The Remnants

A pair of red eyes glared mirthlessly into the mist with maniacal laughter resounding through the haze, refusing to cease. Out of the shadows sprung a wolf with mussed, dingy black fur caressing its skin as protection from the bitter cold. The crescent moon fumbled its way from behind a cumulous cloud, emanating a pale but fierce reflection of the sun's light. The wolf howled longingly to the moon, receiving no response to its embittered call. A single paw reached up, clawing hopelessly into the stoic and unrelenting air, refusing to allow this instance to come to pass. But it already had.

Sakura was coming back from a relaxing walk through the woods when she first encountered it, sitting there with a single broken paw and refusing to show its pain. It was a wolf, perhaps the same one that had been calling to the moon last night, the same one that had woken her from her nightmare. She glanced apologetically at the wolf, knowing that it wouldn't be right to heal the wounded animal. It was more proper to allow nature to take its course. So Sakura shook off her guilt and finished her walk home o get back to bed, for it was an hour or so past midnight and she had an important meeting the following day.

When Sakura woke up the next day, it was after no ill-mannered dreams, and she was pleased immensely. However, she had woken before her alarm, which was an abnormality for her everyday life, and she wondered what had caused her transference from the world of sleep to that of the waking. Sakura decided to just get ready for the events of that day and headed to the bathroom to do so.

She came out fully dressed and toweling dry her hair only to suddenly stop moving as she heard a scratching coming from somewhere near. Sakura absentmindedly dropped the towel that had been drying her hair and walked down the stairs, fearing that a rat would scuttle out from beneath one of her chairs. When the scratching continued, she located the source, and walked towards her window to see the face of the wolf she had seen earlier staring at her with its hurt paw flailing toward the window, reinventing the scratching noise.

"Oh, it's just you," Sakura said aloud to herself. "I was afraid that you were one of those vermin that infest Naruto's house."

Sakura sighed, knowing that she couldn't just leave the poor mammal out there without food or any way of getting any. She was too kindhearted to leave empty the begging hand of a child, so how could she refuse the wolf help when it was so persistent?

A flawless young hand with milky white skin undid the latch of the window and hoisted the rather heavy animal through the opening, careful to keep it from scratching wayward screws. The same hand put the animal down in Sakura's lap and held up the wolf's front right paw for examination.

"What did you do, put your paw through a paper shredder?! This is one messed-up paw, little mister!" Sakura said to the wolf, as if it could comprehend her speech. The wolf simply stared back at Sakura patiently, waiting for her to heal its paw. So Sakura gathered up chakra into her hands and slowly mended the torn flesh and ligaments. When she was done, she felt awed that this wolf hadn't cried out once when she was prodding its paw, for it surely would have hurt with all of the things that had previously been wrong with it.

"Well, you're all done now, you're free to go!" Sakura said cheerfully. "You know, you're better than most of my patients— many of them complain or say some perverted comment, but you didn't even whimper once! I think you're okay, little guy!"

The wolf snarled when Sakura said 'little guy' and she responded with a laugh.

"What's the matter, you don't like being called 'little guy'?" she asked the wolf, and to her surprise, the wolf nodded. "Do you have a name that you prefer?" she asked, raising a pink eyebrow. The wolf nodded a second time and placed its head in her lap. Sakura could tell that the wolf wanted to stay and she supposed that there would be no harm in letting it do so.

"Okay, I'll tell you what, if you can tell me what you would like to be called, I'll let you stay here with me. Is it a deal?" Sakura questioned and then felt silly. She had probably just been mistaking common head movement for nodding and the wolf in front of her was probably the average wolf, which meant that it was dangerous.

But to her surprise again, the wolf leapt up and bounded up her stairs and into her room to where her computer sat. The wolf glanced at the keyboard and then at Sakura, silently letting her know that it would type out the name.

The wolf's wet nose glided first to the 'I,' pushing it down in confirmation of its validity. Then the wolf pushed in the 'T,' followed in quicker succession by the 'A,' the 'C,' the 'H,' and then the 'I,' again. For the finale, the wolf hit enter, saying that he was done entering his name, for its organs surely proved it male.

"Itachi," Sakura said, trying the name out. Then she said more frantically, "Itachi!"

Her face portrayed a myriad of emotions ranging from fear to sadness and one could almost see her mind whirr as it singled out one question from the innumerable others flowing incessantly through her head.

"You aren't by chance, the Itachi? Uchiha Itachi?" the wolf stared blankly at Sakura for a moment.

"Oh, of course you aren't, I must be going insane. It's just that Uchiha Itachi has gone missing recently, it's all over the underground news that even his partner, Hoshigaki Kisame, doesn't know his whereabouts. You couldn't possibly be him," Sakura finished, easing herself out of her previous frantic alert.

However, said frantic alert returned when the wolf typed a single sentence onto the keyboard, his typing skills getting better with each character typed.

'I am Uchiha Itachi.'

A/N: Well, this is my first fanfic under this pen name, and I hope you like it so far. Feel free to flame if you would like, as criticism is always helpful to the aspiring writer. Thank you for reading this.