Preventing The Inevitable

Chapter 8

"Why'd this have to happen to me?" Sakura whispered to herself as she looked down at the ground that was at least double the distance away it normally was, body dangling in the air from where Itachi was holding her up by her wrist. Why was he even so strong at that age?

She forced her instincts – screaming at her to run – to shut up. And, while internally repeating "He's not a threat yet, he never really was, he won't kill you", she ripped her eyes away from the patch of dirt she had been looking at and turned her gaze to his eyes, pitch black (and not blood-red). A part of her expected to see the hypnotic pattern of a spinning Mangekyō to stare back at her, and into the very depths of her soul. A part of her couldn't comprehend the idea of that man not having his Sharingan active at all times, trapping anyone foolish enough to look into the deep pits of crimson inside a living nightmare, slowly gnawing at the sanity of whoever dared to challenge him.

A memory of spinning Tomoe on the face of someone she could never get herself to hate briefly overlapped with what she was actually seeing, but Sakura quickly shook the hallucination away, instead concentrating on the face of a young – so young – Itachi Uchiha.

She had known that he had been young, at one point. Of course he had been. It wouldn't have made sense otherwise.

But something inside of her had never really considered the thought that the Itachi, the most dangerous missing-nin Konoha had ever produced, the murderer of the Uchiha, could have ever been an young boy, too. It felt surreal. That this child would grow up to do something like that. That he would still be a child when he would commit the Uchiha Massacre, one of the bloodiest events to go down in a hidden village that was supposed to be the 'nice one'. That someone would order a child to slaughter their own kin in cold blood. Because it was a slaughter, not a fight or a battle. When he had killed his parents, they hadn't fought back. Because they had accepted the decision Itachi had come to and only wished to protect their other son. They had known they would be killed eventually. Sasuke had never understood that part, even when he had told them the full tale of what had transpired that day, years after he found out himself. "Why did they give up?" he had asked angrily. Perhaps he would've never understood.

(But she understood what it meant to know about your assured death, apporaching ever closer until she could practically touch it. She was familiar with the thoughts that would cross one's mind when a loved one was in danger. And she knew what it felt like to make the decision to reach for one's inescapable fate, grab it, and pull it closer, if only to add that distance to the time another has left.

She understood what it felt like to give up everything and welcome death with open arms, for she had seeen it coming for far longer than the short moment it took to meet the end and face the unavoidable)

Sakura felt disgusted. She looked away again, breaking the eye contact the both of them had been holding for way too long.

"Hm." Itachi thoughtfully hummed as she turned her head away from him.

"Oh, you caught her!" The boy from before suddenly appeared before her – and way too close at that –, earning himself a kick to the stomach, though he probably didn't even feel the force of it. Sakura's chakra was running dangerously low, and she refrained from using any more than was absolutely necessary.

"Woah, Woah! You can't just attack people!" The curly-haired boy raised his arms defensively.

Ignoring him, Sakura turned her gaze to Itachi yet again. "Let me down."

"No, Itachi! Don't!" was the reply she got instead, the other boy looking at Itachi with a pleading look on his face. "She almost escaped my grasp! Itachi, do you know what she was doing here?" He pointed another accusing finger at Sakura. "Jutsu! With that chakra pool! And she's like, what, 7 years old? She shouldn't be doing that!"