The underground chamber smelled of damp bedrock, melting wax, and the sterile, metallic scent of medical supplies that clung to Kabuto's clothes.
Carved directly into the root of the mountain, the small, square room offered no natural light. The cold from the stone floor seeped through Sasuke's sandals, gnawing at the joints of his ankles. The sharp, stinging smoke from twin candles fought the heavy scent of wax, nauseating his empty stomach.
Sasuke sat perfectly still in the center of the room. He crossed his legs, resting his hands loosely on his knees. He established his baseline against the room's hostility: slow, measured breaths. Even, steady pulse.
At the open doorway on the north wall, Kabuto's sandals scraped softly against the stone. The medic-nin stepped fully into the frame, the candlelight catching the glare of his round spectacles. He did not offer a greeting. The weight of the air in the room shifted ominously as Kabuto brought his hands together, his fingers blurring through a precise sequence of seals.
"Temple of Nirvana."
A sudden, unnatural updraft fluttered Sasuke's hair, blowing the candle smoke sharply to the side. Soft, pristine white feathers began to drift down from the stone ceiling, multiplying by the hundreds.
The room seemed to tilt, gravity pressing down heavily on his shoulders.
He tried to lock his posture, but his spine felt loose. His jaw went slack. Saliva pooled thick and useless in his mouth, his throat muscles seizing every time he tried to swallow. His breath went shallow, barely moving his ribs. His heart rate slowed to a sluggish, heavy thump.
A deep, involuntary tremor shook his right knee, his fingers slipping limply off his kneecaps as his chin dipped toward his chest and his posture began to collapse.
Sasuke refused to let his eyes close. He fixed his gaze entirely on the blue-tinted steel of the Kusanagi blade.
He forced a violent surge of chakra up his spine to fight the narcotic weight. The resulting heat scorched the back of his eyes. His irides bled from black to a piercing, luminescent red. Three black tomoe materialized in each eye, spinning rapidly as the Sharingan activated.
The spinning tomoe reflected in the polished surface of the Kusanagi. Sasuke locked onto that reflection.
But the genjutsu fought back.
A feather brushed his cheek. A heavy, suffocating wave of exhaustion slammed into the base of his skull. His eyelids fluttered. His head dipped hard, a drowse dragging him under for a terrifying fraction of a second before he caught himself. He bit the inside of his cheek, using the sharp sting of pain to keep his focus anchored to the blade.
The friction between the heavy, forced sleep and the burning heat in his eyes fractured his perception. The smell of melting wax bled into the scent of kicked-up dust. The bedrock walls dissolved, pulling his consciousness directly into the buried strata of his own memory.
A dull, throbbing ache pulsed in his right ankle.
He possessed five years of age.
The humid, late-summer air of Konohagakure smelled of blooming cicadas. He rode on his older brother's back, his small arms wrapped tightly around Itachi's neck. The jarring, rhythmic bounce of Itachi's footsteps sent fresh spikes of pain through Sasuke's sprained joint, but a deeper, hotter shame burned in his chest.
Tomorrow, he would enter the Ninja Academy. Today, he had failed a basic shuriken drill and crippled himself in the dirt. He buried his face into the fabric of Itachi's shirt, trying to hide the dampness in his eyes.
"I've made mistakes too," Itachi's voice rumbled, the sound vibrating directly into Sasuke's chest.
Sasuke sniffed, wiping his nose against his brother's collar. "What?"
"I used to hurt myself when I trained," Itachi said, his tone carrying a light, easy warmth. Sasuke felt the slight shift of his brother's shoulder muscles as Itachi smirked. "But you know what happened?"
"What?" Sasuke mumbled.
"I kept going."
The warmth of his brother's back rapidly cooled into the hard stone floor of the base.
The falling feathers of the Nirvana genjutsu morphed into a shower of bruised leaves dropping in the twilight.
He possessed six years of age.
The evening air carried the sour, splintered-wood stench of utterly annihilated targets. Dusk mosquitoes whined near his ears. Sasuke walked a half-step behind Itachi, his small sandals kicking at the dirt of the clan training grounds.
His calves cramped, the exhaustion from watching his eleven-year-old brother obliterate targets for two hours settling heavily into his bones. A hot, sharp spike of envy burned in his throat as he struggled to match Itachi's effortless pace.
Itachi didn't look back. His voice sounded distant.
"By the time of the Warring States Period, the Uchiha and the Senju had emerged as the strongest shinobi clans in the world," Itachi said quietly.
Sasuke slapped a mosquito on his neck, his palm coming away smeared with a tiny dot of blood. He dragged his feet, the raw blister on his heel tearing open against the rough hemp of his sandal.
"When one of the fledgling countries of the era would hire the Uchiha to fight in their wars, the opposing side would hire the Senju," Itachi continued, his dark eyes fixed on the horizon. "The constant warfare between our clans only fueled their hatred. Every Uchiha owed the death of a loved one to a Senju, and vice versa. An endless cycle of blood."
Itachi paused, letting the silence stretch across the empty path. Sasuke's throat tightened, a sudden, suffocating breath catching in his chest as the sheer scale of the bloodline locked around them like an iron box.
"But centuries of conflict began to wear on them," Itachi murmured. "Madara Uchiha and Hashirama Senju met as children at a river. They became friends. They bonded over their disapproval of the combat and the death that they, and their younger brothers, were constantly subjected to. They dreamed of a time when children wouldn't need to fight."
Sasuke looked up at his brother's profile, captivated. "What happened?"
"They couldn't do anything about the world at their age," Itachi replied, the shadow of the trees entirely obscuring his face. "So, Madara turned away from their dreams."
