Chapter Text
They find her in the woods, disoriented, barefoot, and blind. A woman says, “Is that?” and a man answers, “Oh, shit, I think it is,” before a third person inches towards her.
“I’m Uchiha Sasuke,” she says, trying to sound more brave than she feels, because there’s something wrong with her. It’s like someone reached into her head, and twisted a pin inside a part of her mind that now won’t stop hurting. Considering how hard of a time she’s having recalling details of anything leading up to waking sightless in an unknown room, she’s assuming it has something to do with her memory. “Itachi is dead. I just want to go home.”
When fingers find her forehead protector, she flinches, and somewhere above her, two squirrels chatter. A second woman sighs quietly, one single exhale of disbelief. “All right,” the one closest to her, the one that recognized her, says. “We’re going to take you back to Konoha.”
The first one says, “Kakashi,” as a warning, and the name stirs up something uncomfortable, but Sasuke can’t grasp the reason. Something’s wrong, so incredibly wrong.
“No,” the second woman says, next to her now, “he’s right. I had her for a few classes in the Academy before I became a jounin. Take her to Yamanaka to be sure, but no one else has hair like this.”
Sasuke looks up in the direction of the voice, and the bandages are rough on her face. “You aren’t Etsuko-sensei.”
But Etsuko-sensei wasn’t her only sensei, she thinks. “I’m Kurenai, who taught the lectures on genjutsu,” the woman says, and Sasuke vaguely remembers her. “Sasuke, what’s wrong with your eyes?”
“I don’t know,” she answers, and her heartbeat stutters at the realization she’s telling the truth, “but I don’t think you’re supposed to take them off.” Then something comes back to her from the fight, and the stutter leaps up to her throat, stronger than a cough. “I need to see the Hokage.”
There’s a short beat of silence. She wraps her arm around her stomach, and for the first time since she started walking, feels the dried blood on her hand. “Okay,” Kakashi says, and from the shifting of fabric, and crunch of grass, she thinks he just kneeled down in front of her. “Sasuke, we’re going to take you back, but you need to answer a couple of questions for me first. Can you do that for me?”
Though she doesn’t know why he’s talking to her like she’s a kid, she nods, willing to do anything to get out of here. Kakashi continues, “Why do you need to see the Hokage?”
“Itachi said he would help,” she says. “There was a man, and he bit me, and it hurt, and I couldn’t use my chakra properly. I know it sounds weird, but—”
Someone grabs the back of her shirt, and pulls. “Well, fuck,” the first woman says. “We’re getting her back. Now. I don’t think she’s lying. This is Orochimaru’s handiwork.”
The first man makes a weird strangled noise; Kurenai’s chakra flares. Even though something tells Sasuke she should know that name, she doesn’t, and maybe whatever the first woman looked at is what’s screwing with her memory.
“Last question,” Kakashi says. “Your cousin used to call you something. What was it?”
Even with her memory as patchy as it is right now, she’s sure she’s never met someone named “Kakashi” before. That might be a common name, though, or maybe he worked with her brother, she thinks, so she answers, “Straw doll,” and hopes he meant Shisui.
When there’s a second shift in fabric, she knows she got it right. “Come on,” he says, and takes her hand, warm around hers. “Let’s get you home.”
It takes three meetings with the Hokage, a Yamanaka invasion of the mind, and two weeks observation in I&T despite her age before Sasuke is declared real and safe. By the end of it, she’s certain that the loss of memory is Itachi’s fault, that he knew this was bound to happen, and she went through something the Konoha-nin were better off not seeing. For her own safety, she decides not to mention it.
Even after she’s given back her status as a Uchiha of Konoha, though, there are still three problems that remain:
She came in with an Amegakure forehead protector.
She has a confined cursed seal.
She has nowhere to live.
At least the first two have explanations. Where better to bring a blind, kidnapped little girl than a corrupt country Konoha rarely deals with outside of wartime? When Itachi registered her for the gennin exam, he just used her given name, so they never heard anything about her. He confined the seal, too. That’s when he had her kill him. The first time the interrogator, whose face she never saw because the bandages can’t come off until after her last day in confinement, tried to say something bad about him, she refused to say a word for the rest of the day. After that, she just learned to ignore it.
