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Oh, you poor, pretty little boy. Pretty little boy, crying over your lover’s lifeless husk. Never did I mean to break your heart; tripped and fell on it when you broke mine.
“You’re too old for me,” your eyes said, a fleeting flash of red betraying your body’s fear response at my advances. And then, I knew what I needed for your eyes to hold mine in a different light. And I took it, prepared to die trying.As I watched you, snot and tears and drool forming one string of sorrow down your chin, into your collar and all over your shaking, white knuckles, half my vision the same crimson as that dead boy’s empty sockets, I finally saw what had made Shisui Uchiha truly privileged: the being of you, bathed in the colour of a thousand sunsets.
And there you are. I close my diary and bury it in my sleeve pocket, because if you’d get your hands on it, you’d read it out loud as you evade my hands all over my yard in your cheeky habit of teasing me for foreplay. A side of you no one else gets to see, not even Shisui: because I know you’re afraid of me, and being goofy is how you hide that from me, and, most of all, from yourself. You’ve been doing that so well it’s become the genuine you-around-me.I don’t think you’re in the mood for that tonight, are you? You poor, pretty little boy, drenched in another kind of red. Strands of hair caught in your arm guards, someone else’s blood clinging to your lips and lids. Your own lips wrapped around your thumb, because why else would your mouth still be as pointy as a toddler’s if not for this secret habit of yours? But you need to get up, get out, get away – officially before I find you, but it’s too late for that.“Itachi.”You can’t hear me, bawling like that. Sasuke has been taken to the hospital, the Anbu are done clearing the dead, but they missed one. Your soul has left your body when your mother’s hit the floor. The shaking, blubbering child curled up in his parents’ blood is a dumb sack of emotional incontinence, beneath even most animals who know better than to broadcast their vulnerability. The hopelessness, the lack of conscious thought in you, is different from when you mourned Shisui. You knew you were on your own in the face of impending doom, but you had a home to return to. A mother and father whose shoulder to cry on, or so your inner voice promised even though you knew you’d head straight to your room and bury that pain under a scowl, because neither of them would listen if you did cry. But now, even that false promise of comfort is gone, and the true love of your life is going to wake up soon, in a hospital gown and choking on hatred. Can’t let them find Itachi like this. We need a monster to take the fall, not a hysterical child. I scoop him up and fling him over my shoulder, and finally, that thumb leaves his mouth. He won’t be getting braces where he’s going, so the sooner he unlearns this, the better. The stench of blood envelopes me as my clothes get hot and wet down to my waist. Was he injured in his rampage and didn’t notice? No, this doesn’t smell of blood.“No worries, boy,” I whisper as I carry him off. “I’ll fetch you a clean pair of trousers.”In the pandemonium of cries, stench, wetness and death, I missed Itachi’s sudden silence. His chest rises and falls against my shoulder, his breath rattling. No tears left to cry after peeing himself to boot, I guess, or maybe his voice just needs a lifetime’s respite from bawling like a teething baby. Did I break Konoha’s most promising shinobi? Does it matter, since he’ll be leaving forever tonight and only return as a severed head? That pretty head, eyes dead if even present, nothing to remind of the person that inhabited it. Wouldn’t that be the most wasteful act in all of human history?Itachi flops over again and I pull him up again, and he sputters and coughs up bath water, again. Maybe he should swallow some of that, rehydrate. One hand around the nape of his neck to keep him in line, I scrub him down with the other as I used to when we were still able to tell ourselves that maybe, somehow, tonight could be prevented. His puffy, glazed eyes search the room. Is he coming to his senses, after years of grooming, and about to jump me? Itachi’s and Shisui’s Sharingan meet, and some tone returns to his muscles. He gathers his legs under him to sit up and turn towards me, his gaze searching mine for some thought, any thought, to gift his empty head. Itachi Uchiha’s head cannot be empty. His tiny hands reach out and feel my face as if he were blind.“You’re no threat to anyone right now, are you,” I say.Itachi blinks his Sharingan away and stares intently at mine, something resembling hope returning to his deep, black orbs. “Doesn’t looking at this only make things worse for-”The boy shakes his head and interlocks his fingers in the back of my neck to wrap his gaze around Shisui’s eye. As I look at Itachi from his dead lover’s eye, my skin begins to crawl. Goosebumps rise and blood pools where it shouldn’t, but where it always has whenever my thoughts got too close to this child. What had started as the idea of grooming him to sic him on his family, took on a life of its own when his father all but volunteered to do the job for me by failing to hide that he’s trying to turn Itachi into his personal attack dog.
