Chapter Text
Sasuke had only meant to get a drink of water.
He couldn’t sleep. The June summer air was thick and restless, and his bed had felt too warm, too damp, like the heat was pressing down through the walls themselves. So he’d crept out quietly, not wanting to wake his mother as he passed by his parent's room. Just a long walk to the kitchen, to cool off— nothing more.
He hadn’t expected the world to break open.
Sasuke heard shouting as he carefully balanced a cool water pitcher between his hands. Not the usual kind— nothing like the sharp commands of sparring or the sudden, barking arguments between clan members that flared and faded like sparks.
This was different. It cracked across the compound like thunder— loud, raw, and deafening.
He froze, knuckles tight against the chilled glass.
Then came a dull, sick thud. A heavy sound. A body hitting wood, or stone, or worse. Silence, only for a heartbeat, then the screaming started.
One voice, high and thin, almost too shrill to be real. Then another. Then more. Crying, shouting, screaming like the whole world had turned inside out. The kind of sound people made when they were being hurt. When they knew they wouldn’t get back up.
The pitcher slipped from his fingers. It didn’t shatter— but the water burst across the floor, cold and sudden, soaking through his toes. He stumbled backward, chest heaving, heart hammering in his throat.
Sasuke moved before he could think.
His legs jerked into motion away from the kitchen and down the hall, driven by something deeper than thought, a pull in his chest that left no room for hesitation. His feet pounded the floor, bare soles slapping hard against the wood, and breath tearing in and out in ragged bursts. Shoji doors rushed past on either side, nothing but streaks of paper and ink in his peripheral vision, melting into the shadows as he sped by.
He slipped and caught himself, the floor damp and slick. His toes dug in, searching for grip, knees jolting as he steadied his balance mid-stride.
Outside, the night flared white.
A flicker of silver, shuriken catching moonlight, then the flash of sparks like fireworks too close to the ground. The clang of steel against steel rang through the compound like windchimes made of knives.
A scream sliced the air. But this one didn’t last. It cut off halfway, like someone had closed a door on it.
Sasuke jerked forward instinctively as if the sound had shoved him. His breath hitched— but he kept going.
He turned a corner too fast and slammed his shoulder into the wall. Pain jolted up his arm, but he bit down on the noise. He staggered, caught the edge with one hand then shoved off again without stopping, pain burning down to his wrist.
No time, he had to keep running.
Nothing made sense. Nothing fit. He didn’t understand what was happening. Only that something wasn’t right. Something had broken into the Uchiha compound. Not a person. Not even a group. Something.
He passed a window. The outside world was still in chaos.
A blur of motion, too fast to be human, sliced past his view, gone before he could tell if it was friend or enemy. There was a streak of red trailing along a window, thick and smeared like someone had tried to hold themselves up.
His head turned just enough to glimpse more motion– something fast, something destroying. He didn’t look twice. His foot caught on a mat and he stumbled, falling to one knee, but pushed back up. He barely felt it in his confusion of churning thoughts.
Where are they?
Mother? Father?
Itachi—?
The name echoed in his chest like a drumbeat. If anyone could stop this— if anyone couldn’t die here— it was Itachi. He was strong. Smarter than everyone. Sasuke didn’t want to believe anything bad could happen if Itachi was still out there.
So he didn’t stop, even as the air still pressed in on him like a grave. Heavy and almost wet like it wanted to stick to him and drag him down. Everything was slower now.
The hallway stretched before him like something out of a fever dream, longer than it had ever been, its wooden floor groaning underfoot, every doorway along the path slightly askew, tilted in angles that didn’t make sense.
The walls, once straight and warm with light, now leaned inward and dimmed with shadow, and even the soft broken paper lanterns looked weak, their light already exhausted. Every step forward made the air feel heavier, like he was wading through something thick and invisible.