The word dreams twisted, warping into the harsh, whistling gust of an evening wind.
Wooooooo—a swirl of cool air pushed across Sasuke's neck.
The falling leaves dissolved back into the pristine white feathers of the underground chamber.
He possessed seven years of age.
The rough, baked clay tiles of the Ninja Academy roof scraped against his bare legs. He sat alone, his knees pulled to his chest. His first day back at school had drained him. He felt the constant, suffocating pressure of his classmates' whispers.
A soft rustle of fabric sounded behind him.
Itachi stood near the roof's edge, clad in his ANBU uniform. He didn't smile. He stepped forward, looking down at Sasuke with a heavy, unreadable scrutiny.
"You harbor resentment toward me," Itachi stated.
Sasuke scrambled to his feet. His hands went suddenly, sickeningly cold. A frantic panic seized his throat, making it impossible to swallow. "No! I don't! You're my brother, I—"
"I am an obstacle," Itachi interrupted, his voice devoid of all warmth. "As your older brother, my role is to serve as a wall for you to overcome. That is my purpose."
The cold wind on the academy roof violently ignited, turning into a suffocating, metallic reek of iron, smoke, and open sewage.
Sasuke tasted something bitter and iron-like in his mouth.
The white feathers turned crimson, reflecting the horrific, blood-red moon hanging above the Uchiha compound.
He possessed eight years of age.
Sasuke knelt in the street.
His nervous system completely failed him, his limbs trembling uncontrollably as his lungs seized in terror.
Itachi stared down at him.
The familiar three tomoe in his brother's eyes had morphed into a jagged, three-sided pinwheel. The Mangekyō Sharingan radiated a cold, paralyzing dread.
The timing of his own blinks felt wrong, the sound of the wind arriving a full second after he felt it on his skin. The agonizing seventy-two hours he had spent inside the Tsukuyomi watching his parents die bled directly into the reality of the dead street.
His stomach dropped into a hollow void every time he tried to count the seconds. The wet, rhythmic drip-drip-drip of blood falling from Itachi's blade became the only stable clock, echoing louder than the distant, muffled screams of the dying clan.
"Why?" Sasuke sobbed, his voice tearing his raw throat.
"To measure my abilities."
Itachi stepped closer, looking down at Sasuke's broken, trembling form. "You represent my greatest challenge. If you grow up hating me, and acquire the Mangekyō Sharingan... we would be a match."
Itachi turned away, his dark cloak billowing. "To gain it, you must kill your closest friend."
The horrific stench of the massacre violently shattered against the blue-green reflection of the Kusanagi blade.
Sasuke's vision snapped back to the underground bedrock.
He lurched forward, his lungs heaving as a violent wave of nausea surged up his throat. The Sharingan strain left a searing, dry heat behind his eyes, his blurred vision struggling to resolve the dim candlelight through a haze of static grain. His pulse rebounded, hammering erratically against his ribs, while a cold sweat broke across his neck.
He gripped his knees, his fingers digging into his own flesh to fight the numbness.
A white feather drifted down, settling against his collarbone.
His chin dipped instantly. The static in his vision flared gray, the unnatural weight clawing its way right back into his bloodstream. He choked on a shallow breath, his spine bowing forward as the genjutsu tried to drag him under a second time.
Sasuke bit down on his tongue until he tasted copper. He pushed another brutal spike of chakra to his eyes, forcing his heavy skull upward, locking the spinning tomoe back onto the polished steel.
A second feather brushed his eyelash. His chin dropped again, his vision going completely dark for a heartbeat. He jerked his head up, his neck muscles screaming in protest. Through the nausea and the searing pressure behind his eyes, the gap in Itachi's story sharpened.
His brother had introduced the dream of peace, Madara's rejection of it, and then simply stopped speaking.
A dangerous, intrusive image flashed behind Sasuke's eyes—Itachi's face softening, a hidden truth buried beneath the blood, a reason for the executioner to spare his little brother. A reflexive why flared in his chest.
Sasuke violently crushed the thought, burying it under a spike of pure, reactive malice.
He dragged the four memories—the sprained ankle, the history lesson, the roof, the massacre—and compressed them into a singular, agonizing point of focus. He bound the horrific sensation of the Mangekyō trauma directly to the physical reflection of the Kusanagi blade. He locked his jaw. A tight, controlled burn spread down his throat. He forced a massive, crushing pressure behind his eyes, evicting the invading exhaustion from his veins. He clamped his mind to the steel.
The heavy, dragging pull of the feathers met a wall of pure, unyielding aggression. They found nothing left to latch onto.
The white feathers hovering inches from his face dissolved into nothingness.
Sasuke blinked, a delayed, painful scrape of dry eyelids over his aching eyes. The spinning tomoe slowed to a halt, fading back into pitch black. The nausea subsided. His breath was still uneven, the feeling of acrid bile stinging his throat.
At the doorway, Kabuto let his hands drop from the final seal. The medic-nin exhaled a slow, measured breath. His rigid posture loosened. Kabuto reached up and adjusted his glasses. A faint, pale green diagnostic shimmer faded from the lenses, the glass returning to normal as the medic deactivated his ocular jutsu. He offered a tiny, almost imperceptible nod as Sasuke's postural sway completely ceased.
"The chakra waveform in the room thinned out rapidly. You woke up," Kabuto noted, his voice echoing softly against the stone.
Sasuke didn't look at him. His eyes remained locked on the blade. He ignored the aching in his skull and the lingering sweat on his neck. He hadn't surrendered control.
"I never went to sleep," Sasuke said.