The Last Uchiha

by undercoverchad

Obligatory Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Masahi Kishimoto. I only borrow the characters and torture them a bit if they don't behave.

Warnings: Spoilers up to the latest manga chapter, although this story sets off pretty much on its own. Rating may change further on in the story.

Summary: Sasuke is dead, and Naruto and Sakura must come to terms with his death, and with each other. But the legacy he leaves behind still affects those who were closest to him, as well as draws enemies thought to be long dead. What happened during all those years he spent as a missing-nin?

Chapter One: War's Aftermath
The Monster War was headed by Orochimaru (5.3: Exiled Nins), founder of the hidden village of Sound and one of the three legendary Sannin formerly from Konoha. It finally came to a conclusion eight years after the Sound's first attack on Konoha, upon the assassination of Orochimaru by Uzumaki Naruto (5.1: Influential Ninja Leaders). Devastating losses were sustained by Konoha, as well as its ally, the Sand, but the Sound threat was wiped out until this day.

Excerpt from History of the Fire Lands (5th Edition)

It is hard to describe what the last days of the war were like. Not out of any difficulty in remembering; the chaos, destruction and wanton loss of life of that period of time are burned into my memory for the rest of my life. But it is because I will not forget, that I want no part in bringing the nightmare images that haunt my sleep to those who have had the grace not to witness it.

The history books will record each battle and its outcome, as well as the heroes and villains that rise to prominence with their feats of bravery and cruelty. Historians will debate the causes of the war and its economic impacts on the parties involved. There might be vague descriptions of the atrocities committed, by both sides, or the sacrifices made by those who have nothing left to contribute but their lives. Only the important historical facts will be recorded. Orochimaru was destroyed, Konoha wins. Nowhere in the books will it mention the true cost that was paid. Perhaps as an interesting footnote, they might record which body Orochimaru was using at the time of his destruction.

Naruto was there at the last. I had been dispatched back to base camp to aid what wounded I could, of which there were many, and it was he who brought me the news – battered and bloody – that he couldn't keep the promise he'd made to me eight years before. It was Naruto who brought me the child.

Pale and frightened, he clung to Naruto's leg and stared at me. I didn't have to ask whose child he was, but I wondered if he knew that the man he thought of as his saviour was the same one who had killed his father.

"What's your name?" I asked him. He stared at me with a mixture of fear and curiosity in dark eyes that would one day reflect the crimson of his bloodline. Naruto nudged him gently when he didn't answer.

"M'Itachi," he muttered. The name struck me like a fist to the chest. Why would Sasuke name his only child after the man he'd hated for so long? Unless…

I turned to Naruto. "How old is he?"

If he was surprised by the tone of my voice, he didn't show it. He'd probably made the same deductions already. "Four years last summer."

Four years old. Sasuke had been sixteen or younger when he'd impregnated some woman. Sixteen. It took at least three years of preparations before the soul transfer jutsu was ready to be performed, and Sasuke had left when he was twelve. The child before me might be Sasuke's biological son, but I wondered if he had intended for one, or if he even had a choice in the naming, or whether it was Orochimaru's own cruel joke.

"Sakura," said Naruto gently. He'd given the child over to the care of one of the nurses and we were now alone in the tent. It was only then that I saw how exhausted he was. Blood and dirt had caked his face and matted the once bright hair, and he was holding himself like a man in great pain. But I suspected the worst of his injuries was nothing physical. His cornflower blue eyes were dry, but red-rimmed, and filled with the immeasurable grief and defeat that must be radiating from my own. He had loved Sasuke too, in his own way.

"I'm sorry," I said quickly, not wanting to hear the details yet. "You're wounded and here I am wool-gathering." I got him to sit down on one of the cots and remove his jacket. The shirt underneath was stiff with blood and had to be cut off, carefully, from the wounds. I saw then, that most of the blood wasn't his, because his wounds were chakra inflicted, and thus, already cauterised. The most severe was the one in his left shoulder. It would have been fatal for most men, requiring amputation at the very least, but Naruto was not like anyone I'd ever known. A gaping hole with seared, blackened edges and burns radiating out from the centre, it went almost right through to his back, and probably had, but for his extreme healing rate.

I'd seen wounds like this before, on Haku, whom Kakashi had killed and on Naruto when he was brought back from the failed mission eight years ago. I knew what caused them. Looking down on the remains of Naruto's blood-stiffened shirt in my hands, I had to force myself to take a few deep breaths.

"Sakura?" A hand, callused and dirty came down hesitantly over mine. I wrenched away from it almost instinctively, then looked up into Naruto's eyes to see the additional hurt I had caused.