The house— his house — didn’t look like home anymore. The little details that had once been so comforting, so ordinary, were distorted now. They bent and flickered at the corners of his vision. The straight lines of floorboards warped beneath his feet, the quiet hush that used to mean safety now pressed down on him like a warning. Something terrible had passed through here. Something that had broken the stillness in a way that couldn’t be fixed.
It felt like walking through a nightmare.
And then— he saw the door.
Itachi’s room.
Sasuke’s heart kicked so hard it felt like it might knock the breath out of his chest. His legs moved before he could think, stumbling forward, feet thudding louder than they should have. He reached for the handle with shaking hands, flung the door open too fast, and stood frozen in the threshold, lungs dragging in shallow air.
It was empty.
Not shattered like the rest of the house. Not torn apart. Everything was still here: the bed, neatly made; the shelves lined with scrolls and books in perfect order; the faint scent of ink and old wood that always clung to Itachi’s space. Nothing had been touched or destroyed yet. And somehow, that made it worse.
The moment held too long. His skin prickled. The walls felt too close. And before his thoughts could catch up, his body moved as he closed the door softly behind him— crawling, scrambling toward the shadows beneath the bed, as if his instincts had already decided for him.
Sasuke shoved himself beneath the wooden frame, heart pounding like it was trying to beat out of his chest. His hands scraped wood and dust and the back of his throat burned from the smell, from fear, from the way he was trying not to cry. The underside of the bed pressed into him, unyielding and cold as he laid curled on his side, watching the world from this spot. The floor beneath him leached warmth from his skin like it meant to drain the life out of him. He curled tighter. Drew his knees to his chest until his muscles cramped and wrapped his arms around himself like a shield.
Make yourself small. Make yourself nothing. Don’t exist.
He pressed his cheek against the floorboards, dust stuck to his skin. The taste of it mixed with panic in his mouth, dry and choking, making his throat burn, but he didn’t dare make a sound. Even his chest ached with the pressure of held breath.
He couldn’t let himself think.
Couldn’t picture the open doors behind him, all those rooms with no answers and no people, only shadows stretching over the tatami mats like spilled ink. He couldn’t think about the way the screams had started, so sharp, so full of someone's voice, and then just… ended.
His ears strained against the silence, desperate for anything. But the quiet pressed back like a wall, dense and suffocating, as if cotton had been stuffed into the world itself. The air had weight now. The kind that pinned small bodies to the floor.
And then— footsteps.
Slow. Deliberate. Just one pair, but heavy enough to make the wooden floor speak with each step. Not walking— choosing. The rhythm was wrong. Too slow. Too intentional. Each step fell like a warning, sharp-edged and patient, and Sasuke’s stomach turned to ice.
This wasn’t someone searching.
This was someone hunting.
His body throbbed with the effort of stillness, the muscles in his back twitching with every breath he forced himself not to take. He pressed his face into the dust and wood. Grit stung his eyes as he swallowed the sharp taste of fear rising in his throat.
Don’t move. Don’t breathe. Don’t exist. Maybe if you’re nothing, they’ll leave.
The footsteps paused and the door handle turned.
A whisper of sound. Soft. Barely audible, but it ripped through Sasuke like a wire pulled taut and suddenly snapped. His jaw locked to stop the whimper that nearly escaped and bit it down hard enough to make his teeth ache.
Shadows slid across the floor as the door creaked open— long, warped shapes that shifted and stretched toward him, darkness crawling across the tatami. He stared at them, frozen, heart hammering so loud he was sure it would give him away.
Then the boots entered.
Not sandals. Not the soft step of his mother, nor the firm, quiet pace of his father.
These were heavy. Solid. Every step like it belonged to something made of stone, too strong, too paced, too sure of itself. They crossed the room with the deliberate weight of someone who owned it now.
The footsteps had stopped.
But the presence hadn’t.
Sasuke could feel it shift beside the bed— more sensed than seen, like the weight of a storm cloud pressing down on the roof. A blur of shadow and fabric moved in his periphery, and then a heavier motion of the figure lowering itself, slow and deliberate, until its shape filled the narrow world of dust and silence beneath the frame.
