The dawn after the massacre broke gray and empty, as if the sun itself hesitated to rise over what had been done. The sky held no color—not the warm oranges and pinks of typical sunrise, not even the clear blue of morning clarity. Just gray, stretching from horizon to horizon like a shroud pulled over the village, as if nature itself was mourning or perhaps hiding its face from the horror of the previous night.
When consciousness finally clawed its way back to sasuke, dragging him up from the merciful darkness he'd been lost in, everything was white.
White sheets that smelled of starch and antiseptic. White walls that reflected harsh fluorescent light with clinical brightness. White ceiling tiles with small water stains that formed patterns he could trace with his eyes without really seeing them.
The faint smell of medical-grade disinfectant stung his nose, mixing with something metallic that lingered in his throat and made his stomach twist with nausea. Underneath it all was another smell—one he would later identify as the lingering scent of his own fear-sweat and the blood that had soaked into his clothes before the nurses had changed him into a hospital gown.
For a moment, Sasuke didn't know where he was. His mind felt fractured, scattered into pieces that didn't quite fit together anymore. The last clear memory was of his house, dinner with his family, Itachi looking tired but present. Everything after that felt like it belonged to someone else's life, someone else's nightmare.
Then the memory came back—not in words, not in coherent narrative, but in flashes that struck like physical blows.
A temple bathed in candlelight.
A blade dripping red.
His mother's smile, so gentle even in her final moment.
His father's calm acceptance.
His brother's voice, cold and alien: "To test the limits of my power."
The Tsukuyomi's torture replaying it all seventy-two hours of subjective time compressed into seconds.
Sasuke tried to move, but his body wouldn't obey properly. His limbs felt disconnected, heavy, like they belonged to a stranger. His throat felt raw, as though he'd been screaming for hours—which, the doctors would later tell him, he had been. They'd had to sedate him when he'd first arrived, his screams echoing through the hospital corridors until nurses three floors away could hear them.
A nurse appeared silently beside the bed, her movements practiced and careful. Her eyes were soft with pity she couldn't hide fast enough when she looked at him. Sasuke saw it—that look he would come to recognize on countless faces in the weeks ahead. Pity mixed with discomfort, compassion undercut by the desire to be anywhere else, talking to anyone else, dealing with any other patient whose tragedy wasn't quite so overwhelming.
"Don't try to move, Sasuke-kun. You're safe now," she said gently, adjusting his IV line with professional efficiency. "The Hokage himself has placed guards outside your door. Nothing can hurt you here."
Safe.
The word felt wrong—like a cruel joke told in the wrong room to the wrong audience. Safe implied there was still something worth protecting, still a life worth living. But everything that had made him Sasuke Uchiha—family, clan, identity, purpose—had been erased in a single night. What remained in this hospital bed was just a shell, a walking corpse that hadn't yet realized it should lie down.
The nurse must have seen something in his expression because she quickly excused herself, leaving him alone with thoughts too terrible to confront directly.
Later—how much later, he couldn't say because time had lost meaning in the white room—he heard voices outside the curtain that separated his bed from the hallway. Calm, professional tones—the kind people used when speaking about someone's life as if it were a mission report to be filed and forgotten.
"He's the only survivor from the entire clan?" The voice was male, carrying the clipped efficiency of an ANBU operative making a status report.
"Confirmed. The entire Uchiha district has been sealed off pending investigation. The body count is..." A pause, as if the speaker couldn't quite believe the number they were about to say. "...comprehensive. Every member of the clan except this one child."
"What about Itachi Uchiha? Have we located him?"
"Missing. Fled the village sometime before dawn. ANBU tracking teams are pursuing, but he has at least a six-hour head start and he knows all our standard protocols. Hokage-sama has ordered discretion—no public announcements about his involvement until we have more clarity on the situation."
"The village will find out regardless. Something this large can't be hidden."
"True. But we control the narrative. That's what matters."
The voices faded as the speakers moved away, their footsteps echoing on the polished hospital floors. Sasuke stared at the ceiling until the shapes above him blurred, his eyes burning but producing no tears. He didn't cry. He couldn't. The tears had dried sometime during the night, burned away by the Tsukuyomi's trauma or perhaps simply exhausted by grief too large for his seven-year-old body to process.
What remained was a hollow ache where his heart used to be, and a single thought that repeated with the persistence of a heartbeat: Kill Itachi. Become strong enough to kill Itachi. Nothing else matters.
