Solipsistic – What it takes to save the Uchiha clan. Naori (Izanami) and Itachi. Reincarnation.

Slight AU.

"You killed nii-san," she says simply.

Itachi stands in front of her under the overhang, half-shadowed by the steady wall of water that runs off the roof. His eyes have a glazed, almost distant quality, and they easily betray his propensity for blood. This person cannot be conscious, or passionate. He is too old to be innocent and too young to be jaded. People like him develop a sort of curtain that shields away any semblance of humanity they have left, and she is skilled at recognizing it and tearing it apart. She will do this now, just as she once did before.

He holds a basket in one hand, and it is filled with tomatoes. A slice of mundane that has no place in the hands of a murderer.

She doesn't expect more than words, but he gives her a shake of his head.

"Who are the tomatoes for?" She asks, looking down at the basket. They glisten like her second brother's blood in the glasslike morning light.

"They are for my brother."

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Irony - incongruity between the actual and expected results of a sequence of events.

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It is not ironic that they named her after herself when she was born, giving their daughter the calling of a once silent legend of the Uchiha clan. But maybe it is slightly so that they wish for her to become a kunoichi.

(Every Uchiha child becomes a shinobi. Their preference is irrelevant.)

When she is four, she sits on the porch of her house after hearing this decision made for her. The streets of the compound are quiet and peaceful. They are no place for someone as used to war and carnage as she is. Absent whimsy overtakes her during these times, but she knows better than to hope as fervently as she once did. Her life was spent changing a single person, and now there are too many.

Two many for one mere set of eyes.

Her brother returns ten minutes later. He is a singular point of awareness in this clan of solipsists, and her first memory in this new time is of him looking down into her cradle with an incorrigible smile.

"Where have you been, nii-san?"

"Itachi's house," Shisui replies cheerfully. She sees that he has long grown used to the absurd levels of intelligence his three-year-old sister shows. Everyone has. Even the absurd becomes commonplace when they see it often enough.

"The anbu boy you met?"

"Yes. I like him, he's interesting. And very skilled, even though he's younger. Come on, I'll show you the shurikenjutsu he taught me." He grins and offers her a hand.

She obliges, holding out her arm and letting him pull her up onto his slender, boyish shoulders. He grips her small legs as he runs laughing into the practice grounds, and she tangles her fingers into his curled hair.

This new brother is better than the old one. Shisui-nii is playful and vibrant, full of life. Like the Kagami-kun she once played with. War has not broken this person, he is almost drenched in peace.

This aspect of it is not confined to him. People are better. This is the first difference she becomes startlingly aware of.

She sits on a log under the achingly peaceful sky, watching Shisui-nii as he somehow manages to hit the centre of the wooden circle repeatedly with his kunai. The metal arcing through forest air is of the same type, but she cannot take his half-playful attempts at shurikenjutsu seriously. Her new brother is merely a child, and those his age in her time were already men and women. Shinobi and kunoichi.

"How was that?" He beams, looking proudly at the three kunai gathered near the centre like wolves fighting over a single prey.

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In the academy a year later, she is the lowest of her class in taijutsu. Not because she cannot fight. It is because she is too used to fighting in a body much larger than her four-year-old form. She is used to fighting her comrade Uchiha Naka with long, deadly arms and legs that were firm with lean muscle. This small body is new to her.

"This is not good," she is told one day.

She sits at the kotatsu and looks at the man she calls 'otou-san'. He is the grandchild of Kagami-kun. Once, he has proudly taught her their family lineage, using wide, spidery tree lines drawn with excruciating detail.

(A solipsist can take pride in other's accomplishments.)

She has listened quietly and declined to tell him she had once played shogi with his ojiisama.

"Why are you performing so poorly?" He asks her in his usual grave voice. "Surely you understand that you must uphold our standards?"

She nods, a quick, sharp motion she has learned from being a silent assassin of the First War. "I understand, otou-san. I will train harder."

He nods in satisfaction.

