The moon was a pale coin hung in a sky drained of color, its light anemic and failing, as if even the celestial bodies understood that some nights were too terrible to illuminate fully. The stars seemed dimmer than usual, their light reaching the earth reluctantly, and even the wind seemed to hush as it crossed the tiled roofs of the Uchiha district. The air carried the faint scent of rain promising to fall but never quite arriving, but it was the stillness that made the night feel fundamentally wrong—a silence too perfect, too deliberate, as if the world itself had stopped breathing to listen for something it dreaded hearing.
The Uchiha compound lay peaceful in the late evening, families settling into their nighttime routines with the comfortable ignorance of people who believed tomorrow would arrive as reliably as it always had.
Itachi moved like a shadow between shadows, his form barely distinguishable from the darkness that cloaked the compound's narrow alleys and traditional architecture.
Every step was measured with the precision of someone who'd trained his entire life for exactly this kind of operation, every breath timed to the rhythm of the night so perfectly that even the most alert shinobi wouldn't sense his presence until far too late. The ANBU mask hid his face—that was mercy, perhaps, though for whom he couldn't say. It didn't hide the tremor in his hands, the way his fingers shook slightly as they gripped his tanto blade, or the tears that tracked silently down his cheeks behind the porcelain barrier.
Behind him, another shadow followed—masked, efficient, deadly. The figure who called himself Madara but wore Obito's face beneath the spiral mask. They'd divided the compound between them with cold strategic efficiency: Itachi would handle the main families, those closest to the coup's planning. Obito would eliminate the peripheral members, the ones who lived on the compound's edges.
The partnership was built on mutual need rather than trust. Itachi needed someone powerful enough to help him complete this massacre in a single night—any longer and ANBU reinforcements would arrive, turning this surgical strike into the prolonged warfare it was meant to prevent. Obito had his own reasons, his own agenda involving eyes and power and ancient grudges that Itachi neither understood nor cared about.
All that mattered was speed, precision, and the complete elimination of the coup plotters before they could act.
The first house belonged to the Uchiha's weapons master—a man named Tekka who'd been instrumental in stockpiling armaments for the planned uprising. Itachi had trained under him as a child, learned tanto techniques from hands that were patient and skilled. He pushed open the door with fingers that wanted to refuse, wanted to stop, wanted to turn around and run from what he was about to do.
The family of three slept peacefully inside. A mother, father, and child barely older than Sasuke, the boy's small form curled between his parents in the way children did when nightmares made them seek comfort. The scene was so peaceful, so perfectly innocent, that Itachi's breath caught in his throat.
His Sharingan flared to life, the Mangekyō pattern spinning with power he'd never wanted to possess. The genjutsu struck all three simultaneously—they never woke, never felt pain, simply slipped from sleep into death in the space between heartbeats. Their last dreams would be peaceful ones. That was the only mercy Itachi could offer.
The tanto work afterward was quick, clinical, ensuring what the genjutsu had started. He didn't look at their faces. He couldn't. If he looked—if he truly saw what he was doing—he'd never make it through the rest of the night.
One by one, the lights across the compound flickered and died like candles snuffed by an invisible hand. Each house held lives, histories, people he'd known since childhood. The elderly couple who'd given him sweets when he'd passed their shop as a child. The young shinobi who'd served beside him in ANBU before being called back to clan duties. The families with children who would never grow up now, who would never have the chance to choose peace over violence.
His technique was flawless—honed by years of ANBU operations, refined to the point where death came so swiftly that most victims never registered what was happening. But flawless technique couldn't stop the weight of it, the crushing burden that pressed heavier with each life he took.
The crows watched from the eaves, their eyes like shards of obsidian reflecting the minimal moonlight. They were his summons, called to bear witness because he couldn't do this alone, couldn't carry the weight entirely by himself even if the world would never know their silent vigil. When he closed his eyes between strikes, he could hear them—the final breaths, the moments of fear when some woke just before the end and recognized the figure in the mask too late.
"Itachi-san?" one had whispered, an older woman who'd taught him calligraphy when he was six. "Why?"
He'd killed her before she could say more, had moved with the speed that made explanations impossible because explanations would have broken him completely.
He told himself it was mercy—quick deaths rather than the prolonged suffering of warfare. He told himself it was for peace—preventing the coup meant preventing a conflict that would have killed far more people on both sides. He told himself he could carry it alone, that his shoulders were broad enough for this burden, that love could be expressed through monstrous actions if those actions protected what mattered most.
And still, when the blood hit the stones—warm and thick and undeniably real—his knees almost gave out. He caught himself against a wall, his breath ragged, his chest tight with grief so profound it felt like drowning. The Mangekyō burned in his eyes, demanding chakra, consuming his vision bit by bit with each technique used. By the time this night ended, he'd be significantly closer to blindness.
A fair price, perhaps, for what he was destroying.
The compound's training grounds ran red with blood that pooled in the spaces between cobblestones. Bodies lay where they'd fallen—some had tried to fight back, clan members with activated Sharingan attempting to defend themselves against an opponent whose Mangekyō gave him overwhelming advantage. Their techniques had been formidable, their will to survive fierce, but Itachi's speed and the element of complete surprise had been insurmountable.