Word spread through Konohagakure the way all truly shocking news spread—quietly at first, whispered behind hands and in corners, then violently as the reality became impossible to deny.
By noon, the entire village buzzed with rumor and speculation. The marketplace, usually full of haggling and laughter, had transformed into a network of hushed conversations that stopped abruptly when village officials passed by.
"They say Itachi Uchiha killed them all. His entire clan. In one night."
"That can't be right—he was a prodigy, loyal to the Hokage! An ANBU captain! He wouldn't—"
"Maybe it was a coup that went wrong? The Uchihas were acting strange lately. All those clan meetings. The way they kept to themselves more than usual."
"Still... his own family? His own parents? What kind of monster—"
Parents pulled their children away when the topic came up, shielding young ears from details too horrific for childhood innocence. The few civilians who'd had business dealings with the Uchiha clan looked shaken, processing the loss of people they'd known, had dinner with, had shared jokes and complaints with like normal neighbors.
Even among the shinobi clans, an unusual silence reigned—not out of respect necessarily, but fear. Fear of what the massacre implied about village stability, about the hidden tensions that could explode into violence, about what other secrets might be lurking beneath Konohagakure's peaceful surface.
The Hyūga elders held an emergency clan meeting, speaking in hushed tones about "containment" and "ensuring our own security measures." The Aburame offered no public comment, their enigmatic silence more pronounced than usual. The Ino-Shika-Cho families—bound by generations of alliance—met to discuss their response and agreed, quietly, to follow the Hokage's lead: grieve in silence, ask no questions, wait for official explanations.
In the Academy instructor's lounge, teachers debated how to handle the situation when classes resumed.
"We have to tell them something," one instructor argued. "Sasuke Uchiha has been in their class for ten months. They'll notice his absence, and they'll hear the rumors regardless."
"But what do we tell seven-year-olds about genocide?" another countered. "How do we explain that one of our most talented students murdered his entire family?"
Iruka Umino sat silent through most of the discussion, his scarred face troubled. He'd grown fond of Sasuke over the past months—the boy's dedication, his quiet pride, his rivalry with Naruto that pushed both of them to improve. And now...
"We tell them their classmate experienced a terrible tragedy and needs time to recover," Iruka finally said. "We tell them to be patient and kind when he returns. The details... the details can wait until they're older."
Naruto didn't understand what had happened at first—only that something was very wrong when he arrived at the Academy the next day to find Sasuke's desk empty.
"Where's Sasuke?" he asked Iruka-sensei as the other students filtered in, many of them whispering among themselves.
Iruka-sensei looked sad in a way Naruto had never seen before. Not the gentle sadness of a teacher disappointed by poor test scores, but something deeper and more painful. His hand rested briefly on Naruto's shoulder as he spoke.
"Sasuke's taking some time away from the Academy. He... he lost his family, Naruto. Something terrible happened last night."
Naruto's brow furrowed with confusion. "Lost them? Like they went missing?"
"No. They're gone. They died." Iruka's voice was heavy with careful euphemism. "All of them. Sasuke is the only one left."
The words didn't make sense at first. Naruto had a vague concept of death—his grandfather had explained that his own parents had died protecting the village, though the details remained frustratingly vague. But an entire family? An entire clan? How did that even happen?
When he overheard two older students whispering about "the Uchiha massacre" during lunch break, the pieces began to click together with horrible clarity. Not just Sasuke's immediate family, but everyone. The compound Naruto had passed sometimes on his walks home. The Uchiha he'd seen in the markets. The elderly shop owner who'd sold his grandfather tea. All gone.
For months—his entire conscious life—Naruto had envied Sasuke in some ways. Not for his skills necessarily, though those were impressive. But for his name, his clan, the weight of history and expectation that came with being an Uchiha. The way people's eyes lit with recognition and respect when Sasuke introduced himself.
Now, for the first time, Naruto saw Sasuke differently. He'd spotted him that afternoon, walking through the village accompanied by a hospital attendant. Sasuke moved like a ghost, his eyes empty of the competitive fire that usually burned there. People stepped aside as he passed, but not out of respect—out of discomfort. Out of not knowing what to say to a child who'd lost everything.
No one dared to approach. No one offered comfort. They just watched with those same pitying eyes Naruto had sometimes seen directed at orphans, at people who existed on the margins of normal family life.
