an Itachi Uchiha x oc fic
One of them survived a massacre. The other caused one. They meet in the wreckage of both and, against every reasonable instinct, they keep showing up for each other.
Sora Chishio has spent her whole life surviving what happened to her clan. Itachi Uchiha has spent his living with what he did to his. Neither of them should be each other’s soft place to land. They become it anyway.
chapter four - blood remembers
warnings: violence · grief · emotional angst · mature themes
tags: slow burn · angst · oc x canon · friends to lovers
The night settled into the compound just like any other night before it. The sun sank into the mountains as the moon arose, the sky reflecting different shades of orange, pink, yellow and blue. The weather was perfectly temperate, common for the spring season in the north east area of the Land of Fire.
The moon was full and bright and filled the sky with her light as soon as the last rays of sunshine disappeared. This was the perfect place to star gaze, deep in the rural part of the country, completely isolated from the loud and bright cities. On a clear night like this, the stars looked like bright fireflies, twinkling in the dark skies.
Sora sat cross-legged on the floor of her room with the door cracked open slightly, wide enough to hear the house, but narrow enough that no one would notice it wasn't shut. She was practicing what her father had shown her that afternoon. Feeling for heartbeats through the floorboards. She felt her mother in the kitchen finishing up the last of the dishes from that night’s dinner, humming a soft melodic lullaby as she worked. Her father two rooms over, in his study, his heart rate soft and calm and steady, the way Sora always remembered it. Her cousins across the courtyard, their pulses small and quick the way children's pulses always were.
The first sound was small. A thud from somewhere outside that her mind registered as ordinary, as something falling. But the heartbeats changed. Her mother's rhythm stuttered. Her humming came to a halt. Her father's spiked, sharp and sudden, as if he knew something terrible was approaching. Then she heard him moving fast, faster than he ever moved inside the house. She rushed to the door and met him just as he was bursting in.
"Sora." He lowered to her level and grabbed her by the shoulders with shaking hands. His hands never shook. "Listen to me. The floor board by the window, the loose one. Right now, we don't have time—"
"Papa, what's happening—"
“Now." The word came out urgently yet hushed, as if he worried someone would hear. He was already pulling up the board, the small hidden space beneath it rising out of the dark. From outside, she could hear voices that weren't her family's, sounds that she couldn’t fully understand. Thuds, slashes, the wet sounds of bodies dropping limply. The cries of women, the begging for mercy. "Get in. Get in and do not make a sound and do not come out no matter what. Do you hear me?"
"Sora." He said her name like it was the only word he had left. He crouched down to her level again and his face was indescribable. It was the face of a man trying to be calm for his child. Trying to protect her, not knowing for certain if he actually could. “I love you. I need you to be brave right now. Can you do that for me?"
She couldn't speak. The words were stuck to her throat like a bundle of thorns. Her eyes burned and filled with tears that she refused to let loose. She nodded her small head as she stared at her father’s blurring face, trying to memorize every crease and crevice and detail. At the door frame, her mother appeared, looking panicked and terrified. Sora tried to get near her, but her father’s grip was too strong.
“Sora, please-“ her mother pleaded as tears streamed down her cheeks. She complied.
He put her in the dark and put the wooden board back over her.
She heard it all. She heard every piece of it. The sounds were coming through the wood like they were coming from inside her own chest. Her uncle's voice, and then another voice she didn't know, shouting, pleading, fighting. Then a sound she felt more than heard, a percussion in her teeth. The clash of weapons. Running feet that vibrated through the floorboards. Her mother's voice, high and sharp and then suddenly not.
She tracked the heartbeats. She couldn't help it. It was the only thing she could do as she lay there helplessly and she couldn't turn it off, couldn't stop feeling them the way she couldn't stop her own heart from beating. And one by one, like candles in the wind, they went out.
She still felt her father's. Faint. Moving. She held onto it the way she held the ground beneath her, clinging to the hope that he would come back and pull the floor board open and pull her into his arms. Into safety.
She counted. She didn't know to what. She just counted, in the dark, listening to her family disappear one heartbeat at a time, until the compound went silent.
She lay in that silence for a long time. Long enough that the dark stopped feeling like darkness and started feeling like the only real thing there was. The anxiety paralyzing her from even lifting a finger, like if she was still enough, everything would go back to the way it was and she would realize this was just a bad dream.
