The first thing he noticed was that his footsteps didn't sound right.
They were too light. Too quick. A soft slap of bare feet on polished wood instead of sandals on dirt. The corridor stretched in front of him, all clean lines and paper doors, lamps burning low. He knew this hallway. He knew every board in the Uchiha compound.
But something was… off.
He looked down.
Small feet. Too small. Ankles he could wrap one hand around. His pajama pants ended a little too high above them, like he'd grown overnight and the fabric hadn't caught up yet.
He didn't own pajamas like that anymore.
Sasuke's skin went cold.
He wasn't walking this hall.
He was watching himself walk it.
The boy up ahead took the corner at a run, dark hair bouncing, shoulders tense. Sasuke saw the way his spine hunched, the way his hands were balled into fists. Fear in his posture, stubbornness in the angle of his jaw.
He should have known that kid down to the last freckle.
Instead his brain gave him nothing.
Who is that?
He opened his mouth. "Hey."
No sound came out.
The boy didn't turn. Didn't even twitch. Just kept going, faster, breath loud in the too-quiet corridor.
Sasuke moved to follow—except it didn't feel like moving. It felt like the world slid around him, scenery dragged past while he stayed pinned in place. The floor stayed solid under his feet and still his perspective lurched forward, pulled after that small, familiar stranger.
A door loomed at the end of the hall. The boy skidded to a stop in front of it, bare toes catching on the raised track. Light leaked around the frame, a bright wedge against the night.
Voices seeped through the thin wood.
"…this is the only way."
Itachi's voice. Calm. Too calm.
Another voice answered—low, rough, ugly with authority.
"For the village. For peace."
Sasuke's muscles locked. He knew that timbre, even if he couldn't put a name to it. Old. Male. The sound of the council chamber when it wanted things dead.
"Your clan was plotting rebellion," the rough voice went on. "Hesitate, and you doom Konoha. You doom your little brother."
The boy in front of the door flinched.
Sasuke didn't remember this. He had no memory of standing outside any room, listening.
This is wrong, he thought. This didn't happen. I was at the Academy. I was—
"You told me," Itachi said quietly, from behind the door, "that a shinobi must be willing to make any sacrifice for the village."
A pause. Fabric rustled.
"We are only confirming you are still willing."
Sasuke's nails bit into his palms. He couldn't feel it. His hands might as well have belonged to a ghost.
Another voice joined in—thin, nasal, one of the elders. "The boy will awaken his Sharingan. His eyes will be… valuable. If you insist on leaving him alive, we must be assured he can be reclaimed."
The rough voice again, approving. "Yes. One survivor can be an asset. A spare set of eyes, hm?"
Spare.
Sasuke's stomach turned.
The boy outside the door pressed closer, ear against the wood now. His chakra—Sasuke could feel it, somehow—fluttered wild and desperate, all bright edges and fear. He didn't understand the words. Just the tones.
Inside, Itachi's answer came, smooth as a blade.
"If you must have insurance," he said, "let him be it. I will shape him. He will hate me. He will grow strong. If there comes a day you want his eyes, you will not find them lacking."
The rough voice chuckled. "You think far ahead, Itachi."
"I learned from you," Itachi said.
His voice didn't change. The room smelled like iron anyway.
The boy rocked back a step, the way you do when someone hits you through a wall.
Sasuke watched his own face tilt up toward him, as if suddenly aware of being observed.
He still didn't recognize that expression.
He knew his own scowl. His own practiced blankness. This kid's eyes were too open. Too young. Confusion and trust and something fragile flickering behind the panic.
I was like that? That… soft?
Something hot and ugly twisted in his chest.
The door slid open.
Itachi stood there in full ANBU blacks, mask in one hand, the red fan of their clan on his back like a target. His eyes slid right over the boy in the hall, as if he weren't there. As if he'd never been standing there at all.
For a second, Sasuke saw him clearly—no blood, no motion blur. Just his brother's face. Calm. Composed. Dead tired. A shadow at his shoulder, half a step behind him: a man with one arm bandaged to the fingertips, a cane, and one visible eye like a piece of dirty glass.
The shadows ate the man's features. The bandages still shone white.
Sasuke tried to move. To shout. To do anything.