Now she’s out, and important people are deciding living arrangements while she sits on a hospital bed with a friendly medical-nin named Michi and the Kakashi guy across from her. “If it hurts, or feels off,” Michi says, “don’t hesitate to tell me.”
Cold metal presses against Sasuke’s cheek bones, the start of the bandages. She remembers being bandaged before, after going blind from Itachi’s Mangekyo Sharingan, and seeing nothing once they were off. Suddenly afraid, she shuts her eyes, and feels the bandages fall away with a too-loud click of the scissors.
“The lights are dimmed, Sasuke-chan,” Michi says. “It shouldn’t hurt you.”
Probably slower than is necessary, Sasuke opens her eyes, and the moment she realizes what’s going on, she does so all at once. “Nothing’s red,” she says. “I can see. Why can I see?”
Everything’s less vibrant than it would be with her Sharingan activated, but she also doesn’t feel her chakra getting drained out of her just for a few hours of her sight. To her right, there’s a rustle and light clang, and then someone’s in her line of vision. His hair’s grey, messy like Shisui’s before his mother made him get a haircut, with a forehead protector pulled over one slate grey eye, and a mask on his face. He’s holding something rectangular and white up to her face, which she recognizes as the back of a photo.
When the woman appears at his shoulder, Sasuke can see her just as clearly—white coat, eyes like moss, hair the color of bark. “Oh,” Michi says, and her face pales. Sasuke’s happiness abruptly ends. “This is like you, isn’t it?”
Before Sasuke can ask, Kakashi looks away from the photo and back to her. “Sasuke,” he says, “what’s the color of your eyes?”
She almost says red and black, but stops herself, because she doubts he means the Sharingan. Though she hasn’t seen what she looks like in a long time, something like an eye color is a hard thing to forget. “Grey,” she says, “but a lot people think it’s black.” The other two exchange a look. “Is there something wrong?”
“I’m going to go get the Sandaime,” Michi says, which means something is most certainly wrong, before turning to Sasuke. “You’re going to be fine. Kakashi-san, I’m sorry, but?”
After he says he’ll take it from here, Michi leave. For a moment, things are awkward. But Sasuke is smart, and realistically, two and a half years isn’t a terribly long time. “They’re blue, aren’t they?” she says. “Dark blue.”
By some cruel twist of fate, she was born with her father’s eyes; her brother managed to get their grandfather’s, who was nice enough, from what Sasuke can remember. When she thinks of him, she remembers chocolate mochi sneaked when her mother wasn’t looking, and hands shaking. Eventually, there was coughing and blood. Itachi’s illness wasn’t random.
She doesn’t want those eyes.
Despite what she wants or doesn’t want, Kakashi’s shoulder drops. In the dim light of the hospital room, his visible eye seems flat. “I’m sorry,” he says, which is somehow better and worse than hearing yes.
Because of how often Itachi used his Mangekyo Sharingan, his eyesight had been going, too, though at a slow rate. But she knows what an Eternal Mangekyo is. The moment this happened, any damage overuse had caused corrected itself. Kekkei genkai never have much logic anyway.
The doors opens, loud and threatening, and the Hokage enters with Michi a few steps behind. Sasuke had been so desperate to return because Itachi told her she had to, but suddenly she thinks of rain and paper daffodils, and wishes she were anywhere but here.
Whether or not she’s “safe,” Sasuke’s still suffering the effects of “captive bonding” and came with the title of gennin from a different village, so living situations are tricky. In the end, they stick her in a modestly sized apartment in an a calm area of Konoha’s residential neighborhood, with either Kakashi, as the other last Sharingan user (who happens not the be a Uchiha, uncomfortably enough), or various other jounin and ANBU periodically checking up on her. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best anyone can think of.
Considering that it means she can have at least some time to herself, she’s not complaining.