Her father's heartbeat was still there. Faint as a candle through a wall.
She moved quickly. She pushed the board up and the smell that hit her nose was wrong, everything was so wrong. She didn't allow herself to imagine the outcome of what had just occurred because if she did, she would stop moving and she couldn't stop moving.
She moved through the house on her hands and knees. Some primal part of her knew not to stand up yet, not until she understood what was out there, so she crawled through her home which didn’t feel like her home anymore and kept her eyes on the floor, following the only heartbeat she had left.
It led her to the courtyard.
She stood up when she came through the door and she was finally able to see everything she wasn't ready to see. The courtyard that had once been full of the people she loved, was now littered with their lifeless bodies arranged in shapes and positions that her young mind could not process. She felt like screaming, the images before her tearing through her insides like a jagged sword, but she maintained her composure. She had to find her father whose heartbeat kept getting fainter and fainter. She made her way through the compound, stepping over severed limbs and pools of blood, trying to keep her eyes off the ground, off the reality that was sprawled all around her, as if that would make it all go away. She found her father near the old tree. The one her grandfather had planted when he was a young man almost 50 years ago.
"Papa." Her voice came out tiny. She ran to him.
He was barely breathing. His chest moving in shallow increments, each one a question. She dropped to her knees beside him and her hands found him before her eyes had fully processed what she was looking at. She pressed her hands flat against his chest the way he'd taught her, reaching for his heartbeat through her palms the way they'd practiced just that afternoon.
It was there. Thread-thin and fading.
"No." Her voice cracked. "No, no, no." She repeated frantically as her mind raced through all the options she had left. She had to do something, she could fix it. She’d seen her parents do the same for so many people in their village. Sick elderly people, injured young men, women in the brink of death after childbirth. She knew it was possible. She just didn’t know how.
She poured her chakra into him. Not the same way her parents had performed blood control to their patients, gently and carefully. She didn't know what she was doing. She knew only that his heartbeat was fading and she could feel it fading. So she pushed everything she had into her hands and into him and screamed at her own ability with everything she had: Fix it. Fix it. Fix it.
"Yes—" She pushed harder. "Come on, please—“
The heartbeat stuttered. Surged. And then stuttered again. The blood circulation commenced and halted with each time she tried to pump it through his body manually.
Something tore open inside her. She kept pushing and pumping and becoming more desperate with every failed attempt, her chakra control completely unrefined and spotty. She was focused and frantic at the same time, the emotional turmoil that was a recipe for disaster when her ability was so volatile. Her father had taught her that during her training, to never attempt blood release unless he was there to monitor her.
She felt it come up through her like a tide.
Her arms went dark first. The lines spreading from her fingertips up past her wrists, past her elbows, fast and uneven, nothing like the gentle controlled bloom she had seen on her father. Her blood rose to meet the air without her permission, at the main veins of her wrists and elbows, forming sharp spikes underneath her skin, ripping through her veins and protruding out as if pulled by a magnet. She felt it pushing outward, answering the call she didn’t mean to make but was making with every desperate cell in her body.
"Papa." She cried, her voice raspy and gone from all the screaming and crying, which she hadn’t even realized she was doing all along. "Please, I'm trying, I need you, please-“
The blood around her wasn't hers anymore. It rose from the courtyard, from the ground, from everything the night had left behind, drawn by a pull she didn't know she was exerting. It moved in slow dark arcs through the air. It crystallised and broke apart and crystallised again in jagged shapes she wasn't making, wasn't choosing, wasn't controlling at all.
She didn't see the fragments flying. She didn’t feel the sharp sting of her wounds as blood poured out of her own veins. She only saw her father's face. She only felt his heartbeat getting quieter.
The silence it left was total. She felt the specific, impossible absence where the most familiar heartbeat in her entire world had been, and her mind simply broke. A scream rippled through the now quiet compound. She wailed as she kept pushing, refusing to accept that her father, her teacher, her protector, was gone.
She brought him back over the threshold and lost him. Brought him back and lost him again and again and each time the loss hurt the same and each time she refused to accept it, refused to accept she had no chakra left to use, no blood left to give, no tears left to cry. Her small hands stayed pressed flat against his chest while the courtyard filled with the cries of a child too young to understand the finality of death.
