Chapter Text
edited *
The Uchiha Family stood in what seemed to be a white room. Mikoto remembered being here twice before; and there was only ever one reason.
The first was at her own death with her mother and father behind her. She wasn't aware at the time, oblivious to their presence while she focused on the memories flashing in front of her: Childhood birthday party's, her first day at the academy, meeting her future husband for the first time.
All of her favorite-and all of her worst memories, were displayed on a large white screen. Ending with a quick trust of a sword, Mikoto saw her own eyes flash brightly , then dim.
The second time was after the death of her first son, Itachi. He stood before her, his memories flashing like a movie in front of her and her husband's eyes. She remembered standing there watching his earliest memories-from the day of Sasuke's birth to the days of the Uchiha massacre and onward. The Akatski. The illness. The flare of a blood red sharingan- then death.
This was how the deceased would learn to know and judge the newly dead.
It was their job to decide what happens next.
Judgment must be passed, and the viewing of one's memories was their families only way of doing so accurately.
Because it was their job to decide the afterlife of their loved ones, not some God.
There was no heaven or hell, only the vast white unknown.
Family would be the judge of one's deeds, making their eternal existence after, either a safe heaven with them, or a hell of eternal alienation.
The mistakes made in life do affect where one ends up in death. However, it is not a weighing scale of right actions and wrong outcomes.
It's about forgiveness , and about facing the reality of your actions through the eyes of those you loved the most.
Are they proud? Will they forgive you? Was it worth it?
Heaven and hell are not two places. They are one vast white, shared by all.
Will they except you when they know the nitty gritty things? The despicable lies?
Will you be able to surround yourself with the grace of their presence once again, after such a long miserable time apart? Or will you be shunned, and forced to live in despair? Surrounded by what could have been; if only you had made the right choices, done just one little thing differently.
The Uchiha bloodline tends to refrain from abandoning those in the clan that have died. It is very seldom that an Uchiha roamed the emptiness alone.
Itachi was no exception.
The family welcomed him with arms wide open. When all the chips were in, both parents decided to forgive him.
Besides, he did try to take care of Mikoto's youngest. Life just ... had a funny way of nudging in where it didn't belong.
The third time it happened, Mikoto was used to the feeling of suddenly waking up in the white room. The blinding light not as sever- the ringing noise not as deafening.
In front of her, her husband, and her son Itachi, was an older man, one in his late fifties or sixties. His strong back and hair were all they could see. A proud red and white fan placed in the center of his soft shirt.
The man was sitting in a weathered old chair made of Birch, Palm, and Cedar;directly in front of the white screen.
Unlike most Uchiha , the seat the man manifested was humble.
Mikoto herself had a flashy gilded chair and Itachi's was a blood red mahogany. She never saw her husband's.
The man's sturdy back was only slightly hunched and his hair was of the Uchiha kind, burly and fighting against the hair tie holding it in place.
It seemed as if it was finally time for her youngest son to have his judgment day.
Mikoto couldn't feel time pass .
It must have been nearly sixty years since her death and she felt as if it was just yesterday that she saw her youngest son smile brightly against strong orange festival lights or pout at his father's negligence.
He -like everyone else on this day, had his eyes glued to the projector screen in front of him.
He was not aware of the people behind him or the person in front of him on the other side of the plain white screen.
He would not be until the show was over.
Opposite to the Uchiha family stood the Uzumaki family. A unit of three: Minato, Kushina, and Naruto. Kushina found herself in this familiar white-walled place. However, this was only the second time she had been here.
When Kushina and her husband passed, they stood opposite one another with the memory projector between them. The memories that showed on the shining white projector explained the lives they led in relation to each other. Their memories were shows together.
Kushina and Minato were childhood friends and lovers, it only made sense to see them united in death.
Kushina found herself wondering briefly if her son had ever found someone to share his memories with, the way she and Minato had.
It would be impossible to tell until the show started.
Because this is what this was, a show. She was never there to see it in person.
Not for the first time, the pain of missing her son dearly shocks her.
She would finally be allowed to see the life her son had lived. To Kushina, it felt like a second death- being reminded once again that she was not there to be apart of any of the memories she would watch.
Like Mikoto, time passed quickly for Kushina. However, the time, while flowing freely, stabbed like thousands of knives on her conscience. Kushina could hardly forgive herself for leaving her son so soon.
she had let out a small gasp when she appeared in the room.
It was unmistakable, what was happening. she would see her son again.
He sat on a pedestal.
