Itachi, Is That A Baby? (by SpoonandJohn)

"Uncle what?" Sasuke was distinctly aware that he had someone hugging him from behind. That was not what he'd been expecting when he headed out to confront his brother. And the commentary had sent his brain into short-circuit as he tried to follow it.

"Holy fuck!" Naruto was standing against a wall with Kisame standing over him. "Where the hell did that one come from?" From his perspective, it looked like his best friend was currently being cuddled by a junior member of the Akatsuki, what with the cloak and all.

"Hari." Itachi's voice was that of the long-suffering parent. "Why are you hugging my brother?"

"Because he's family?" Hari paused. "Oh right!"

"Hari! Put the kunai down!"

Sasuke had felt the point of a kunai against his throat as the person behind him began to radiate the most disturbing killing intent he'd had the misfortune of being exposed to. Where others' auras of menace had made him terrified of his own death, this had been the sensation of someone who was killing him because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

"Good point, dad. Stabbing him in the kidneys will make it take longer—familicide should be savored." Now the weapon was pricking his side. This wasn't really much of an improvement.

"No, Hari." His brother was talking to the weirdo hugging him, it seemed. "You're not to kill him." That was an interesting development. Then again, he figured if his elder brother wanted him dead, he'd never have made it to toddlerdom.

"But isn't that what I'm supposed to do with family?" What was wrong with this freak?

"No."

"You did!"

"You can't kill him." That was acceptable.

"You got a whole clan! I just want this one." What?

"He's not strong enough." Hey!

"So I should gut him now, then." The knife was beginning to press against skin through his clothes. Why were they discussing this? Sasuke tried to move his arms, but that was a firm grip he was in.

"No!"

"But you taught me that I should kill them when they're weak!" A fair lesson, admittedly. And very Uchiha. From what Sasuke had gathered (not from civilians who had the strangest investment in the greatness of the Uchiha for some reason) by reading scrolls in his family's compound, the Uchiha had been much pretty the most poisonous bunch of backstabbing horrors as he could ever be glad not to have been raised by. It wasn't that Sasuke liked children, because he despised the little snot-machines—and D-ranks had done nothing to change that position—but he had the idea that children were supposed to have more parenting than being told how to hold a kunai and being terrorized to awaken a rare bloodline. The Uchiha didn't agree.

"I want him to get stronger first."

"That's stupid!" A sentiment that, however Uchiha, Sasuke had to echo. Except that it was in reference to him. Wait.

"I'm not weak!"

"Hush, Uncle Sasuke. I'm talking to my dad." What?

Itachi's mouth opened, but Sasuke beat him to the punch. "Hold on. What's with this 'uncle' thing?"

"Your brother is my dad, duh." Did the person with a blade at his kidneys just say 'duh'? This was officially approaching the most humiliating experience of his life. Naruto's liplock with him still took first place, but it was a near thing at this rate.

He was going to regret asking this question. He just knew it. "How old are you?"

"I'm going to turn twelve this month!"

Sasuke looked at Itachi. Everyone watched as his lips moved in some rapid calculation. "Oh gods! That's sick!"

Itachi blinked. Somehow the conversation had rather gotten away from him. "What?"

"You were eleven when you sired him?" Sasuke shuddered. He'd known his family hadn't been nice people, but breeding eleven-year-olds? Suddenly, the whole mass-slaughter thing was making some more sense. Everyone said that Itachi had been a genius and perhaps he'd taken it badly. "You know, suddenly, I understand why you killed everyone."

"What?" Itachi was slowly looking around, trying to find who was hiding and laughing at what had to be some kind of prank. He'd suspect Hari, but his son wasn't usually inclined to this kind of joke.

"I'm so sorry for what happened to you," Sasuke said. "I'm not sure I can go through with killing you. You had good reason."

"WHAT?" Itachi tried to dispel the illusion and found that there wasn't one. His eyes spun into Kaleidoscopic Sharingan as he tried to see through it. What in the hell had gone wrong with the world?

"You were forced to have sex with a cousin—thank the gods our sister was stillborn—when you were eleven." Sasuke's reading in the family archives had been distressingly enlightening. The Uchiha had always kept things in the family to try and breed the Sharingan true. He turned a bit to address the person holding him at kunai-point. "You know that's not okay, right?"

