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The mirror of their hotel room’s bathroom was clouded over from Itachi’s shower. The vent in the ceiling, despite making an impressive amount of noise, was doing very little to clear up the situation. Once he had his pants on, Itachi pushed open the door to let out more steam.
Kisame was not in the room, presumably still out finding them supplies.
The bathroom was cramped, with yellow tiles that Itachi suspected had not been yellow when installed. The toilet, wedged between the shower stall and the sink, was basically under the sink’s basin. The sink itself did not have enough of a counter to hold Itachi’s toiletry bag, which he placed directly in the chipped basin and set about unpacking.
Most renegade ninja did not bother with toiletry bags. There was rarely time and place for anything beyond brushing one’s teeth and cleansing oneself with the horrible two-in-one unscented soap and shampoo bars sold at every shinobi supply store.
Itachi, however, was unlucky enough to require travelling with half a pharmacy’s worth of medical supplies.
Sometimes, one’s body simply decided it needed to destroy parts of itself. There was no rhyme or reason for why this happened, as far as Itachi could tell, except that it frequently happened to him in particular.
His body had, as meticulously as he killed his own family, gone after the lining of his lungs, destroyed the insulin-secreting cells of his pancreas, had recently become suspect of starting on the myelin sheaths of his nerves, and, most bafflingly of all, wreaked havoc upon his digestive tract when exposed to wheat and barley.
Had this started to happen to Sasuke too? Itachi thought not; Orochimaru would not entertain such a body, even if it had an Uchiha’s eyes. Konoha would not have allowed Itachi to become a ninja at all if he’d graduated at the usual age.
Itachi blinked down at the device pulled from his cloak before entering the bathroom. His vision had been darker, recently. This, for once, had not been a rebellion on his immune system… just his own bloodline limit ripping through his retinas.
(Although it might also be the multiple sclerosis, his doctor had cheerfully told him. That one was tricky.)
The device was new. Palm sized and surprisingly sturdy, it had survived in his weapons pouch for the past month. It could wirelessly speak to the sensor resting on the back of his arm, beaming his blood glucose levels electronically into the air. The device then translated the data into neat little graphs, where Itachi could analyze patterns such as “chakra strain does indeed cause severe hypoglycemia” and “getting up to fight in the middle of a meal is too long a delay in administering insulin.”
This replaced the need for finger pricks to monitor blood glucose. The doctor who had recommended the device to Itachi had very kindly and gently assured him he wouldn’t have to see blood for days.
Itachi did not care about seeing blood. But he liked the graphs, and he liked being able to check his blood glucose mid-run, without having to manage the multiple tools required for finger pricks.
The sensor on his arm, just slightly wider and thicker than a large coin, needed to be replaced every two weeks. It stuck to his skin by the miracle of an adhesive strip, but the adhesive had started to fail with time, and Itachi easily pulled the whole thing off. It left behind a tiny puncture wound where the sensor’s fiber had gone under his skin, slightly raised.
Between his poor vision as the remaining fog on the mirror, Itachi could not see the puncture, but he could see the ring of dark gray fibers left behind by his clothing sticking to the adhesive. Itachi took an alcohol wipe– the same ones he and Kisame kept around to remove their nail lacquer– and used it to scrub off the adhesive debris.
The pharmacy worker who’d ultimately sold Itachi the blood glucose sensors had also sold him additional skin adhesive for his “active lifestyle.” Most of Itachi’s fights now involved him blinking his sharingan at people and hoping the tingling in his fingers wouldn’t interfere in hand signs. He would not consider this “active” compared to what he did at the beginning of his missing-nin career, but he supposed he did spend most of his time wandering around outside.
The additional adhesive was quite good. It had kept his sensor on through a mission where Itachi and Kisame had walked two days through a hurricane, fought an entire platoon of hunter-nin, and then set a warehouse on fire. Once it was on, it wasn’t coming off.
Itachi wiped the adhesive over the now clean spot on the back of his arm and applied the new sensor. He scanned it with the matching device to set it up, took his evening pill regimen, and then retreated into the hotel room to sit quietly and meditate and pretend his lungs were alright.
Kisame eventually returned with a new roll of kunai, iodine tablets, and a bag of take-out.
“You can eat buckwheat, right?” Kisame asked, shrugging off his cloak.
Kisame asked this at least once a month. Itachi could see where this was confusing.
“Yes,” Itachi answered. He moved forward to inspect the food– soba noodles in a savory soup, topped with vegetables and meat. “Did you inquire about the other ingredients? Or possible cross-contamination?”
“Uh,” Kisame blinked at him, his grin taking on a fixed quality. “Well. There’s dango?”
Wheat flour was not a usual ingredient in soba. But it could be. It was not a risk Itachi was willing to make.
Itachi gave Kisame his soup and ate the side salad and dango rolled in sesame paste. Dango would never betray him.
(Except when he didn’t take enough insulin for the dango, or that time it was shoyu dango, soaked in glutenous soy sauce. That had been a deep, cutting betrayal.)