Nothing about the Chishio compound mission briefing had prepared Kakashi for what was on the other side of the gate.
He'd known going in that it was bad. The tip they received came from the nearby village, and reported an attack in the north east mountains of the Land of Fire. The tip was low on detail and high on urgency, which was a classic indication that the situation was dire.
The courtyard stopped him.
Not because of the bodies, Kakashi was no stranger to corpses. He processed those the way he'd trained himself to, clinical and sequential, without absorbing, without getting emotions involved. It wasn’t the damage to the structures either, significant as it was, the cracked well, the broken windows, the deep score marks in the stone.
It moved. Slowly, in arcs and drifts, thick dark currents suspended in the air, defying gravity, and it all circled the center of the courtyard where a child knelt over a body with her hands pressed against it.
Her arms were dark to her shoulders. The veins under her skin pulsed and branched in the sickening rhythm of chakra reserves being pushed past their limits. Half-formed crystalline shapes rose and collapsed around her in an unstable orbit, some of them close enough to the bodies of the other fallen clan members.
"What is that," Tenzo said, quietly. Not a question, exactly.
"Kekkei tōta." Kakashi responded. "Blood Release. Appears to be out of control."
"Long enough." He responded. "She's almost empty. She'll drop soon."
Drop was one word for it. Kakashi ran the numbers fast and grim. Chakra depletion at that rate, that young, with no signs of slowing, could be fatal.
"We need to get close enough to stop her."
Neither of them moved immediately. That was telling, he thought. Their team of three standing at the courtyard entrance, all ANBU, all trained for things that most people couldn’t even begin to imagine, and all of them hesitated to walk into that radius. The floating blood. The jagged crystal shapes that appeared and vanished with an unpredictability that made threat assessment genuinely difficult. The little girl at the center of it.
"I'll go," Itachi, the youngest and newest team member, said.
"She's almost out. We don't have time to figure out a better approach." He was already moving, slow and deliberate, no sudden movements, and Kakashi watched him pick his path through the debris with careful precision, very aware of exactly how wrong this could go.
Kakashi tracked every floating shard in the air. His hand stayed near his weapon. This was not a situation his training had given him clean protocols for, and he didn't like that.
She noticed them when Itachi was six feet away.
Her head came up fast, with the snapping animal attention of something cornered, and what Kakashi saw in her face wasn't the blank unfocused state he'd expected from someone at the edge of depletion. It was terror. Immediate, unequivocal terror, and underneath the terror something that was already reorganising itself into something more dangerous.
The blood in the air around her lurched.
"Stop.” Tenzo's hands moved, a single seal, and the ground between her and Itachi split and rose into a thick wooden barrier and the crystal shard that formed from the floating pools of blood around her shattered against it.
She scrambled backward. One hand finding the ground, the other still reaching toward the body, the two impulses fighting each other, and the blood in the air lurched again in the midst of the chaos. Sharp shards of crystalized blood shot out from every direction, hitting stone walls, tree trunks, anything that appeared before them.
"We're not here to hurt you." Itachi said, from around the edge of Tenzo's barrier. His voice genuinely calm, not the performed calm of someone managing a situation. "We’re here to help. Let’s talk.”
She was breathing in short, wrecked increments. Her hands were back on the man’s chest, whom Kakashi gathered was someone close and precious to her. Likely her father. She was still pushing chakra through, he could feel it, even from here, but he was not sure what exactly she was trying to do.
"He's gone." Itachi again, and there was something about his voice this time, not gentleness exactly, just honesty, plain and direct. "I'm sorry. He's already gone. You can stop now.”
A sound came out of her that Kakashi would never forget.
The blood dropped. All of it, all at once. Every suspended arc, every half-formed spear. She collapsed with it, falling sideways over the man’s body with the loose bonelessness of someone whose body had given out.
Itachi reached her in the same moment. He crouched down beside her looking at the body she was sobbing over, recording and analyzing every detail. He looked up and around at the rest of the corpses. Kakashi did the same. The massacre was undeniable. No forensic analysis was needed to realize that no other survivors were left. Kakashi’s heart tightened for a second and then he walked over.
She curled over her father's body and shook without making any sound at all, her body completely drained of everything that she couldn’t even cry out loud.
Tenzo appeared at Kakashi's shoulder. His voice was very low. "What do we do?"