Outside, the soft rain converges to a thicker stream and beats heavily against the sliding doors. She walks to the bathroom and stands before the clear mirror, looking at the body that is now hers. A child's body that she has been born into, with silky hair cropped to her chin – so different from the stream of black it once was – slightly pudgy fingers, and red, red eyes.

Everything is different but the Uchiha name. Even after centuries of blood, it stands tall and proud amidst the tumultuous discordance that lays beneath the village's calm. She is an Uchiha, and her people are still breathing. The clan has grown into its glory.

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On that day several years later, she is reading in the forest, with her back to a tree firm like an extension of the earth under her legs. A single, lone, desperate laugh makes it way though the foliage, and she stumbles to her feet. It is unmistakably nii-san's voice that produced that sound.

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Reincarnation – a reappearance or revitalization in another form.

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"They are for my brother."

She narrows her eyes at this person, Uchiha Itachi, who mocks her loss. His innocent tomatoes do nothing to change that her second brother died without her knowledge, alone, before she could tell him he'd been the one to light that lumbering flame of hope once again. Shisui-nii, a waterlogged body shifting leisurely through peaceful flow of the Naka River.

(Itachi is stronger, but she can kill him.)

"You killed nii-san," she says again. "You did it to take his eyes. His body returned without them, after all. You are a danger to the Uchiha."

"I did not kill him."

She knows he has done it. Itachi stands there and the rain is harsh around them and she knows with quiet certainty that she has been born as the reification of the Uchiha clan. Her hand is still a child's, belonging to an eleven-year-old girl. But it is long, embedded with the strength to throw a thousand kunai and wield the longer blade she uses.

Like she's once done long ago, she holds out this hand to him. Her eyes spin red – red like Shisui's blood – as she looks at him.

"Impossible," Itachi frowns. "You have not activated your Sharingan, but you-" He pauses as the realization settles uncomfortably onto his young shoulders. Suddenly he is pale, and the dark circles gracing the skin below his eyes stand starkly from the paucity of color.

Her hand is held out to him. She could not prevent nii-san's death, but she can do this for her clan. This is how she will seek exoneration, through this effortless conviction that had once saved a comrade and founded an ideal.

"I … I cannot fight you like that," he says. The basket of tomatoes drops to the ground, and three of the fruit roll away into the rain beyond the overhang. They sit there glimmering red as the water crashes into them. "You do not understand. You do not-"

He stops there, composing himself. And then he is the Uchiha solipsist once again, slowly reaching down to gather the fruit that hasn't been crushed and push it back into the basket.

Her hand it still held out. It grows cold in the rainy evening but she won't take it back until he has made his decision. She will offer it forever, like she did before. In her mind, no one is beyond redemption. But Itachi carries the basket in one arm and turns to leave, in the direction of his house.

He looks back for a single glance, and sees one of her Mangekyou eyes fade to white, losing its vision.

She follows him.

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For two years, she watches. She watches him break slowly, without fail. Each step he takes away from her leaves a deeper scar in his mind until he is nothing but a wreck of what he once was. Until he is slashing with fury, finally unleashing the tremendous passion behind his glasslike eyes.

She watches him kill three-hundred-thirteen Uchiha clan members one, two, one hundred times.

Every time, it is the same. He comes to her at the beginning of the cycle with ghosts of tear marks down his face, trembling as he holds himself back from reaching for the retribution of her hand. They stand under the overhang of the quiet shop building in the empty street, and the rain slides steadily behind him.

"Please," he says in a pained voice. "I must do this. This is my duty. I … I loved your brother more than anything. He was a friend … he let me take it. He took it himself and gave it to me. It was entrusted to me, I cannot give it to you."

"Stop this," he says another time. "I cannot kill him no matter how I try. I will never be able to kill him. You cannot make me, we will be here forever, until we go mad."