On the first night, Kurenai stops by, looking about as confused as Sasuke expected when she walked inside. “Etsuko is going to come around eventually to see you,” Kurenai says, taking in the sight of the origami paper scattered throughout the sparsely furnished living area. Sasuke’s still getting used to the fact that she can see, and may have gone overboard with the colors. “I didn’t know you could do origami.”
“I could only see for a few hours a day for a while, and lived in a place where it always rained,” Sasuke says, rubbing her eye in exhaustion. Activating the Sharingan at random is still a habit she needs to break. “You’d need a hobby after a while, too.”
Even though she has a feeling it’s more than that, it’s the best reasoning she can think of, and she remembers fingers tucking paper flowers into the elastic holding back her ponytail. Kurenai actually smiles that, small and maybe a little affectionate, moving around easily in the apartment despite the low lighting. “I never had the talent,” she says, examining a raven. “Of course you’d be a bird person. Have you eaten yet?”
She hasn’t. Still, Sasuke nods. “I thought these were just supposed to be check ups.”
Shrugging, Kurenai says, “I have a soft spot for lonely gennin.”
“I’m not a gennin, though,” Sasuke says, frowning. “No one’s going to let me be a Konoha-nin when I showed up like that.”
That referring to the Ame-nin forehead protector, of course, and the supposed captive bonding, which isn’t true, but she’s ten, and no one listens to girls who are ten, even when they’re right. Apparently Kurenai has much more faith in Konoha than Sasuke does, though, because she says, “Eh, give it a couple of months. I’m sure a few strings can be pulled. Did you go looking for clothes today, or just groceries and paper?”
To Sasuke, the paper was incredibly important, and she forgot about clothes once she saw it. She hadn’t realized she was still in the outfit the hospital handed her. “I’ll go tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow I’m going to be busy on a mission,” Kurenai tells her, “but how about I send over someone to help you? When’s the last time you’ve stepped foot into a store?”
“Um.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” She doesn’t need help, Sasuke wants to insist, but she knows she’s a bit of a novelty right now. After all, she did return from the dead. “I’m going to make you dinner. Consider it a welcome home present.”
Everyone keeps calling Konoha home, but it still doesn’t feel that way. “Okay,” she says anyway, and adds, “Thank you,” because missing-nin can teach their little sisters manners.
Someone other than Itachi had to have taught her origami, though, and she can’t help but wonder if that someone misses her.
For some reason, it was Kakashi who got stuck helping her with clothes shopping, and things just derailed from there.
Now it’s a week later, which corresponds with a dry spot of missions for him, and he caught her trying to go to the compound to train. Apparently she’s not allowed there, though, and after a ridiculous amount of begging and pleading, he brought her out to an empty training ground on the other side of town. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he says, more to himself than to her, but she’s too excited to care. “Okay, remember. It’s been a month since you’ve done anything, and these are new eyes. Go easy on yourself.”
In the past seven days, he’s called her both hyperactive and sullen, said she was brat, and that she needs to pick an attitude and stick with it. Maybe if she proves herself to him, she can become a Konoha gennin. If she becomes a Konoha gennin, she’s one step closer to finding out who’s in Ame, and if she really has someone waiting for her. Or, at the very least, she can get the constant stream of jounin and ANBU off her back, because it’s starting to get annoying. Kakashi’s the only one who doesn’t treat her like she’s about to shatter into a million shards of fragile wood. Blind girls don’t become kunoichi if they’re delicate, and losing Itachi hurts somewhere deep inside her that she didn’t know existed, but she can survive this. She has to, for him.
Even more than returning to Ame, or gaining some form of independence, though, she needs to become a gennin again so they can let her train, grow stronger. Despite the block in her mind keeping her memories in some dark, dusty corner of her subconscious, she knows this much: it’s Orochimaru’s fault her brother’s dead. If it weren’t for this seal, Itachi wouldn’t have made her slip the blade through his chest. Her brother might not have liked killing, but she entered Konoha with his blood on her hands; she doesn’t care how dirty she needs to get them again if it means getting her revenge.
