Chapter Text
Soulmates.
Itachi remembers the day his mother explained them to him.
He’s four years old, sitting at the kitchen table after finishing his lunch. He isn’t quite tall enough for his feet to reach the floor, and he swings them back and forth on the chair. He doesn’t realize he’s doing it at first, and stops the motion as soon as he does. It’s childish, and his father would scold him if he saw.
But Father isn’t here right now. He’s at police headquarters for work. His mother is the only one home with him, standing feet away at the sink and washing the dishes they just dirtied. Over the sound of the faucet, she sings a song as she scrubs them. Her voice is pretty, and Itachi is content just to sit and listen to her.
Her sleeves are rolled up, bare arms on display. Itachi glimpses the black kanji on her wrist as she reaches over to place a dish in the drying rack, and his content turns to curiosity.
“Mother, what’s that on your wrist?”
This isn’t the first time he’s seen it. And he’s glimpsed similar marks on others, as well. But he doesn’t have it and neither does his father, and this is the first time he can remember clearly wondering why.
Itachi sees his mother’s shoulders tense, her hands pausing. He worries, for a moment, that he’s said something wrong—is he not supposed to talk about the marks? But then Mikoto is turning to look at him, relaxed and smiling.
“No one’s told you about soulmates yet, have they?” she asks.
Soulmates. It’s an extremely familiar word, but not one he fully understands.
He’s heard it several times, passed around in conversation. He’s read it in books. He’s seen it engraved in the stones within the clan’s shrine. And although he’s managed to puzzle a bit of it out through context, it’s still a word whose meaning he holds only a vague idea of.
He knows that soulmates are something adults have. You love them and marry them and then, eventually, have kids with them. He doesn’t understand what they have to do with the black markings on his mother’s wrist, though.
“Soulmates,” Itachi says. The word feels strange on his tongue as he tests it out, feeling out the two separate syllables. “Like you and Father.”
Mikoto’s mouth tightens. Something slightly painful flickers in her eyes, and Itachi immediately feels guilty for whatever he said to cause it. But it’s quickly gone, once again replaced by her smile.
She turns off the faucet and walks over to him, pulling out one of the chairs so they’re sitting across from each other.
“Your soulmate is someone very special to you,” she explains. “There’s only one of them in the entire world. They’re the other half of your soul—the person who completes you and understands you and knows you, better than anyone else. They’re the person most dear and sacred to your heart.”
Itachi listens to the words, mesmerized, attempting to grasp this foreign feeling his mother is describing. Mikoto reaches forward, gently, to take a hold of his wrist. She turns it so the inside of it is facing up, and she brushes her thumb over his pulse point—exactly where the black marking on her own wrist is located.
“This is where your soulmate’s name will appear one day,” she tells him. “When you’re around twelve or thirteen. It’s called your soulmark. We’re already connected to our soulmates, of course, from the moment they enter the world—but the marks are the gods’ way of giving us a bit of direction.”
Itachi stares down at the pale skin, imagining a mark like his mother’s one day inked upon it.
His soulmate.
Itachi, ever curious to how the world works, is instantly filled with dozens of questions. They buzz around in his head, each one begging to be asked. But when he opens his mouth, none of them are the question that ends up being spoken.
Instead Itachi says, “Father isn’t your soulmate. Is he?”
The fingers tighten around his wrist. Mikoto exhales quietly, her eyes slipping briefly closed.
“You,” she tells him, “are far too perceptive.”
Perceptive. Itachi doesn’t know what that word means. He makes a note to look it up in the dictionary later. He can’t tell by her tone if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.
“No. Your father isn’t my soulmate,” she says.
After a visible hesitation, her fingers slip from his wrist. She holds out her own between them, the one with the soulmark, and turns it to bare the name to him. The way she does it, slowly and carefully, reminds him of the way someone reveals a secret.
Kushina Uzumaki, it reads.
Itachi looks up at his mother. “You love her?” he asks.
Her fingers brush over the name, unmistakably tender. “I do.”