She nods in understanding, because after so many gyres, after Itachi reveals himself to her piece by piece, she truly understands. She has heard his reasons, and the wretched feeling in her heart for having done this to him had come like a thunderstorm, suddenly, brutally. After another year, it fades. There is nothing she can do.

"I can't," he says the next time, finally understanding her wish. "If I don't do this, hundreds more will die. I cannot let them die!"

She looks at him with one eye red and the other pure white.

In a way, it is impressive. Naka only lasted a few hours before his finish, while this boy went on, and on, repeating almost endlessly even though his sharp intelligence shredded apart any semblance of hope. This thirteen-fifteen-year-old boy – both ten years younger and two years older than her – holds back a quiet passion, an almost melancholy lust for life. Yet it was once drained out of him, and he was left with two eyes that burned and a little boy who called him nii-san.

"You know as well as I do that this is the only way to escape," she tells him, holding out her cold, half-frozen hand.

(Izanami's true power lies in the cruelty of changing a person's identity.)

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They talk for those two years. She is the only one he can speak to, and she waits patiently with her hand outstretched. She learns that Uchiha Itachi is different. He becomes the reverse of a solipsist as eventually the lives his blade takes are far more real than his own. There are times when he doesn't believe he exists.

One year three hundred sixty days and he is broken. He doesn't approach the overhang, simply drowning silently outside in the rain, looking into up at waterlogged clouds.

Five days from then, he comes back from his ever-repeating massacre with a new resolve in his eyes. He faces her, standing upright, having killed three hundred thirteen people and traumatized one young boy for the three hundred sixty fifth time.

(People have natural resilience.)

"I want to ask you if you will help," he says. His eyes are no longer glazed but full of life. "I do not know who you are, but your ability is useful. If I do this, we must fight in the war that will follow to prevent more lives from being lost."

Without hesitating, she nods. It has been two years. Itachi has become part of her. They are solipsists together, a contradictory idea that she embraces full heartedly.

Seeing that, a lonesome smile comes across his face, one of a person who has crossed a thousand mountain ranges and returned to a warm bed. She knew it would end this way no matter how he tried, but seeing it was all the more painful.

He clasps her hand delicately, as if it were made of sheet-thin glass.

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Solipsism – The theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

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The coup falls sudden and harsh and Konoha's divide materializes with the force it had been gathering year after year. Itachi is the strongest shinobi they have, the entire brilliance of the Uchiha clan concentrated into one, passionate fourteen-year-old boy. She is not recognized for her strength, and is placed in the compound-front with the rest of the children. Something as trivial, as utterly insignificant as their misinformed opinion does not deter her from taking her blunt blade and mercifully knocking down any Uchiha who she sees fighting.

The older she grows, the more familiar her body becomes, and the better she is able to fight.

"It's different than it was," she tells Itachi one evening, just as the blanketed night falls like a curtain around their hiding place outside the compound. "War is supposed to have blood-filled glory. Instead we're shown this mockery of a playground fight, a mere Cold War with kunai in the hands of every participant." There is minimal fighting; too much of the effort is dedicated towards the tangles of politics that strikes them. When there is fighting, every shinobi goes prepared to die.

Itachi has long grown used to hearing these strange comments from her, and he no longer asks her what they mean. Instead he leans back against the wall of the alley building and closes his eyes. "I need to sleep," he says simply. "If I take any more soldier pills, my body might die too quickly."

She nods, "stay awake until we reach the compound. It is only a little while longer until the skirmish outside will stop, and we can walk back without being attacked." It is dangerous even for the strongest.

But he falls asleep right there, against the cold wall, and she stays awake beside him.

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There is sometimes a single day without fighting, when the entire divided village seems to be held in the forceful stronghold of peace, like a caught fish pretending to be dead in the hopes that it's catcher will throw it back to the sea. In times like these she stays within the compound - which has grown almost completely separate from the rest of the village - and helps them bury the dead they've found.

This, she is used to. This is the reality of her comfort zone. She tells Itachi this while they stand by the newly dug graves.