Kakashi doesn’t help her, but he watches, and comments. “Your chakra control is good,” he says. “You need to work on your physical stamina. A month off didn’t do wonders for you. Aim’s not bad—”
“My aim’s great,” she cuts in, a little insulted, and tries to hide that she’s out of breath. “I’m just not used to targeting something without a chakra signature.”
He doesn’t have an answer to that. She hadn’t expected him to. While she might not be delicate, she’s skinny with messy hair, tall for her age, and ten. No one is ever going to take someone like her seriously. “Right,” he says in a blank voice hard to gauge, and she’s reminded strongly, painfully of Itachi. “It seems as though you have control over your Sharingan in its normal form. Have you tested out the Mangekyo?”
With an Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan, she won’t go blind, but these aren’t her eyes, and it makes her wary. But he’s right, and she should try, so she activates it. The world becomes beautiful and great, colorful with detailed movement, and if only this gift came at a different price.
She doesn’t realize she’s fainting until she wakes up ten minutes later, leaning back against a stump with Kakashi shoving a bottle of water in her face. “You don’t have the chakra for it,” he says. “Give it a few years.”
Despite not wanting it, there’s something about that that’s painful and wrong, but still, she drinks her water, and doesn’t say a thing.
On the day she’s finally considered safe enough to become a Konoha gennin, she dreams of a black sky with red clouds, filled with paper birds. It leaves her tired, and sad, and she attends team assignments wishing it would rain.
She’s little, and sits in the back, so no one notices her until her name’s announced. “Team Ten,” the chuunin instructor says, “is Wakamori Kichiro, Oshiro Yuki, and Uchiha Sasuke.”
There’s a ripple of confusion through the crowd, and wandering, curious eyes finds her. Outside it’s bright and warm, a typical late June day, and sunlight slips through the windows, reflecting off every forehead protector’s metal band. That’s when the thought hits her, hard, for the first time in weeks:
I don’t belong here.
To her relief, no one calls across the room to comment. In preparation for jounin sensei to come in to collect their students, everyone begins splitting off into their teams, and hers comes to her instead of expect her to find them. “I’m Kichiro,” a redhead boy says, taking a seat in the row in front of her, and twisting. “This is Yuki.”
Oshiro Yuki is like her, all dark hair and dark eyes and sharp features, tall for his age. But his skin is darker, there’s a splash of acne across his nose. There’s no symbol on his back, which means he’s a civilian’s son. The same can’t be said for Kichiro, with the tilted five-point blue star that she vaguely recognizes as a symbol worn by a boy one of her cousins tried date. His hair’s short, bunched up by his forehead protector, and there’s a cut above his eyebrow. He’s barely taller than she is.
“I’m Sasuke,” she says, and several people are still trying to discreetly shoot her looks. Of all the teams, there’s only one in its entirety that isn’t; a boy in green and orange, a girl with her hair pulled into two buns like a second set of ears, and a Hyuuga. This is the age group right above hers, she realizes.
“You’re younger than us, right?” Yuki says, and reluctantly, Sasuke nods. “That’s probably why you were put with me. I’m the youngest of the year. Don’t worry, we’ll look out for you.”
Just because she’s young doesn’t mean she needs any looking after. Before she can say this, though, the door slides open with a click, and the first few jounin come in, wearing varying degrees of smiles. She wonders how many people in this room will return to their families tonight, having to explain that they failed.
A man she doesn’t recognize calls for Team Ten. He’s on the younger end, with brown curls, and a scar across his neck. “Ready, Sasuke-chan?” Kichiro asks, and she wonders how’d they treat her if she were a boy.
As she stands, she ties her forehead protector around her head, careful not to knot her hair. If she’s going to become a kunoichi of Konoha again, she might as well do it right.
“Heard you passed, kid.”
“Heard you failed your team again, Kakashi-san.”
When she arrives home, he’s leaning against her door frame, reading his stupid book. She’s sweaty, and her body aches, and though she knows it wasn’t the purpose of the exercise, she’s still angry with herself for not getting the bells. “How’d you know the answer was teamwork?” he asks, and looks past the edge of the cover, down at her.