He didn’t want to look. Didn’t mean to. But his gaze was drawn sideways, his body too frozen to close his eyes, too terrified to do anything but see.
The edge of a black cloak spilled against the tatami, its hem edged with grime and something darker— dried, flaking red. It caught the hallway light just enough to show movement beneath. Layers of armor gleamed, long pale bracers down the figure’s forearms and the flat of a chest piece where the cloak parted slightly.
And a mask.
It was white— bone white. Its markings red as if blood had dripped down its face and stained it. The shape of it was animal-like, angular, with a mouth that didn’t move. Eyes that didn’t blink.
ANBU.
But not the kind he knew. Not the kind that stood guard beside the Hokage’s manison or the kind who crouched on rooftops and vanished like heroes into the leaves.
This one didn’t feel safe.
The chakra in the room had changed, and even though Sasuke didn’t know how to name it yet, he felt it in his skin, an invisible heat that scorched instead of warmed.
The figure leaned in. Sasuke tried to inch back farther, but there was nowhere left to go. His spine pressed against the wall, arms trembling. The hand reached under the bed and he flinched hard, a short, sharp movement he couldn’t stop.
“No—! ” he cried, voice cracking with panic before he could swallow it down. A hand closed around his wrist not cruel, but solid.
Sasuke kicked. His heel smashed into the wooden leg of the bed and pain exploded up through his ankle, but he didn’t stop. His legs thrashed, his hands pried at the floor, his whole body twisted like a caught animal.
“Let me go! Don’t—don’t take me! Please!”
He was dragged out anyway, scraped across the floor like a bundle of cloth, limbs twisting, breath catching, the world opening up above him like a nightmare he couldn't wake from.
The air out here was wrong.
The figure knelt beside him, the mask hovering above just inches from his face. In this light, the red streaks across it gleamed. They looked thick, wet. They smelled like metal.
Then, with a motion so quiet it barely stirred the air, the figure’s hand moved again, reaching towards the edge of the mask. The fingers paused there, curling with slow precision beneath the smooth, pale underside of the bone-white faceplate. They didn’t tremble, but there was a deliberateness to the movement, as though the one behind the mask wasn’t simply removing a disguise, but peeling back something heavier— something more final.
A faint scrape of cloth against porcelain marked the only sound as the mask lifted, cutting through the silence with a softness that made Sasuke’s skin crawl. He didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until his lungs began to ache.
The shadows did strange things as the mask rose, casting hollow lines beneath cheekbones and deepening the lines below the shadowed eyes. Finally, a full face emerged from beneath the lifted mask, the last inch revealing dark, heavy-lashed eyes that had once watched him with gentle patience— but now seemed like a reflection seen in water, familiar, yes, but rippling, distorted, touched by something unknowable.
It was Itachi.
For a moment, Sasuke couldn’t believe it.
He blinked hard, but the image didn’t go away. It was Itachi. It was his brother’s face beneath the mask. Just as it had always been— only… wrong.
Something about it was off, as if the warmth had been scraped clean from his expression. The lines of his mouth were tight. His jaw clenched. His eyes, so dark and deep, didn’t look at Sasuke the way they used to.
Sasuke stared, too stunned to speak at first. The world around him had narrowed to just that face, the shadowed outline of it framed by the long fall of dark hair above his ninja headband and the black cloak pooled at his shoulders. For a moment, nothing existed beyond the low, flickering light that caught in the angles of Itachi’s face and the pounding, breathless rush of Sasuke’s own heartbeat in his ears.
Then, in a voice so small and raw it felt pulled from the deepest part of him, Sasuke whispered, “I-Itachi…?”
It didn’t soften his brother, but there was a small recognition.
It lingered between them like a fog that wouldn’t lift— thick and unnatural, muffling even the beat of Sasuke’s thoughts.
