Preventing The Inevitable

Chapter 8

"Why'd this have to happen to me?", Sakura whispered to herself, body dangling a few inches 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.

The memory of spinning Tomoe 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 kill their own kin in cold blood.

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!"

Itachi, who didn't seem bothered by the familiar way the other boy was talking to him, the heir of the Uchiha clan, gave her a long look, analyzing her messy hair (a product of re-familiarizing herself  with her chakra, causing her to fall from the tree quite a few times) and the tired way her eyes were threatening to close every minute (fuck, she needed to work on the chakra pool thing).

Finally, his assessment was: "Hn."

She glared at him. "Let. Me. Down."

"Hey, Pinkie! Easy going there! We won't bite you." The other boy interrupted again.

"My arm hurts. Let me go."

Instead of letting her down, Itachi simply brought up his other arm and moved to hold her up by her waist, raising her to eye-level.