She opens the door, slips inside the cool darkness of her apartment, and flips on the light. “What’s the point without it?” she says, pulling off her forehead protector. “No one’s invincible. Teammates help you from dying. They can also pick up the mission and complete it when you finally do.”
For a long time, she had to live blind, stumbling around in the dark learning how to navigate by sense, and scent, and sound. Before she did, Itachi took her by the hand and acted as her guide. Now he’s dead, by her kunai, and he’s her eyes again. She spent years thinking he was the greatest shinobi alive, but she was wrong, and every time she looks at her forehead protector, she thinks that it should have a slash through the middle.
Without invitation, Kakashi follows her inside. As a gennin, she no longer needs babysitters, but he and Kurenai are the closest things she has to company. Loneliness hurts only slightly less than the nightmares most days. “Well, you’re not wrong,” he says, scratching the back of his head, “but the principle’s not quite there yet.”
“What do you mean?” She drops her forehead protector on the endtable of the couch next to a couple paper flowers, and heads to the kitchenette. “Do you want anything?”
He makes some vague sound she assumes means no. “You’re right about one thing,” he says. “No one’s invincible. But teamwork isn’t just about finishing the mission. It’s about loyalty to your teammates, too. You’re going to fight better with people you care about. Connections help you work together, and keep you human.”
The glass of water fills nearly to the brim before she thinks of something to say. “That’s not what I learned.”
“Remember who gave you all these great teaching’s yet?” Kakashi’s the only one she’s trusted enough to explain she remembers close to nothing. When she shakes his head, he continues, “Amegakure’s used to being a warzone. It’s not right, and they don’t deserve it, but developing an impersonal attitude was something of a collective coping mechanism.”
“How’s that fair?”
“It’s not.”
She sips her water, and it’s so cold it burns. “Kaito-sensei’s afraid of me.”
Looking her dead in the face, any sense of casual exchange gone, Kakashi tells her, “You have Orochimaru’s cursed seal, Sasuke. A lot of people will be.”
Even if it means getting a scratch in her forehead protector, and having all of Konoha do a lot more than fear her, she will get her revenge on Orochimaru. She tries to ignore that the thought of disappointing Kakashi leaves her with a rotten feeling already.
When Itachi blocked her memories, he blocked her ability to care as much as she has to right to, and Sasuke quickly discovers a problem with her plan to potentially go missing-nin other than Kakashi. Yuki and Kichiro are too nice, but they aren’t afraid to attack during training just because she’s a girl, and she likes them both more than she should.
By the time they get their first C-ranking mission outside the walls, the Konoha forehead protector is weightless a thing to wear. “Aren’t you a little young?” Isamu, a Daimyo’s youngest son, and therefore least important, asks, eyeing her warily.
Kichiro throws an arm around her shoulders, disregarding personal space. It’s noon, but the clouds are covering the sun, dulling the red of his hair. “This is Uchiha Sasuke,” he says, and Isamu’s eyes widen slightly in recognition of the name. “You can’t be in safer hands than Team Ten, Isamu-san.”
“Uchiha?” he says, and glances to Kaito. “I thought the whole family, you know.”
Over the past couple of months, any hesitation Kaito-sensei had towards her has faded, and now he smiles at her, though it’s faint. “No, there’s still Sasuke,” he says. “She’s keeping up the family legacy.”
“Yeah, which means in a couple of years, we’ll have to be fighting off potential suitors,” Yuki says, elbowing her in the side, and Isamu smiles, too.
“Fine, fine, sorry I doubted you, Sasuke-chan,” he says, raising his hands in quick defeat. “Forgive me?”
She says she will, of course, and the incident’s forgotten. After a while, Kichiro drops his arm, and the clouds clear, elongating shadows, clearing the air.
Today Uchiha Sasuke turns eleven, and Team Ten gets ambushed on a C-ranking, noncombatant mission just inside the perimeter of the village nearest Konoha. “Look at her eyes, men,” one of the Tani-nin say as the six circle the team on some dusty, deserted abandoned road just out of sight of any village building. “I think we’ve found the Harbinger of Amegakure. Defected, did you, little girl?”