"You are strange," he replies. "You're always there, aren't you? It's disorienting, but if you left I don't think I'd have a firm grasp on anything."

She knows. She's the one who has changed him with her one white eye, and now she is the unseen thread that keeps him standing. Her eye is hidden behind a genjutsu, but he always sees it when he looks at her.

The graves before them are like the little piles made by burrowing animals, they are so small. There is only so much space to bury them when land is needed for the compound-front. She pushes her lengthening hair behind her ear in the evening wind. "How is your brother?"

"He is fine, but scared sometimes," Itachi tells her in a pained voice. "I only ever want Sasuke to be happy. He doesn't understand what is happening, and that is best." He turns to look at her, and his eyes are haunted. "Did you know, that I've killed my parents three hundred sixty five times, but I couldn't kill my brother even once?"

She nods, listening. She did follow him, after all.

"Not once," he admits. "I thought that was the escape condition for the longest time. I thought you knew everything, and it wasn't hard to make myself believe it. I thought I would never escape because I couldn't kill him. The actual condition was trivial compared to that. I have made my decision, I have convinced myself of it, and yet ..." He trails, not knowing how to express it. He is older now, fifteen-seventeen. He is old enough to be jaded. "Three hundred fifteen dead so far in total," he mutters. "It has finally exceeded three hundred thirteen of what I would have done."

"Opportunity cost," she says plainly.

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Occasionally, she spends time with him and with his brother, the younger heir, a boy named Sasuke. He is an agreeable, wide-eyed poster-child and he calls her onee-san.

Itachi is there with him far longer. He spends the little free time he has stressing his mind and body to train with his brother. She sits by a tree in the Uchiha training grounds and watches as he adjusts the younger boy's stance and helps him arc the kunai to just barely strike the edge of the board.

Sasuke runs to her, delighted. "Did you see that, onee-san? I hit the target!"

She smiles softly, "if that was an actual target, you might have just grazed his sleeve."

"Don't be too harsh on him," Itachi walks to them after picking up the stray blades. "He's learning. It's ok if he hits sleeves for now." He ruffles his brother's hair.

Sasuke beams, "if nii-san says it's ok, then it is!" He exclaims. "When this coup-thing is over and I can go back to the academy, I'll make sure to be at the top of my class, onee-san."

She reclines and simply enjoys the transient peace and the grass beneath her fingers, knowing that Itachi prefers to keep his brother oblivious. She doesn't tell him that far away, the village's shinobi children are already learning to fight against Sharingan eyes.

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Days later, they send anbu to target the clan's main house, in an all-or-nothing attempt to assassinate Uchiha Fugaku. The person they send is strong but expendable, like a blade right out of the fire, sharp and efficient yet not broken into. Lacking experience. Still drenched in human emotion.

She stands outside, watching as the anbu with the Dog mask pulls his blade from the stomach of Itachi's father. His body crumples to the floor, and she doesn't move. There is no need to. Konoha has made a mistake. Fugaku will only become a martyr.

Fugaku is strong but not overly so, not like her own exalted Uchiha leader once was.

For a while, she and the anbu member look at each other. His hands are trembling slightly, he is still young. Barely older than her thirteen-fifteen years. He was probably told to kill every person he saw, but he is hesitant when he looks at her and sees the genjutsu drop. Sees her one white eye. She stands still, her stomach overcome with a sort of familiar effervescence as she waits.

Then, the door swings open.

"Nii-san, what's that noise-" Sasuke stops cold in the doorway, looking at her, and the anbu, and his father on the ground. At the blood that spreads like the ripples of a pond.

The anbu Dog's hands grip the tanto, and he strides towards the second target, the boy he recognizes from Konoha's own bingo book. Sasuke stands there shivering, and for the first time she intervenes.

Her body is familiar now, and she can move with her former speed even if she cannot fight with it. She takes Itachi's brother's arm and flickers away, away from the house, and runs to the gates of the compound where the sounds of a quiet war filter through. Sasuke holds onto her hand tightly and cries in racking sobs.

