Chapter Text
Hinata had checked on Sasuke — physically visiting and speaking with him, that is, not stalking him from across the village — exactly once in the month-long span between the Massacre and her ascension to Hyūga clan head. He’d flinched from her — flinched in instinctive, atavistic fear, the sort Hinata well recognized, the same way he’d flinched on the night itself when Hinata in her bloodied ANBU armor had found him weeping over the bodies of his parents. And although she’d worn civilian clothes for her one visit, he had flinched from her then, too.
“I won’t intrude again,” Hinata had said (blankly, unable to summon any more suitable expression).
“Fuck off,” Sasuke had said, equally blank.
“If you ever need me, just ask. You know where to find me,” Hinata’d told him, and then fucked off as requested.
Some weeks later she became the Hyūga clan head, and was abruptly far, far too busy to bother Sasuke where she wasn’t wanted. Once, Itachi (sleep-deprived and wild-eyed, but still with an intact hitai-ate) had extracted a promise from her that she’d keep Sasuke safe; she checked on him from a distance, like an anxious habit, in dull village council meetings and while doing equally dull administrative tasks, and when he eventually graduated from the Academy (he was good for an Academy student, but only that) she threatened Taichō into teaching him and his team properly. (Not that Team Seven would necessarily have thanked Hinata for this, had they known. Taichō’s training style was influenced more by junior ANBU training than anything else.)
Hinata herself had, to her great resentment, also been forced to dial back her ANBU involvement. Even though she delegated absolutely everything possible to Neji, or Neji’s mother Chiharu, or the rest of her freshly appointed Hyūga clan council, there simply wasn’t the time for her to go on monthslong infiltrations anymore.
Instead, she was predominantly assigned to briefer (and necessarily higher-profile) missions. Hinata was too busy by then to worry about her reputation outside the village, but without her knowledge it was becoming quite formidable.
Itachi spent a great deal of time alone with his thoughts, these days. Watch shifts, trading off with whatever incompetent teammate Akatsuki had lately seen fit to inflict upon him. Observing his various targets, lurking in shadows and under genjutsu. Waiting for the elusive animal of sleep to find him, his failing body frightening it away. Alone with his thoughts was as pleasant a state of being as anything Itachi felt he might reasonably hope for; he indulged himself in impossible dreams and fanciful hypotheticals. As long as Itachi was quite strict with himself and remembered always that such pleasant eventualities could never truly come to pass, it was harmless enough, was it not?
One frequent subject of such contemplation was the nature of redemption. Even in the realm of fantasy he shied from the thought of Sasuke’s forgiveness — which, after all, would destroy his last desperate plan to keep Sasuke safe, and therefore Itachi’s other feelings on the matter were irrelevant. Safer all around to while away the hours wondering what might possibly convince or induce Hinata (his teammate, his dearest friend) to consider his betrayal repaid.
Hinata did not forgive easily, if at all, and Itachi’s betrayal had been — no minor slight. Thus the gesture of apology would need to be equally grand; although at first Itachi had little better than a hazy idea what might possibly suffice, nonetheless he imagined in great detail the suspicious look on Hinata’s face relaxing, replaced by irritated acceptance. She had always been given to physical affection, and Itachi would have given nearly anything to trade the ache in his joints for the bruising of one of her affectionate, too-hard punches.
It took Itachi a surprisingly long time to meet Orochimaru face-to-face.
He hadn’t been aware, prior to joining Akatsuki, that the Snake Sannin was also a member — it had been a bit of an unpleasant shock, that first meeting, to see the Otokage’s ghostly, faintly rainbowed hologram. He’d remained silent — he’d been wary of misstepping — while Jūzō lectured Orochimaru for trying to poach his mission partner.
However, neither Itachi nor Orochimaru had been physically present for the encounter; Akatsuki’s group meetings were all conducted virtually, via the rings (privately, Itachi suspected this was to reduce the risk of them all killing each other). Really, he rarely found himself in Akatsuki’s Amegakure hideaway, and neither did Orochimaru — if anything Orochimaru was there less; being the Otokage was presumably a major time commitment.