The boys box her in before she can answer, their shoes kicking up dirt, and it hasn’t rained for days. “She’s a loyal kunoichi of Konoha,” Yuki says, holding his kunai out in front of him. “Try to get her, and you have to fight all of us, too.”
When the first two Tani-nin lunge, Sasuke moves by instinct, and her hands fly into seals she doesn’t remember learning. Yuki relies on kunai and string, using his kicks and elbow thrusts as backup for enemies who get too close; Kichiro comes from a clan, with his family jutsu based on wind-based attacks he barely understands, but are strong enough to kick up dirt and dust and leaves, and obscure their opponents’ vision. Kaito-sensei, as a jounin, can wield nature transformation ninjutsu Sasuke’s never seen before, combining wind and fire to create something new.
Sasuke has no origami paper on her, but she has explosive tags, and she’s a Uchiha, which means fire’s in her blood. Her chakra infuses with the paper, twisting it into the shapes of shuriken and hardening the edges into something sharper than normal blades. When she releases them, letting them spin, they’re no longer attached to her, but the chakra means they’re still connected, and she controls their movements the way someone must have taught her. With her Sharingan, no dirt or debris can affect her. The tags avoids her team, but explode on impact with her designated target, sending smoke and the smell of burning skin into the air.
After Kaito-sensei gets one of them down with a well placed, simple kick to the face, and she hits another with a genjutsu manipulating whatever his best memory is into something rivaling his worst, someone else calls retreat. Yuki throws one of his kunai, successfully wrapping the string around a Tani-nin’s knees, and knocks him over. His companions don’t wait around long enough to try and win him back, despite saving the other two.
Kaito-sensei orders them to be on guard, then wraps the Tani-nin on rope and pulls him up, pressing the tip of a kunai to his jugular. “Why did you attack us?” Kaito-sensei asks, and the other man looks over his shoulder, directly to her.
“Don’t you know who she is?” the man answers. “Never help a blind girl find her way home, because then her eyes will turn red, and you’ll be dead soon after. Where’s your follow-up, girl?”
There’s no recollection of ever getting called the Harbinger of anything. Her teammates turn to her, fear in their eyes for the first time, and she thinks about origami. She thinks about twisting into paper hawks, and flying somewhere faraway.
“Why are you so close to Konoha?” Kaito-sensei asks, and she’s relieved he’s ignoring to question for now. “What business do you have here?”
The man doesn’t answer. Instead he bites his tongue in the form of a stereotype she didn’t know existed in real life, and dies with blood dripping from his mouth.
They don’t talk about it, even though they should, and Sasuke experiments with chakra and paper and jutsu she only half-remembers learning. Training with Kakashi she used to practice the Sharingan, and anything else she played safe, keeping it to what she knows can be explained away by Itachi teaching her. Once she lets go of that, she taps into a new range of knowledge she can’t explain having.
“I never thought I’d say this,” Kichiro tells her one afternoon at the training grounds, leaning his elbow on her shoulder, “but origami’s kind of cool. Where’d you learn this?”
At night, Sasuke dreams of a woman with purple hair, and soft grey eyes, or a man with a face like a fish standing by her brother, his skin bluer than the Ame floods. They don’t have names yet, but it’s not unusual now for Sasuke to wake up with tears on her cheeks. “The Sharingan lets me record any technique,” she answers. “It’s a different sort of memory than my normal memory, which is why I can use it without actually remembering where I picked it up.”
“So you mean it could’ve been anywhere?” he asks.
Shrugging, she says, “Yeah, pretty much.”
To Kaito-sensei’s surprise, she still does little with fire outside of her family jutsu. She’s too embarrassed to explained to anyone that day by the lake, when smoke caught in her eyes the way it wasn’t meant to for someone like her.
Kichiro moves his elbow off her, and bends down, picking up a stray paper shuriken on the ground. Of everything she’s memorized, this is the technique she’s finding the hardest, as though it was only half-taught, and she still has so much to learn. “Why make them like this?” he asks, holding it gingerly in the middle. “It looks more like a pinwheel without a stick than a shuriken.”