“But… Father…”
“I care deeply for your father,” Mikoto says. “Don’t ever doubt that.”
Itachi is good at reading people. Her words are true. There’s no lie in her eyes. But there is a sadness, when she looks at the inked name—an unfathomable grief. And Itachi realizes it’s deeper than any emotion she’s ever looked at his father with.
He's silent for a moment, processing, as the relationship he’s always thought his parents to have shifts in his mind. “I don’t understand.”
Mikoto reaches out to brush his bangs out of his eyes. “This world can be very beautiful,” she tells him. “But it can also be very cruel. Some of us get fairytales. Some of us get tragedies.”
Itachi bites his lip at the words. He turns his eyes down to the wrist in his lap, staring down at the blue-green veins beneath pale skin.
“I don’t think I have a soulmate,” he says.
His mother looks stricken at the words—at the surety he speaks them with. “What? Sweetheart, why would you think that?”
Itachi shrugs his shoulders. “Just a feeling,” he tells her, and doesn’t understand why she looks so sad.
Later that day, Itachi goes to the compound’s library to research soulmates. Even if he doesn’t believe he’ll ever have one, he’s still interested. It’s a subject unknown to him, and Itachi doesn’t like things being unknown.
He likes to understand everything.
His mother doesn’t mind him going off by himself. So long as he stays in the district—he isn’t allowed to go into the village without supervision, a rule that’s been drilled into him multiple times. Itachi thinks it’s stupid, because the village’s library is much bigger and better. But for now, he settles for the compound’s smaller one.
The woman who works the front desk is Yumiko Uchiha. She’s the wife of one of the men that work with his father. She greets Itachi by name when he enters, and Itachi greets her back with a smile. She asks him if he needs any help finding anything, but he declines.
In no time at all, he’s found the small section of books on soulmates and has piled nearly all of them into his arms. The library is mostly empty, but there are a few patrons present—Uchiha that he doesn’t recognize. They look at the four-year-old strangely when they see him settling down at a table with the large books, but he doesn’t pay them any mind.
Even at such a young age, Itachi already knows he’s a genius. The eyes gawking at him like he’s some strange creature aren’t anything new.
He stays there the rest of the afternoon, buried deeply in the pages. There’s so much more to soulmates than the brief explanation his mother gave—Itachi devours every scrap of new information he reads.
Everything she said to him is the truth. Apparently, there’s a deep bond between soulmates that exists long before a person receives their mark. The connection draws them together from the moment they are both present in the world and drawing breath—and that connection strengthens once their soulmarks appear and the two become aware of each other. They can feel each other’s pain through it, their emotions—and on rare occasions, with very strong bonds, can even use it to seek out the other’s location.
Itachi learns about all the different types of soul bonds. Because his mother was right about that, too—this world can sometimes be very cruel. Having someone for a soulmate doesn’t always guarantee you’ll be theirs. Unreciprocated bonds, or one-sided bonds as they’re more commonly called, are rare, but they still happen.
Like the bond his mother has. At least, Itachi assumes this is the case. Because if his mother’s bond was reciprocated, then why wouldn’t she and her soulmate be together?
Even rarer than one-sided bonds, there are people who possess no soul bond at all. No mark ever appearing on their wrists. There’s an old stigma against these sort of people—they are considered by many to be cold, unfeeling, broken. Incapable of being loved.
Sounds like me, Itachi thinks to himself.
Itachi knows that there’s a war being fought. But until now, standing on a battlefield with blood squelching beneath the soles of his shoes, Itachi didn’t realize what the word actually meant.
Still-warm corpses are strewn everywhere. Piled over each other, their expressions twisted and frozen and terrified. Itachi shakes, and attempts to disguise it as being from the cold. He wants nothing more than to shut his eyes against the sight.
But his father won’t let him. He forces Itachi to look.
The smell of blood is thick in the air, even as the rain pelts down and begins to wash it away. The water is freezing against his skin, soaking his hair and his clothes. Itachi stares out at the battlefield of dead shinobi, feeling sick to his stomach.
