Chapter Text
A few months after Sasuke turns seven, he starts seeing double. Only once every so often, but still, sometimes his vision blurs and he gets dizzy, a headache sharp behind his eyes.
He wants to tell Brother, but he’s always busy these days. Whenever Sasuke gets a chance to spend time with him, his weird double vision drops by the wayside in favor of shuriken training and dango. He doesn’t want to tell Father, because he might be disappointed in him, might take it back and say he’s no longer worthy of being his son. He won’t tell Mother because she would fuss and fret and tell Father, and then he’d be back to square one, and also Mother will treat him like a baby.
Really it’s not that bad, so he doesn’t mention it, and tries not to show it, and then he doesn’t know how to bring up the fact that if he tries to look at cousin Shisui from the corner of his left eye, he can’t see him at all.
So he doesn’t bring it up.
Brother notices anyway.
One day Shisui meets them at the training grounds and Sasuke jumps sky high. They’re practicing shuriken techniques, and Sasuke might not have the instincts of a killer yet, but he has the instincts of a little boy and sharp things in his hands, and he hurls them immediately at a threat he can feel but not see. If Shisui wasn’t as fast as he is, he could very well have been in trouble.
“Don’t sneak up on me!” Sasuke howls, feeling his face turn red in embarrassment.
Shisui puts his hands up in surrender. “I wasn’t sneaking, I promise. You gotta work on your reflexes, baby boy,” he says, quick stepping forward to ruffle Sasuke’s hair. “If you wanna be a good ninja like big brother, you can’t go jumping at thin air.”
Sasuke pushes his hand off with a huff, ears burning.
“Sasuke, didn’t you see Shisui waving?” asks Brother, his narrow forehead creasing. His dark eyes are unwavering as he frowns down at Sasuke.
Sasuke’s shoulders stiffen and he can’t stop it. “I— I did! It just… he surprised me!” He rubs his eye like he can clear out some grit, but it only makes his vision pop with green and yellow sparkles and nothing changes when he opens it back up.
“Do you have something in your eye? Let me see.” Brother doesn’t give him a chance to deny it, crouching down in front of Sasuke and peeling his hand away from his face. His eyes flick Sharingan red and Sasuke stiffens all over again. Brother’s Sharingan is different— or, no it’s not, it’s the same as always. He just thought it was different for a moment.
Brother’s pale thumb rests on his cheekbone, gently pulling the soft skin down, peering into his eye with a look on concentration. Sasuke’s eye stings from how much he’s been rubbing it recently, and the bared flesh feels raw.
“It doesn’t look like there’s anything in there. Can you see okay?” Brother asks, releasing his hold and his Sharingan at the same time. His thumb coasts tenderly along the slope of Sasuke’s cheek, caressing now instead of capturing.
Sasuke blinks rapidly. He can see Brother just fine, not blurred or out of focus but Shisui looks like half a ghost, like he can see all the way through him, for all that he’s standing right there watching in concern. “Yeah, it’s fine. I got it out,” he lies.
____________
A week later Sasuke runs home from the Academy and collapses in the street just outside Uncle Teyaki’s senbei shop.
He wakes up two days later screaming and clawing at his eyes, and nothing Mother can do will calm him down until he cries himself back to sleep in her arms. Father sits at his bedside in between clan meetings and hushed conversations, and they both wait impatiently for Itachi to get back from his most recent mission.
Sasuke spends almost a week in bed, nightmares every night, eyes clenched shut every time he wakes. He lets Mother hold him close and rock him gently, lets Father place a broad hand on his head, smoothing down sweaty hair and tangled cowlicks, but he refuses to open his eyes to look at either of them.
The clan medic-nin comes to check on him one day when he’s long since fallen into shivering dreams, and carefully peels open his eyes to check on them, soothing chakra keeping him sedated. His right eye is crisp red of an awakened Sharingan, a single tomoe spiraling out of control even in unconsciousness, but the left is the cloudy uneven texture of a burst blood vessel.