Which gave Itachi time to consider what he would do, should he ever encounter the figure who had haunted his best friend’s nightmares. How he might kill Orochimaru permanently, which of course was what he must do. (Otherwise, on the off chance he ever got the chance to beg for Hinata’s forgiveness in the future, what would he say — “I had a chance to kill Orochimaru, but I didn’t, because we were coworkers at the time and it would have been awkward”? If he asked her to give him a task as a test of loyalty, quite likely it would be killing Orochimaru; perhaps if he did it preemptively it might even help his case?)
The sticking point was — permanently.
Orochimaru was twisted and clever, and perhaps the most prolific shinobi researcher Konoha had ever seen, and cheating death was one of his primary obsessions. Itachi couldn’t rightly face Hinata, having set himself the task of killing Orochimaru to prove himself to her, if Orochimaru then came back. Thoroughness was paramount.
Itachi warped a proprietary Uchiha jutsu for tracking perpetrators of bloodline theft and turned it to the task of locating any possible reservoir of Orochimaru’s genetic material, which an enterprising biological specialist might use to make a clone. Unsurprisingly, there were many of these; most were scattered around the various Oto bases, but there were also several caches in surprisingly far-flung locations. In the course of his Akatsuki missions, he systematically eliminated them, taking care to ensure there was no outward sign of disturbance that might alert Orochimaru.
On one of these trips, he found a laboratory where several test subjects were dying, fatally injured by the experimental cursed seals that had been applied to them. He wasn’t a fūinjutsu expert, but he used the Sharingan to memorize the similarities and differences, as well as whatever likely-looking notes he could find. Then he broke into ruined Uzushiogakure, discovered the entire place was sealed up tight by elaborate fūinjutsu that required an Uzumaki bloodline to open, developed another variation on the bloodline-theft tracker jutsu to look for the scattered remnants of the Uzumaki clan, and accidentally discovered Leader-sama’s actual body wasting away in a cave in Ame some miles away from any other living being.
Itachi left him alone: Leader-sama’s medical affairs bore no real relationship to the task at hand. Conveniently, on his next Oto base infiltration Itachi encountered an Uzumaki named Karin, who he was able to kidnap and then induce to unlock the Uzushio fūinjutsu archives. (And then lock them up again after he’d used the Sharingan to memorize everything. The stasis fūinjutsu on the archives was a true work of art and had kept the scrolls amazingly well-preserved, and he wasn’t a monster.)
He’d been contemplating killing Uzumaki-san to keep her from spilling anything to Orochimaru, but had fortunately checked first if she had an intact, successful cursed seal — which she did. It would be best, he decided, to have a convenient test subject in his attempts to ascertain whether Orochimaru had left a substantially complete chakra impression of himself in the seals, and if so, to find a way to remove them.
Uzumaki-san was amenable to this, particularly as an alternative to dying. She wasn’t a fūinjutsu expert either, but she was no slouch as a biologist and had much more familiarity with the seal in question than Itachi had. She also had more free time to work on the problem, trapped as she was in a run-down hut in the vast Wind backcountry with her chakra sealed and inside three layers of Uzushio’s finest prisoner-containment seals.
(He didn’t ask about the bite marks on her arms, nor did she volunteer an explanation.)
Itachi knew that the most highly-regarded fūinjutsu experts in Konoha had tried and failed to remove the cursed seal; he didn’t expect to have much more success. And, indeed, they didn’t make much progress via conventional fūinjutsu methods — but the mechanism keeping the chakra imprint of Orochimaru contained was not unlike Uzushio’s jinchūriki seal, and Itachi had read old Uchiha clan records indicating that the Sword of Totsuka had been able to extract and seal tailed beasts (temporarily; over a period of decades the beast would naturally reform somewhere in the outside world, just as with any other attempt to seal one in a non-human container), and, well, it didn’t hurt to try.