More and more alienated from his clan, Itachi’s nights with Shisui were gradually replaced by nights with me, away from the compound and prying eyes, because one day, he and Shisui had to learn of their brethren gossiping about having caught them in the act as far back as Itachi’s graduation. Tuns out Shisui, too, just couldn’t help himself around the magical charm of this creature, and soon, his hands would wander all over that velvety skin.
Itachi seems content as long as someone, anyone, fills the void inside of him with their flesh. Shisui holding a special place in his heart changed nothing, and this freshly scrubbed runt is already filthier than his trousers in my laundry basket.When has your face gotten this close to mine, boy? I can smell his breath, taste it, that cold, empty smell that comes from a stomach empty safe for whatever he takes to stay sane. I fished him out of the bath a while ago, towelled him off, and somehow, for some reason, not cut his throat as I’d planned. That throat he presents whenever I take him, leans into having it grabbed and crushed, as if he wants me to end it. I pull the lapel of my bathrobe tighter over his chest so he doesn’t catch a cold. He needs to die. What do I do with you, boy?Chapped, dry lips brush mine as Itachi keeps searching my face for something neither of us have time for tonight, or ever again. His focus keeps returning to my right eye as he tries to reconstruct his lover from there. I want to fuck Itachi till he bleeds. Or so, I scribbled at the side of many a page in my diary which I seal religiously after each use, imagining my hands around his tiny waist, thumbs touching in the small of his back. The runt unable to even cry, overwhelmed by what his body is going through. A dumb sack of emotional incontinence is exactly what I want him to be, in bed anyway, or wherever else I’ve taken him over the years. What started with his father bribing me to recruit Itachi into the Anbu, became Itachi’s favourite form of self-harm. Because he wasn’t doing this to himself, he dumped that guilt on me.Maybe that’s why he’s arching into me now, get me to hurt him and maybe, if I’m feeling generous, spill his entrails all over my sheets. He needs to die. The heart I didn’t know I had breaks, but Itachi Uchiha needs to die.“Do you remember our deal that I’ll ensure Sasuke’s safety in exchange for your service?”Itachi nods.“Would you trust me to uphold it even without you around?”His eyes widen with a hint of fear, but whom for? Finally, he flutters his lashes and the weight of that forces his tired head to nod again. He crawls onto my lap and wraps his arms tightly around my neck, pressing his hip against my groin to beg for some final semblance of warmth. He could do this all day, because he’s a passive sleeve of flesh. Me? I’m old, boy. I walk with a cane. And yet, I somehow find myself buried in his body once more.The clock strikes midnight and my cock’s gone soft inside Itachi. He’s still tightly wrapped around it, soft and hot and moist, and about to nod off. Took him long enough. I imagine that after a night like this, one would either pass out half-dead or never find a moment’s sleep again. I pull the plastic bag out of my sleeve pocket and feel his eyelash brush against me neck as he studies the object.“I’m sorry, boy, but there’s too much of my DNA on and in you, and if they find you dead after you just slaughtered Konoha’s mightiest clan unhindered, there will be a thorough autopsy. I’ll have to make you disappear with as little of a mess as possible, so I’m afraid I can’t just cut your throat.”Itachi sighs and leans against my chest, still warming my cock. Bag in hand, I’m assaulted by mental images of this pretty little boy’s face in there, eyes wide past pretty, his gaping mouth sucking in more plastic to seal his throat, limbs thrashing, fingers clawing at anything at all, bowels spilling. Messy and undignified. I let go of the bag and lift Itachi off my lap to lay him out on the floor. Does he care about anything I do?Itachi curls up on the tatami and gathers his hair into the bathrobe as I head to the supply closet. What a considerate boy, trying not to get his DNA caught in my flooring. Rummage all I want, though, I can’t seem to find a canvas his size. Wanted to put him to sleep using Genjutsu, then smother him with a pillow and catch whatever little spillage that produced on a plastic sheet I’d then roll the whole boy up in, but lo and behold: Danzo Shimura is unprepared. Has the thought of tonight distracted even me?Returning to the bedroom, I find Itachi getting dressed in his spare uniform I’d prepared as I expected him to soil himself at some point and couldn’t have him look like a scared child – a