His body stayed nailed in place.
Itachi stepped past the boy. Past Sasuke. His gaze didn't flicker.
He walked down the hall.
Behind him, the bandaged man's cane tapped on the floor. A slow, patient metronome.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
With each tap the hallway changed.
Paper doors warped into doorways blown wide open. Lamp-light became the harsh glow of the moon. The polished floor darkened, went slick underfoot, stained with long, dragging smears.
Bodies appeared where nothing had been—a flash of hair, the shape of a hand, an open eye staring. The boy stepped back, heel skidding in something wet.
He slipped.
Sasuke's stomach lurched with him, uselessly.
The scene jumped.
He was in the main room now—the one from the memory he did have. His father's study. Table overturned. Wall scrolls slashed. His parents kneeling side by side, backs straight even in death, burnt smell in the air.
The boy—him—stood in the doorway, shaking so hard it made his shoulders twitch. Tears on his face he didn't seem to notice. His lips moved, soundless in the nightmare.
Itachi stood over their bodies.
His sword dripped.
"You…" the boy whispered, voice catching. "…why?"
Sasuke knew what came next. He'd replayed this night so many times the words had grooves in them.
You are weak. You don't have enough—
Itachi looked up, Sharingan spinning.
"You were the one I was allowed to spare," he said instead.
The line hit like a kunai between Sasuke's ribs.
The boy flinched as if struck.
"Allowed?" he echoed, mangling the word with grief. "By who?!"
Itachi's mouth twisted. For a heartbeat, something like disgust flashed behind his eyes—aimed at someone else, some ghost in the corner of the room that wasn't there.
"By the village," he said. "By the men in shadow who would take your eyes when it suits them."
The bandaged man's silhouette flickered behind him. Cane against tatami. Tap. Tap.
Sasuke couldn't breathe.
None of this was right. None of this lined up with the memory he knew by heart. The phrases were wrong. The timing was wrong. It was like someone had taken his worst night and turned the knife in a new way.
"Why?" the boy sobbed again. "Why would you—"
"Because this is the path I chose," Itachi said, and his voice lost all shape, words stretching into a low, constant roar. "Hate me. Live. Grow strong enough that even they fear you. Only then—"
The room folded.
The walls slammed inward like a closing hand. The ceiling fractured into shards of night. Sasuke fell, or the floor did, or the world came apart; he couldn't tell. The blood underfoot became something else—dark soil, tangled roots, the stink of the Forest of Death.
He hit the ground hard enough that the impact rattled his teeth.
Except he didn't feel the ground.
He felt bark digging into the back of his real body. Damp earth under his real hands.
The dream and the forest stacked over each other like badly aligned pages.
The kid version of him vanished. In his place: Sylvie on her knees, hacked-off hair clinging to her cheeks, ink and blood smeared across her fingers. Naruto sprawled nearby, chest barely moving. Zaku's shadow loomed over them, arm cocked back, palm grinning with the promise of destruction.
Sasuke's breath tore in and out, shallow and useless.
Not again.
He tried to move. His limbs felt full of sand.
Not again.
The silhouette above Sasuke wavered—Zaku's face bleeding into Itachi's for a heartbeat, then into the blank lights of the bandaged man's stupid single eye, then back again. All of them looking down at people he cared about like they were trash to be swept aside.
"All you can do," Itachi's voice murmured from everywhere at once, "is watch. Run. Beg. You were spared. You are weak."
Sasuke's teeth ground together.
Something burned at the side of his neck.
It started as a pinprick, like a hot needle pressed into his skin. Then it spread, crawling under the surface, ink in water, black lines etching themselves into his blood. The pain rolled outward across his shoulder, up his jaw, down his spine. It hurt so much it was almost a relief.
Anger surged up to meet it, wild and choking.
Not again.
He didn't want to be spared. He didn't want to be left behind, a piece on someone else's board, a set of eyes to be harvested when convenient. He didn't want to watch his team die like his clan had, while he stood there with his hands empty.
The mark seared hotter, as if answering.
The boy in the memory had sobbed.
Sasuke snarled.
The world went white around the edges, pressure slamming through him like a breaking dam—chakra twisting, thick and wrong and intoxicating. The forest shuddered.
He snapped his eyes open.