Sasuke is curled up on the floor of his living room, winded and looking into the eyes of the corpses of his parents. The images Itachi had forced onto him play over an over again behind his eyelids and without the aid of the tsukyomi.
Staring at the rapidly expanding pool of blood inching its way towards him; Sasuke thinks that this is the first time in his life he's ever been awake.
He, no her because he remembers being her but then no, that's not right either. Sasuke is himself but there's something else inside of him now too, or rather, someone else. Memories of wearing cotton dresses and wool socks and working ridiculous hours to save up for a camera surface in Sasuke's mind.
He doesn't know if he understands some of the memories, doesn't know if he understands why he would stress over freckles on his face or why he would bleed between his legs sometimes.
His brother steps over the bodies of their parents and stands over him. Sasuke is so confused, to much is happening inside his head at once and he can't grasp onto a coherent thought long enough to make sense of anything.
His brother grabs him by his arm, hauling him up with an unrelenting grip that has his bones creaking under the strain.
"Aren't you scared, little brother?" he taunts, shaking him roughly to get his attention, "Don't you want to run away?"
Sasuke's face is wet with tears and he tries desperately to claw at the hand holding him.
I don't understand, he wails, I don't understand what's happening; I'm so confused.
Itachi's face flickers with some unreadable emotion before smoothing back out into that cold mask. His brother, who gave him piggyback rides and hugged his nightmares away, tosses him back down to the floor into the blood of their parents.
Sasuke gags as the congealing liquid sloshes up onto his face and arms.
He remembers being a girl and being in a pool of blood. He hadn't understood why people hurt others then and he doesn't understand now.
His brother says something about him not being worth the time or energy to kill and tells him to come seek him out when he's stronger.
His brother closes the door behind himself when he leaves and Sasuke waits before crawling forward to wrap his arms around the body of his mother. She's already cold and he's never felt more pathetic.
He's there for hours before someone notices what's happened to the Uchiha clan and the village sirens are going off. He's there for even longer before ANBU come searching through the house.
He's covered in so much blood that the ANBU operative that had knelt down to move his body startles when he twitches. They carefully pry him off the floor and he wiggles in their firm grip, trying to get them to let him go.
The operative must signal to someone because moments later a medic is entering the room and wrapping him up in a thick blanket and disappearing with him.
Sasuke is still so lost and confused even after they've cleaned him up and put him in an empty hospital bed.
...
Kakashi felt a deep shame when he'd stepped into the compound to help identify and clear up the bodies. He hadn't meant to fail Itachi in such a way.
He passes by the long row of corpses that are placed along the main street of the compound. Operatives are going in and out of houses bringing with them everyone from the elderly to tiny little babies who were slaughtered in their cribs.
He's been given the task of collecting the corpses of the main family.
The house reeks of blood before he even enters and it has him breathing through his mouth while he searches the rooms for the bodies.
The corpses are piled together in the living room and the floor is sticky with blood. He catches sight of a tiny body curled up next to the corpse of Uchiha Mikoto and he feels his heart drop.
He had thought that Itachi had loved that boy so dearly and it's horrid to think he would hurt him.
Kakashi kneels down to start moving the bodies to the street when the little boy twitches and his too-big eyes are looking up at him with a glassy sort of confusion. It nearly scares him enough to react violently but he quashes down the instinct and instead carefully snakes his fingers under the boy's arms and peals him off the floor.
The boy hardly reacts, only wiggling a bit in his hold, and Kakashi doesn't need to be a Yamanka to know the kid is coming off of what must have been hours of psychological torture and trauma.
He flares his chakra and an ANBU medic comes rushing in.
ANBU Dove is a tiny mouse of a woman and she's fairly old for the black ops but she's always been stern and reliable. Even though she's wearing a mask Kakashi can pick out the minute twitches of her muscles that tells him she's horrified at the sight of, so far, the only living Uchiha to make it out of this massacre. She unseals a thick blanket and carefully wraps it around the boy before cradling him gently in her arms. She signs to Kakashi before disappearing to take the boy to the hospital.
He looks back down at the Uchiha head and his wife and gets started on dragging their bodies out to the street.
...
Inoichi had been busy with the search for Itachi and so he hadn't been available to interview young Sasuke when he was found alive. Two weeks later, the T&I members that had been sent come back and suddenly the Yamanaka head is the last resort to get the little boy to talk.
Sasuke is morose and confused most days, although he doesn't talk about it. ANBU stationed on his guard and medical personal have observed the boy stumbling about his hospital room in a daze and say that he reacts poorly to seeing his own reflection.
ANBU Bear thinks that Sasuke has been not letting himself go to the bathroom, either, and that the boy just holds it in for hours. Whatever would cause a kid to fear looking at his own body like that doesn't sit well with Inoichi.
Sasuke is a child and this tragedy has stripped him of that part of himself. So, Inoichi splurges and buys a very expensive teddy bear that's made from alpaca fur from that one toy store his daughter has always loved. He also buys a few different kinds of coloring books and a large pack of crayons.
Sasuke latches onto that bear so quickly that Inoichi chuckles. Once the kid is certain his new toy isn't going to be taken away from him anytime soon, he starts curiously leafing through the coloring books.
"I know that it's probably pretty boring in here most of the time so I thought you would like something to keep you busy until you're released," Inoichi explains and doesn't miss the way Sasuke's eyes keep darting to the more feminine floral themed coloring book but purposely avoiding it in favor of the ninja themed one currently in his hands.
