Chapter Text
Itachi’s last memory was equal parts pain and relief. The path he’d set himself on all those years ago could never have brought him anywhere kinder, something he’d known ever since he saw a bloodstained face fall away down the cliff side into the rushing waters of the Nakano.
Seeing his little brother’s face one last time was all he dared to wish for. To set Sasuke firmly into his plans of protecting Konoha, protecting his last remaining family the best he could even as his lungs and heart gave out. So much had gone wrong already, so many ghosts hanging over him and whispering his sins in the dark - and it was always dark, with his eyesight failing him as he’d failed so many others.
His last memory was of Sasuke’s face. The shock and fear stretching it thin. Cold wind making the blood dripping off his hands feel cool. His heartbeat petering out as he fell to the rocks and rubble, exhausted to death and finally able to sleep peacefully for the first time since he was a child curled up safe in his mother’s arms.
Waking up again had never been in his plans.
The room was pitch black. His body sluggish and weighed down from sleep - and wrong. No restrains held him down but something set his mind into a panic, the thick quilt ripped off his body as he scrambled blindly around the tatami floor.
A glass object clattered to the floor when he hit a table, his desperate clawing towards some corner of the room sending it flying. His hands finally met a cool wall, and Itachi patted around trying to find an exit, his eyes flickering wildly here and there despite not catching even the dimmest source of light.
He didn’t know someone had heard him until large hands were pulling him back away from the wall. Whoever had come for him was massive - at least as tall as Kisame, easily lifting him and holding his limbs still even as he struggled and clawed to get away from them.
It was the humming that calmed him in the end. The familiar tune that he was certain he’d never heard before, the soft voice whispering to him in-between verses, soothing his fears away and leaving him a shaking mess in her arms.
“It’s alright,” the woman hushed him, a gentle thumb wiping the tears away from his cheeks.
“Okaa-san’s here, little bird. She’ll keep you safe. It’s alright.”
She sounded nothing like the woman who’d been Uchiha Mikoto, and yet Itachi believed her every word.