Sasuke, stricken with horror and grief, had been unable to conceal his knowledge of the truth from Hiruzen.
"What your brother told you was true," Hiruzen had conceded, standing there in the Hokage's office with his back to a kneeling, silently-weeping Sasuke. "I did not ask explicitly him to withhold the truth from you, but I believed that the request had been implied when I asked him to take the blame for the massacre. Itachi was a true Leaf shinobi, a hero who put the welfare of the village as a whole above the love of kin and clan, but in the end, his grief at having sacrificed his family members must have overcome his sense of reason, driving him to make the decision to take his own life and to divulge the secret of the massacre to you. But, Sasuke, your brother sacrificed so that you would also become a loyal shinobi of the Leaf."
Try to embrace friendship…humility, love…and teamwork. If you'll do as I ask…perhaps someday you'll have at least one person …who loves you as much as Mother and Father and Oniichan did.
Sasuke clung to those words with all his might, and, as he grew older, did his best to honor his brother's final request. Though he wasn't conscious of the fact, however, deep down inside, his hope was that by being a good boy, heeding Itachi's instructions, he could somehow bring his family back.
He did his best to internalize and display humility. He understood his place in society. He was Uchiha Sasuke, a cool, good-looking prodigy, the possessor of a dojutsu that was feared, envied and sought-after, the object of popular admiration, but he was also the sole survivor of a cursed clan, a clan that the other residents of the Leaf would rather not have around at all. Accordingly, he did his best to forget his mother, his father and the other members of the clan, for when he remembered them, he felt a mixture of sadness and anger - anger that was so powerful that it made him question and fear himself - fear the grip of the Curse of Hatred. He only allowed himself to remember Itachi. It was right to remember Itachi, for Itachi was a hero to the Leaf.
Sasuke tried to exercise teamwork and display kindness. He did not rebuff Haruno Sakura when she begged for his romantic attention, but did his best to reject her gently or tolerate her advances in silence. When she criticized Uzumaki Naruto and attributed his character flaws to his lack of a parental figure, he swallowed the anger he felt, bit his tongue and walked away. When they failed Kakashi's bell test and Naruto was tied to a post, Sasuke attempted to feed him his own lunch. As they spent more time with one another, he began to see in that loudmouthed, quick-tempered, hotheaded boy some of the same loneliness that he himself felt, and so he gravitated more towards him. And so, in the Land of Waves, having learned that he and his teammates had been duped into taking on an S-ranked mission, Sasuke trained hard, but, during his leisure time, also watched over the oblivious Naruto from a distance. He stepped in to reprimand the reckless moron for overexerting himself during training and skipping meantime, and somehow, the two youngsters, who usually bickered, found himself training together until it was dark and the moon emerged from behind the clouds. All the while, against his will, Sasuke remembered the touch of his mother's gentle hands as she'd plastered bandages over his bruises and scrapes and admonished her little one for training too hard.
In the face-off against Haku, he took that excruciatingly-painful Ice Needle attack to rescue Naruto. When asked why he had done it, he insisted that he did not know, that his body had moved on its own. The insistence was not a lie. Perhaps he would never know just why he had sacrificed himself for Naruto's sake. But when the sweet darkness claimed him, before he returned to life, the smiling faces of Mother, Father and Oniichan filled his vision. The sound of Mother singing her favorite song was as sweet as the aroma of the dango that Father had brought home for Itachi and him.
