Sasuke is bound by grief.
It took him a long time to see it; a battle and a stretch of unconsciousness, a few hours in a shadowy room. Days. Eons. But he has seen it now, and it cloaks his soul with anguish.
As he leaves Orochimaru's tunnels and goes to find his brother in the company of other broken children, Sasuke is made of steel. His roiling, monstrous mess of love and obsession and aching terror is, as he obliterates his master, forged into a sword; a weapon tempered in hatred and carried with one purpose.
He never smiles, never frowns; never even turns his head to watch the world as he passes through it. He walks like a ghost, or a murderer; barely existing, closed up tight. His (new) teammates bicker and sulk and flirt, Sound nin who want to take the gossip with them even though the man who fueled it is dead. Sasuke is silent. He hunts.
Every morning, with his face a mask and his mind a sharpened blade, Sasuke pushes his dreams aside into the darkness of his psyche. They are still there, still lurking at the edges, but he shoves them away with perfect equanimity, perfect lack of empathy. They do not matter, just as Konoha and Orochimaru do not matter, just as Naruto's efforts to retrieve him are of no importance.
The dreams do not matter, or he tells himself that they do not. Nothing matters but Itachi, Itachi's punishment, Itachi's death.
Sasuke denies the fact, as he denies everything else, that when Itachi is gone there will be nothing left for him to do or be or hate.
He hunts for his brother, and, after a time, he finds him.
When, in the abandoned Uchiha stronghold, in the dark, Itachi turns to face Sasuke and looks at him with kaleidoscope eyes, there is a brief moment in which Sasuke is afraid. He stares, blankly, without the sharingan, at the terribly, sickeningly familiar face of his impassive elder sibling, and he does not know what to do.
"Sasuke. It's me," his brother says, and it takes all the boy's courage not to run away, run far away, away from this face which has too many memories at its beck and call.
When he looks at Itachi, as Sasuke sees him; at handsome, enigmatic, sane-out-the-other-side-of-madness Itachi; Sasuke's mind replays the murder of his family, replays the dark erotica of his dreams, and more than his dreams; replays the illusions a serpent forced upon him, down in another dark place.
They watch each other, the last Uchiha brothers, the ones tied together by hatred and other, less simple things.
Sasuke, in the convoluted, multifaceted place which is his own mind, forces order out of chaos and picks up once more the sword of his loathing, holding it in focus, a talisman against the memories.
As he has done many times before, the young man beats his own soul into submission, and stands with a face paler than porcelain, a mask that reaches deep.
Words are exchanged, then; trivialities spoken by cold lips and reinforced by colder eyes. Things have changed, since their last encounters. It remains to be seen whether the Uchiha brothers are on equal footing as shinobi, but of their matched skill at impenetrable facades there is no doubt.
"You don't know a thing about me," Sasuke whispers, dead eyed. They dance around each other, quick in movement, unbending in vigilance.
"Just how much hatred I have bottled up in this heart…" he goes on, wielding his imaginary sword. "Or just how strong I've become as a result of that."
"You don't know a single thing about me," Sasuke hisses to the man who has been the only thing he ever truly hated, ever completely feared, ever really wanted.
Sasuke is bound by grief.
He does not know it yet, but the net is tightening, the chords of his anguished destiny drawing in around him, unseen and pushed aside.
They fight. That is enough to summarize the battle between brothers; enough, at least, for this chronicle. Other artificers of narrative have laid out the movement of lightning-quick taijutsu, the battles of illusion; the mounting arms-race which is the clash of sharingan versus sharingan.
The physical world is not for this story. The final escapade of twisted sibling attachment, of Sasuke and his dreams, his lust; I write of that, and it takes place in the mind.
They fight. Itachi stops, at one point, to give his little brother a sardonic and somewhat crazed appraisal of their clan's bloody history. Sasuke is not surprised by it, not really, and does not listen with all of his attention. In his soul, he knows it already. Why else would he feel for Itachi what he does? The past actions of his cursed, unfortunate tribe are of no importance. Now, now; now Sasuke fights Itachi, and there is nothing more important to him than the progression of that fight.
Sasuke is a mask.