When Itachi returns, Sasuke has been navigating the house with his eyes closed for two whole days, but he can’t restrain himself from opening his eyes and seeking his brother out. He starts crying all over again at the sight of Brother peering down at him, not half see-through like Mother and Father and Shisui and all those strange horrifying bodies he saw all over the compound, but whole and present and even though his expression doesn’t quite line up, he’s there and that’s all that counts.
Medically, there’s nothing wrong with his eye. Sasuke goes back to the Academy, and the world makes sense. He comes home to the compound, and everything is off kilter.
Sasuke feels like he’s being haunted, always half-seeing the people around him, always turning his head to see if what he hears matches up with what his eyes tell him.
Sasuke does not go into the dojo any more. He doesn’t want to step in the blood.
He closes his eyes whenever he is home. Brother starts guiding his hands to the table during dinner, quietly murmuring the location of the rice, of his tea, of his chopsticks, so Sasuke can eat dinner without knocking things over. He rearranges the furniture so the foot paths are straighter, fewer sharp corners sticking out into empty air, then leads Sasuke through them carefully, holding his hands and describing the layout as they move.
____________
Father allows him one week of that before he puts his foot down.
“Sasuke, you cannot be a ninja if you behave so childishly. This nonsense will stop now. Your brother won’t always be there to hold your hand.”
Brother, in fact, is out of the house, a meeting with his commanding officers taking him away for several hours. Sasuke is making tea, because Itachi told him it was good training for his spatial awareness: finding the tea leaves, boiling water, arranging the cups without dropping anything off the edge of the table. Pouring is the hardest part, where his fingers have to hold the tea cup to know where it is, while his other hand hovers in mid air with the pot. His fingers are blistered from one too many mispours.
Sasuke flinches at the reprimand, hot water slopping out of the teapot, and opens his eyes to see that once again he’s scattered loose leaves all over the counter on the way to steep. He looks up at Father before he can stop himself, and flinches again away from the sight. This time the water spills onto his hands and he drops the teapot, sending it shattering across the floor and the rest of the hot water splashing up onto his legs. He shrieks in pain and clenches his eyes shut again. Father darts across the room, sweeping Sasuke up into his arms, and quick steps to the hospital as the burns set in.
“Do you see, Sasuke?” Father asks after the medic-nins have retreated, salves and bandages applied in swaths. Chakra healing was enough to lessen the burns, but Sasuke’s skin is red and tight. “This is not sustainable. Sasuke, look at me,” he snaps.
Sasuke tries to open just his right eye. He can’t keep his left eye shut, the eyelid slits open and his face contorts under the strain. He lifts one bandaged hand and holds his left eye shut, and only then does he look at his father.
“Yes, father,” he mutters, chastened and scared, his adrenalin gone in the wake of the medic-nin.
“You are an Uchiha,” his father continues, arms crossed. “Your eyes will be your greatest weapon. If you continue on like this, you will shame your clan, and the legacy of the Uchiha dōjutsu.”
“Yes, father,” says Sasuke.
____________
Trying to keep his eyes open is driving Sasuke insane. He jumps at everything, regardless of which side it approaches him from, because he no longer trusts either eye. He’s only seven, but he feels like the exhaustion of constantly being on guard will drive him into an early grave. His dreams are still strange and frightening, and when he looks at Itachi, it’s a toss-up on whether his expressions are aligned in casual blankness, or a disorienting mix of a gentle smile and a cold glare.
When Father is out of the house, Mother will let Sasuke close his eyes, and he can feel the tension in his body slip away as she guides him through the routines Itachi established. She tells him quietly about how sometimes ninja are forced to fight at a disadvantage, in the dark, or in a smoke screen, and that training his other senses to compensate is not a shameful waste of time. Sasuke doesn’t like being treated like a baby, but so long as it’s for training, he doesn’t mind as much. His mother’s hands are strong as they hold his, her weapon calluses worn soft from years of motherhood, but the steady assurance of them never fading.