It was Elm and bleached white to look like the white walls around them.
There was nothing left to do but wait.
With a sudden flash, the screen displayed big numbers counting down from five, to four, three, two, then one.
Then the screen went black.
Mikoto was worried, the screen had never been black for so long after the countdown. What was wrong with her son's memories.
Unlike Kushina, she did not have a soulmate to share her memories with, so the lag was frightening. None of the Uchiha in her family knew what was happening.
The screen lit brightly and a lone swing popped onto the screen. Unremarkable to both families, but Naruto and Sasuke knew it immediately.
A small boy walked onto screen, blond hair dirty and face red, knees scratched, while dried tears were still caught on both cheeks. Kushina's heart filled with anguish and recognition, it was her son after all.
The Uchiha family all released a similar sound of confusion at once.
Except for Sasuke who remained staring blankly at the memory, almost unseeingly, Mikoto and others couldn't help but wonder why the blond child had taken center stage in Sasuke's memories.
This memory was not Sasuke's, it was Naruto's.Their son had just sat down on the swing, swaying the swing side to side, a look of confusion on his face. While the two families watched, Naruto remembered something he had long since thought he had forgotten.
---------
Naruto had spent the day at the playground hoping to find someone to play with.
He approached many kids, unfortunately, they all would just back away frightened and run to their mother or father.
It seemed that every kid other than Naruto had a parent to run away to. Naruto alone had no one to accompany him.
He decided to disregard the idea of approaching anyone else, opting to instead sit aside on the swing that stood across from the academy. The swing itself found a home on the outskirts of the village's only playground, right next to the hidden leaf's one and only ninja school.
He would observe the kids, not directly of course. If they caught him staring, they would alert their parents and one of the parents would complain to the park manager. Some big bulky adult would come around and shoo him from the premises. But there was no time for that now.
Naruto sat on the swing, sideways, so both feet planted firmly on the ground on both sides of the wooden swing. He evaded eye contact, simply observing the families around him.
At times like this, he wondered why he didn't have a family or anyone to take care of him. That depressing thought quickly subsided when Naruto simply decided that he could make someone care about him, just like the rest of the kids on the playground. Because Naruto was a scientist now, and he once heard one of the Anbu guarding his house say that scientists' observed things in order to do an 'experiment'.
After scratching his head for a good couple of minutes, he decided to ask the guard what he meant by "egg-sper-ah-mint".
After a brief explanation and a rudely whispered comment that they thought he would not hear, he decided to pull off an experiment of his own.
You see, he had observed a "phi-nom-ih-na" that occurred at the park a couple of times. It seemed to Naruto that, when a child would fall, a parent would magically appear and come to help them, even if they were not their parents.
Once a kid would fall, dozens of mothers and fathers would flock to the kid who fell and gives him band aids and kisses to calm his tears.
So Naruto decided one day that he would do an experiment.
He wanted to see who would come to his aid if he fell.
By midday, he walked straight out into the playground, knees bare of clothing, elbows proudly showing out of his shirt, chin tiled up and ready to be scrapped.
It was just a matter of time until he got some sort of bruises somehow. However, the kids avoided the swings when he would swing there and would run from the slide when he climbed the rungs.
There was no way he would get injured if no one wanted to play?
Then what would his experiment be good for?
He thought " I might just still be able to pull this off".
Despite being left alone, every eye was on him, watching like a hawk.
Not a single parent could stray too far from his presence.
Naruto decided that he didn't need to play with some kid in order to get a scratch, he could just trip and fall right here, and every parent would see him.
They would be surrounding him in no time. Score!
For a moment he daydreamed, practically drooling at the thought of some positive attention. It had been so long since someone had held him.... in fact, maybe no one had ever held him. He just could not wait to have some kind eyes face him, finally!
Maybe then he would finally be a normal kid like everyone else.
Maybe then, all the kids on the playground would see that he's not scary: he's just like everyone else. When he falls, he gets hurt too. nothing to be scared of at all, BELIEVE IT.
So with quick breath and a fake stumble, Naruto crumbled to the ground.
The weight of his body was much more than Naruto had anticipated. He fell and the playground fell silent alongside him.
Naruto, laid on the ground waiting, his heart beating quicker every second in his tiny chest. He was too scared to look up, he could feel every eye on him at that moment.
Surely the parents would come running soon.
Then he thought, time must be moving slower.
That must be why no one is moving yet.
They just.... haven't caught up to him just yet.