He has a façade maintained without flaw, without a slip which might disclose emotion or humanity beneath it.
The mask is one of the greatest tools of the Uchiha, matched only by their fabled kekkei genkai. The aloof, domineering attitude which comprises it has served the clan well, shielding its greatest geniuses. Itachi, prodigy, accomplished spy, had mastered it by the time he was thirteen.
For Sasuke, learning the mask took all the years of training and suffering and torment between his clan's slaughter and the day, in his sixteenth year, when he fights his brother for the last time.
Sasuke is a sword.
He burns with hatred, maintaining a perfect edge, the grip of his mind on the weapon which is his self tighter than a steel vice.
Sasuke's control, now, goes beyond terror, beyond lust. It is sharp, pristine and stripped of all confusion.
What his mind has become outside the ever-watchful guardianship of his loathing is another matter entirely. But he hides it well, the tempest, and to him that is all which matters.
Sasuke is a broken child.
He holds himself together; has had to learn to hold himself together, to connect the fragile pieces of his composure above the molten fire which the inside of every great Uchiha.
But Sasuke is broken, and his last defense (the sword of hatred, remember; the weapon his brother told him to forge) cracks apart in the end.
The exact moment when Sasuke's final mask splits forever is easy to pinpoint. It is when his beloved, hated Itachi, instead of ripping out his younger sibling's eyes, touches gentle fingers to Sasuke's forehead and says "Sorry, little brother; this is the last time."
Sasuke breaks apart when, under the soft, endless fall of the rain, he looks down to see his brother's corpse on the ground, bloodstained and empty, unresponsive as the sky. He feels something go wrong inside his chest, something small and yet more painful than anything he has ever experienced. He feels the start of the sorrow.
Then darkness claims him, and the two brothers lie together under the weeping clouds. They lie together amid the ruins of their clan's fortress, and they are silent.
Sasuke is bound by grief.
After he wakes up in a dark cave with a stranger as his kidnapper, the boy who thought he was the last Uchiha runs a whole gamut of emotions.
As the man who introduces himself as Madara tells a story of war and love and betrayal, Sasuke is forced to listen.
He tries to hide from what he hears. From anger to shock to panic and back to greater anger the young man flees, and always behind him the ghost of doubt and then, later, the ghost of overwhelming anguish follow.
In the end, having struggled and writhed and fought tooth and nail against the truth, against a shattering of all he has believed and lived for over eight long years, Sasuke gives in.
It has been said before, but it bears repeating: if Sasuke had only ever hated Itachi, things would have been almost easy. And if Sasuke had never felt for his brother adoration and longing and lust, then the things Madara told him would not have stuck. They would have had no internal evidence to support them, and the history related in a hidden cave would have been ever doubted by Sasuke Uchiha.
But, before eight years of hatred, Sasuke had eight years of loving his brother. And so the truth (or almost truth; nobody knows) which Madara speaks are the final hammer to find the cracks, to land the finishing blow. Sasuke is shown that the Itachi he loved was real, that his brother was a more honorable shinobi than any he had ever known, and that all his endless hatred had been in vain.
He is shown by Madara that the fixation he felt for Itachi was never really gone; it was only twisted, first, and then hidden by a mask, by a sword, by a lie.
Sasuke stands, afterwards, on a stone by the shore of the sea, and thinks about what he has been told.
He thinks about the founding of Konoha, about the eventual subjugation of his willful, powerful clan, about the truth of Itachi, which Madara told.
He thinks about how sorrow and bitter loss came crashing down on him when he finally believed; how his heart, long broken, is now broken for Itachi and not by him.
He thinks about the other story Madara related, after the dramatic revelations were over, after Sasuke was taught to believe. He thinks about the quiet anger in the mysterious, ancient shinobi's voice as he told Sasuke about his own brother, about beautiful, fierce, fragile Izuna who died too soon and whose sacrifice was forgotten.
Sasuke knows now that Madara too loved his brother in a way he should not have. He knows that Madara (lucky, lucky Madara) felt a little more than dreams and shadow clones, before Izuna's death. He knows that Madara, after almost a century, still holds on to his love, and will burn the world because of it.