Fugaku drops a heavy hand onto his son’s shoulder. His wrist is bare, markless.
“Burn this sight into your eyes, Itachi. Never forget it.”
Itachi pulls his gaze away from his father’s wrist. His eyes sting, but he refuses to cry. He looks out over all the corpses, and he thinks about the nature of death. He thinks about the nature of life. He thinks about how fleeting all of it is, how meaningless.
Itachi doesn’t think he has a soulmate. But if he does, then he feels sorry for whoever it is.
The Third Shinobi World War comes to an end. In the aftermath, the entire clan gathers to burn their dead and honor the fallen. Itachi stands with his mother in the front, watching his father perform the rites and light the pyre. He bows his head with the rest of the Uchiha to recite the familiar prayers to the flames.
Itachi’s aunt is among the dead. But Fugaku doesn’t cry, so Itachi doesn’t either. Her soulmate does, though—loud, gut-wrenching sobs that make people shift uncomfortably and avert their eyes.
During one of the funerals, Itachi spots an older boy slip in and linger in the background, separate from the others. He has silvery hair and a slanted hitai-ate. He clearly doesn’t belong, and members of the clan shoot him disapproving looks; but no one tries to tell him to leave.
Itachi tugs lightly on his mother’s sleeve. She looks down at him in question.
“Who is that?” he asks her in a whisper, looking toward the lone figure. He keeps his voice low as to not disrupt the ceremony.
Mikoto follows his gaze. Her face softens when her eyes land on the boy, sympathy in the set of her eyebrows and the curve of her mouth.
“Kakashi Hatake,” she tells him. “Obito was his soulmate.”
Obito Uchiha is the one whose funeral rites are being performed now. Christened a war hero at only twelve, there is no body to burn on the pyre.
Itachi looks back at the older boy—Obito’s soulmate. Even from so far away, Itachi can see that his visible eye is filled with a crushing, uncomprendable sadness.
He wonders about the disapproving looks. The Uchiha Clan’s burning rites are sacred and private—but soulmates are allowed the exception to bear witness. So why is Kakashi Hatake being regarded with such unfriendly eyes, such accusing glares? He turns to ask his mother, but Inabi from his father’s work shoots him a harsh look for talking during the ceremony. He snaps his mouth closed and keeps it that way.
Kakashi only stays for the single service. Then he’s gone.
Itachi doesn’t understand. Life, death—what is the meaning of all of it? Any of it? He stares into the flames and searches for an answer, recalling the sight of the corpse-ridden battlefield. If all life starts and ends the same, then what is the value of it? What is the point?
Early the next day, Itachi throws himself head-first off a cliff. He isn’t quite sure why he does it. He isn’t trying to kill himself—he doesn’t think he’s trying to kill himself. He’s just trying to understand.
It doesn’t matter. The crows save him.
Itachi is five years old when his baby brother is born. He knew it would be a brother, not a sister, and he told his mother so—he’s proven right on the twenty-third of July, when the baby comes out and takes his first wailing breath.
Itachi waits outside the hospital door while the birth takes place, anxious and twisting his fingers. When he’s finally let inside the room, his mother is propped up against the bed. She’s tired-looking, sweat causing her dark hair to stick to her forehead, but she’s smiling down at the bundle of blankets in her arms. So is his father, standing next to her—and the soft expression on his face is one Itachi can’t recall him ever wearing before.
Mikoto looks up at him, frozen in the doorway, and beckons him inside. “Itachi. Come meet your little brother.”
Itachi hesitates. Then he takes small, uncertain steps across the floor. His mother smiles at him in encouragement as he stops next to the bed, looking down at the tiny, wrinkly lifeform in her arms.
His brother.
Itachi’s breath catches. He can’t tear his eyes away.
“Here,” Mikoto says. “Why don’t you hold him?”
Itachi feels his eyes widen. She leans forward slightly to pass the bundle of blankets to him. Slowly, carefully, she guides his hands to the proper places and the weight settles in his arms. He stares down, transfixed.