Itachi kept his insulin in an experimental storage scroll meant to prolong the shelf-life of food, which Sasori called an “abomination to the shinobi arts.” It had twice mysteriously frozen his insulin solid and ruined it, but was otherwise a workable solution to not having regular access to refrigeration. He had to remove Kisame’s butter in order to unseal his insulin.
“I think we should head south next,” Kisame said once they’d cleared their food away. He rolled a battered map of the Elemental Nations across the tatami mats of the floor.
“The upheaval in Rice Country is predicted to generate a lot of missions,” Itachi agreed. “We’re likely to be sent that way anyway.”
Having to sprint across three countries to get to the next mission in time was… bad for lungs.
“And the weather’s better,” Kisame added cheerfully.
“Yes,” Itachi murmured. Chilly autumns in the northern countries… also bad for lungs.
“Not to mention the food,” Kisame drawled on. He pointed to a coastal town and started rambling about types of seafood.
Itachi did not particularly care about eating a wide variety of clams, but southern countries were less likely roll all their food in wheat. Very civilized of them. He nodded along with Kisame’s proposed plan to head to the southern coast of the pocket of Water Country that ran along under Rice Country, the result of stealing useful sea-access hundreds of years ago. They’d be able to enjoy themselves until someone inevitably hired Akatsuki to assassinate one of the several men currently vying to replace the Rice Country daimyo.
When Kisame got up to brush his teeth before bed, Itachi picked up his blood glucose reading device to see if the dango had betrayed him after all.
The device displayed an error message.
Itachi tried again.
The error message persisted.
Replace sensor, the digital display demanded.
Itachi didn’t have another sensor.
“Everything okay?” Kisame asked, re-entering the room and throwing his toothbrush in the general direction of his travel bag.
“Yes,” Itachi lied, replacing the device in his weapon’s pouch. He could simply do a finger prick.
“I thought you didn’t have to do that any more,” Kisame said.
“It’s fine,” Itachi continued to lie, squeezing blood from his finger.
In the morning, the sensor still wasn’t working. It had failed, Itachi supposed, and after he’d brushed his teeth and washed his face, he went to pull the device off.
It was stuck.
He had, after all, very carefully glued it to himself with an adhesive meant to last for weeks.
Itachi tugged experimentally at it, and it felt as if the whole of the back of his arm moved with it. He could pry it off, obviously, but he was confident this would also remove some of his skin.
He fished out another alcohol swab and ran it over the sensor. It did not loosen at all.
He and Kisame checked out of the hotel and started for Water Country, and the useless device was still glued to him.
“More finger pricks?” Kisame asked when they stopped for lunch. “You said–”
“I’m working on it,” Itachi said through gritted teeth.
xXx
It took three days to get to the coast, which involved two days walking and then a day taking a ferry down a river, which was a welcome break for Itachi’s… everything. They set up camp on a beach, on soft sand well above the tide-line, and Itachi had not seen Kisame this happy in months.
Itachi was currently experiencing a mysterious numbness in his legs and still had a non-functional medical device glued to his skin.
He woke up at night sweaty with hypoglycemia and sat outside their tent on the beach, watching the moon and eating leftover green tea dango.
Dango would never betray him.
They only got one full day of Kisame acquiring and then cooking various types of clams and mussels on the beach before they were sent to assassinate the Rice Country daimyo’s nephew.
“We didn’t even get to try the blue surfer clams,” Kisame sighed as they packed up.
Running with mysterious leg numbness was… odd. The numbness did not affect his ability to move his legs, but the lack of sensation had high potential to make movements uncoordinated. The muscle memory that came with the sharingan seemed to compensate for it well enough, although using the sharingan would inevitably give him a migraine later.
Assassination was simple enough, at least. Itachi was simply going to use genjutsu to waltz into the nephew’s mansion and have him walk into some sort of body of water. Or off a balcony. Or into an exposed sharp object. Itachi was not picky.
And so Itachi wandered into a mansion late at night, putting guards to sleep as he went, while Kisame sat in a tree outside in case things went sideways.
And sideways things went, almost immediately. If not for the sharingan, Itachi would not have noticed the senbon aimed at his neck in time to dodge.
One of the guards had not nodded off under his genjutsu. The guard’s chakra pathways and movements were wrong– it was a puppet. Had the nephew gone so far as to hire Suna-nin…?
“Itachi,” the puppet rasped.
Ah, no, even more sideways than usual.
“Sasori,” Itachi greeted. “It appears there was a miscommunication.”
Itachi did not kill their target that night. Instead, he met with Kisame, Sasori and Deidara in a heavily warded storage shed on the edge of the mansion’s property.
“We were hired by the mother-in-law,” Sasori said, sounding deeply annoyed by their presence. “She’s very keen to help her grandchildren get in line for for daimyoship. Did Leader-sama not tell you our mission took precedence?”
“We were told a quick assassination was top priority,” Kisame answered mildly, flashing his pointed teeth in a polite smile that was, in fact, deeply intimidating.
