Itachi had attacked Naruto. He had attacked Sasuke's almost-friend. Had been in Konoha, and completely overlooked Sasuke, ignored him entirely, to go after Naruto.
And what would have happened if Sasuke hadn't burst in in time, or if Naruto's weird new teacher hadn't come back? Would he have been faced with the same nightmare, new once more? His once-precious older brother, standing with a bloody blade in hand over a far too still figure on the floor?
By the time that he woke up from his brother's curse – no, illusion, it was just an illusion – everything had changed, but somehow seemed about the same as it was before, anyway. Itachi is gone again. They have a new Hokage. The village is still, a little quieter than before, but otherwise it's as though nothing ever happened. Orochimaru didn't attack, the village wasn't almost destroyed, and they didn't all almost die multiple times. Sasuke's world didn't get turned on its head. Again.
Except it did.
When Sasuke woke up, Naruto was sitting by his bedside. He was looking at him with this sort of intensity that almost hurt, like those stupid blue eyes could see through his soul.
"Hi," He said, not even blinking.
"Why are you staring at me, dobe?"
Naruto's head tilted to the side. "He didn't feel evil."
It felt like a stone had settled in his stomach. "Who?" He didn't need to ask. He already knew, and the look his sunny friend gave him said that Naruto knew he knew. "How can you know? You said, when you first told us about this, you said that you couldn't feel bad auras. That they never felt bad, to you, only tainted sometimes. He could be the worst person on earth and you wouldn't know!" Naruto nodded sagely, and he looked far older than his years.
"But he didn't just not feel bad, Sasuke. He felt good. Like Sakura does. He feels kind of…corroded around the edges, like he's maybe a little crazy, but good."
Sasuke couldn't breathe. This was not what was supposed to happen. Of course Itachi was crazy, he had killed their family! But he was not good. That good man, the one he had once called aniki, was not real. It had all been fake, he had been tricking them all along. Or maybe, maybe Naruto was lying! Yes, that had to be it. Naruto was jealous of Sasuke, always had been. Maybe he was trying to throw him off, trying to make him weak, trying to-
It was this thought that shook him from his stupor. No. Naruto would never do that. It just wasn't in him. Even after years of Sasuke's rebuffing and rejecting and humiliating him, Naruto had never thought of him as anything but a friend. He wouldn't do that because he wasn't like that at all. He was better than the rest of them, with their lies and their hatred and their anger. If Sasuke was able to read people the way that Naruto could, he thought that Naruto might feel something like sunshine, always bright and beautiful, and never leaving for good. If Sasuke could trust anyone in this world, it was him.
So, he took a deep breath and said, "Tell me everything."
Naruto shook his head slowly. "Sasuke, I know you want to know, but…I'm not really sure that it will be good for you. Can you handle it? You've been thinking of your brother as evil for years, right? Can you really just accept this?"
It would be so much easier if he could just say no. If he could just continue blindly hating his brother and ignoring the part of him that still hoped that Itachi wasn't bad; that his big brother really had loved him. But if it was true, if Sasuke didn't have all the information he needed, then he couldn't just say no. He needed to know. He needed to know.
"I can try."
Naruto looked him deep in the eyes for a second longer, and then began. "He feels like safety. Like love, and compassion, and kindness. Like a kind of fierce, never ending loyalty and protection that was kind of scary, how intense it was. I…Sasuke, I just don't understand how someone like that could have done something so awful. He was practically glowing – I mean, not actually glowing, like you do sometimes, but like – just, really really good, okay?"
"Yes, I get it already!" Sasuke snapped. He didn't know what to think. Naruto would never lie to him, he had just finished establishing that, but – well. Perhaps it was better to simply gather information for now, and not think about what it meant until later. So he took a deep breath, and tucked the revelations about his brother into a nice safe box that he could open when he had all the pieces of the puzzle. He was just going to ignore the thing about glowing entirely, just as he had the first time Naruto had mentioned it. "What else? You said he felt crazy. Crazy how?" Naruto tilted his head and scrunched up his nose, squinting his eyes in a way that looked simultaneously ridiculous and adorable.
"Um, the best way I can describe it would be like something was eating at the edges of his Aura. Like, it was turning dark and crumbly, and then drifting away, really slowly. It was sort of almost like how yours used to look – don't worry, it doesn't now, but it used to. But his is more, somehow. Like, all of that, plus…poison? Or sickness, maybe? Something bad, creeping in from outside. Something terrible." Naruto shuddered. "I've never felt anything like that before."
Sasuke nodded along, but inside, he felt sick. Something terrible, eating away at his brother's soul? And he had felt like that too? Sasuke remembered the look on Naruto's face, when that seal activated. Was that why?
"What about the fish guy?"
"The one who was with him? With the blue skin and the really sharp teeth?" Naruto squinted in that funny way he did sometimes that made him look just like a fox. "He felt like blunt force trauma, sort of. Like, brutal honesty. But with hidden depths, too. Not good, not bad. Didn't really feel much of anything toward me, so I couldn't get a very good reading." This caught Sasuke's attention.
"You can tell how people feel toward you?"
"Yeah!" Naruto puffed up with pride and beamed at him. "I've been getting better with the details, ya know? We've been meeting a lot more people lately, and they have a wider range of feelings for me. I used to just get the really strong emotions, and most of what I got was bad. I think the practice is helping!"
Sasuke allowed himself a tiny smile, but then dropped it as a thought occurred to him. "How did It- that man feel about you?" Honestly, he wasn't sure he wanted to know.
Naruto tilted his head to the side and thought for a long, long moment. Just when Sasuke was about to call it off, he answered, "Curious? Concerned, just a tiny bit, and intrigued. Umm, sort of a little…regretful or guilty, I'm not sure which. Something really odd that I don't know the word for. But mostly just curious. And not even that much." Naruto shrugged. "From what I was picking up, he feels a lot of things really strong, and he gets lots of conflicting feelings. I don't think I was really his priority."
"Of course you were his priority. He ignored me completely. His entire focus was on you until your teacher showed up." Sasuke had been almost an afterthought, for all the time and effort his brother had taken to deal with him. But now Naruto was giving him a strange look, heavy and piercing. It was an unusual look to see on the kid who Sasuke had always thought of as an idiot. It was becoming more and more clear to him lately that no matter how intellectual Naruto was or was not, he understood people almost terrifyingly well. Better than Sasuke ever would, probably, which made him an invaluable resource in times like these. He wondered how long it would be until the rest of Konoha figured that out.
"No, I don't think so. A lot of people out there are really good at hiding their emotions. Until they meet me, of course. I've seen a lot of people whose faces and actions would never tell you what they were thinking and feeling, you know, on the inside. That crazy guy with the eyes – he wasn't thinking about me at all. 'Specially once you showed up. In fact, I'm pretty sure he didn't want to be there at all." The look sharpened until it felt like it could cut through Sasuke's soul like a well-kept kunai. "If I was you, I wouldn't be asking what he's doing. I would be asking why." Suddenly, the look was gone, and Naruto was back to giving a sheepish smile and scratching the back of his head. "Just something to think about, I guess."
Watching his teammate – and yes, Sasuke was definitely keeping him – from the corner of his eyes, the last Uchiha thought that he had rather a lot to think about, now.