They hide there under the shelter of the overhang in the abandoned section of the compound, abandoned because of the run-down shops and the graves that litter the area. The same overhang under which Itachi came to talk to her day after day, refusing that silent hand.

"We have to go back!" Sasuke pounds his fists against her leg with the strength of all his foolish bravery. "Oka-san was in there too! They were both there! Otou-san needs to go see a medic!"

"Fugaku-sama and Mikoto-sama are both dead by now," she tells him. "I cannot match that anbu the way I am."

He continues the barrage for almost an hour before collapsing and crying onto her leg.

Minutes later, Itachi appears where they are, having sped back after hearing of it. He almost collapses in relief when he sees his brother alive.

"I couldn't do any more," she tells him. "Your parents are dead."

But his eyes are glazed over by happiness already and he takes her in his arms. He is only fifteen, but because of her he has seventeen years of life and his eyes are clear, unglazed, the effect of her mistake. "Thank you," he says.

Beside them, Sasuke has fallen asleep from the exertion, curled up under the overhang. His tear glistened face is solemn and his breathing is slow and heavy.

"I wish I could help," she admits, stiff in his arms.

"No need," he murmurs into her dark hair. "You are glorious."

When he presses his mouth to hers, she can forget the metallic tang of blood.

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Sacrifice – to relinquish a part of oneself for a purpose.

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The coup doesn't seem like it will ever end. Her second parents are dead, and she lives with Itachi and his brother, a fragmented semblance of family that they all hold onto with an iron grip. Why does it drag on so long?

Konoha had made the fate-searing mistake of underestimating the Uchiha.

At first, it is clear who has the upper hand. The clan is decimated during the start, beaten down easily into the dust. Then something occurs, something so unfounded and unexpected that it shatters the subtle power structure of the nation. As each Sharingan-bearer member sees parents, lovers, friends die, they change.

They activate their Mangekyou.

It is a weapon whose use they worship and price they know nothing of. Every Uchiha martyr leaves one anguished soul behind. And these pitiful wrecks, blinded by fear and driven by revenge, these weapons are worth ten, twenty of Konoha's shinobi.

(Someone prepared to die will fight more furiously than someone who is not.)

Sometimes, rumors filter through, saying that other countries think of attacking. She knows this will never happen. No one sane will willingly intervene in Konoha's war. No one will risk having his throat cut and dragged through the Naka River to pillage at Konoha's weakness.

She sees the anbu with the Dog mask a few days later, by the riverbank. There has been no overt fighting for a while, simply the stifling pressure created by the village's once-settled fury. He looks down into the steady river water, with his clay Dog mask at his hip. She is barely surprised when he turns to reveal another mask, and a red Sharingan eye.

"You shouldn't be here," she tells him, walking closer. She has always had an acute sense of danger, and this person no longer poses any. "It is too close to Uchiha ground. That eye won't win you any favors."

He doesn't respond to that. Instead, he says, "thank you for taking that boy away. If you hadn't, I think I really would have …" He doesn't have the heart to finish, and she nods and smiles and leaves him to take care of his own demons.

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Other times, she and Itachi sit within the compound, outside her house. They do not stay in his, because his is too full of blood that no one wants to clean. Sasuke is inside studying his shinobi history books in the hopes that he will catch up once the 'coup-thing' stops and he is let back to the academy.

The two of them sit silently in the still-empty street, with their backs to the sliding door. He turns to look at her. "Almost four hundred, now."

"You count their dead as well," she observes.

"Their dead number more than ours. They have more to spend," he reclines back and closes his eyes. "The person I told you of has contacted me again. We had an agreement, all that time ago. I did not fulfill it and now he wishes to know why."

"Tell him about me," she says. "I will speak to him. If he is who you say, then I will know what to do."

"You would ask me to hand you to Madara. I'd never do that."

"This is fact, Itachi: He is far stronger than me, but I can kill him."