Sasuke gives him a meek smile of gratitude and burrows his face into the fur of the bear. Inoichi would bet his left foot that no one had even so much as given the kid a hug since the massacre.
Inoichi doesn't outright interrogate the kid, already knowing that Sasuke is wildly distrustful of everyone that interacts with him. So, instead, he sits there with Sasuke in silence for a few hours and colors.
Inoichi pulls the floral themed coloring book towards himself and points to the images, "I love flowers; did you know that me and my family run a flower shop?"
Sasuke shakes his head.
"When I was a child I used to get teased for how girly I was," he admits while grabbing a lavender crayon to color in the blooms of the Wisteria on the page, "There's nothing wrong with liking flowers, though, they hold a lot of important cultural significance that people tend to overlook."
Sasuke has set his crayon down and is giving him his full attention so he continues, "Did you know that flowers can be used to send messages to people?"
Sasuke hesitates before slowly shaking his head, looking curious about the subject.
"It's true. If you arrange the flowers into a certain style of bouquet, you can says anything from 'get well soon' to 'I want to poison you'."
Sasuke giggles a bit at that and Inoichi smiles and pushes the book towards Sasuke. The boy bites his lips as parses through whatever it is he's thinking about before he slowly accepts the book and starts to color in the flowers.
As he goes, his shoulders lose a bit of tension and Inoichi feels successful in getting Sasuke to open up even if it's only a fractional amount.
"I want to go home," Sasuke whispers at some point and Inoichi nearly misses it because the boy tries to cover his words with the sound of the page in his coloring book turning.
Inoichi gives him an apologetic smile, "I know you do. We're working really hard on getting things in order so that it's safe for you to do that."
Sasuke shifts positions and Inoichi frowns before glancing at the clock on the wall. He's been here for hours and Sasuke hasn't gone to the bathroom once. The man knows from experience that kids' bladders could only hold so much for so long.
"Do you need to go to the bathroom, Sasuke-kun?" he asks kindly, hoping that by broaching this subject his hard work doesn't backtrack.
Sasuke flinches and curls in on himself ever so slightly. He shakes his head fervently.
The man doesn't miss the way Sasuke squirms in his bed.
"You're going to make yourself sick if you keep this up," he says with a sigh, "Is there a reason you don't want to go to the bathroom?"
Sasuke shrugs and refuses to look over at him, instead he very intensely starts to color again, what once was clean and methodical is now messy and erratic.
"Are you scared of being alone? Is that why you don't want to go to the bathroom?"
Sasuke doesn't acknowledge the question and keeps coloring.
Eventually the man, with the help of a nurse on staff, wrangles Sasuke towards the bathroom. The kid is fighting and kicking the whole way and Inoichi can say for certain he's never seen someone act like this before.
The nurse looks equally as confused.
"It's okay sweetie," she coos gently, "Do you want me to go with you? Yamanaka-sama can wait outside."
Sasuke hesitates but finally agrees and the nurse reports to Inoichi later that Sasuke had struggled to build up the courage to go to the bathroom and when he did he chose to sit on the seat instead of standing like most men do.
He's got a suspicion as to why but he doesn't bring it up in the kid's file choosing to let Sasuke come to them if he wants to.
...
After days of persistently spending time with Sasuke in his hospital room, the boy eventually talks about the massacre.
He doesn't say much, and Inoichi knows they're not going to get any more out of him, but what they did get is helpful.
"Everyone was already dead when I got home," Sasuke says while burying his face into his bear's stomach, "Big brother did something with his eyes and made me watch over and over and over again."
Inoichi rubs a gentle hand over the boy's back, "What happened next?"
Sasuke stares up at him with a haunted, glassy-eyed look that the man has only ever seen from shinobi who have seen the worst of the worst.
"I woke up."
...
ANBU drop Sasuke off at his compound and leave without a word. He stares at the front gates for over an hour before he feels brave enough to go inside.
It's a ghost town and back when Sasuke was her instead of him, she had visited an abandoned town once to take pictures of the crumbling architecture. It had been haunting then and is horrifying now because the ghosts that lingered were his family.
A clean up crew has gone through and removed the corpses and the worst of the blood stains but they didn't do a very good job because flecks of brown still paint the sidings of businesses and houses. There's a distinctly sour smell to the air as well that tells Sasuke the blood that seeped into cracks has been festering and he doesn't want to know what his own house must smell like.
He clutches the teddy bear the interrogator gave him and edges along to go home.
His living room is a lost cause, he discovers. The blood has seeped into the floor boards so badly that some of them are warped or expanded. The walls have had a good scrub down but the arterial spray from his father has stained the white paint ever so faintly.
Sasuke closes up the room and tries to move on.
Itachi's room is a disaster. His mattress has been dragged onto the floor and his clothes and things are strung about. ANBU had been searching for any clues but had clearly come up short.
Sasuke carefully rights everything before going to his own room.
His house is so quiet now, and it frightens him.
He'll have to return to the academy tomorrow morning but he feels so hollow as if his organs have all been scooped out. Memories from his other life tell him that this is depression he's feeling and that he should be outraged that the village is just dumping him back into the place where his family was slaughtered.
He doesn't have the energy to be angry, though, not even with Itachi.