Itachi wonders: What is he supposed to do with this tongue inside of him? What is it seeking within his mouth? What is this other seeking? That is his curiosity.

"Kiss back," he says, impatiently. The smell of rice wine drenches Itachi's face. Hair is scraping his face. He toys at the tongue with his own. It would seem more natural to bite it off, but he does not. That is improper somehow.

Once their tongues have been moving together for a while, his body has changed.

Everything has changed. That is the odd thing. Sex. How it makes a room change.

Itachi does not let his guard down, and he can tell this is causing displeasure.

"I've wanted to fuck you since that day," he keeps hearing, and he squirms against the mouth at his neck, and the hands undoing the tie in his hair, and running through it. Freeing it. Tearing off his clothing.

Itachi does tell him one thing, once.

He recalls telling him, this stranger, that sometimes he has a recurring dream. In this dream, he loses his his limbs, eyes, and mouth, so he cannot see, or communicate, but lives, sealed within his own body. Perhaps, he thinks, sex is like this. Like losing yourself. Being sealed inside of yourself. Where you lose your words. Your mind. Your eyes. It's just a room. A room and straw and oil lamps.

There is something crippling about this. Being pressed down. With one's mouth covered, so words cannot be said. With one's limbs bound to the bed, gripping the sheets, pulled to the air as one would lift a leg in a cast, with one's eyes and senses foggy. Sex. Debilitation.

Fuck. Fucking. Fucked. Spittle, the swirl of a tongue over the inked skin of his shoulder; teeth marks, fingernails up and down his back. Yes, he understands why sex is an expression of dislike. And he understands why men hate the women with whom they have sex, and why the women hate them. Understands the second kind more, now -- when he is fucked. And this is because sex debilitates. Defeats.

Because you allow yourself to have your clothes torn off, your skin marked with scars you will count in the mirror in the morning, the weight and pressure of someone above you, in you. You, letting them do that. Only because of that itch in the stomach.

It feels good, briefly, and that is why you loathe it all the more.

This pleasureable crippling.

Being crippled should not feel good, but it does. It undeniably feels good to have eyes on him, hungry, consuming, teeth on the pulse, the breathy whisper in his ear of fuck, fuck, fuck, the hardness against his stomach, and the hand around it, and his own breaths. He makes no sound. Only breaths. But it is as if his partner wishes to drink the sound out of him. So beautiful, and how beautiful must you have been when you killed them all, Itachi-san? That is the attraction. How he murders. Of course.

He forgets, eventually, whom he is fucking, or that they have any humanity at all, because if they do, he has not noticed it in all this time. What is important is the mouth on his mouth, on his ear, on his shoulder (it lingers there, returns many times), the bites, the droplets of blood on the tip of the knife, the shading shadowed light, the smell of sweat, the hand curling between his legs, massaging. Sex: The sum of parts.

It happens three times.

Once: On his knees, once, with the cool sheets an unbearable friction against the burn of his stomach, hands gripping his thighs, and that shuddering, pounding pace that has him biting the pillow.

Twice: On his back, with the legs hoisted up and the blood reverberating in his ears.

The third time: In a kind of sitting position, seating himself on the erection -- weeping from lubrication and from the earlier efforts of his mouth -- feeling the slippery slit wetting the place where the skin puckers, shoving up into the body --

-- curving the spine with the sensations against the nerves --

And the third time, Itachi does feel his body clamp, collapse, sighing out a shivering completion.

The oil has burned low.

In the watered-milk light of morning, Itachi counts his new scars.

The curiosity has been satisfied now. The room-altering mood has ended with the dawn. He washes the dried semen from his thighs and does wonder, briefly, why nudity is a cause of such offense. It must be because humans wish for others to die. Otherwise, it would not trouble them to look upon the evidence of living.

The scars are masked, eventually, by black and red.

"Itachi-san!"

That man had followed him to the gates of the village.

"Why won't you take me with you?" Those hot spikes of anger. "As I have said, I too parted ways with your village."

He is still looking at him as if he wants to bite into him. Saying, in a panicked tone, that he "loves" him -- which Itachi relatively does doubt -- although this so-called love, if it is love, is a love which wishes to assault him with drunken kisses, undo him, overwhelm him. It is a suffocating and tiresome love, and Itachi has already grown tired of it. His patience for physicality is limited to his libido, which is only active once in a long while.

Sex: The primal animal impulse which makes you tolerate foolishness. But briefly.

"I cannot love anyone," Itachi says, honestly. "Nor do I have the desire to."

But that answer does not satisfy. It never seems to, with such people. People who, for some confused reason, have decided they must project something onto him. Some him that is not himself. People who wish to take everything: his clothing, his movements, the emotions he does not have to offer. He tells them, truly, he cannot give that which he does not have, and he has no love left to offer.

"Itachi-san," this man (his name -- yes, he had a name, Ryozo, Itachi seems to recall -- ) pleads, reaching toward him. This will turn violent. "You are all I have thought about since that day -- "

"I am aware of this."

Why can't I have you, the eyes demand. Because I am my own, Itachi thinks. Because they take it as a giving -- the others. They presume sex is an exchange. That you emerge from it different, as if through a fire. And this is why he believes the sex he has must not be the sex of others, because he has exchanged nothing, and he is no different.

This man wants to kill him, he knows. And probably killed his wife for just this reason -- for having eyes for anything besides himself. For not being fully his. For not surrendering autonomy, as one wishes the other to do when one tries to debilitate through sex.

"Itachi-san -- " The voice is growing ragged. Those hands, those killing hands, sweat-slick, move with the arms in a parody of embrace. "Itachi-san -- "

Those hands are coming to kill him.

Most embraces become murder, if the situations shift.

Itachi suspected it would end in this manner all along.

"You are not a very good shinobi," he says, without harshness.

His fingers have already grasped the knives between them, three for three knuckles.

"You should wear your hitai-ate, at least."

The hands are still coming toward him.

Itachi moves.

[ Itachi wakes up and lies unmoving for a while, remembering the blood on his hands. ]