Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
Red seeped into black, ugly and sinful, a lusty terror and a horrifying bloodlust curling around the dark, twisted landscape of shadows and bones.
He ran from it, as hard as he could, but the path went nowhere and his feet moved not an inch in paralysis. He was trapped there, with that monstrous voice whispering sinuously in his ear of the birthright he was running from.
"This is your birthright, boy. Isn't it glorious? You will grow to love it. You were born for slaughter; your Hell-sent eyes prove how much you want this."
At that point, Sasuke woke up.
.
It is a curse. These eyes are a blight that will stain me until the stain has swallowed me up and what made me me is no longer anything but an empty shell.
Small, trembling, still-pudgy hands shone like the moon in the darkness of the empty house.
As Sasuke haunted his cavernous resting place, flitting back and forth from room to room, sampling each bed to see which was most comfortable, he fled, because each set of sheets was still crunchy with blood and each room hung with a miasma scent of iron and fear. The smell roamed the halls too.
His small feet made trailing circles in the blood patterns he couldn't bear to clean up, sickening him all the while, but still Sasuke couldn't keep moving. He felt as though if he did, some monster with black and red eyes would rise from the shadows and devour him, mind, body and soul.
He had a curse on him. Sasuke held the curse that had afflicted every member of the Uchiha since time immemorial. The Sharingan eye.
The Sharingan was hailed by many ignorant denizens as a blessing, as a gift to be revered, envied and sought after. It was a blessing for Konohagakure, and the real rulers of that place had encouraged the Uchiha to proliferate even when they hated them, beat them down and lashed at their backs mercilessly. The Uchiha clan were good for breeding stock and expendable super soldiers, and nothing more.
Sasuke would be forced to awaken his eyes, and give his eyes to small, innocent children weighted down in blood as the corrosion came upon them and devoured them the way it did him.
.
It was a corruption. Itachi's mind had warped and fallen to the curse of the Sharingan eye as his dark heart took hold of him. The corruption only showed in the eyes, but it rotted the soul and warped everything else, until darkness followed and light fled.
The Uchiha had fallen because their eyes corrupted them. And Sasuke, whose Sharingan had not yet awoken, was running out of time.
Sasuke wasn't sure how the kunai had come to his small eight-year-old hands. He saw it there and knew what he was willing to do.
A deep, yawning beast of pain reared up out of the abyss as it started, screaming in every drop of blood and every second of lacerated skin. Sasuke smiled as blood poured over his lips, and he licked away the copper fluid.
Darkness descended over him.
This was the point when Sasuke woke up again.
.
Sasuke woke up to darkness, endless, permanent darkness. He didn't roam in it, only sat still and drank it in.
He was resting on a thin mattress; a faint pressure in his right arm told him where the IV needle was, filtering sedatives into his body to keep him calm and prevent a panic from rising. Sasuke could hear the faint, high-pitched beep in the back from the heart monitor.
There was something over the upper portion of his face. Sasuke reached up, and felt the threads of gauze bandages. They were wet.
Sasuke pressed deeper, and his fingers kept going until he reached the base of what seemed to be a soft depression, a basin in flesh. There was nothing there.
Sasuke smiled.