“This is a dumb mission anyway, yeah,” Deidara complained. “Just let me fake a gas leak. Blow the whole place up. Problem solved, yeah.”
“That would create several more problems,” Sasori hissed.
“I will ask Leader-sama for clarification,” Itachi declared, before Sasori got distracted by bickering, or Deidara got distracted by his own insane artistic endeavors.
Itachi ducked out of the shed, hopping over the garden wall into the bows of a tree just outside the compound. His legs continued to feel off, and Itachi experimentally tried the chakra string technique he’d copied from Sasori, attaching them to his own legs.
He landed as unsteadily as a genin just learning to tree-jump. Not nearly as easy as Sasori made it look.
“Ah, I see the problem,” Konan said when Itachi finally got a hold of her via his ring. Her form flickered in his mind’s eye. “I’m sure you can find a solution.”
Akatsuki leadership was… often not helpful.
“What does that mean?” Sasori demanded when Itachi reported back.
Itachi was feeling lethargic, and.. just generally, nonspecifically bad. There were a million possible reasons for this. He wished his sensor had worked, so he could subtly check if the reason might be elevated blood glucose. Instead he simply put on his most neutral face and said:
“What are the exact parameters of your mission?”
Sasori abandoned them to go complain to Leader-sama himself, and Deidara crossed his arms and proceeded to regale them with a rant about how his talents were being wasted. Itachi could feel his usual sharingan-induced headache starting up early.
Itachi gingerly sat down and pulled out his old glucometer and pricked his finger. His blood glucose was high. Had… had the dango betrayed him…?
“Oh, so you are falling apart, yeah,” Deidara said smugly, leaning over Itachi with hands on his hips. “Not even your stupid magic eyes–”
“Deidara,” Kisame interrupted. Deidara rolled his eyes and brushed his long blonde hair over his shoulder.
Deidara held back on verbally insulting Itachi further, but forty-five minutes later Sasori still had not returned, and Itachi checked his blood glucose again in the vain hope it had somehow righted itself.
It hadn’t, and he had a headache, and there was still a non-functional medical device glued to his skin.
Deidara leaned against the wall next to him and asked, “So you ever accidentally summon something with that?”
“...no,” Itachi answered.
“What,” Kisame barked out with a laugh.
“He summons crows, doesn’t he?” Deidara snapped back.
“You don’t just summon an animal any time you bleed, kid.”
“Well, how am I supposed to know how animal contracts work, yeah?”
Kisame revealed that Itachi had once summoned crows and then used the left over blood to check his blood glucose in the middle of a fight. Itachi shot him an annoyed look. He didn’t have to tell Deidara that.
“We solved it,” Sasori announced when he returned two hours later. “Itachi will simply make his target commit suicide and leve a note passing his responsibilities in ousting the daimyo onto the eldest son.”
“The eldest son is eight, yeah,” Deidara pointed out.
Itachi rolled his shoulder. The leg numbness was slowly transforming into a annoying, painful pins-and-needles sensation, and he was glad there was no impending fight.
“It’s doesn’t matter to the continuation of the mission,” Sasori said, and Itachi wandered out of the shed to lay his genjutsu trap.
xXx
Somehow, it turned into a fight anyway. Akatsuki missions were like this.
Itachi’s whole body hurt, but he was used to pushing himself through it. Between his eyes, his genjutsu, and his fire techniques, he was still one of the deadliest ninja alive.
There was still a non-functional medical device glued to his skin.
At least exercise depressed blood glucose.
xXx
They bought the blue surfer clams at an open air market. The place smelled distinctly of salty air and dead fish.
“These weren’t even caught today,” Kisame complained to the stall owner. “You should really give me a discount.”
The clams went into the storage seal along with the butter and Itachi’s insulin, a true gamble with the dubious nature of clams on Kisame’s part. They were planning to meet with the artist duo for lunch, as a mission debrief.
“Deidara said he’d pick,” Kisame informed Itachi as they wandered back into town.
“Hmm,” Itachi replied. Deidara did not seem likely to think of others when picking a restaurant.
He had indeed picked a stall that specialized in deep-fried breaded things, called bakudan. Itachi ordered tea and pretended he was too good for Deidara’s favorite food.
Deidara’s posturing outrage was, at the very least, funny.
On the way out of town, despite feeling exhausted, Itachi micromanaged Kisame shopping for further clam-related cooking supplies, demanding to see the ingredients list on everything he bought. Then they swung by a pharmacy, and Itachi was finally able to inquire about removing the glued-on sensor.
“You just peel it off,” the pharmacist said, looking unimpressed with Itachi’s problem solving skills.
“It is… well attached,” Itachi said.
“Have you tried acetone?” the pharmacist asked.
“Yes,” Itachi replied blandly.
“Well, it should come right off,” the pharmacist replied, as if Itachi were lying for incomprehensible motives.
Kisame shifted awkwardly behind him. Itachi, feeling fed up with the conversation, cast just the tiniest genjutsu over the pharmacist to make him stop talking and hand over two new sensors.
There was room on the back of his arm for two sensors, after all.