He walked out of the Foundation mansion, and walked along the village road at the foot of the Hokage Monument.
The sound of wings. Insects.
“Don’t play this stupid game. How about you just show yourself already?” Itachi announced to the sky, sunlight spilling through the trees. The branches above his head shook, and a human form dropped down before his eyes.
“Hello,” Sugaru said lightly.
“What do you want?”
“I wanted to talk to you for a minute.”
“On Danzo’s orders?”
“It is on my own discretion.” Sugaru put a hand on his white tiger mask. As Itachi watched silently, he quietly pulled it off.
“So it is you, then.”
“Yes, it is me.”
He had seen this face before, with that smile creeping across it. When Tenma died and Shinko quit being a ninja after the mission to guard the daimyo of the Land of Fire, they had been replaced. One of those replacements was a girl who talked a lot. And the other was a boy who never spoke at all.
“I forget your name from that time.”
“Yoji.”
“That’s right.” The man before his eyes was the genin, Yoji.
“Just ten from the Foundation cover the entire population of Konohagakure. And another two for the Uchiha clan,” the unmasked Sugaru noted.
“What are you talking about?”
“Monitoring. Separate from the Hokage’s Anbu, there is a monitoring division through the Foundation solely for the Foundation.”
It was only natural that Danzo’s organization would have such a division in place.
“A total of twelve people are required to monitor the people of the village. With just that number of personnel, we can know the movements of the village.”
Itachi couldn’t believe Sugaru had stopped him to boast about the excellence of his own organization. He was not done speaking. Itachi stayed silent, and waited for Sugaru to continue.
“There is one more person who has been ordered to monitor.” Sugaru’s index finger thrust up into the air, rotated slowly in space, and pointed to his own chin. “Me.”
“And what exactly are you monitoring?”
“You. Ever since you started at the academy, I have been watching the person known as Uchiha Itachi.”
Itachi wasn’t surprised. He’d had a strange feeling since the day of his graduation ceremony, when Danzo spoke to him. Something like déjà-vu, the feeling that he’d known the man for a long time. If Danzo had started watching him when he entered the academy, then this feeling made sense.
“Lord Danzo has used twelve people to monitor the village. The fact that I was devoted to you alone is proof of just how much he has favored you.”
“I’m not exactly pleased to have that man favor me.”
“It seems I misspoke. You are already in the palm of Lord Danzo’s hand. You won’t be able to escape from his darkness.”
“Did you come all this way just to tell me this nonsense?”
“My father was an extremely terrible man, you see?”
The conversation had suddenly flown off in another direction, but Itachi simply waited for Sugaru to continue.
“He was jealous of the fact that his son excelled. He was a man who could only show off his own power by hating, and causing pain. He would assault me for any reason, or no reason, so I knew how to forget pain from before I can remember.”
The hard quality of Sugaru’s voice as he indifferently told this tale was excessively disturbing.
“It was my fifth birthday. I accidentally fell off my chair, and spilled juice on the clothing of my father, sitting in front of me. That day, my father was likely in a terribly bad mood. ‘Your apology sounded cheeky,’ he said, and slit my throat.” His voice gradually grew heavier and darker. “It was then that I killed someone for the first time.”
“Is your voice an after-effect of that?”
“No,” Sugaru said, waving his right hand. “Because of my father, I completely lost my voice. It was only after Lord Danzo took me in that I learned how to speak by making the insects I keep on my body make a small noise in resonance.”
The rustling voice was the product of combining the quiet noises of insects.
“People have darkness within them. I learned that when I was five years old. However, the darkness I carry is still slight, compared with that of Lord Danzo. My darkness is a personal darkness. But his darkness is the darkness of this village. If you kill him now, the darkness that fills that body will spill out all at once, into the village. And if that happens, this village will not be able to remain sane.”
“So, you’re telling me not to kill him, or something?”
“Right now, you could not kill him.”
“I won’t know unless I try—”
“I know.” Sugaru cut him off, as if to beat him to the punch. “You are not sufficiently ready.”
Itachi said nothing.
“You are prepared to shoulder the darkness of your clan.”
They glared at each other, neither moving an inch. Only the dry conversation went back and forth in the space between them.
“Do you know a child called Naruto?”
“The jinchuriki for Nine Tails.”
“Though imperfect, he is the son of the fourth Hokage. Don’t you think it strange that because Nine Tails is housed in that body, everyone in the village treats him so cruelly?”
“Danzo?”
“Yes.” The narrow eyes on Sugaru’s pale face bent into bow-like arcs as he smiled. “Human beings are cowardly creatures who obtain their own emotional stability as they sympathize with or slander people lower than themselves, foolish people.”
“Are all human beings—”
“I know,” Sugaru said simply, cutting Itachi off. And then, he continued matter-of-factly, faint smile still on his face. “Someone like you, born under a warrior star, is different. You’d best not think that everyone is as strong as you are.”
Itachi wanted to be strong, he wanted to be a warrior, but he had never once thought that he was.
“Lord Danzo did one thing. He simply made it known that the Nine Tails that plunged the village into terror was housed in the body of that child. The people of the village then made their own judgments, and decided on their own to discriminate against Naruto. With this terrifying child as their just cause, they shifted responsibility to someone else, and now the people turn a cold shoulder to Naruto. And by looking down on the poor child, they maintain their emotional equilibrium. Your clan fulfills a similar role to Naruto. Isn’t that so?”
“Are you saying that Danzo’s pulling the strings behind the discrimination against the clan, too?”
“That is an enmity from before Lord Danzo was born. It’s not good to make everything his fault.”
Itachi was forced to move with the slippery Sugaru. He might try to change the flow of the conversation, but he couldn’t catch hold of an opening.
“Sacrifice Naruto’s life, and reduce dissatisfaction in the village. Sacrifice the Uchiha clan, and maintain public order. The dissatisfaction of the various people that arises in the village accumulates in Lord Danzo himself. All responsibility lies with him. That man is prepared to shoulder the darkness of the village. Are you prepared to do that much, at least, Uchiha Itachi?”
Prepared to shoulder the darkness produced through sacrifice … For Itachi at that moment, those words were heavier than anything else. Had he actually taken on the darkness produced by the sacrifice of his friend’s death?
“All the same, you cannot kill Lord Danzo. And you most certainly cannot escape him.” Sugaru’s words dragged Itachi into the darkness. “Remember this—at any moment, I am watching you.”
Sugaru’s body transformed into countless insects, and flew upward. An infinity of black dots bled into the light filtering through the trees, which had started to take on a crimson hue.
Once the insects had disappeared, Itachi turned his head to the sky. “Shisui. What should I do?” He had never prayed for the existence of God like he did at that moment.
“Answer me, Shisui.”
His friend’s spirit did not begin speaking to him, nor did the hand of God reach down to save him.