A person does not need to speak to Uchiha Madara to know what he is like. She has watched from afar during the First War as he danced a dance of iron and blood. She once dreamed as every Uchiha dreamed of being acknowledged, of being looked at, of even being killed by that legend of a human being. She can face him once again, and this time she is no longer in love with this image.

Itachi's smile is wry and pained. "You have a strange definition of death."

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There is one day when the death count finally exceeds four hundred. Itachi is slowly breaking once again, doubting himself, doubting everything. She sits in her small room with her legs crossed, and the ironically peaceful sound of silence is the only other entity there with her.

This was enough. This could not go on. The first war she lived through was sudden and brutal, a blunt knife taken to the enemy's neck, a mallet against a flimsy skull.

This one is silent. It is drenching treatise papers in poisoned ink, hiding from misguided fear, teaching children to beware of the red eyes, sending so many anbu the sight of clay masks is inextricably linked with the thought of revenge. The people are better, the war is impossibly worse.

So she sits by herself and thinks. The sound of Itachi outside critiquing his brother's penmanship filters through, disturbing the silence. It is muffled by the sliding doors.

"Not like that," Itachi is saying. "You must allow the lines to flow. Don't concentrate so precisely on making them straight. They'll be straight if you write smoothly."

The sound of a paper bomb goes off in the distance. Itachi will be called to fight within minutes.

(The strong are used more often than the weak are sacrificed.)

"Like this." The rustle of paper. "See, this is adequate."

"Your writing is freakishly neat, nii-san! It looks like something straight of out a textbook."

Her first eye was able to change a single man.

Could her second save a nation?

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Later that day, she pulls Itachi into her room and they sit across her futon.

"Go back to him," she says. "To Sandaime-sama. He is hurting, isn't he? He will help you."

Itachi frowns, and the life is startling evident in his face, "why? I've made myself believe that this is for the best, that it is better to leave things to play on. You don't need to worry about me. I'll fight harder next time, I haven't killed a single person since this coup began but I'll continue to hit them down until they can't fight any longer. I'll save as many lives as they kill."

"You can't stand to see every number added to the count," she tells him. "I'll solve this myself. Please go, tell Sandaime-sama the Uchiha clan will submit tomorrow if he gives his word that they will be merciful." She slowly drops the genjutsu held over her eye, exposing the singular whiteness. "Will you be able to handle Madara if I do this? He should be pleased, after all. His goal will have been reached in a different way."

With that, Itachi finally understands. After a sharp, brittle nod and one last, lingering press of their mouths that conveys everything he cannot put into words, he leaves.

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The clan holds on to shreds of propriety in bloodline like children refusing to relinquish their childish, made-up game. After Fugaku's death, their game of leadership falls to a council member who is his mother's sister, the closest to him by blood apart from his too-young children.

Her name is Uchiha Inori. Inori is brilliant yet ruthless creature. Inori takes the few pawns she is given and plays them expertly across Konoha's board.

She approaches this woman late that night.

"Ah, it's you," Inori says absently, not looking up from her maps. As if those maps would protect her, protect her from the girl who stood in her doorway. "Come learn your position. We can't afford to be down a single member, and you're old enough to fight now."

She walks up to Inori. "What will you order us to do, Inori-sama?" a single leaf falls out of her hand, onto the floor. A silent thud.

"Isn't it obvious?" A pointed, power-lusting finger jabs at the west district on the map, "here will be the next. A singular target, but maybe it will give us a slight advantage. I have to play with what I've got."

She sees the map, sees the circled target, sees the training grounds nearby, sees the Naka River streaming red with failure.

Without hesitance, she holds out her hand once more.

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Peace settles heavily upon Konoha's shoulders.

In what is left of the clan compounds, a boy named Uchiha Itachi is teaching his brother to throw kunai.

By the river outside the village, a girl named Uchiha Naori has lost what was left of her sight.

Yes, Naori is the Uchiha woman who (in canon) was the first to activate Izanami. This was inspired by Shippuden 338.

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