Dark eyes, identical to his own, peer up at him from a small face. And Itachi is abruptly aware that he’s holding the whole world in his hands.
One glance—that’s all it takes for this baby in front of him to become his entire world. He’s lived in a world of gray his entire life, and suddenly it’s as if his entire view shifts. Everything bursts into bright color. He feels as if he can finally see the world as everyone else around him seems to see it—as something beautiful.
Fugaku’s hand settles on Itachi’s shoulder, though Itachi barely registers it. “Did you decide on the name?” he asks his wife.
“Sasuke,” Mikoto says, smiling. “His name is Sasuke.”
Sasuke, Itachi thinks, and the name instantly engraves itself into his soul.
The newborn baby reaches up and yanks on Itachi’s hair. The five-year-old hisses slightly, more in surprise than pain, but then he smiles. He untangled the tiny fist from his hair, offering up one of his fingers instead. The baby immediately grasps it, pulling it into his mouth, and Itachi’s heart feels so full that it could burst.
For the first time, it feels like his life has a meaning to it. He has a reason to pull air into his lungs each morning.
I promise, Itachi vows, holding his baby brother tightly against his chest, I’ll protect you no matter what.
From that day forward, it feels as if his life splits up into two different parts—the days before Sasuke and the days after Sasuke. He doesn’t like to think about those first five years without his brother, and sometimes they’re impossible for him to even grasp. Because Sasuke is his life, and he can’t imagine how he even existed before he was there.
Being an older brother brings a purpose to Itachi’s life. It makes him feel, for the very first time, that his singular life has value. That he matters.
He has a reason to exist now—to protect his little brother.
This world is a cruel, vicious place. Itachi realized this at for years old, when he was forced to stand on a battlefield and burn blood and death into his mind forever. He realized this when his mother showed him her soulmark that day in the kitchen, a deep sadness in her eyes.
This world is beautiful. But also cruel. It will try to break Sasuke from the moment he enters it, it will try to stain him in blood—but Itachi won’t let it. He won’t let it.
His parents are so often busy. His father is head of the clan and captain of the police force, and his mother is hardly there just to hang off his arm; she, like him, also has her duties. Itachi understands this, has been preparing since birth to someday take Fugaku’s place—but he still can’t help thinking his parents’ priorities are in the wrong place sometimes.
Sasuke deserves to be put first, before everything. But Itachi is the perfect son, the perfect heir, the perfect shinobi—so he keeps these opinions to himself.
If they won’t put Sasuke first, then Itachi will. He always will.
He begins attending the Academy that same year. He was excited before he started, but once entering he ends up finding the classes disappointing. Most of the curriculum the instructors are teaching are things Itachi already knows, and he feels ostracized from the start. He’s smarter than all of his classmates, too smart, and despite the fact that Itachi barely speaks to them, they all seem to despise him.
Well, except the girls. They won’t leave him alone. They keep invading his space and blushing—asking him who his soulmate is, as if he’s supposed to know.
Don’t they know how soulmates work?
The best part of his day is when he’s finally allowed to rush back home—back to his brother. His mother is usually preparing dinner by then. His father arrives home from work in the evenings, but sometimes he’ll be back early; on those days, if he doesn’t look too tired or too stressed, Itachi will ask Fugaku to teach him a new jutsu.
Life, for a very short while, is good. The war is over. The village is at peace. Minato Namikaze is nominated as the Fourth Hokage, and his parents actually seem optimistic about the change in leadership.
Itachi doesn’t think much on soulmates anymore. He still doesn’t think he has one—but he has Sasuke now, and he doesn’t need anything else.
Sasuke is a warm, reassuring weight in his arms. Itachi sits on the porch steps, the full moon in the sky casting its glow over the compound. He stares down at the sleeping bundle of blankets, rocking the baby in a practiced fashion, and wonders about his parents.
It's late. They said they would be back by now. Why aren’t they?
All of a sudden, a dark, ominous chill seems to fall over the air. A heavy, suffocating feeling, and Itachi straightens, every part of his body on alert. Sasuke senses it, too—he wakes up and begins instantly crying, fat tears rolling down his cheeks.
