Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Edge of a Weeping River

He had been someone, before the fall.

The legends forgot he was made of

Flesh and Blood

Made of- crooked grins, careful hands, eyes the color of dawn.

Uchiha Shisui dies for the first time at age seventeen, as he throws himself over the edge of the cliff away from Itachi. Goodbye, little cousin. Please, save them.

There would be nothing wrong with this. Nothing at all, except for the cold sweat on his brow, and the fine tremors in his hands when he sits up again in his own bed. And he is gasping, trembling, drowning on air because it cannot be. It cannot be that he can still see his hands. Outside his bedroom window, a red sun rises.

And that is where it all begins.

He has awoken again after what had surely been the last day of his life, on that very same morning. He convinces himself that his prior death had been a dream. But it felt so real. He could still feel the burning in his eyes, Danzo's trickery, still feel the storm of rage and grief. But it couldn't have been real.

And he goes through the motions, donning the ANBU mask, making his way around the house. He could go to see Itachi, could go to see someone, anyone. But who would he tell? Who would believe him?

Who wouldn't start a civil war?

Danzo's summons come again. He goes, mechanically as a toy puppet, lead pooling in his stomach like congealed blood, because he knows how this ends, and yet he can't seem to find any reason to avoid going.

And in fact, he fights even less than the last time he can remember when Danzo and his henchmen take his right eye.

He remembers to flee, because his body should not fall into their hands. Cannot fall into their hands.

Uchiha Shisui dies for the second time at age seventeen two hours earlier than the first time around when he throws himself off the very same cliff towards the Naka River. This time, there is no Itachi to watch, he doesn't want his cousin to have the Mangekyo, Danzo would steal it, he's sure. This time, his left eye is crushed on the rocks below. Why? Why did I know how I would die?

Again, there would be nothing wrong with this. Nothing at all, except for the hand clutching his chest, and the phantom pain on the left side of his face as he sits up again, in the silver moonlight. The clock tells him that it is a minute past midnight.

The calendar on his bedside table that it is two months before the day of his death. He sits there with his head in his hands until the sunlight filters through his curtains, and Aunt Mikoto comes up to see him because he'd never been late for breakfast before unless he was gravely ill.

"Are you injured, Shisui? Are you well?"

He cannot look her in the eye.

But inside him there is a bubbling chasm of doubt. Did I make the right decision? Did I do the right thing?

What had happened to his family after his death? Itachi saves them. They all lived happily. He consoles himself, tells himself that he made the right choice. That he'd do it again, if he had to.

But please, please, a little more time with these familiar faces. These people that he loved so dearly. Surely two months before I die again for their sake is not too much to ask.

He spends the next two months before the summons on sick leave from ANBU. He laughs and colors pictures with Sasuke, putters around the kitchen after Aunt Mikoto, takes wrapped bento lunches to Uncle Fugaku down at the station. And everyone is tense, but that's alright, it's alright because he'd go and die for them all over again when the summons came. They'd be saved.

He oversees Izumi's training, sits and eats lunch with Naori and Naka. He summons his nin-cats and only pets them for the first time since he can remember. He'd always needed their help before, but now he is just counting down the hours, waiting for death to come again.

Each day slips through his fingertips like sand. It's too soon. Too soon. Where did all that time go, why, why can't I stay?

He slips into bed the night before the summons, and hopes and prays that he has the courage to die once more.

That night he wakes to Itachi standing over his bedside with a bloody tanto in his shaking grip.

"I'm sorry Shisui." And he does not understand. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but Sasuke..."

Itachi draws the tanto down in a quick clean slash, and Shisui doesn't even have the time to figure out what is going on except perhaps that the village had betrayed his trust.

Uchiha Shisui dies for the third time at a minute past midnight on the day he died the first time around, his throat cut and his blood weeping rivers around his shocked form.

There is something deeply wrong when he sits up again, because this time it is not in the bed he'd been sleeping in for the past five years, but his childhood bedroom, with his smaller, chubbier hands. He feels as though he's still drowning in his own blood, and his hands find his throat.