He'd fought his cousin Izumi near the central fountain, her three-tomoe Sharingan spinning desperately as she tried to track his movements. She'd been his friend once, perhaps more than friend, someone who'd understood the weight he carried even before tonight.
"Itachi, please," she'd said, kunai raised but hands shaking. "Whatever they made you do, whatever they threatened—we can find another way. We can run. We can—"
The genjutsu had trapped her in a lifetime of peaceful happiness—growing old together, children, grandchildren, dying peacefully in bed surrounded by family. Seventy years compressed into a single second. And then her body had fallen, and Itachi had moved on to the next target with mechanical precision even as something inside him screamed.
Sasuke woke to a strange stillness that his unconscious mind recognized as wrong even before his conscious thoughts could process why.
The cicadas had stopped their evening chorus—unusual but not unprecedented. But the frogs by the pond were also silent, and the distant sounds of the village that usually filtered through even at night had vanished completely. It was as if someone had placed the entire compound under a dome of absolute quiet.
Sasuke rubbed his eyes, half-dreaming still, caught in that space between sleep and waking where reality felt negotiable. He noticed the lamps outside his window were out—all of them, not just his street but the entire visible compound. The darkness was more complete than it should be.
The air smelled wrong. Faintly of iron and smoke and something else he couldn't identify but that made his stomach clench with instinctive fear. His mother wasn't in her room when he checked—the sliding door was open, her futon empty and cold. The dinner plates were still on the low table in the main room, food congealed and untouched. His father's sandals were gone from the entryway.
A knot of fear coiled in his stomach, tightening with each new detail that didn't fit the normal pattern of his life.
He ran, his small feet slapping against the wooden floors as he rushed through the house calling for his parents. The silence swallowed his voice without echo. When he burst out the front door into the compound streets, the fear crystallized into something approaching terror.
The streets of the Uchiha compound were empty. No guards at the usual posts. No late-night chatter of adults finishing their evening routines. No sounds of training from the dedicated practitioners who worked through the night. Just the faint patter of liquid—not rain, he realized with dawning horror, but something thicker sliding down roof tiles and dripping from eaves.
When he turned the corner near the training field where he and his classmates sometimes practiced on weekends, he saw them. Shapes in the dark, sprawled like discarded dolls, their positions wrong in ways that made his mind reject what his eyes were showing him. He didn't count how many. He didn't dare look closely enough to count. He recognized clothing, familiar patterns worn by people he'd known his entire life.
"No... this isn't real..." His voice cracked, too high and thin to sound like his own. "This is a dream. A nightmare. It has to be."
But the blood pooling around his sandals was warm and real, soaking into the fabric with terrible persistence. This was no genjutsu he could break. No illusion he could dispel.
He kept running, his breath ragged with panic, his mind fragmenting as it tried to process horrors his seven years of life had never prepared him for.
At the end of the main street, the Nakano Shrine loomed—its doors half-open despite the late hour, candlelight inside flickering weakly against the darkness. The temple had always been a place of peace for Sasuke, where his mother would take him to pray during festivals, where the stone faces of ancient Uchiha looked down with stern but protective expressions.
Tonight it felt like a tomb.
He pushed through the doors, his feet slick with something he refused to acknowledge, his breath coming in gasps that sounded like sobs. The interior should have been empty at this hour, locked and dark until morning prayers.
Instead, he found them.
His father and mother knelt side by side in the temple's center, their backs straight, hands resting in their laps in positions of meditation or prayer. They looked almost peaceful, almost like they'd simply come here for evening contemplation. Fugaku's face was calm in a way Sasuke rarely saw—all the stern disappointment smoothed away into something approaching serenity. Mikoto wore the gentle smile she always saved for her youngest son, full of the love she'd never quite managed to express adequately in words.
And standing before them, tanto drawn and dripping red, stood Itachi.
"Nii-san?" The word came out small, confused, a child's voice trying to make sense of an impossible scene.
Itachi turned slowly, and for an instant—just a fraction of a second—the mask of the assassin slipped. Not in his face, which remained carefully blank, but in his eyes. The Mangekyō pattern spun slowly, and within those crimson depths Sasuke glimpsed regret, sorrow, love, and absolute devastation all twisted together into something too complex for a child to fully comprehend.
"Sasuke," Itachi said quietly, his voice rougher than usual. "Why are you here? You were supposed to sleep through this. You weren't supposed to—" He stopped, swallowed hard. "You shouldn't be here."
"What's happening?! Why are—why are they—" Sasuke couldn't complete the question, couldn't form words for what his eyes were showing him.
Mikoto's eyes opened one final time, focusing on her youngest son with love so pure it hurt to witness. She smiled, the way mothers do when words fail but the heart speaks louder. "Sasuke... run."
"Mother, please, I don't understand—"
Steel flashed in candlelight. Two bodies fell as one, the sound of them hitting the floor echoing through the temple with terrible finality.