Sasuke can almost see the two Uchiha boys, one long dead and the other still carrying his twisted devotion. He can almost see the spiked, ebony mane of the young war god who was Madara, and the full, somewhat effeminate face of dead Izuna, whose quiet demeanor belied his deadly power. He heard, in the dark cave, in Madara's voice, that the love they had for each other was almost as strange and complicated as the love he himself has for Itachi.
Like Sasuke, Madara too slaughtered his own sibling. Like Sasuke, Madara's crime is layered in self-lies and confused motives; nobody will ever know whether Izuna consented to the theft of his eyes, just as no one will ever truly understand in what ways Itachi's death was suicide and in what ways it was murder.
This second history, that of a brother loved well and killed quickly, is not one Sasuke will ever share with the world; it is personal. He will hide it in his own heart, as Madara has hidden it in his. Sasuke knows that the devious older Uchiha only told him the story to seduce Sasuke into obedience, but the young man does not reject the gift. He will remember Izuna, and honor the memory.
Sasuke ponders, on his rock by the sea, the way his clan constructed itself over the decades. Between ambition and power-lust and perversity, it's almost as if fratricide and incest was the inevitable result.
That night, when Sasuke falls asleep at last, his dreams have changed. Now it is under a sky of rain in the ruins of a fortress that he meets Itachi, rather than in a street littered with corpses. Now there is no kunai in his brother's hand, and that delicate, worry lined face bears a smile.
But, as before, the dream plays out a strange scene. As before, Itachi reaches out and kisses Sasuke, the rain running down their faces, over their skin. And as before, Sasuke does not resist his sibling's touch.
Sasuke Uchiha is bound by grief, and he is bound willingly.
Child of a cursed clan, son of a murdered family, brother to a dead shinobi, there are too many ties binding him to ever be cut, ever be severed. He will be bound until the day he dies.
The terror and anguished lust of the past have been untangled, cast aside with Itachi's death; just as Sasuke hoped they would be. But love remains, love and the bitter want which can never be fulfilled, want which, as Madara has taught him, their clan has always known.
The dreams, once feared, once used against Sasuke, have not let go of him. But they are his now. His brother; his beloved, noble, martyred brother; is his. Sasuke knows now that Itachi was always his, to the very end.
Naruto, heir to the Will of Fire, still pure in his affections and his thoughts, dreams of bringing Sasuke back; dreams of healing him. But Sasuke has abandoned all bonds save those of grief, despite the lingering interest he still has for the golden boy, his opposite, his rival.
Sasuke loves only the dead, now; he and Madara are alike in that. And his love, as Madara's did, is leading him into darkness.
One who loves the dead cannot love the living, you see. The loyalties conflict. The bonds tangle. Sasuke has had enough of tangles; more than enough. He will never be pure, never be cleansed; not really. But he can seek revenge, and feel as though it redeems him.
The death of every living soul in Konoha may appease Sasuke for a while, but the fact that he desires such death is proof of a single thing:
Sasuke Uchiha has failed to learn not to love his brother. He has not learned to let Itachi go. If he had, he would honor his dead obsession's memory by going home, back to the Leaf; going and making Naruto happy. He would give his future to the village, as Itachi did.
Sasuke loves Itachi, needs Itachi, but he does not understand the other man. He loves, that is all. And that is the tie, the chain, the red string of fate, which shall lead him to his tomb. For his love is full of unfulfilled desire, full of longing and passion-charged memories, full of grief and fueled by dreams.
Sasuke lives with his love, claimed at last and chosen. He lives with his grief, lives with dreams of a dead man who kisses him in a ruin, who strips him bare under the rain and answers his never-ending want with adoration.
Sasuke lives, and remains bound, and what the end of his chained soul will be is not my place to guess.
A/N: ahahahaaha I finished it! *happy dance* Now I can leave Sasuke's head alone for a while. Dang is that kid messed up.
Uchiha three-shot is complete, despite lack of conclusion, because it doesn't really need one. The bonds are only the cause. As to the effect… we will have to wait for actual canon to create more theories.
I would very much appreciate to be told what you think. My gratitude.