victim – if caught. He fastens the clutches of his flak jacket as if this is just another mission, and in a way, it is: he can’t be found dead in a bathrobe, can he? But with all his cooperation in his own execution, all I’m seeing now is red. His heart irreparably broken and his soul dissolved in his mother’s blood, the only Itachi left is that arrogant, aloof shithead who was praised too much and disciplined too little. Cool and collected, he pulls his ponytail out of the popped collar and smooths his fringe over his headband. He shoots me a glance, then slips into his combat boots. My fist shakes his glacial facade for a split second, but he quickly finds his footing and wipes the blood off his lip. This is a good thing. This boy right here, this shinobi, is the Itachi Uchiha I wanted to sell. The one who attacked his tired commander in his own home, after the blood of his family failed to quench his thirst. But blessed with skills unknown to the public, said commander got the upper hand and, at great risk to his own life, vanquished the demon.What a demon. His eyes are still large and soft and pure, and he thinks nothing of me watching his every step towards the window. Clever boy. If he were to lose his footing, he’d plummet to his death at the bottom of Hokage Rock. Crouching in the window sill, he throws me that look. That knowing look that says, “You did this to me and I let you”. He searches my face again and I grant him one last pleasure, a look from Shisui’s eye, and he drinks it in, welcomes the spell it casts. Shisui’s crimson gaze needs no Kotoamatsukami tonight. Itachi wants to fall like his lover, see what he saw, the starry night sky his soul may or may not ascend to, if there is enough of it left. His breath in my mouth, I wrap my tongue around his one last time before striking him right on that beautiful, smug puss to ensure my DNA is traced to my fist, not my kiss, but muscle memory keeps him perched on that window sill. Swallowing what’s left of my own soul, I deal a blow to his chest that should reverberate in my wrist for years to come. He’s never taken a critical hit in his life; there’s no muscle memory to steady him now.His small body grows smaller and smaller as he falls, when his hand shoots into his back pouch, producing a spool of wire with a grappling hook at the end. Glistening steel zooms past my vision, slicing through my left cheek, and the hook catches my curtain rod. The shriek of spiked soles scarring rock echoes from the stairs leading to the raid shelters. I steal a glance and sure enough, there he runs, barely visible in the thin blue light announcing sunrise. A smirk settles on my face in spite of myself.“Run, you clever boy. Run and taste the wind in your drowning lung, smell the petals that catch in your hair, their dance too slow to clear your path. Run for one more sunrise, run to find the pastries still warm, because you’re not running to win a race: death has caught up long ago, keeping pace, ensuring your failing eyes don’t lose its smile.”I close my diary for the final time. The last page couldn’t hold my thoughts that spilled onto the inside of the back cover. Has it been nine years? Crows are almost done hollowing out their former master’s rib cage. Your eyes have been harvested – figures. That pretty face, the soft cheeks and plump lips, breaking apart between black beaks and talons. There is no space left in this little booklet to jot down the thought carousel of “our time together was too short”. There is no bringing you back now. “I loathe that Shisui got the lion’s share of you”. Torn flesh where I used to bury myself in you; the soft parts of you serving as a point of entry for weak scavengers who will never know the thrill of achievement. “I should have killed him much, much sooner.” Blue nails, scraped and torn as you held on to life as you finally felt it fading. “When he was mine, in my arms to die.” A life that wasn’t close enough to mine as to restore it with Izanagi. Not close enough, no matter what I did, how young you were when I made you mine, how deep your teeth buried into my shoulder as I took you, how much of my skin got stuck under your nails, or how much of my cum your body absorbed, I could never make you mine as deeply as my heart demanded – a symbiote, at the very least. Instead, all I could do was become your parasite, one that was denied its fill and must now watch the crows take what I couldn’t: your heart. Ripped out by two pairs of black talons, the organ is dismantled, and I spill myself where it used to be, wrathful satisfaction at your inability to deny me behind those ribs any longer. “But his heart is gone,” my inner voice of reason whispers smugly. “It evaded you one final time”.