Sasuke's scream split the night—a sound that would echo in his dreams for years to come, in every waking moment and sleeping nightmare, a sound that marked the exact instant his childhood ended and something darker was born in its place.
He ran, his world reduced to pure animal panic. The temple hall blurred around him; the world turned red through tears he didn't remember starting to cry. His feet carried him without conscious direction, muscle memory navigating familiar streets that had become alien territory.
But the footsteps behind him were steady, calm, inevitable. Itachi followed at a measured pace, not rushing because he didn't need to. There was nowhere Sasuke could run within the compound that Itachi couldn't reach, no hiding place that would offer sanctuary from what was coming.
When Sasuke stumbled over bodies he'd been too panicked to notice, his hands landing in cooling blood that would stain his skin for days no matter how hard he scrubbed, Itachi was there. The tanto blade glinted faintly in the minimal moonlight, and his eyes—those terrible eyes—glowed with the black flames of the Mangekyō Sharingan.
"Why, Nii-san?" The question tore itself from Sasuke's throat, half sob and half demand. "Why?! What did we do? What did they do?! Mother and Father—they never hurt anyone! They loved you! I loved you!"
For just a moment, Itachi's expression flickered. Something human tried to surface through the monster's mask he'd constructed. But then it was gone, buried under the necessity of what he'd already started and couldn't stop now.
"To test the limits of my power," Itachi said, each word slicing sharper than any blade, the lie delivered with perfect coldness because the truth would have destroyed them both. "The Uchiha clan had grown weak, complacent. You are weak, Sasuke. Pathetic. You've always been in my shadow, always trying and failing to match me."
"That's not—that's not true! I've been training! I've gotten stronger! You said you'd teach me the—"
"You have no talent. No potential worth developing. But perhaps..." Itachi's head tilted slightly, considering. "Perhaps if you survive, if you grow strong enough to hate me properly, you might become worth my time to kill."
He moved faster than Sasuke could track, faster than a seven-year-old's eyes could process even with the Sharingan that activated unconsciously in his terror. Itachi's hand gripped Sasuke's face, fingers digging in with just enough pressure to terrify without causing permanent damage.
"If you wish to kill me someday, hate me. Despise me. Dedicate every moment of your life to becoming strong enough to take your revenge. Run. Live. Survive only to make me pay for what I've done tonight."
The Mangekyō spun, and suddenly Sasuke was drowning in images—forced to watch the massacre play out again and again and again in the Tsukuyomi's infinite loop. Every death. Every plea. Every moment of his parents' final seconds played out in excruciating detail from countless angles. The genjutsu crushed him under the weight of horror repeated seventy-two hours worth of trauma compressed into a single second of real time.
And then, just as Sasuke's mind was beginning to fracture completely under the assault, Itachi reached out one final time. His fingers touched Sasuke's forehead in the gesture he'd used a thousand times before—the gentle tap he'd given when promising they'd train together tomorrow, when saying goodnight, when offering wordless affection in the only way their family's emotional restraint allowed.
"Forgive me, little brother," Itachi whispered, so quietly that Sasuke almost didn't hear it through the roaring in his ears.
Then everything went black as Sasuke's consciousness mercifully fled from horrors too great to process while remaining sane.
By morning, the Uchiha district was silent. The village whispered of betrayal and madness, of a prodigy who'd snapped under pressure and destroyed his entire clan in a single night of incomprehensible violence. The truth—the impossible choices and terrible sacrifices—sank into the same darkness that had birthed the massacre.
Hiruzen Sarutobi stood before the compound gates as dawn broke, his pipe trembling in his hand though he made no move to light it. Behind him, ANBU operatives worked to document the scene, their professional detachment failing to hide their horror at the scale of destruction. Danzo watched from the shadows and said nothing, his expression unreadable but his visible eye carrying something that might have been satisfaction or might have been the acknowledgment that necessary evil remained evil regardless of necessity.
In the hospital, a boy with black eyes lay motionless in a bed, staring at the ceiling without seeing it. Medical nin had treated his chakra exhaustion and physical collapse, but they had no techniques for healing what the Tsukuyomi had done to his mind. He replayed one question over and over in an endless loop that doctors would later identify as the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder:
"Why?"
The question had no answer he could access. Only hatred remained, pure and absolute, filling the void where family and love and childhood had existed just hours before.
And somewhere beyond the village walls, walking alone into self-imposed exile that would last years, a young man in ANBU black carried a burden the world would never forgive him for. Itachi Uchiha had saved the village through monstrous action, had prevented war through fratricide, had chosen the many over the few at the cost of his own soul.
History would remember him as a traitor and murderer. Only three people would ever know the truth—the Hokage, the manipulator, and the brother who'd been left alive specifically to grow strong enough to eventually deliver the justice Itachi believed he deserved.
The Uchiha name had burned away, leaving only silence behind.
And in that silence, the spark of vengeance took root—a spark that would one day shake the shinobi world to its foundations when the last surviving Uchiha came to understand that hatred, however justified, was merely another kind of prison.
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