And for a moment—just a brief, crystallizing moment—Naruto felt something strange. Recognition.
So that's what it looks like from the outside... when you have no one left.
Naruto had his grandfather, had Asuma, had the household staff and the protection of being the Hokage's family. He'd never experienced true isolation, true loneliness. But he recognized it now in Sasuke's empty gait, in the way his former rival seemed to have shrunk somehow despite being the same physical size.
He tried to approach Sasuke that day after the brief Academy session ended early, offering him a rice ball he'd gotten from his lunch—one of the good ones with salmon filling that his grandfather's cook made specially.
"Hey, Sasuke," Naruto called out, jogging to catch up. "I heard... I mean, Iruka-sensei said..." He fumbled for words that didn't exist, then just held out the rice ball. "You should eat something."
Sasuke didn't take it. Didn't even look at him. His gaze was fixed on something distant, something only he could see. He just kept walking, his footsteps steady but mechanical, like someone who moved only because stopping would mean confronting reality.
Naruto stood there, the rice ball growing cold in his hand, and muttered, "Fine. Be that way."
But it didn't sound angry. It sounded like someone who'd just realized that loneliness wasn't special—it was shared. That underneath all their competition and rivalry, they'd always been more similar than different. Both trying to prove something. Both carrying weights they shouldn't have to bear at seven years old.
From his office window, Hiruzen watched the funeral procession wind through the empty streets of the Uchiha district.
No public ceremony—he'd forbidden it, claiming it was out of respect for the clan's privacy but knowing the real reason was to avoid questions he couldn't answer honestly. No speeches about honor or sacrifice. No flowers or public mourning. Only silence and masked ANBU bearing the coffins of the once-proud clan toward the cremation grounds.
Eighty-seven coffins in total. Eighty-seven lives erased in a single night to prevent a war that might have killed thousands. The calculations of it were sound—Danzo had made sure he understood the numbers, the projections, the scenarios where allowing the coup to proceed would have resulted in far greater loss of life.
But numbers couldn't account for the weight of it. For the faces he'd known since childhood now reduced to names on death certificates. For the children who would never grow up, never become the shinobi they'd dreamed of being.
He'd wanted to attend the private ceremony in person, to kneel by Sasuke's side at the funeral, to apologize for everything—for his brother's actions, for the lies that would have to be maintained, for the weight that child would now carry alone for the rest of his life.
But Danzo had advised against it with cold pragmatism.
"Attachment breeds instability, Hiruzen. The boy must learn to live with the truth we give him, not the one we hide. Your presence would only complicate matters, make him ask questions we cannot answer."
Hiruzen had ignored the bitterness rising in his own chest and murmured to the empty air, watching Sasuke's small figure at the head of the procession, "You've inherited a burden far too heavy for any child, young Uchiha... May you find a reason to keep walking. May you find something beyond hatred to sustain you."
But even as he said it, he knew it was a hollow hope. Itachi had made sure of that with his final genjutsu, planting the seeds of vengeance so deeply that nothing else would be able to take root in Sasuke's heart.
Three Weeks Later.
The village returned to its normal routine far faster than Sasuke thought possible.
Missions continued to be assigned and completed. The Academy reopened fully after a brief period of adjustment. Children laughed again in the playgrounds. Merchants haggled over prices. The world moved on—except for him.
Sasuke returned to the Academy after two weeks of medical leave, arriving to find his desk exactly as he'd left it, his classmates stealing nervous glances at him but mostly pretending everything was normal. Iruka-sensei welcomed him back with gentle encouragement, offered accommodations if he needed them, made it clear he could take breaks whenever necessary.
Sasuke refused all of it. Accommodations implied weakness. Breaks implied he was fragile. He would be neither weak nor fragile ever again.
At night, he dreamt of red eyes spinning with cursed patterns, of falling cherry blossom petals that turned to blood when they hit the ground, of his mother's final smile and his father's calm acceptance. He would wake gasping, covered in cold sweat, the Tsukuyomi's torture replaying with fresh horror each time.
By day, he trained. Harder than anyone else. Harder than was healthy or sustainable.
If Iruka said run five laps, Sasuke ran ten. If a classmate finished learning a technique, Sasuke mastered it and two others before sundown. His silence became armor he wore constantly; his obsession with improvement became the only purpose that gave his life meaning.
Every bruise, every ache, every pulled muscle was proof that he was still alive—and that one day, he would be strong enough to kill the brother who had taken everything from him.