(By long tradition, the Uchiha clan heir received the Sword of Totsuka as soon as they had achieved a three-tomoe Sharingan in both eyes. Itachi probably ought to have left it with Sasuke; to be perfectly honest, though, he hadn’t remembered until it was already too late.)
As it turned out, the chakra imprint was the key. Once Orochimaru’s imprint had been sealed within the sword, the other tamper-proofing mechanisms in Uzumaki-san’s cursed seal disintegrated, making it trivially removable.
Uzumaki-san stared at her unmarred skin and burst into tears. Itachi, attempting to be polite, did his best to fade into the background.
“…I can’t believe it worked,” she said to him later, then fell uncharacteristically silent, though her body language and subvocalizations indicated she had something more to say.
“Mn?” Itachi prompted.
Uzumaki-san jumped. “What are you going to do with me now?” she blurted.
That was… actually a good question. Itachi didn’t really want to kill her unless he had to. Perhaps she’d like to help with some other aspects of his project?
“The rest of the cursed seals will also need to be removed,” he said. “I’d appreciate your assistance.”
“And if I don’t?” she probed.
“Hm.” Itachi paused. “You will have to remain here until I’ve ensured Orochimaru is eliminated. Or, if you prefer, I can kill you.”
“What the fuck,” Uzumaki-san muttered (Itachi politely ignored this). “You’re going to kill Orochimaru?”
“It will not be sufficient to kill him once. I am going to eliminate him entirely, by destroying any mechanism which he might use to return to existence. To do any less would be… unforgivably sloppy.” He trailed off there, thinking about Hinata, glaring at a senbon in a tree embedded very slightly wide of the mark; she always valued both thoroughness and precision, and this had to be the absolute best work of Itachi’s life.
“Why? I mean, not why is it sloppy” — Uzumaki-san waved a hand — “I get that, but why are you doing it in the first place?”
Itachi thought again about just killing her. Instead what fell out of his mouth was, “I used to have a friend.”
He paused. Did he mind if Uzumaki-san knew — in the vaguest possible way — about his true feelings for Hinata? He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he wanted someone to know him — some aspect that was not a part of his Akatsuki deep cover — but there had until now been nobody to tell without it getting back to Leader-sama or to Madara. And Uzumaki-san already, unavoidably, knew a lot about his plans.
“I used to have a friend,” he repeated. “Most likely I’ll never see her again. I’m doing this for her.”
“A friend in Konoha?” Uzumaki-san asked sharply — agitated, invested. “Who has something against Orochimaru — personally?”
Itachi narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Is that relevant?”
Uzumaki-san said, “I came to Otogakure really young — I grew up there, after my mom died.” Again, how is this relevant, Itachi wondered. “And I used to have a friend who was a Hyūga. Byakugan and everything.”
All of his annoyance at the non-sequitur completely dissipated. Itachi knew next to nothing about Hinata’s pre-Konoha life, despite his best efforts — she never talked about it, and refused to answer questions. If Uzumaki-san had actually known her… and Itachi hadn’t mentioned his friend was Hinata, either. Just that she was a female Konoha-nin with a grudge against Orochimaru, which — a more likely guess would have been Mitarashi Anko. Konoha had gone to some effort to conceal that Hinata had come to them from Oto. It was not impossible that Uzumaki-san was a very well-informed liar making up a story to keep Itachi from killing her, but Itachi decided to provisionally assume she was telling the truth.
“My friend — I helped her get out,” Uzumaki-san continued. “She would have been — six or seven, probably. She said she was heading for Konoha. I always figured I’d never see her again, but Uchiha-san, now I’m wondering if your friend and my friend are the same person.”
A very, very well-informed liar — or. Or, much more likely, Itachi had kidnapped a friend of Hinata’s, nearly killed her, and then trapped her in a cabin in Wind for six months doing fūinjutsu research. Fuck.
“The details match,” he said, “as does the timeline. If your suspicion holds — I must thank you for helping Hinata-san escape.”
