Chapter Text
He wished he had already obtained his Sharingan.
It would have been a great aid to his trek through the village at such a late hour; the streets were enveloped by the shadows of the taller buildings, cast by the light of the full moon. He took his time walking home to avoid any embarrassing stumbles, regardless of the lack of villagers outside. There was no need to rush since his parents had recently begun to expect his late arrival home most days of the week. They always assumed he stayed out to train.
It was mostly true.
When the glow of the lanterns from the entrance of the clan compound came into view, he sprinted the rest of the way, hoping he could make it home in time to greet his parents before they readied themselves for bed. The taps of his sandals echoed around him, unhindered by the lack of other sounds. As soon as he passed the gate, he was blinded once again by the dark—the moon was covered by a thick layer of clouds.
As soon as his eyes were diverted by the darkened sky, his foot hooked on something and he was sent stumbling onto the unforgiving ground. A sharp pain shot up from where his ankle hit the offending object, and new cuts scraped his exposed arms and legs. Muttering words much too vile for any child to know—ninja child or not—he examined his leg, noticing a gash running from his ankle to his heel. Even moving his foot closer to examine the cut in the barely visible lighting made it sting. Grimacing, he pulled down his sleeve and dabbed away the excess blood, and glanced back at the silhouette of what had tripped him.
Luckily—or perhaps not—the clouds cleared just a bit and the moon lit up the road enough to make the shuriken embedded in the dirt glint.
He immediately shot up, Academy training kicking in and taking over. He crouched into a fighting stance, hands ready and legs tensed, ready to spring at any moment. His ears strained to hear any sound as he inched his way through the Uchiha compound, eyes trying to will the Sharingan into use as he scanned the area for whoever had the gall to attack the Uchiha clan.
It was in that moment, senses trying desperately to do more than they were meant to, that he noticed no streetlights illuminated his path home. Not a single sound drifted from the area that was supposed to be filled with the vitality of Konoha’s greatest clan. And the shuriken…
Throwing caution to hell, he stumbled his way into a run towards his home, feeling an increasingly suffocating dread as he noticed shuriken and kunai littering the streets of the compound.
He threw himself around a corner, immediately screaming when his feet slipped from underneath him—the earlier injury stinging anew—and he slammed onto his back in a haze of pain and frantic fear. Glancing to his side, he screamed again.
His cousin Inabi stared back at him, face contorted in a choked, fearful expression. His nose was broken and his skull had collapsed in on itself in multiple places; he couldn’t even find his eyes. Traces of blood painted across his face—a handmark, where someone had grabbed his head and smashed it into the ground repeatedly. Blood and hair pooled in a mess under Inabi’s head. He came to a horrified realization that it was the cause of his fall.
He staggered away from the body until his back hit against a useless lamppost, panting heavily and eyes fixated on what should’ve been his cousin. His hand reached back and hit another shuriken that was stuck in the ground, making him flinch away. He cradled the new cut close to his chest, trying to suppress the wracking shudders running through his body as each breath felt like swallowing down thumbtacks.
He pried his eyes away from the corpse to glance in the direction of home, only for the dread to intensify into a panic as he saw dark red liquid paint the streets and the silhouettes of things (people?) he couldn’t begin to even think about.
Instead, he mentally mapped out the cleanest route home and sprinted there, eyes fixed on his toes and desperately ignoring the splatters that marked the edges of the unimaginable. A limp hand—missing a few fingers—entered and exited his periphery. A brand-new golden ring nestled on slim, pale fingers with a light blue polish decorating her nails—Kanade-nee-chan. He only saw the bakery in the corner of his eye, but he clearly noticed the large figure crushed against the splintered remains of the display. Sako-oba-san. A head lolled out of a doorway, visage shaped into what may have been a disturbed sleep, had there not been bruises decorating the slim neck, undoubtedly crushing the windpipe. Short spiked hair, and a series of piercings on the left ear—Hanako-nee-san.
He nearly tripped himself as he stumbled to a halt near his home, desperately ignoring the body—Akio-ojii-san—that he had to leap over to get to the porch. As soon as he entered through his front door, he paused.
No blood, no weapons, no signs of damage on the walls.
He knew he shouldn’t have, but he breathed a short sigh of relief. Though he didn’t dare call out. Whoever—whatever—was the cause of the devastation outside could very possibly have been hiding in one of the houses.
Taking care not to make a sound, he shifted his feet across the floorboards and approached the first door along the hallway. Minutes after checking most of the rooms and finding them empty, he gripped the handle to the door of the last room. He wanted to steel his resolve to simply open the door, even as he desperately tried to believed that he would find nothing in the room.
He pushed the wooden door open, looked up from his initial gaze on the cold smooth floor…
And froze at the sight he was greeted with and took it all in before he could handle no more.
He collapsed to his knees and vomited out everything his body could give, but then he kept on retching, hoping he could expel all the horror he felt from deep within his chest.
The figures of his loved ones lay atop one another in the middle of the room. Long gashes tore through their bodies and ripped flesh from limb, the red pooling around and beneath their bodies, interrupted only by the white of bone as the moon illuminated the gruesome scene. The grotesque angles of their limbs and necks made the sight more terrifying, but the worst was yet to be seen, he realized, as his eyes drifted upwards.
Blood trailed from two spots on each of their faces, leading to dark black holes that promised to suck in his soul and give him a similar fate as their eyes where are their eyes who took their eyes—!!
Clutching his face and trying to shield his sight from this horror, he shakily stood back up and tripped out the door he was so hesitant to walk through before (never should have walked through).
As he fled from his home, from this nightmare, and towards the Hokage Tower, his eyes did what they previously couldn’t and sought out the little filters of moonlight to guide him through the streets.
Sasuke finally awakened the first stage of his Sharingan.