"I'm sorry," I said again, inadequately, because it wasn't his fault at all that Sasuke was dead. His may have been the hand that had done it, but it was never his fault, no matter how much that treacherous voice inside my head wanted to blame him.

He looked at me steadily. "So am I," he said, and his words held a world of sorrow. "More than you can ever know." He stood up then, picking up his jacket from the floor, and was at the tent-flap which served as the door before I realised that he intended to just walk out without receiving any medical treatment.

"It's alright," he said, when I tried to stop him. "I'll heal on my own. I understand how you feel. At the moment, I don't think I can even face myself in a mirror." He turned his head and tried a smile, which only made him look sadder than ever. "Come find me when you're ready to talk."

I let him leave because I wasn't.

Orochimaru's death had been the decisive factor in our winning of the war. Leaderless, the disorganised Sound nins fled the allied forces of Leaf and Sand. Kabuto, as Orochimaru's general, had rallied the remnants of the Sound army, and had held out for awhile, but was brought down by a concerted attack.

ANBU units and hunter-nins tracked the surrounding countryside for remaining rebels for days until the Hokage and Kazekage declared the Sound threat eliminated. All in all, the actual fighting had taken little more than a fortnight. Would that the aftermath of war took such a short time to end. In the medical tents, there were nins – some of them still young enough to be considered children – who would be scarred for the rest of their lives by their experiences. Those were the lucky ones. Relatives of the unlucky ones were even now making their way back to Konoha for the three day mass memorial service to be held at the end of the month.

Uchiha Sasuke's name was not on the list of the dead to be honoured, nor was it to be inscribed on the memorial stone.

I did not know what they did with his body either, but two days after the last battle, a great column of black smoke rose from the north, visible even from the base camp. One of the injured ANBU remarked that they were 'finally burning those dead bastards'. The air was acrid for days.

Sasuke's son remained at the medical tent. As captain of one of the ANBU teams, Naruto had duties that could not include taking care of a young boy. Part of me wondered if he could not face the child because of the resemblance to his father, but I knew it was unfair of me.

Shy and withdrawn at first, little Itachi soon made himself popular with the nurses, by offering help or running errands without complaint, and by just being irresistibly adorable. Even I found the ice around my heart melting a little at the sight of a black-haired boy chattering animatedly with a patient, though a part of that might have to do with the memories I still retained of his father. He was so like, and yet unlike Sasuke. When I looked at him I couldn't help but see in him the brooding boy that I had loved for such a long time, who had been my companion for only one short year. And yet, Sasuke had never smiled at me like little Itachi did. Had never willingly held out a hand for me to take.

He nearly gave me a heart attack the second night he slept over in my tent. Having taken a little time to get over his shyness with me, he soon proved to be an exuberant talker, surprisingly articulate for one so young. But then again, he was the son of Sasuke – prodigal genius extraordinaire.

One of the first questions he asked me was: "Are you my mother?"

I tried to will my heart to slow down, and managed not to stutter. "Why would you say that?" He gave me a look of clear-eyed innocence, too young to understand what that question, and all its subtleties meant to me.

"Father talked a lot about you when he was nice."

I made a mental note to find out what that meant. "How do you know it was me?"

"You're the only pink-haired lady around."

"I see. And what did he tell you then?" Not that I would keep my fingers crossed about him saying anything good about me. We hadn't exactly parted on mutually amicable terms after all.

Itachi swung his legs back and forth on the cot. "That you're nice, an' lots of other nice things too."

That was a pleasant surprise, and one that touched me more than I cared to admit. But there was no time to dwell on whatever Sasuke may have said. Itachi was watching me closely, black eyes bright in the flickering lamplight, waiting for an answer that I wanted so badly to give. I had once wished for this, a child like this, because it would have meant that Sasuke was mine.

"I'm sorry," I told him. "But I'm not your mother."

He looked downcast for a moment, then whispered, "Can I still call you mother?" There was an aching need in his voice, the sort of yearning for family that I sometimes caught in Naruto's eyes.

"I'm afraid not, honey. It wouldn't be fair to your real mother." The look of disappointment in his eyes made me wish I could say otherwise. "But," I offered, "You can call me Aunt Sakura."

One thing that had worried me was whether Itachi knew what had happened to his father. In the last two days I had spent with him, he hadn't asked for once, or spoken of, Sasuke at all. His eyes went flat when I broached the subject with him.

"Father's dead." he said abruptly.

My god, had he actually seen Sasuke die? Or had Naruto already told him? If he had, he hadn't mentioned it to me. But Itachi shook his head when I asked him if that was how he knew.

"Father told me he was going to die. Then the old man took me away." He made a face. "I don't like the old man," he confided in a whisper.