"What in the name of all that is holy are you talking about?" snapped Itachi.

"I understand why you killed the clan after that."

"Hari is adopted!" Itachi snarled. "I killed the clan to test my powers!"

Sasuke angled his head and saw the swirling Kaleidoscopic Sharingan gleaming in his captor's eye. "Right. Sure." That was why Itachi's son had awakened some sort of mutant evolution of the family's prized eyes at age eleven. It must have been so horrible that he repressed the memories of everything involved and convinced himself that his son was adopted. His family was so fucked up. When he rebuilt it, he would have Naruto advise him on how to make a clan that wasn't so screwed up.

Kisame had stopped towering over Naruto and was now using him to stay upright as he laughed. Naruto meanwhile had tears pouring down his face as he realized his best friend's brother had been so horribly treated. He'd always felt bad for Sasuke because his family was dead, but it was sounding like that might have been a good thing. How awful.

Hari looked up. "Oh."

"What 'oh'?" Itachi was grateful that he was going to be able to pretend that didn't just happen for a bit.

"Your distraction turns out to have not worked at all."

"What?"

"The target used the time to summon a—ohshit!" And then the wall exploded.

In the wreckage stood a giant man, as large as Kisame, wearing bright red and a forehead protector with 'Oil' written on it. "Never fear! The Gallant Jiraiya is here!" He was standing on a toad and began a little dance. "Women love me and—"

"Hey! I know you! Aunt Konan loves your books!"

"—men want to be . . . what?"

"My aunt back in Rain has your whole collection in her underwear drawer." Sasuke blinked. Why did his nephew know the contents of his aunt's panty drawer? When did he get an aunt? Oh gods, given that story about the boy being adopted, that was probably his nephew's mother—and it was his 'aunt' . . . dear gods, did she live?

"I'm always glad to find out about fan—did you say 'Konan'?"

"Yeah!"

"In Rain?"

"Yep!"

"What's she look like?"

"Um . . . tallish. Blue hair. Likes paper. She's really pretty. My Uncle Hidan says the papercuts would be worth it to wreck that. Of course, he only says it when she's not around." Sasuke's eyes had bulged out and his Sharingan was activated, beginning to grow to the third stage as his horror at his nephew's life mounted—was Itachi planning to mate his son with their sister?

"Hari!" Itachi's voice cut in.

"What?"

"What part of 'operational security' did you not learn?"

"Operation? You said we were going on a trip!"

"Screw this. Kisame, we're leaving."

"Aren't we supposed to grab the Power of Human Sacrifice?"

"The hell with that. We're leaving." The Sharingan-enhanced glare was enough to convince Kisame.

"Wait! I want to get an autographed set for Aunt Konan!"

"Hari." Itachi followed Kisame out a hole the huge shark-man knocked in the wall.

"Aw." He turned. "If you could send a set to Aunt Konan, God's Tower, Rain, I'd appreciate it!"

"DAMNIT Hari!"

"Coming, dad!" Hari jumped out after his father.

"Okay . . ." said Jiraiya. "What in the flying fuck just happened?"

"No idea, Horny-Toad Sage."

"You little brat!"

X

X

"Dad?"

"Yes Hari?"

"Are you mad at me?"

"Why would you think that?"

"You look kinda like Professor Snape right now."

Itachi sighed and stopped his running to walk over to a tree and bang his head against it a few times. "At least you drive your teachers as crazy," he muttered. "No, Hari, I'm not mad at you. Just frustrated."

"Why?"

"My brother seems to have decided not to kill me."

"Oh." Hari paused. "And?" The modifications to his haircut meant that his left eye was now visible, four points whirling around.

"Nothing, nothing."

X

X

Sasuke was glaring at his bowl of broth-with-noddles-in. Thanks to his . . . he was beginning to suspect that Naruto qualified as his best friend. And his only friend. He really needed to see about expanding his social circle. The past week had been an unpleasant one.

Despite the cheers from the idiots who saw it as some important thing that he unlocked the third tier of the Sharingan, he had spent his time going through more and more of his family's records. He'd read what there was before, but he was going over it with the jaded eye of a ninja, even if he was brand new. It had been nauseating stuff.