"We take her back," he said. "And we figure out what happened here."
Kakashi stayed up most of the night writing it.
Site assessment: Chishio clan compound, full structural and population loss. No evidence of external combatant presence. No weapon strikes, no tracks or entry points suggesting forced intrusion. Single survivor: female, approximate age 9, identified as Sora Chishio, found at the center of the affected area exhibiting active and uncontrolled Blood Release.
He stopped there for a long time.
He knew what that paragraph would read as to anyone reviewing it without having stood in that courtyard. The conclusion was right there, clean and simple and terrible: the survivor is the perpetrator. No visible external threat. A child manifesting a destructive ability at the scene.
He had stood in that courtyard. He had seen the damage, the distribution of it, the things about it that didn't cohere with a single child as the source. He had watched her face when they arrived, the terror of someone who did not know who they were, who thought they might be what had come for her family. That wasn't the face of a perpetrator.
He wrote the facts as observed anyway. Nothing excluded.
He added one more line at the end.
No remains of additional children were located at the site. Clan records show at minimum three children under the age of twelve and 5 infants and toddlers. This discrepancy is unresolved and warrants further investigation.
He looked at that line for a long time before he let himself sleep.
She came back to consciousness slowly, in pieces, and the world assembled itself around her one sensation at a time. Ceiling first. White. Blurry. Then the smell, clean and medicinal the way hospitals always smelled. The soft linens of the bed she lay on engulfed her in a comforting warmth. The bright light coming from the big windows hit her eyes making her squint and groan in annoyance.
She sat up so fast the room started spinning.
“Easy.” A voice said, from her right. It was not a voice she recognized. She scrambled backward until her spine hit the headboard, her hands finding the sheets, looking for something, anything, that she could use to defend herself but finding nothing.
“You’re in Konoha.” The voice said again. Her vision finally cleared from the blurriness and head rush from sitting up too fast. A boy, sitting a few feet from her bed, not much older than her. He looked like he had been settled on the chair by her hospital bed for a while, waiting for her to wake up and was now being very careful not to startle her further. “The hospital. You’ve been here since yesterday.”
She stared at him. She knew those eyes. She had seen them in the courtyard, across the radius of her own unraveling, before everything went dark.
“Where is my father,” she said, her reflexes making her turn her head to the side, as if looking for another hospital bed in the giant room she had been placed. She saw nothing.
He didn’t look away from her. Didn’t reach for a kinder version of the answer. “He didn’t survive,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
She had known. The knowing had been sitting in her chest since she woke up, heavy and permanent as stone. Hearing it out loud was different anyway. Her heart stung from the tightening of hearing those words out loud. It knocked the breath out of her, made her forget how to maintain the most basic functions. She held her breath for a few seconds, the news hitting her with an intensity that she had not expected, even though deep down she knew it was coming.
She didn’t cry. She had nothing left to cry with.
She looked down at her hands. Both of them bandaged to the elbows, white linen wrapped tight over the places where her own blood had torn its way out. She stared at them for a long time.
“My name is Itachi,” the boy said, after a while. “I was there. In the courtyard.”
“I know,” she said. Her voice came out quieter than she intended. “You were the one who told me to stop.”
She turned the bandaged hands over in her lap. “Is everyone else—”
“Yes,” he said, before she could finish. Sparing her from having to say it.
She absorbed that. The full weight of it settling into her slowly, too large to arrive all at once. She stared at the window and said nothing for a while, and he let her.
“There are people,” he said carefully, after a moment, “who have questions about what happened. About what we found when we arrived.”
She looked at him then. She noticed the careful way he’d chosen those words, the implication underneath them that he was making sure she understood without saying it plainly.
“They think I did it,” she said.
He didn’t confirm it. He didn’t deny it either. “I think it would be good,” he said quietly, “if you were careful about what you say. And to whom.”
She held his gaze for a moment. Looked at the young boy in front of her whose dark gentle eyes were trying to hold back the empathy and compassion he was feeling inside. He had come. Had waited for her to wake up, just to warn her.
He nodded once. Settled back in his chair.
The grey morning light turned slowly to something warmer, and neither of them said anything else, and it was, in its strange and insufficient way, enough.
The Hokage’s office felt smaller than it was when all three of them were standing in it.