I drew my own conclusions from that conversation. Itachi didn't seem affected by his father's death, and I guessed that relations between them were estranged. After all, by the time he was old enough to recognise Sasuke as his father, Orochimaru had already taken over, if he hadn't been the one to actually father the child. It was no wonder that they were not close. Orochimaru as a nurturing father figure was a chilling thought.

In any case, he behaved as any normal child might, and the nurses under me grew quite fond of him.

Not everyone was taken by him though. Once, as I was walking past one of the tents, the clang of metal, a gasp of dismay and raised voices caught my attention.

Peering in, I saw a nurse trying to calm the patient, an injured jounin, while Itachi cowered at the foot of the bed, looking close to tears. A metal basin lay upended on the floor nearby, the clean water it held dampening the earthen ground.

"You get that traitor's spawn away from me," raged the jounin. He was bandaged across his chest and one of his legs was in a splint. "I won't have that bastard's offspring here." He leaned forward then, glaring at the child with unmistakeable hate. "Did you think you could rectify your father's sins, eh? He got what he deserved, and so will you, mark my words. Creatures like you shouldn't be allowed to exist."

I thought it was high time I intervened, and stepped into the tent. "That's quite enough, Shinkichi. The child had nothing to do with Orochimaru, and shame on you for saying such things." Then, more gently to the frightened boy, "Come away, Itachi. I have something for you to do." Shinkichi remained unabashed, and it was in the days to come that I realised that he was only one out of a growing number of people who knew of Itachi's parentage and despised him for it.

I wondered at the irony of it. That Sasuke – who had been the golden boy of the village before he left – had a son who would in all likelihood undergo a childhood similar to Naruto's. Prejudice, when it's unjustified, can be a very difficult thing to face, especially when you were only a child. But unlike Naruto, I was determined that Itachi would never have to face it alone.

I remembered the expression on his face as he held on to my hand while we walked back to the main camp. Four-year old children should be shouting and running about, not looking abjectly miserable because an adult wished him dead.

"Aunt Sakura?" he whispered. "Why did that man hate me?"

Four-year olds should not know the meaning of hate. I squeezed his hand and wished fiercely at that moment that Shinkichi one day understood what his words had done to this child.

"Because he is an ignorant man." I would not lie to him, or tell him placating fabrications. He deserved better than that, and it would be better for him to hear the truth from me before those who hated him twisted his mind with their denigrations. It was a miracle that Naruto had turned out as the fine man he was. I stopped and crouched down to face Itachi, struggling to express in words that he would understand.

"Listen, Itachi. There will be people you will meet who will say many bad things to you. They will do so because they are angry at your father, but because he isn't here, they will take it out on you instead. You must never be afraid of them, do you understand?"

He nodded solemnly. Then, showing a wisdom far above that of a four-year old's, he said, "Father hurt many people, didn't he?"

I'd made a promise to myself that I wouldn't lie to the child. "Yes, yes he did, but what made you say that?"

He shrugged. "He hurt me too."

He said it so casually, so matter-of-factly, as if it didn't concern him at all. I gripped him by the shoulders. There had been bruises on his body, but I'd just assumed that they had been obtained during the fighting.

"Did he beat you?"

"Only when he was in his mean moods. I stayed away from him then."

I'd noted something that he'd mentioned before, and began to suspect something that made my heart thump at the possibility. "Itachi, did your father seem like two different people? Was he nice to you sometimes, then mean?"

He looked at me in wonder. "How did you know?"

If what I suspected was true, then Orochimaru had not been able to fully take over Sasuke's body. He'd managed to rebel somehow, to break free at times. But how could I explain to this child that his father really had been two different people?

"Your father was possessed by an evil spirit," I told him, because technically, Orochimaru could fall into that category.

The explanation seemed to make him feel better though, since he said, more cheerfully than before, "Really? Then it was the evil spirit who hated me then." I didn't have the heart to agree or disagree with him, because I didn't know what Sasuke was like anymore, he'd proved that when he left, and now I no longer had the chance. The one person that might have any idea of what Sasuke had been like, or what life for him had been like the last few years was Naruto, and I was nowhere near ready to talk to him, to hear about Sasuke's last moments on earth.

But it seemed that I would have to, soon, if I wanted to know why Sasuke didn't kill himself when he had the chance to, and rid us all of the threat that was Orochimaru.

To be continued

A/N: Well, that's it for the first chapter, I hope you liked the story so far. I've already got the next three chapters planned out, though I'm hesitant about posting if this chapter is not well received. So please, review and tell me what you think, I'd really like to know, especially if you have any constructive criticism to offer, since I'm blind in the area of my work, but then again, all authors are.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

undercoverchad