This takes place shortly after the events of Chapter Seven.
Sasuke stared at the notebook he pulled out of his pack. Everything else he had taken with him to Wave he had put away except for this. 'Think about writing it down,' the Sannin had said. He got up from his bed, and set it on the desk, hesitant, before he sat down in his desk chair and grabbed a pen, before opening it to the first page.
My name is Uchiha Sasuke.
He paused, biting his bottom lip. It was a new habit, one that had started the day they were assigned their genin teams. Putting his age didn't feel quite right, but… facts first.
I am a twelve year old genin of Konohagakure. My genin team is Team Seven, under Hatake Kakashi. My teammates are Haruno Sakura and Uzumaki Naruto.
I am the only remaining Uchiha in the village.
My older brother is a missing-nin.
On our first mission out of the village I killed for the first time.
"And I don't know why," he whispered. That part he couldn't write down. Not when their whole team was pending a psychological evaluation. He knew the reasons for the evaluation— the mission on its own, along with his first kills— but how he felt when he did it was still a cold, disconnected thing, looking back on it. Like they weren't people. It wasn't something he liked to remember. He had thrown up after Haku had decapitated Gato on the corrupt businessman's ship.
He hadn't slept well since then. Even right now he felt tired and worn down, but he refused to try and sleep it off just yet.
He looked over what he wrote. Mentioning Nii-san at all was probably fool-hardy, but he still felt it was important to mention him. His older brother had killed their whole clan, but…
But...
The thought skittered away unfinished, like it always did. No matter how many times he tried to force it, to try and figure out why there was supposed to be a reason or excuse or explanation or anything attached, it evaporated away from him.
He remembered walking in on Itachi standing over their parents' bodies, and then nothing in between, ended with a poke to his forehead and being told to become stronger. He had woken up to a woman in an Anbu mask carrying him to the hospital in a dead run.
Genjutsu was what the medic-nin had diagnosed as the cause, and it was said to him with a pitying look, after the first interrogation in the hospital room with a Yamanaka clan member revealed the gaping hole in his memory. There was nothing to be done. He would just need to move on and he would be fine, though it was hard to ignore the fact that the medic spent an awful long time writing something in Sasuke's medical file after that, with a hefty report from the Yamanaka shoved in there. The folder had gone from being basically empty to almost as thick as Itachi's was, something he only got glances of when it was time for the yearly shots at the hospital.
As far as anyone knew, his nii-san had snapped and killed the whole clan. No reason at all. Except for the fact that he could tell there was a second part to that thought stuck in his head, and only Sasuke knew it was there.
He had become skilled at keeping secrets to himself since then, because whatever happened that night wasn't limited to that slippery thought and blocked out memory.
Besides the loss of his whole clan in a single night, something about him had changed the moment he had stepped into the clan compound, even before he saw the first body or sign something was wrong.
The adults had become easier to read, easier to understand, without needing to always ask why they were saying or doing something. Not so old and impenetrable.
He still wished his first reaction to seeing Iruka-sensei when he finally returned to class hadn't been thinking that Iruka-sensei was practically a baby who shouldn't be teaching, though. He shook his head, trying to clear his head of that particular memory.
Everything else, though… those first few months entirely on his own had been different, from how he suspected they should have been.
He had been very, very careful to try and not reveal that he had only began to feel like that and was thinking like that from after the night of the massacre. He wasn't always successful, but it was at least enough. It meant the comments were about how he was showing his potential and was being so mature for his age, the speakers sometimes just barely avoiding mentioning Itachi, instead of them being about Sasuke being off.
He wondered if this was how Itachi had felt at times, too. He remembered all the times Nii-san had been called responsible, mature, and treated like a miniature adult. Being able to be compared to Itachi more than he had to be was something he was trying to avoid.
Not for the first time, he wished he was able to ask someone for advice about any of this. Instead, his sensei had stopped talking to him at all unless it was absolutely required, until their encounter with Jiraiya. Kakashi wasn't going out of his way to pretend he didn't exist anymore, but it wasn't like it was before.
Going out of his way to learn about the jōnin's history and finding out more about him had explained that. Kakashi was considered the village's last prodigy, before Itachi. His records— or lack therein— were proof enough to back that up. Hatake Kakashi, son of Konoha's White Fang. A student of the Yondaime. Copy-nin Kakashi of a thousand jutsu. Friend-killer Kakashi. Kakashi of the Sharingan, who had basically disappeared from the records a fresh genin could access around the time Sasuke was born. He could guess what that meant, when the jōnin was fourteen years older than his students, when there had been praise from his father for Itachi being so young to join Anbu.
No wonder his sensei was ignoring Sasuke. Especially with an ugly and old nickname like 'Friend-killer' in some of the older materials Sasuke could find, though it seemed to have gone out of use.
Instead of anyone he could ask anything, all Sasuke had was a notebook he could barely write anything in.
He flopped to the side, just barely landing on his mattress, where he rolled over and groaned face down into it. There was no grace in the movement. Being twelve and like this was awful. Maybe thirteen would be better.