Itachi had been in this room before reporting to the Third with the rigidness that his role required. He knew how these debriefs went. Factual. Sequential. The kind of conversation that reduced what had happened to a series of observations that the people in this room could do something with.
He gave his account the same way Kakashi gave his, and Tenzo after that. The courtyard. The blood. The girl at the center of it. He chose his words carefully and said what he had seen without involving his emotions, because that was what this room required of him and because he understood that his personal feelings would do very little to shift the weight of Lord Third’s decision.
The Third listened without interrupting. His eyes, behind the deceptive gentleness they always carried, were taking everything in and revealing nothing about where it was going to land.
“The clan records confirm it,” the Third said, when they had finished. “The Chishio were a closed community. No alliances, no active shinobi on record, no enemies we have documented intelligence on. They were a pacifist clan that refused to integrate into the shinobi nations, they detested war and death.” A pause. “The damage to the compound is consistent with a Blood Release event of significant scale.” His eyes moved across the three of them. “The girl is the only variable we cannot account for. Furthermore, the girl has offered no account of the events.”
Itachi kept his face still. Sora had chosen the path of complete silence after he had warned her to be careful with recounting the events of that night. Whether that aided or hurt her case was not certain yet.
“Our assessment,” the Third continued, “is that she presents too significant a risk for standard placement. The ability is volatile. We have no experience for containing it in a civilian or even a standard shinobi context.” He set his pipe down. “She will be held in the lower tunnels until a longer term plan can be established.”
The room was quiet for a moment.
“With respect,” Itachi said.
Kakashi glanced at him. Tenzo went very still.
The Third looked at him. The full weight of his superior’s gaze landed on him. “Uchiha.” The Third said, granting him permission to keep speaking.
“Detainment won’t contain the ability,” Itachi said. “It will give it nowhere to go. A kekkei tōta that volatile, in a child that age, under prolonged confinement with no outlet and no training,” He stopped. Chose the next words precisely. “The risk increases, not decreases.”
“And your alternative suggestion.”
“ANBU candidacy. Structured training, supervised development of the ability, a framework that gives her discipline instead of isolation.” He held the Third’s gaze. “A weapon that is trained is significantly less dangerous than one that is not.”
The silence that followed was tense and thick. Itachi held his breath as The Third eyed him, thinking of a response to the young boy’s suggestion.
“She is nine years old,” the Third said.
“She has no formal shinobi training.”
Something moved across the Third’s face that Itachi couldn’t fully read. “You are suggesting we invest considerable village resources into training a child who may have destroyed her entire clan.”
“I am suggesting,” Itachi said carefully, “that the alternative is holding a child with an uncontrolled kekkei tōta in a tunnel and waiting to see what happens when she runs out of reasons to cooperate.”
“She would need a supervisor,” the Third said finally. “Someone responsible for her progress and any incident that occurs during the training period.” His eyes moved to Kakashi. “You wrote the report.”
Kakashi straightened slightly. “I did.”
“Then you understand the variables better than most.” It was not quite a question. “You would take responsibility for her candidacy.”
Itachi watched Kakashi absorb the weight of what was being handed to him, which was not a request nor a suggestion.
“I’ll back the recommendation,” Kakashi said. “What he’s describing is sound. Containment without structure doesn’t solve the problem. It just moves it somewhere darker.”
The Third was quiet for a long moment. He looked at Itachi. Then at Kakashi.
“She will be monitored at all times during the initial period,” he said finally. “Any incident, any loss of control, any indication that the training is not producing the intended result and the arrangement ends immediately.” His eyes settled on Kakashi. “You will personally oversee her integration. That is not a suggestion.”
“Understood,” Kakashi said.
The Third picked up his pipe again, which Itachi had learned meant the conversation was over. “Dismissed.”
They walked out. The door closed behind them and the corridor outside was very quiet. Kakashi looked at Itachi. Itachi looked ahead.
“That was either very smart,” Kakashi said, “or very reckless.”
“It was both,” Itachi said.
Kakashi was quiet for a moment. Then: “She’d better be worth it.”
Itachi didn’t answer. He thought about the hospital room that morning. The way she had looked at her bandaged hands. The way she absorbed the news of her entire clan being wiped out. The exhausted look on her face. He couldn’t let her suffer through more by being punished for a crime she didn’t commit.
“She will be,” he said, and continued walking.
