Chapter 559: The Obsession Written in Blood
"I have too much innocent blood on my hands. Sins I cannot escape from... I was wrong. I hurt too many people. And I hurt you."
Uchiha Itachi lay on the ground. The words came out in pieces, fragments surfacing and then falling away.
"Maybe none of those people needed to die. Maybe... I should have found another way."
"...But I didn't."
He closed his eyes. The corner of his mouth moved slightly -- whether that was a bitter smile or self-mockery, it was difficult to say.
"At the time, I could only see two roads. Kill them all, or watch them be killed -- watch more people die. I chose the first."
He wasn't asking for forgiveness. There was no expectation of absolution anywhere in his voice. He was simply speaking, lifting out piece by piece the things that had been pressing down inside him for far too many years.
"...Itachi. I cannot agree with you."
Satsuki's voice arrived in its usual register -- flat, controlled, carrying no particular rise or fall.
"But that's not primarily because of how many innocent people you killed."
Itachi's brow furrowed slightly despite himself. Not because of the killing? Then what?
"...I am Uchiha," Satsuki began, taking a slight turn. "And I have come to understand what the Uchiha nature actually is."
"When we pour our feelings into someone we have recognized, we never look back. We transform those feelings into something that runs through our blood itself. The person you chose, Itachi -- was it me?"
Itachi nodded slowly.
He wasn't the type of Uchiha who went around declaring the clan's special nature out loud. But he knew what that nature was, and he recognized it in himself. That quality of absolute fixation once a person had been chosen -- the way feeling became force, became something inseparable from the blood that moved through the body.
Satsuki was right.
The person he had chosen, from the very beginning until now, was Sasuke.
Not the Uchiha clan. Not the village. Not peace. Sasuke. He had pressed everything he was against that one child -- every thought, every sacrifice, every remaining fragment of hope. His life had become a performance staged for an audience of one. And that one person was Sasuke.
"...I am not a good candidate for rebuilding the clan."
Satsuki's voice continued. "Because for me, more than the clan, I care more about the person I have recognized."
Itachi's head came up sharply.
"You just said you would do it, so let me be plain."
Satsuki's voice dropped a degree. The air around her shifted -- a sharp killing intent rising without effort, pointed unmistakably at Itachi.
"The reason I hate you -- and the reason I hate my world's version of you -- is what you intended to do that night in order to awaken my Sharingan."
The expression that crossed Itachi's face was one of comprehension. Bitterness in it. Guilt. And underneath those, the strange stillness of someone hearing something they had already known was coming.
"...So that's it. I went after the person you had recognized."
He understood it now, completely.
That night, he had used Tsukuyomi on Sasuke. A full seventy-two hours of constructed reality -- the images looped without interruption. Himself moving through the clan district. Himself standing before their parents' bodies. The blood dripping from the blade. Again and again, hour after hour, forcing Sasuke to exist inside that until the boy was entirely broken.
He had exhausted every approach available to him, destroying Sasuke's equilibrium, drowning out everything inside him except hatred.
He had even pushed it until Sasuke was barely functional, until Itachi himself had begun to go cold with the fear that the Sharingan wouldn't come at all. And only then had it finally appeared.
If, at some point during those hours, one of Sasuke's friends had appeared -- someone who happened to be in the vicinity while Itachi was still waiting -- what would he have done?
The answer came from somewhere deep and honest.
He would have killed them. For the sake of the larger picture he had decided on. It didn't matter who. It didn't matter what their relationship with Sasuke was. As long as he believed killing them would force the awakening, he would have moved without hesitation.
Besides. He had already killed enough people that night. One more or one fewer -- what actual difference would it have made?
"Itachi. Do you understand what you're saying?"
Her voice was quieter now.
"If he had actually died that night. Died under the protection you believed you were providing -- whatever your reason was, for the village, for peace, even for me -- as long as he died, I would not have remained alone in this world."
"After I finished killing you and everything that caused this. Of course."
Itachi listened to her words.
He wanted to stand up. He wanted to walk to where she was, stand in front of her, say the word sorry in a way that was worth something.
He knew it would change nothing. The dead wouldn't come back. The suffering Sasuke had been put through wouldn't be undone. But it was the only thing left that he could still do.
His body wouldn't let him.
His fingers pressed into the mud, trying to find purchase, trying to push himself upright. His arms shook. Two attempts. Neither got him off the ground.
"...I'm sorry."
Satsuki said nothing.
She stood where she was. Her expression showed nothing on the surface. But her fingers had curled inward, and she felt something knotted and unresolved sitting in her chest -- because she could not actually finish this.
No matter what she did here, she could only administer a beating. She could not kill him.
This world's Itachi. His ending belonged to this world's Sasuke, not to her. And with her own world's Yuu -- her mother's softness had made that choice for her too. The most she could do there was a complete severance, walking away and not looking back.
The grief that had nearly collapsed her when she watched Naruto almost die before her eyes all those years ago -- that wound. It turned out she hadn't been able to repair it through this after all.
Satsuki's gaze moved away from Itachi and went cold. She turned to leave.
The churning in her chest wasn't gone, but it had settled enough. The crack was still there. It was just quieter now.
And she really had been too lenient with Naruto lately. Thinking about the fact that during their time together he had found time to go running off to Gaara -- Satsuki made a quiet resolution: before they had a child, she was not giving Naruto a single unoccupied moment to himself.
"Wait..."
Itachi's voice came from behind her.
Satsuki stopped. She turned. What patience remained in her voice was thin. "What else do you want to say."
"Thank you..."
"Don't inflate your importance." She cut him off, her tone flat as stone. "Your body is exactly as it was. I didn't cure you."
She was stating a fact. The illness Amaterasu Rei had suppressed was temporary -- like covering a pile of waste with a cloth. When the cloth was eventually pulled away, everything waiting beneath it would return.
"No. That's not what I mean."
Itachi shook his head.
"I know that from the moment I killed the entire clan, death has been the only ending available to me. I won't accept any path toward a future, not even a trace of one. That isn't because of you -- it's because that is what I deserve."
He meant it. Not in the way people say things they don't quite mean. If a genuine opportunity to live had appeared in front of him right now, he would have refused it without hesitation.
Because he had never planned on living. From the night he first raised the blade, death was the ending he had arranged for himself. He had never built anything pointing toward after that.
"Sasuke... you found a path toward light. But not because of me."
His eyes were reddening at their edges.
But they stayed on Satsuki -- on that face that carried something of both Sasuke and Mikoto in it, on those eyes he had never seen before, on the proof of a possibility he had never imagined.
He hadn't seen Sasuke's future.
But he had seen another kind of answer.
"...I am truly glad." His voice was very quiet. "Thank you. For letting me see what Sasuke can become."