It is smooth, unmarked, neither scarred, nor marred by anything when he checks it in the mirror. By the curve of baby fat over his cheekbones he is twelve years old again, and this is the year his parents died and he moved in with Ita-with Uncle Fugaku and Aunt Mikoto.

He begins to suspect that his family is not saved when he dies. He begins to suspect that everyone dies, that no one is safe, and he has failed everything and everyone.

That morning it's his mother that calls him down to breakfast, and he hugs her tighter than he really should, and does his best not to break down crying. I won't see you again except when I'm dreaming.

His uncharacteristic grief prompts her to take him to the hospital, and he goes, neither willing nor unwilling because what else is he to do? Perhaps they'll find what is wrong with me there.

They don't find a single thing, except that Shisui now has an aversion toward blood.

The Hokage takes him off the active duty roster, and he is left adrift. The medics tell his parents that he has depression, they don't know why, but what the rest of the clan learns is that Uchiha Shisui, most promising shinobi of his generation, has broken under pressure.

It takes him two years to notice the subtle shunning, the way clan members would go out of their way to ignore him, to pretend that he did not exist. It takes him too years because he does not know what to do, or how to fix this.

I die then. I die now. They'll all die. I fail every single time.

Shisui sees ghosts where living people used to be, and feels more ghostly with each passing day.

His father drinks himself into an early grave in the meantime. His mother, bowed and broken under the weighty stare of the clan, takes a mission and comes back in a body bag.

The night after the funeral, he returns to the river.

Uchiha Shisui dies for the fourth time as he drowns beneath the iced over Naka River in the dead of winter. He is fourteen years old, but he's really nineteen, and he is done with depression.

He sits up again a quarter past noon on a breezy summer day, the year he turned sixteen in the correct bedroom this time to Sasuke pounding on his door.

"Shisui-nii, wake up. You promised we'd go buy tomatoes together since Niisan isn't here." He pulls himself from the bed, a chill wrapped around his bones even though it is summer.

"I'm coming Sasuke, hold on a moment, and we'll celebrate your birthday a bit early, alright?"

He resigns from ANBU a week later, and joins the group of dissenters in an attempt to persuade Uncle Fugaku to take over the village.

It is the only way that anyone will survive.

The coup comes a year later. The dusty streets bleed red with the blood of fallen men and women on both sides.

Shisui and Itachi meet across the battlefield that used to be center city, but is now nothing more than ash and rubble. Itachi filled with pain, Shisui with determination. I will not fail again, Itachi.

Everyone will live, even you.

The Uchiha win, and the trials that come afterwards turns his stomach and when the clan sentences Itachi to die, he can no longer hold back the bile in his throat.

Konoha becomes a military dictatorship within the year, and each dissenter is punished by death. His family had become poisonous from the inside out.

But he doesn't know if that's what they've always been.

Uchiha Shisui dies for the fifth time when he spikes his own sake at a celebratory party when he is nineteen but really twenty two, and the burning pain in his veins doesn't drown out the burning pain in his heart. Or the sound of Sasuke's screams when they'd dragged Itachi to the stake.

Is there no way to save anyone? Is everything meaningless?

He jolts awake from his slumped position against the wooden post of his genin team's training field.

Uchiha Shisui dies again for the sixth time when he stabs himself through the heart with a kunai a minute after he wakes up.

He sits up on a winter night when he is nine.

He throws himself off the stairs.

But he sits up.

The legends forgot that he is brilliant.

It is sad no one cares.

A.N.As you may have noticed, this has nothing to do with Bloodless. I really have no idea where this came from, but you can have it, I guess? Uchiha angst and tragedy is an integral part of the Naruto fandom after all.

I get the feeling that Shisui would have no clue how to change a single thing no matter when he woke up again after his death because his death is a catalyst, it is not the end, but a beginning of sorts.

And thus, he dies. And dies. And dies. And dies, and dies and dies and keeps on living.

~Tavina