“Itachi?” he whispered again, his voice tiny, his lips trembling around the word. “I… I was so scared. I didn’t– what’s happening? Why were you wearing that? Where’s Mother? And Father? Are they okay?”
The questions came too fast, too broken to hold weight— but they spilled out anyway, each one a lifeline thrown blindly into the dark. He searched his brother’s face, desperate for something, a flicker of reassurance, a crack in the mask now lifted, anything that would make the nightmare lose its teeth.
But Itachi didn’t answer.
He only stared, the faintest crease forming between his brows. Neither anger, grief, nor even regret.
Just stillness.
Stillness so complete that it might have been mistaken for calm, if not for the flicker of a muscle tightening in his jaw. And in the silence, Sasuke felt it. A tension that didn’t belong to him, a current of something deeper running beneath the surface of his brother’s unreadable face.
Itachi’s hands, holding onto Sasuke’s arms just below the shoulders, firm but not rough, were trembling. Not violently. Not enough that someone watching would see, but enough that Sasuke wondered if it was his own body shaking.
Without thinking, he surged forward in a desperate, shuddering motion and flung his arms around his brother’s neck. His small hands clutched at the thick fabric of the cloak, the folds rough beneath his fingers, and he buried his face against Itachi’s high shirt collar, where the scent of steel and cold wind still clung faintly to the skin.
The motion was instinct, driven by the same helpless force that made children hide beneath blankets in the face of monsters. If he just held on, if he just pressed in close enough, maybe everything would stop spinning. Maybe the nightmare would snap back into something he could understand.
Then, quietly— so quietly it barely stirred the air between them— Itachi finally spoke.
“I’ve got you now.”
It didn’t feel like reassurance.
But Sasuke couldn’t bear that, couldn’t accept the hollowness in that voice— not yet. His voice came out in a whisper, half-buried against Itachi’s shoulder.
“They’re okay, right? They’re okay?... Tell me they’re okay…”
He said it again and again, like if he kept asking, the words might make it true. If he said it just right, the nightmare would crack open and spill out its secret.
There was no answer.
Itachi only shifted his weight, one measured breath at a time, arms folding beneath Sasuke with that same unnatural, ghostlike quiet, the way he always moved when he didn’t want to be seen. His hands found balance beneath Sasuke’s legs and back, and he lifted him in a single, seamless motion. Effortless, like he weighed nothing at all.
That was when Sasuke noticed it— the bulk of a pack slung over Itachi’s shoulders, its straps brushing against his arm as he was lifted. He didn’t understand. It felt out of place, like Itachi had packed for something while the rest of the world was still breaking.
But the thought slid past him, too slippery to hold. It snagged somewhere deep, but he didn’t ask. He couldn’t.
He just held on.
Didn’t ask where they were going. Didn’t care.
His fingers curled tighter into the fabric at Itachi’s shoulder, little fists twisting the cloth like it might hold him here, keep the world from slipping further. His eyes squeezed shut, lashes wet. If he didn’t look, maybe none of it would be real. Maybe if he kept them closed long enough he’d open them to something else.
But then they moved further and stepped out into a new hall.
His eyes cracked open before he could stop them— not wide, not fully, just enough to glimpse, to see. The hallway stretched ahead, warped and hollow, as if the light itself had thinned. And down its length, ruin had taken root.
A door hung askew on one broken hinge, lolling sideways like a jaw snapped loose. The frame around it splintered outward, speckled with shards of wood and plaster that glittered like ice in the low light. A smear of something dark ran the length of the wall beside it, thick, crusted, and streaked in long, trailing arcs.
A large handprint that had slid downward.
He blinked again and saw a body.
Half-splayed against the foot of a shattered window, legs twisted beneath them like the joints had folded wrong. One arm was flung wide across the floor, palm up. The other was curled against their chest, as if they’d tried to hold in the wound. But it hadn’t worked.
The eyes— that was the worst part.
Open. Dry. Clouded over, but their sharingan still burned through the haze.