There’s no point in having it look real; this way, it appears feminine and assuming, nonthreatening enough to be the last thing to try and evade, when in reality the points are just as sharp as metal. “Do you know the first rule of stealth, Kichiro-kun?” she says, taking it back, careful not to hurt him.
“What?”
“Make everything dangerous look like it’s not.”
Only two weeks after Kaito-sensei gives his team the contracts for the chuunin exam, Sasuke finds herself half-unconscious on the bloody grass of a forest clearing, surrounded by the dead. “Huh, Konan was right,” a blonde missing-nin says, kneeling at her side. “Orochimaru really didn’t take you.”
He’s familiar, with hair like a canary wing covering half his face, but no forehead protector tied around his head. “Why’d you kill them?” she asks.
There’s a pause, and then he leans back, sitting on his ankles. “What, like I was going to let Orochimaru kidnap you?” he says as she pulls herself into sitting position, hands slipping in the blood. There were nine fighting, including her, before the missing-nin showed up and killed everyone. Now eight are dead, exploded by clay coming directly from his palms. “How’d Konoha get you again? Doesn’t matter now, you can tell me on the road. We should get you home before you bleed out.”
When he reaches out for her, she backs up, and her hand lands on Yuki’s, hot and charred and bloody. She looks up, and there’s the missing-nin, and his hand with its hole is trying to grab her shoulder.
“No!” She stands, nearly tripping backwards over her teammate’s body, and just barely moves out of the way. Birds of prey circle above them, silent, waiting for her to die, too. “My home is Konoha. I don’t even know who you are.”
The vaguely excitement he had on his face disappears, and the forest sways around her, dulling. Her Sharingan’s faded. “Your eyes,” he says as he stands, too. “But those are Itachi’s—what did they do to you? Aw, come on, it’s me, Sasuke-chan! Your brother’s greatest rival. I taught you taijutsu, threatened to blow up that examiner for being a dick to you. You’ve got to remember something.”
He’s young, she realizes, probably about the same age as Itachi would be. “I don’t know,” she says, trying to take another step back, and hitting her foot against an enemy-nin’s hip. “Come any closer, and I’ll attack.”
“Can you see?”
“Yes!” She pulls out a kunai, a real one, and holds it in front of her. There’s blood on her hands, under her nails, and it’s like when she killed her brother all over again. “I mean it. I’ll kill you.”
Even as she says it, she knows it’s useless. A kunai wielded by an exhausted little girl won’t do anything against a man who can kill eight people in just a couple of attacks. With an exaggerated sigh, he says, “You used to be a work of art, kid. Eh, someone’ll know how to fix you. Sorry about this.”
As he lifts his hand again, clay at the ready, she’s hit by a sudden burst of nervous adrenaline, enough to push her not just to her normal Sharingan, but straight into the Mangekyo. “Aw, fuck,” the missing-nin says, and she thinks, Go away.
The first thing she’s aware of is the flames, black as the sky in her dreams.
The second is the pain.
For her own safety, Sasuke tells no one about the blonde missing-nin, making out the men Orochimaru sent after her sound much stronger than they were instead.
“They killed Kaito-sensei first,” she said three days after she returns, which was the first she spent awake, in a hospital bed in a solitary room on the three floor. “Two kept me, Yuki, and Kichiro distracted, and the other three—anyway, Yuki and Kichiro were killed pretty easily after that, but Kaito-sensei had taken out one, and I used an explosive tag to kill another, but then they were getting closer, and there were three of them, and I just. I don’t know. I don’t know where I got the energy for Amaterasu, but I did.”
That was nearly month ago. Since then, she’s been keeping to her apartment as much as possible, sleeping when she can manage, living off what she made during her short time with her team. For all her thoughts of running away and becoming a missing-nin to find what she left in Amegakure, her nightmares are proof that that’s no longer an option. She will kill Orochimaru; she’s more certain of this than ever. Half of Konoha walks on eggshells around her, still unsure of where her loyalties lie, because she’s Uchiha Sasuke, the girl who disappeared for two and a half years only to return covered in blood with her brother’s eyes.