It’s Itachi who comes up with the idea. The other Uchiha wouldn’t even think of it, really. They’re training again, kunai practice in the woods, when Izumi stops in to deliver a message for Itachi from the clan Elders. Sasuke’s more accurate with shuriken, but he’s been practicing his kunai throws and has gotten a lot faster with them. Brother has to throw his own knives to knock Sasuke’s off course when he throws them instinctively at the ghost-threat.
Sasuke is gulping down sobs and well on his way to hyperventilating as Izumi tries to assure him that she’s not hurt. Brother frowns, eyes calculating, and then kneels down and tapes Sasuke’s left eye shut. It surprises Sasuke into swallowing hard, his breath stuttering back into a more reasonable pattern, and he stares at Itachi with one wide, dark eye.
“You’ll have to practice a lot more to compensate, little brother, but I know a ninja who fights with only one eye most of the time,” Brother says, his thumb pressing down the edges of the tape into Sasuke’s soft cheek. “Aiming with one eye is hard, and you’ll have to work on your hearing and chakra sensing to compensate for your eyesight, but it is possible. Is that better?”
Sasuke nods, a little stunned. He lets Izumi walk him back to his house, while Brother goes to the clan meeting, and she walks on his right side and doesn’t comment on his perfectly functional left eye hidden behind the tape.
His father shakes his head in disgust when he sees Sasuke’s makeshift eyepatch, but Sasuke is obeying the letter of his commands, at least, and Mother won’t let him scold Sasuke for it.
Sasuke wears his eyepatch to his classes at the Academy too, because Brother is right, it takes a lot more adjustment than he expected to navigate the world with only one eye. Taijutsu is harder, shuriken throwing is harder, even walking is harder when he can’t judge the distance between himself and any obstacles. He walks into the classroom door twice on the first day.
Iruka-sensei pulls him aside after class.
“Is everything okay at home, Sasuke-kun?” he says, face crinkled up in concern.
Sasuke nods, his face heating up. He’s never actually tried to explain what’s happening, he’s only ever avoided people’s questions and his family adjusted around him. He doesn’t want Iruka-sensei getting the wrong idea, but how do you say my left eye can’t see my family without getting even more weird looks than the eyepatch?
He touches his taped up eye. “I got something in it, and it hurts. Big Brother put this on so I wouldn’t hurt it more.”
“Do you need to go to the hospital?” asks Iruka-sensei. He moves like he wants to touch Sasuke’s eye too, but his hand halts in midair.
“No, I already did. Brother says I should practice my chakra sensing in the meantime.”
Iruka-sensei looks intrigued. “We don’t usually practice chakra sensing until your final few years at the Academy. How good is your sensing now?”
Sasuke flushes. “It’s not… it’s okay.” He knows Itachi’s chakra patterns, and he can recognize Mother’s and Father’s if he concentrates, but he’s only just started sensing other clan members, and he’s terrible at sensing shinobi outside the clan.
“Do you know Kanchi no Jutsu? It’s a technique to help you focus your chakra sensing. It will help you learn how to read chakra signatures even without the jutsu, in time,” says Iruka-sensei.
Sasuke didn’t even know there was a technique for that. He just sort of thought you concentrated hard and then eventually you were a sensor type.
Iruka-senesi laughs at the expression on his face. “I can teach it to you. We could work on it together after class, if you want. Do you want me to ask your parents?”
“No! It’s fine, I can tell them!” says Sasuke, eagerness bright on his cheeks. If he says he’s learning special techniques from his teachers, his father won’t be mad about him staying late. Besides, he stays late in the training grounds almost every day for shuriken training anyway.
Iruka-sensei watches him closely as the weeks go by and Sasuke keeps his eye taped shut, but he doesn’t ask again, and Sasuke doesn’t provide any explanations. Eventually Mother gets him a proper eyepatch instead of tape and he switches to that smoothly, ignoring all questioning glances as if they don’t exist, like a true Uchiha.