His head jerked away, burying itself deeper against Itachi’s shoulder, into the warmth of his cloak, but even that wasn’t safe. Sights flooded in like water through cracked walls — fragments and images still caught in his periphery.
A kunai lodged in a wooden post next to a ripped screen door.
A small sandal, soaked through, lying alone on the steps.
Another shape— too still— slumped beneath a tree in their yard, neck bent, hair spread across the stones like ink spilled from a brush. Someone else he’d known. Someone who used to smile and say hi to him in the market.
“What…” Sasuke’s voice trembled, no louder than breath. “What happened…?”
There was no reply.
Itachi walked on as if none of it touched him. Tthe blood was just fallen rain and the bodies no more than shadows that he’d already seen. Every stain, every mark, every face, he stepped past it all long before they ever arrived.
And then they turned a corner, passing through a narrow doorway.
And the silence changed.
It was heavier here. More complete. Not because there was less noise— but because it meant something. A silence that took up space and knew that it was being watched.
Sasuke’s eyes opened again, slowly.
Two forms. Side by side. Dressed in their finest robes, like they were about to go out for a festival or a family photo.
Sasuke blinked, confusion and dread clouding behind his eyes— because for a brief, fragile second, he thought maybe they were just sleeping. That’s what it looked like.
Except the blood. It spread from beneath them like spilled ink, seeping through the patterned silk of their clothes, soaking the floorboards beneath their bodies, already drying at the edges to a dull, rust-colored crust. It clung to the folds in the fabric, pooled in cracks in the wood, painting everything in a silence too thick to breathe through.
Their faces looked peaceful.
Too peaceful.
Unmoving.
Unbreathing.
“No…” Sasuke whispered.
Then louder— cracking, rising, panicking—
“No! No! No! ”
His limbs tore free, shoving away from Itachi’s chest, heels hitting the ground unevenly, and stumbling forward with a choked gasp as he lurched toward them. Feet tripping over one another. Hands outstretched.
“Mom!! Dad!!”
But he didn’t make it.
Arms wrapped around him again— unyielding, snapping, inhumanly fast— yanking him backward before he could take even three full steps. The force of it knocked the wind from him. He flailed against Itachi’s grip, wild and clawing, kicking with all the strength a child could muster.
“Let go!!” he screamed, voice high and breaking and raw. “Let me go!! They’re not dead! They’re not!! They’re just— They’re just sleeping!! ”
He thrashed, fists beating against his brother’s arms and the chest that held him. The sobs spilled out in jagged bursts, pulled straight from the center of him, where something had already started to fracture.
“Let me go!! ”
But Itachi didn’t loosen his grip. He simply held Sasuke fast, arms like iron, wrapped around him as he cried and kicked and begged. Then, without a word, he turned away from the bodies.
From the lifeless silence that filled the room like smoke.
Out through the ruined doorway. Through a home that no longer felt like home. Past walls riddled with splintered holes and cracks, past fences that leaned as if they'd been mowed by force. Into streets that once gleamed with festival lanterns and laughter— now hushed, shadowed, lined with ash and echoes.
And still, Sasuke wept.
Pressed to his brother’s chest, his tears soaked into the fabric, his body trembling under the weight of something too large to name. His voice had long since cracked, the sobs reduced now to harsh, broken gasps. Each breath hurt. Every step carried him farther from something that had already vanished.
“They’re all gone,” he said at last and even that barely counted as sound. Just the ghost of a voice. Just breath turned to dust.
And when he finally lifted his face, when he dared to look up at the shape of his brother blurred through tears, he found no comfort there.
Only cold.
Itachi’s face was stone. Unreadable. As if it belonged to someone else entirely. As if every softness Sasuke had once known there had been scraped away. And somewhere in his chest, where his heart used to beat like a child’s, a question formed. Heavy. Dreadful. Crawling into the hollow his grief had left behind.
Who did this?
And worse still—
Why isn’t Itachi asking the same thing?