“Does that mean you’ll let me out,” Uzumaki-san said flatly.
Itachi sighed, and started undoing the fūinjutsu barriers.
Behind him Uzumaki-san said, “I guess if you’re doing this for — hm, I can’t very well call her 279 anymore. If you’re doing this for our mutual friend then I should fix your lungs so you don’t die.”
On the one hand: Orochimaru was dead now, and the body burned. His reserved materials for cloning had been eliminated. The cursed seals had been removed from everyone in Otogakure, with the Nidaime Otokage’s very generous assistance, and Itachi had adjusted his Uchiha tracker jutsu yet again to detect the chakra imprint of Orochimaru that lay in every cursed seal, so he continued to remove cursed seals from non-Oto shinobi as he found them. (He’d even happened across Mitarashi Anko, and put her under with Tsukuyomi to remove her seal.) He knew Hinata hated her own cursed seal, and was pleased that he could now remove it for her, in addition to presenting her with the proof of Orochimaru’s elimination.
On the other hand: Hinata very well might not forgive what had happened with Uzumaki-san.
But like he’d already said to Uzumaki-san — he would in all probability never see Hinata again, and even if he did, her forgiveness had already been an unlikely outcome. Perhaps it was all academic.
…It was unlikely to help his case that Akatsuki continued to attack Konoha-nin.
Itachi wondered if something could be done about that, nearly repressed the thought on instinct — then paused. His quest to fully eradicate Orochimaru had been really quite smooth; none of the negative consequences Itachi had feared (endangering his position in Akatsuki — Uchiha Madara deciding Itachi had gone back on his word — endangering Sasuke) had come to pass.
Orochimaru had been only a man, not an unkillable god. Leader-sama was only a man — and not one in particularly good health. Madara-sama; Shimura Danzō; the Hokage himself, even… it was like a figure-ground inversion, and left Itachi dizzy where he stood. These men, who he had previously considered to be immutable constraints on his solution space, were mortal like any other. And then, the previously unthinkable thought: if they proved to be obstacles, they could be eliminated.
Something in Itachi snapped. New vistas of possibility unfolded before him. He could, if he wished, form a plan, walk into Konoha, and slit the Sandaime Hokage’s throat. He was capable of it, physically. It was an available solution component.
It would of course constitute an unforgivable betrayal of the village, which was something that mattered less to Itachi than it once had.
Itachi didn’t end up killing the Sandaime Hokage, mostly because he felt that Hinata would not have approved. He eliminated Zetsu, and Uchiha Obito who called himself Madara, and almost did the same to Leader-sama (having already found his real body, gravely ill), but at the last moment Konan had tried desperately to stop him (a bad matchup for her, given Amaterasu) and bargained him down. The two of them had retired to the Ame countryside, and Itachi had after some thought referred Nagato to Otogakure’s medics, and then, as easily as that, he was the leader of Akatsuki. (And of Ame — either of which was a full-time job on its own; he nigh-immediately combined the two organizational structures, mostly out of desperation.)
Next he turned his attention to the Yondaime Mizukage: another of Obito/Madara’s schemes. Itachi allied Akatsuki with Momochi Zabuza’s mongrel band of Kiri missing-nin, then methodically took the Kiri regime apart, and wished Kisame the best of luck as the Godaime Mizukage. As a Kiri-nin Kisame had been well-liked; various and sundry Kiri missing-nin, including most of the missing Seven Swordsmen, trickled into the village when they heard he’d taken the hat.
After that, Akatsuki was down to – in addition to Itachi himself – Hidan, Kakuzu, and Sasori. And an (annoyingly loud) Iwa missing-nin named Deidara who Sasori had recruited. Itachi was still pondering what to do about Shimura Danzō when Konoha made its first diplomatic overtures: the village proposed a non-aggression pact to be followed by a trade deal, to be hammered out by a small group of negotiators, led by a young Nara jōnin whom Itachi had never met.
It was a better opening than anything Itachi had planned for.