That's why, despite this thumping in his heart and the seconds passing, no one was moving.
The tension in the air became too thick for Naruto to ignore, so his small head just slightly looked up.
He deduced that everyone had seen him fall, every head in the area was turned towards him.
Naruto has succeeded in falling in a way painful enough to cause a long scrape to travel across his knee.
A surprising amount of blood was pooling beneath him, however, he could not feel it.Suddenly, his vision began to blur.
There were tears in his eyes. They were not from the cut, Naruto still could not even feel the injury itself.The only thing he could feel was an uncomfortable hole of red hot shame spreading through his chest.
His tears poured over his cheeks and he whimpered slightly.The hole spread to his stomach and out on to shaking limbs and a blood red face.
He knew his data was correct. At the sign of injury, parents should flock to injured children, this was fact.
No, the flaw in his experiment was his logic, not his observations.
How foolish of him.
He was only now starting to realize-
to put things together.
To assume that anyone would come for him, was absolutely foolish.
In their eyes, he was not a child, he was nothing but a monster.
He had heard that word thrown at him more than once already. Even at his current age of five, he was well aware of what that word meant.
However, so so foolishly, it was not until this exact moment that he had realized one important truth.
He was an outlier.
Up until this point, Naruto had assumed that all kids were treated the way he was. He though being a monster was normal.
He is only now realizing that is was wrong.
Children were cherished and children were protected, Children got kisses and band aids and they had parents to run home too.
He did not have anything, and there was no one who would give it to him.
'OH', he thought,
'now I know for sure, there must be something wrong with me.'
And he cried. Everyone watched, oblivious to the real cause of his tears.
On the faces around him, not that Naruto even dared to look at them, a worried look quickly flashed on, almost like a sudden light switch.
For many of the parents at the park, this was the first instance they had ever witnessed that proved that the small boy in front of them was not some fiery raging demon of destruction, buy a grieving child.
' oh no'
some thought, 'Naruto.... is just a child'.
However, this realization did not spark any movement.
The crying boy was left alone in the bloody spot he crumbled down in.
slowly, Naruto, with tears still bubbling up and snot spilling from his nose, pushed Himself up from his spot with shaky limbs.
Slowly, the small child walked back to the swing that moved in the evening breeze. Sitting, facing away from the crowd watching behind him, his pathetic profile faced the academy.
While looking at the school Naruto remembered something. He remembered that some children get hugged by parents and teachers at the dismissal of each school day.
Here he realized that parents are not the only people who could care for his bleeding knee. 'teachers.....they look after you too!'
With this thought, Naruto decided that he wanted to go there. He wanted to be a ninja. He didn't understand why.
The sight in front of him was beautiful in a way he could not yet comprehend.
To him, it was a new untainted dream. The burden of sadness he had felt at moment could now be pushed off and ignored, instead, he could focus on something new.
Naruto needed a new fixation, a new study. Otherwise, how would he ever continue to go on?
******
Unblinking eyes stare straight at the past, not even registering his painful memory. Kushina however, has a much more expressive reaction. Tears build in her eyes and her face scrunches in a familiar way, she and her son's likeness is remarkably more noticeable at that moment.
Both have tears that well up vividly-both grow crows feet at end of their eyes, and tears spill in arcs over the same plump cheeks.
She could not believe what she saw.
The bleakness of Naruto's first memory was devastating.
Minato pulled her in close.
The Uchiha family was aghast, except for Sasuke, who was still stuck in his trance.
The knew exactly who this boy was now.
Mikoto quickly thought of her old friend and was suddenly struck with a deep sense of guilt. Was this Karma? Would she pay for abandoning her dearest friends son now, in the afterlife? She had so many questions but there was no time for any answers.
The bright screen moved swiftly now, carrying the next memory in smoothly.
******
Perched up high-a young Sasuke, at age of five, sat on Itachi's shoulders.
Surrounding them was the vastness of the Uchiha estate. The two had just passed police headquarters. With a voice much lighter than anyone could remember, Sasuke Uchiha asks with a bright obnoxious smile,
" That's where daddy works right?! Itachi! LOOK I CAN SEE HIM".
He couldn't of course , But ItachI indulged him anyways.
Chubby child arms reached out towards the building. When Itachi looked up to his brother, it looked as if the sun itself was shining down on him: bright beams filtering through his hands that reached to the sky.
Sasuke 's mouth had one front tooth missing, so the words were spoken with a slight lisp.