His classmates noticed the change. Rock Lee tried to engage him in enthusiastic discussions about youth and hard work, but Sasuke's responses were monosyllabic at best. Hinata approached once with quiet concern, but retreated when his cold stare made it clear he wanted no comfort. Even Kiba, usually boisterous and friendly, kept his distance after one attempt at casual conversation was met with hostile silence.
Only Naruto persisted, though even he scaled back his usual loudness, trying different approaches with the stubbornness of someone who refused to give up on a friend—or rival—even when that person clearly wanted to be left alone.
One evening, long after official Academy hours had ended and the training grounds should have been empty, Naruto found Sasuke alone in the fading light.
Sasuke stood before the kunai target, throwing blade after blade with mechanical precision. His hands were bleeding—not dramatically, just small cuts where his grip had slipped, where exhaustion had made him careless. He didn't seem to notice or care.
Thunk. Bullseye.
Thunk. Bullseye.
Thunk. Bullseye.
Every throw was perfect. Every strike dead center. Not because he was particularly trying for accuracy, but because anything less would be unacceptable. Weakness in any form had to be eliminated.
Naruto approached slowly, making noise so he wouldn't startle Sasuke, though some part of him doubted anything could startle someone who'd survived what Sasuke had survived.
"Hey," Naruto said, keeping his voice uncharacteristically quiet. "It's getting dark. Iruka-sensei will lock the grounds soon."
Sasuke didn't respond. Just collected his kunai from the target and returned to the throwing line.
Naruto watched for several minutes, torn between respecting Sasuke's obvious desire for solitude and the equally strong instinct that leaving him alone was wrong somehow.
"You know," Naruto finally said, "you're gonna wear yourself out training like this. Even Grandpa says rest is part of getting stronger. Your muscles need time to—"
"Go away, Naruto." Sasuke's voice was flat, emotionless. "I don't need your advice. I don't need anything from you."
"Yeah, well, tough." Naruto sat down on the grass near the target range, deliberately settling in. "I'm staying anyway. Someone needs to make sure you don't pass out from exhaustion out here."
"Why?" The question came out harsh, almost angry. "Why do you care? We're rivals. Competitors. That's all we've ever been."
"Because," Naruto said simply, picking at the grass, "I know what it's like."
"You know nothing." Sasuke's hands clenched around a kunai hard enough that blood dripped more freely from his cuts. "You have a grandfather who's the Hokage. You have family. You have—"
"I know what it's like to see people look at you and see something scary instead of just you," Naruto interrupted quietly. "It's different from what you're going through. I'm not saying it's the same. But I recognize that look people get—that combination of pity and fear and wanting to be anywhere else."
Sasuke's next throw went slightly off-center—still hit the target, but not the bullseye. His first miss in over an hour.
"I don't need your pity."
"Good. I'm not offering it." Naruto stood up, brushing grass from his pants. "I'm offering to be here. To train with you, compete with you, push you to get better. Same as we've always done. Just... without pretending everything's fine when it's obviously not."
For a long moment, Sasuke said nothing. He just stood there, kunai in hand, silhouetted against the darkening sky.
Finally, so quietly Naruto almost didn't hear it: "He told me to hate him. To dedicate my life to getting strong enough to kill him."
"Are you going to?"
"Yes." No hesitation. No doubt. Pure conviction.
"Okay." Naruto nodded. "Then I'll help. We'll both get stronger. And when you're ready to face him, you won't be facing him as someone weak. You'll be facing him as the strongest shinobi in the village. Maybe in all the nations."
It wasn't comfort. It wasn't therapy. It was just a promise between two seven-year-old boys standing in the fading light—one consumed by vengeance, the other determined not to let his rival walk that path completely alone.
Sasuke threw his last kunai. Bullseye.
"The strongest shinobi," he repeated quietly, testing the words. "Strong enough that he'll regret leaving me alive."
And in that moment, watching the last light fade from the training grounds, their rivalry transformed into something more complex—a connection forged not through shared joy but through recognized pain, through the understanding that strength could be born from loss if you were willing to let it consume you.
Two lonely boys stood on opposite sides of the same darkness—one trying to fill it with purpose and connection, the other with vengeance and power.
And that's how their true bond began—built on ashes and determination and the shared understanding that the world was far crueler than either had imagined, but that surviving it meant never stopping, never resting, never allowing yourself to be weak enough to lose everything again.
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