The sudden distress seems to come without reason. But Itachi knows better.
This feeling… it's…
Itachi rocks his brother back and forth, putting on a fake smile and attempting to silence his wailing. “Shh… it’s okay, Sasuke… it’s okay… I’ll protect you…”
A deafening roar splits the night. That’s the only warning Itachi receives, as suddenly parts of the compound go flying through the air. A gigantic orange tail slashes through the night air, crushing buildings and trees and people.
And then everyone is screaming.
It’s complete chaos. The screams ring in Itachi’s ears, cutting through his brain like razor blades. Everyone is running, trampling over each other in their fear and panic, and there are bodies and debris and blood—the ground is shaking—
Itachi’s breath is coming too quickly. His chest is tight. But a piece of someone’s ceiling comes flying toward him, snapping him out of it. He clutches his baby brother to his chest, throwing himself forward and using his own body as a shield.
“You’re okay,” Itachi says reassuringly, looking down at his brother. “You’re okay. I know that was a little scary…”
His knees are scraped and bleeding. He ignores the pain. He bundles his brother up in his arms, shielding him, as he stumbles back to his feet and begins to run.
People are fleeing in every direction—shoving against him and nearly knocking him to the ground. Sharp pieces of gravel cut into his palms, his nails white-knuckling the blanket Sasuke is wrapped in. His brother is screaming in his ear, and Itachi’s heart is pounding in his chest.
It's so hard to think. Everything around him is breaking.
Safe, Itachi thinks desperately, tasting his own panic in the back of his throat. Have to get him safe, have to get him safe…
Where are his parents?
He shoves through the chaos and rushes down the street, in the opposite direction of the destruction. He almost doesn’t catch the faint crying amidst all the noise—but something about it sticks out. It’s coming from one of the alleyways he passes.
It’s a young girl with dark hair. She’s clinging to the wall as the world falls apart around her, sobbing out her mother’s name. But she’s completely alone.
Itachi hesitates. Though everything in him is screaming at him to get Sasuke to safety, he can’t bring himself to leave this girl to die.
“Hey!” he calls out.
Her head snaps in his direction, eyes wide. “Itachi-kun?”
Itachi’s startled to find that he recognizes her. She’s one of the girls from his Academy classes—Izumi Uchiha. He hasn’t spoken to her much at all, though he’s seen her watching him quietly sometimes.
His heart fills with urgency. Keeping a tight hold of his brother with one arm he reaches the other out toward her. “Come with me! Hurry!”
She almost doesn’t make it. He grips her hand and yanks her forward, saving her life a mere second before she’s crushed by debris as the building is hit and crumbles. She clings to him fiercely, fists twisted up in his shirt and body shaking.
“Itachi-kun…”
“Stay with me,” Itachi tells her. “You’ll be safe. I’ll get us out of here.”
He feels her grip on his shirt tighten.
Finally, through all the chaos, he manages to find his father. The man is in his police captain uniform, standing strong and authoritive amidst the storm as he directs people to the shelter. Itachi follows his directions, and once they’re safe inside, Izumi finds her grandmother. He leaves the two of them together.
Then, he curls up with his brother in an empty corner of the room—shaking and shaking and shaking. He clings to Sasuke like a lifeline, refuses to let anyone close. Fear still surges in his veins, tastes like blood in the back of his throat.
“You’re safe,” he whispers, pressing Sasuke to his chest and rocking him. “You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe…”
Konoha is saved. But the price was too high, too devastating, and no one is celebrating.
The casualties from the Nine-Tails’ attack are numerous. The numbers reach into the triple digits. But no loss is as crushing as that of the Fourth Hokage—the man who sacrificed his own life to seal the beast away and save the village.
Konoha’s entire population comes together to mourn him. The funeral rites are different than the ones for the Uchiha Clan, the body lowered into the earth rather than burned.
Minato Namikaze is buried beside his wife. For the next month, Itachi listens to his mother cry herself to sleep. The skin at her left wrist has turned a horrible gray.