The older brother could not remember a time when Sasuke had been more adorable. Eyes wide and sparkling, the younger Uchiha quickly grabbed on to Itachi's hair and tried to steer him towards the police station, like one would with the reins of a horse. However, Itachi was determined to stay on path.
Despite Sasuke's wondering thoughts, Itachi remembered that they were on their way to the Uchiha's secret training grounds.
He was supposed to help Sasuke with his Shuriken practice, and he knew that if he allowed Sasuke to derail their mission, his little brother would do nothing but pout later about it.
so onward they went on a steady course. Deep into the forest together.
Despite the promise of help training, Sasuke spent most of the time on the sidelines, simply observing his cooler older brother.
He pretended to pout, even crossed his arms and turned to the side, blowing his cheeks like a bullfrog and making a disappointed grumble.
Though, when Sasuke dared to peek out of the glare he put on , he dropped the act, and let his amazement show through.
'
'Wow, I really got the coolest most awesome brother in the history of the entire world.'
He truly believed this.
To him, at this moment, Itachi was everything.
'Wow! look at that cool ninja star trick! He didn't even need to open his eye!'
Sasuke's amazement melted into a warm smile which was full of content.
Just being here with Itachi was what mattered.
'Training be darned, I just want to be with Itachi every day!'
Being with his brother made Sasuke happy. It seemed as if just his presence was calming.
It was not as if he didn't love the rest of his family, Because he did. But they all were too overbearing. His mother smothered him, and his father was cold. Sasuke always felt like he needed to change when he was with his family. He felt that if he wasn't smart enough his father would never love him, and if he wasn't kind enough, his mother would hate him.
To Sasuke, his brother was all he needed. Everyone else could disappear, and as long as his brother was with him, he would be fine.
Before They both knew it, the day was nearly over and Sasuke was fast asleep under the shade of the Japanese maple tree above him. Itachi, who had just finished perfecting his hidden rock target technique, walked slowly to his brother. With hands as gentle as he could, he slowly woke Sasuke and told him to climb into his back.
Once safely on, Itachi began the trek home.
As Sasuke snoozed, Itachi moved forward, slowly and steadily, careful not to wake his brother.
Once almost to the end of the forest, Sasuke started to shake. There was a sudden furrow in his tiny brow and his arms wrapped tighter into his brother. Suddenly, his childlike grasp became steel, and his small arms clutched Itachi in a vice grip. Sasuke's arms traveled north and he began to clutch desperately at his brother's neck, unaware of his deadly grip.
Startled, Itachi grabbed onto his brother's hands and tried to remove them, but for some reason, Sasuke's grip would not falter. Sasuke demonstrated strength much beyond his years, no child could hold with such ferocity. Tears surfaced quickly to Sasuke's eyes, he was still not awake and in his sleep, he started to scream. His shouts bounced off of the trees surrounding them, his anguish was amplified.
The only witness to his cries was held captive, Sasuke refused to let go.
With more tears and pained shouts, Sasuke's cries became obnoxiously loud and they rang throughout the forest.
Suddenly, Itachi fell forward, out of breath and gasping, bumping into the tree closest. The light filtered through the tree above them, falling onto Sasuke's face.
The force of Itachi's stumble made an apple fall from above, and when it clunked onto the ground, the sound finally awoke Sasuke from his nightmare.
His arms were no longer cutting off the air flow and Itachi sucked in deep breaths, immensely relieved.
He had no clue why Sasuke reacted in such a strange way.
With tears now flowing freely, Sasuke sobbed openly to brother, confiding in him.
" Itachi! I had the worst dream ever!'
Itachi, who was still slowly catching his breath, couldn't believe that this was Sasuke's reaction to a simple nightmare. Briefly, he wondered what would happen to Sasuke if he had experienced something truly scary. After shuddering and shaking his head at the horrendous thought, he responded," is that so'
" I dreamed I was stuck in a big wave, like down in The ocean,and it just kept coming and coming, and I couldn't breathe!" Sasuke talked without breathing, so by the end of his tiny rant, he really couldn't catch his breath.
Itachi reassured his younger brother, promising that they were on dry land and there wasn't a drop of water in sight besides his own tears.
He wouldn't be dying anytime soon.
When the younger finally calmed down, he snuggled into Itachi's back, pretending the dream didn't exist.
Slowly, the brothers set out again.
It was almost night time and their mom was making their favorite meal for dinner. However, they would need to race home if they wanted to make it there before it got cold. They were far from being out of the woods yet.