A Girl's Mind is a Dangerous Place

Chapter 66

A/N: im not really active on wattpad, except to drop updates and then leave back to my preferred sites (tumblr and ao3), but i did hear something about wattpad making some pretty controversial changes and removing a bunch of stories? I dont THINK any of mine are going to fall under those categories, but just as an  FYI, if it does come to that, I'm not going to bother appealing or anything. I'm clenastia on AO3 too, and if/when I continue any of my older wattpad stories i'll crosspost them there anyway, so if anything ends up disappearing you know where to find me! like i said tho, pretty sure none of my stuff is gonna get blocked and im not gonna delete the account or anything, this is more a just-in-case notice.

As always, thanks for reading and hope you enjoy!

Home.

He casts his gaze across the damaged gates, the crumbled rock that even now genin are working to clear, exhaustion lining every face.

For a flickering instant, a dozen earth jutsu cross his mind-

The bittersweet crash of reality.

Home, but not home any longer.

Not one he's welcome in.

His partner, he knows, will read his moment of hesitation as a violent one.

"You wanna actually confirm any of the rumors, and you can't go killing brats here," he laughs lightly, nudging him with a sharp elbow.

Acting is so easy, when everyone else does all the work for you.

Itachi makes certain to sigh, uncoiling tension in his shoulders with the deliberate focus of a predator on the hunt.

The chunin guarding the gates are clearly ANBU in disguise, but they weren't his team. He snares them into an illusion with effortless grace, and walks through unopposed.

They won't even realize he held them, likely. There's not any Uchiha left to train with, to learn how to detect their more subtle genjutsu, and both are far too young to have worked with anyone other than Itachi himself, in that short stint in ANBU.

The Uchiha clan jutsu will die with him.

Itachi doesn't flinch away from the truth, anymore, but it still hurts. So many of their clan genjutsu are never written to any scroll, but instead taught directly, by trapping those who awoke their sharingan in one and walking them through how to reverse engineer it.

In the kind of cover he now has to maintain, Itachi will never be able to teach Sasuke those more subtle techniques. Anything less than his most powerful genjutsu will be read as signs of weakness or lingering affection and-

Those other jutsu, then, will die with him.

There's no one else who can teach them.

Even Kakashi-senpai was never allowed to learn, because they were clan techniques. Not for outsiders, sharingan or no sharingan.

Itachi is the last bastion of their clan's history. Everything they used only their perfect memory to keep, everything they used only their eyes to pass on-

Itachi's death, truly, will be the death of the clan.

The bloodline will continue, with Sasuke, but-

The history. The clan techniques. The clan secrets, and rituals.

The stories. The games. The memories. The language.

None of them can be taught, without the sharingan, and Sasuke hadn't awoken his until everyone else was already dead.