Before she can kill Orochimaru, though, she first needs to leave her room. Enough dust’s built up that it’s visible on the rare occasion she turns on a light. Origami’s stopped cluttering every flat surface, instead ending up on string, now hanging from her bedroom ceiling. Someone once told her that if she were to make a thousand paper cranes in a year, a wish would come true. Normally Sasuke isn’t much of a believer in superstition, but with her team gone, no one knows what to do with her, and her opportunity to avenge them, and Itachi, is slipping away more steadily by the day. The cranes have turned her ceiling into an curtain of color, fluttering in the breeze whenever her window is open, making the sound of pinwheels turning, of kunai cutting through the wind.
Sometimes she thinks about blinding herself again, just to make the world go away for a few hours at a time.
The knock on the door is sudden, and unexpected, and she startles, nearly falling from her bed. There aren’t many people who can sneak up on her, even from moderate distances, and of those, there’s only one who visits her. There’s only one person who visits her, period.
“Now’s not the time, Kakashi-san,” she calls, loud enough that he’ll hear her, and pulls the blanket over her head.
Without pause, he answers, “I’m one of the ones with a key, remember, kid? I’ll drag you out if I have to.”
All the jounin who used to regularly check up on her had gotten keys, and she should’ve known Kakashi hadn’t thrown his away. She’s been avoiding him as thoroughly as everyone else, and doesn’t want him to see the state of her, or her apartment. At least when she blind, she never had to look in the mirror, and confront how much of a mess she is.
He’ll follow through with his threat, though, and she knows it, so she pulls herself out of bed. When she opens the door, he’s leaning casually against the frame as usual, fully dressed in his jounin gear with the bells for his gennin testing at his waist. She’s still in her pajamas, a pair of black shorts and a yellow shirt that don’t suit her, but Kurenai bought for her anyway. With her disheveled, loose hair, and wrinkled clothes, she’s sure the way he raises his eyebrow at her is entirely justified.
“I’ve got good news,” he says, letting himself in. “The Sandaime originally wanted to tell you himself, but I asked for permission to do it instead. You ready?”
She says, “I can’t wait,” and the frown on her face deepens of its own accord.
“Your enthusiasm is touching,” he says as she shuts the door. “Anyway, down to business. Yesterday, I got my usual team of three potential gennin, but one got pulled by his parents this morning for a series of complicated, ridiculous reasons. You need a team. I’m also the only other one with a Sharingan, and what you did was enough what to get attention. What do say? Are you willing to be my first ever gennin, or do you want to stay in your pajamas until eleven and eat one meal a day?”
For a long moment, she’s quiet, thinking it through, because this isn’t just anyone. This is Kakashi, and he’s the one who found her in the middle of the bodies and the fire that burned for seven days and seven months. “I got my last team killed,” she says finally. “Are you really going to put your new one at risk like that?”
“It’s not your fault,” he says, which he’s told her a hundred times, and he can tell her a thousand more and she’ll never believe it. “That was all Orochimaru. And I’m more prepared than Kaito was. It won’t happen again.”
Again, she’s quiet. Then she says, “I need to shower and dress first.”
He grins, visible even through his mask, crinkling the corner of his eye. “I’ll even treat you to breakfast,” he says as he flicks on the main room light. “Just don’t tell anyone.”
With that, he walks past her, and settles himself on her couch, pulling out his book. “Kakashi-sensei,” she says, and he peeks over the edge, eyebrow raised again. “Nevermind.”
Though it’ll take some getting used to, she knows she’ll be able to say it comfortably eventually. For now, it’s the closest to a thank you that he’s going to get.
I’m Uchiha Sasuke, she thinks, and I’m a loyal Konoha gennin.
That’ll take some time to get used to, too, but Itachi gave her his eyes, and sent her here for a reason. His death was as much her fault as Team Ten’s, and if it’s loyalty they all want, then she owes them that much, at least.