Sasuke floated, limbless, boneless and utterly spent. His head still hadn't come down from among the clouds and he drew air into his lungs with an insatiable hunger. He made an effort, willed his arm to move, searching, until it bumped into the naked body lying next to him, equally breathless for once.

Shisui.

His cousin, his older brother's best friend, former ANBU shinobi. And supposedly dead.

He didn't shape the question that begged asking, not yet. Sasuke needed his mind to clear and he was unwilling to come down from his high. So they lay in the darkness together, motionless, until their breaths slowed and their pulse returned to normal, each alone with their own thoughts.

Sasuke was beginning to feel his eyelids getting heavy, however, and sleep was the last thing he wanted at the moment. His voice echoed, too loud in the silence.

"How are you still alive?"

The answer came with a few breaths' delay. "Let's not ruin tonight with a history lesson."

Sasuke sat up, his eyes trying to locate Shisui and latching on to the rhythmic motions of his chest.

"We had a deal."

The sound which escaped his cousin fell halfway between a snort and a sigh. The longest moment crept by in utter silence after, until Sasuke began to think he wouldn't be getting anything out of Shisui tonight. Then his form shifted. Warmth receded with him, cold air leaving goosebumps over Sasuke's skin. He felt around for his clothes, but only found a blanket and he dragged that over himself instead.

Another soft sigh and a candle lit not three feet away from him. Sasuke's eyes were drawn to it like a moth and they trailed along the contours of Shisui's body – the man who had just possessed him completely and whose face he hadn't seen in a decade. They traced the expanse of his shoulders, then down along the sinuous length of his spine to the dimples on his lower back and lower. His study came to a halt when Shisui set the candle down on a nearby table and sat down beside him.

Sasuke stared at him in the light, uncomprehending. His mouth opened and closed and no sound came out. Whatever he had expected to see, it was not this.

A black eyepatch covered the hollow where his right eye had been. Their shared aristocratic features, the once familiar lines of his face, looked sharper, more angled, hard bone and misery. But most baffling of all was the dark webbing which marred his skin – a network of blackened veins and capillaries in stark contrast with his pallor, more pronounced around his remaining eye and along his arms and legs.

"What… happened to you?" he asked eventually.

Not a muscle had moved on Shisui's face during Sasuke's shameless scrutiny, but his jaw tightened at the question.

"I was betrayed," he said, and before Sasuke had a chance to ask the next obvious question, he raised a hand to stop him. "But for you to understand that, I should start at the beginning."

Sasuke's mouth suddenly felt dry, his tongue swollen as an old memory surfaced. Clansmen accusing his brother of having murdered Shisui and Itachi lashing out. The visceral fear it had struck in him, sensing the killing intent radiating from his brother. He swallowed the thickness in his throat. He needed to know.

"Was it Itachi?"

A note of desperation made its way through, clinging to his brother's name. A shadow crossed his cousin's face, almost ominous, before his features realigned themselves into something more akin to contrition. He shook his head, but didn't say the word 'no'. In the flickering candlelight, Shisui looked drained, much older than he was. It was such a strange combination that Sasuke didn't really feel like his question had been answered. Dread coiled in the pit of his stomach and even as he thought he couldn't say the words, they slipped past the seam of his lips.

"But he did do something."

Shisui's lips pressed together minutely before he schooled his facial expression into a blank mask Sasuke didn't want to see. Rage was beginning to boil inside him when his cousin finally decided to speak, and this time, he left him no room for interruptions.

"Our clan wasn't blameless, you know. About that night. They'd started down this path two years before, planning a coup d'état. Your father and the clan elders were behind this agenda. Naturally, it stirred concerns among Konoha's leadership. Itachi and I were in the ANBU at the time, so we were tasked with finding a solution to end their madness. Avoid civil war. Being a part of the clan, as well as Konoha shinobi, however, we found ourselves walking a rather thin line."

"Double agents," Sasuke whispered, more to himself.

Shisui nodded in assent. "Eventually, we came up with a peaceful solution. My sharingan enables me to use a special technique called 'Kotoamatsukami'. It casts a powerful mind-controlling genjutsu on the target, virtually undetectable. I proposed to use it on your father to change his mind. Avoid bloodshed. The Council agreed." His voice tightened. "But I was betrayed by one of the village elders before I could put that plan into action. He didn't trust me. He had me poisoned, weakened, in order to steal my eyes. I managed to get away with one."

Sasuke listened, rapt, wide-eyed but otherwise stone-faced, emotions spun in a tight ball, held down lest they surfaced all at once.

"I met with Itachi after that. I was already dying from the poison. I thought my death might still do some good, so I left a suicide note and entrusted my remaining sharingan to him before jumping off the cliff in the clearing. I'd hoped that might demoralize our clan, make them understand the dangerous path they were treading. But as I found out later, it did nothing but buy some time. Not long after that, the order was given to eliminate the Uchiha clan."

"Who?" Sasuke demanded. "Who gave the order?" His voice was beginning to shake.

"Danzo Shimura. The same man who stole my eye."

"The elder? Why didn't the Hokage stop him?"

"No one knew until it was already too late. The order was given in secret."

Sasuke stared at him in bewilderment even as he seethed. "How could the Hokage not know when his own shinobi were missing and innocents were being slaughtered?"

Shisui shook his head slowly, that same shadow twisting the contours of his face. "Danzo's order was carried out by a single ANBU member."

Sasuke felt the blood drain from his face, but Shisui set mercy aside and saw this through the end, granting his petulant demand that they do this tonight.

"Itachi," he said.

The cleaver fell. It sectioned off that maelstrom of emotion rising within Sasuke and left him in a grey limbo, unspeakably numb. Thoughts refused to take shape, his vision darkened, doubled and blurred. What was Shisui saying? The thought of his brother slaughtering one Uchiha after another, spilling their family's blood, his blood, kaa-san's and tou-san's…

"Why?" he murmured, not even recognizing his own voice. "Why would he-"

Then he saw it. The trace of pity in Shisui's eye, the endless night of sorrow beyond it. And he knew why before he answered.

"Danzo used you as a bargaining chip."

The final blow and Sasuke thought he heard his own heart break. He let his head hang, suddenly devoid of strength. He feared the tears might never stop falling if they started, but they didn't. He didn't understand how that could be when he didn't know what he was supposed to do with all this pain, where to put it. He looked up at Shisui, throat constricted, but able to produce the necessary sounds.

"Show me," he said. "Use your sharingan. I need to see."

Shisui said nothing, even as Sasuke thought he might fall apart in front of him. He was holding himself together by the very edges, torn and still tearing apart. Because part of him didn't believe it. He didn't believe Itachi had slaughtered their entire clan just to save him, how could he?

"Shisui," Sasuke said, more hiss than name.

Shisui's gaze hardened into onyx. He didn't try to dissuade him, didn't ask why. He obliged and red bled into that bottomless black, tomoe spinning lazily, chakra latching on. He molded it around Sasuke's wide-open consciousness and seized only his senses, leaving him perfectly aware of everything and able to hear his voice. A mere dip in the lake and he could pull himself out anytime he wanted, because the currents were strong and monsters lurked in its depths.

The truth as Shisui had lived it, it turned out, was far more terrible than any words he could have used to describe it.