If it hadn't required a Sharingan to find, most of the records would probably have been gone. Sasuke had burned them after he read them this time, his Sharingan memorized them for him. He needed to rebuild his clan for sure now, if only to make sure that the Uchiha had a legacy in the village other than spite and incest and treason.

Hadn't that been an unpleasant awakening. Reading between the lines, this time able to remember all the other bits he'd read, and looking at it with the paranoid eyes of someone who'd fought for his life as a ninja . . . his family had been planning something bad. He didn't know when or what, but it had almost certainly been treason, judging from the fact that these would have been innocent scrolls that could have been left for anyone to find them. The only reason to hide them was that they had a darker interpretation.

And that was to say nothing of the family tree he'd uncovered two years ago by asking in the office of records in the Hokage's tower. The Uchiha had been very closely knit indeed. The worst of it was finding that there was a third sibling under his parents' names. 'Kiko' was recorded as having been a stillbirth. It sickened him to realize now that his parents had hidden away their daughter from the world to use her for breeding.

He felt bad for his older brother. He'd no doubt been trying to protect their sister from further horror. But that didn't excuse the mass murder of the children. Itachi was a rabid monster and it fell to him as family to put it down. It wasn't Itachi's fault, but it needed to be done. Sasuke needed power and he needed it fast.

Itachi was the last of the Uchiha's legacy of madness. He and Konan-Kiko. Sasuke needed to erase the stain of his family from history, wipe out the two remaining memories of those disgusting kin. Only then could he build the clan anew on the ashes of the old. He would definitely be adopting Naruto into the family. The blonde might not carry the blood of the Uchiha (a bit of a plus in this case), but his influence would hopefully result in a clan of nice, mildly-crazy ninja instead of violent, incestuous ones.

X

X

"Hey, dumbass."

Naruto glared at his best friend, although without much hatred. It was hard to be angry at him right now, what with what they'd learned about his family. Besides, he'd managed to find the old hag and talked her into becoming Hokage. He was riding pretty high. And Sasuke didn't mean it, anyway.

"We need to talk."

The blond ninja joined his best friend at the gates of Leaf, ahead of the two Sages who were having a squabble. Naruto wasn't following the whole thing, but he was pretty just it had to do with the pervert and attempting to grope the granny-lady. It was funny to watch the powerful Sage cringe in fear when his teammate screamed at him.

"You heard what my brother said, right?" Sasuke wasn't looking at his friend, just staring ahead. His eyes were narrowed and they weren't their usual black; the Sharingan gleamed.

"Yeah." Naruto had been sad to hear that someone had a worse childhood than him (Gaara notwithstanding). And the scale of how bad it was . . .

"I need to rebuild my clan."

"Oi, Bastard!" Naruto jumped back several feet. "I know that there was that . . . incident in the Academy, but I'm not into guys!"

Sasuke's head snapped up to look at Naruto so quickly that the people with them flinched as the cracking sound echoed. "WHAT?"

"You want to rebuild your clan with me?"

"Yes . . ."

"I don't swing that way."

" . . ." Sasuke closed his eyes and sighed. "Nor do I, Naruto."

"Oh. Good." Pause. "I'm not using Sexy Technique—"

"Good gods! I do not want to have sex with you!" The silence from the three behind Naruto was deafening.

"Princess?"

"What?"

"Did I just hear what I thought I heard?"

"I'm not drunk enough to have imagined it."

"Oh. I'm not sure that's any better."

"You idiot!" Sasuke had Naruto's collar in his hands. "I'm not asking to sleep with you. I want to adopt you into the clan!"

"—because I like Sakura and—what? Wait, you'd be my dad?"

"No!" Sasuke closed his eyes again for a moment. "As a sibling."

"But I don't have the Sharingan . . ."

A sigh. "This is true. But there are . . . things about the clan that, well . . . I can explain once you're a member. But let's just say that I want to add some new blood."

Naruto was silent, but there were tears forming in the corners of his eyes. It was one thing to have friends, but someone who wanted to be family? Even if it was the bastard who was his best friend.

X

X

It was amazing just how fast paperwork like that could get dealt with when the Hokage happens to like you. Despite the hubbub of getting a military dictator sworn in and arranging for various reorganizations necessary after a major catastrophe, the Hokage had found time to sign the papers that allowed the adoption of Uzumaki Naruto into the Uchiha clan as well as waving the usual waiting periods and several other conveniences that made life easier.

There also hadn't been much in the way of objection. Sasuke had wondered about that until he'd had a chance to talk with the new Hokage. She had bluntly informed him that it was because there was a ninety-day grace period during which objections could be raised and so she had accidentally failed to mention the adoption at all and was planning to forget about filing the paperwork in the records department for the next four months. At least. She confided that she was likely to leave it off longer than that in a drunken stupor because of Naruto. He had said he completely understood and only wished that Leaf allowed underage genin to drink.

X

X

Naruto was uncomfortably sitting at the Uchiha clan table. It was used for formal clan meetings, which meant it had gone unused for almost thirteen years. Prior to that, it had been pretty much in a state of constant occupation; the Uchiha liked their formalities almost as much as the Hyuga. Now it had handwritten notes scattered on it. Most of the details weren't committed to paper, but locked in Sasuke's head. For the last two hours, he'd gone over the details of what he knew.

"And that's why I brought you in. I can't imagine any spawn of yours managing to be that kind of messed up. With any luck, you'll balance it out."

Naruto was pale. He hadn't realized what he was getting into. On the upside, Sasuke seemed to pretty much think that most of his clan's traditions could burn. But still . . . they were fucking crazy. It was shocking his best friend wasn't a bigger asshole than he was.

"But before we can work on that, we need to erase the last remains of the old ways. Itachi is a mad dog—that makes it our responsibility to deal with him. I can only assume that my sister is similarly damaged at best. At best, she'll be catatonic. Either way, they need to die." He paused. "We will have to hope that you can work your magic on my—our nephew."

"Come again?"

"I want you to punch him in the face and tell him you want to be friends."

"What?"

"It worked on Gaara. And Neji. And the new Hokage. And Kiba, come to think of it. Oh, and that brat in Wave."

"You mean Inari?"

"Yeah. Sure. So you're in charge of getting him sane again."

"Uh . . ."

"Think of it like this, Naruto: he's been horribly abused and tormented and could really use a friend and a welcoming family."

"Believe it!"

(A/N John)

Spoon suggested I name this chapter "Spoon's Fault Again". She has a point, honestly. Almost all of this chapter is her fault. She was the one who wanted the meeting in the first place to look anything like it does. And then she was the one who said that when Sasuke realized how young Itachi must have been to father Hari, that he decided that he understood why Itachi massacred everyone. When Hari revealed his knowledge of Konan's panty drawer (a danger of the Byakugan alone, I assure you sick freaks) she said Sasuke would think it was because she was his mother and it was part of the lie they told themselves to avoid thinking about it. And that Hari would be bred into the line with Konan. I admittedly added the idea of a stillborn elder sister, just because it seemed so fitting to just enough "fact" to make the misunderstanding the worst possible thing. Other than that, I'm pretty much only responsible for Hari breaking operational security to ask for a set of Icha Icha and Sasuke deciding that he had to adopt Naruto to get the clan some blood that isn't tainted by crazy (enter Kushina?).

(A/N 2 John)

I'm also really sorry about the whole cliffhanger thing. That honestly hadn't been planned as a cliffhanger. It just seemed like exactly the place that the chapter should end, rather than planning to leave you folks dangling. Spoon just spoke up though and says she takes credit for that, so I'm letting that stand. If you're upset about the cliffhanger last chapter, it's her fault.

(A/N 3 John)

Plot. Yeah. So this story is occasionally getting plot. I will admit most of it will be Sasuke-related. He's sadly more of a protagonist than Hari. Not that I'm changing the focus of the story, mind you, just noting that he's got more main-character-y traits. So he's likely involved in plot.

On a similar note, I should explain that the reason Hermione tends to feature so heavily is that she acts as a comparatively good barometer of a moderately sane reality and therefore a somewhat acceptable foil for Hari. Most wizard-born tend to accept insanity as being normal.

Have fun,

John Out