Besides, he’s not the weirdest shinobi out there. There’s one chūnin he’s seen who has both eyes covered. And all the jōnin are weird, Brother says so.
____________
Sasuke comes to read Itachi’s chakra signature as a camp fire, a safe haven in the dark of the woods. Mother’s is like a handheld sparkler, bright and popping and fierce, and Father’s is a hearth fire, steady and low burning and constant. Iruka-sensei’s chakra feels like the lapping of the shallows in the lake, warmed from the sun, and bright crystal clear. Sasuke’s better at sensing when he does the hand-seals for Kanchi no Jutsu, but his range is slowly expanding, so he can walk through the compound and not get startled when people approach him from his blindside.
When Sasuke can sense his classmates without making the hand-seals, can tell where they are on the Academy training grounds without opening his eye, Iruka-sensei starts teaching him how to channel chakra to his ears, so he can listen for an opponent’s attack and anticipate them. Then he teaches him about natural energy, and how there are more energies to the world than just physical and spiritual. Everything has energy, from the flowing of the Naka river, and the trees turning their leaves to the sun, and the littlest animals in the undergrowth.
He relearns how to aim his shuriken, learns how to anticipate fists and feet coming at him from the left, learns how to judge distances, and finally, thankfully, stops running into open doors.
Itachi has been going on fewer missions out of the village these days, after almost a year of non-stop travelling with breaks few and far between. He spends more time with Sasuke, turning him down a little less often, though he is still kept busy with his job and his role as clan heir. Sasuke runs into his fingers a little too hard a couple times while adjusting to his depth perception, but it certainly doesn’t stop him poking Sasuke in the forehead at every opportunity. It’s good for training, he says.
Brother makes him take his eyepatch off for training sometimes when it’s just the two of them, when he’s sure they’re alone and won’t be disturbed. Sometimes he blindfolds Sasuke completely, and trains him in complete darkness, using only his sense of balance, of hearing, and his slowly burgeoning chakra sensing.
Everyone else gets used to Sasuke’s one-eyed techniques, and their gazes don’t catch on his eyepatch quite so often.
His mother sits him down one day and fusses with his unruly hair, combing his middle part away so his bangs hang heavier over his left eye. It looks funny, and it makes his scalp tingle, with all his hair brushed the wrong way, but it looks less out of place to have hair over his eyepatch, than an eyepatch on his otherwise untouched face. Even though his hair is not technically in his eyes, he still has to learn not to flick his head to toss his bangs back when he feels them tickling his cheek. He gives himself a crick in the neck for a week before he learns better.
____________
Sasuke has overheard his brother and his father fighting a lot more since he started training his other senses. When they fight it’s nothing like a ninja battle, instead it’s all cold words and tense silences, and shoji snapping shut. They fought when Itachi left ANBU, and when he refused a position on the Konoha Military Police Force, and when he has missions out of the village that Father doesn’t approve of. They fight about the Hokage, and someone named Shimura, and Brother tells Father sharply to remember his oaths, and Father tells Brother that he does the clan a disservice to think so lowly of them. They fight after Sasuke refuses to take his eyepatch off in front of the clan Elders on his tenth birthday, Itachi stepping between Sasuke’s downcast eye and Father’s harsh words.
For all that they fight, Father is still proud of Brother, always and best, and Sasuke scrapes along behind seeking his own recognition. He doesn’t graduate early, he hasn’t managed to activate his Sharingan again (he doesn’t even remember activating it in the first place), and he still peers out at the world with only one eye, which Father has acknowledged, but will never really accept.
____________
Sasuke graduates top of the class, and no one has asked about his eyepatch in almost a year, when he meets his jōnin-sensei.
“What’d you do to your eye?” sensei asks, like his face isn’t almost completely covered himself.
Sakura gasps a little more dramatically than the question warrants, and Naruto whips his head around to stare at Sasuke like he’s been waiting for this answer for years.
Sasuke scoffs, because he’s twelve. “What’d you do to yours?”
“Hm. That’s fair,” Kakashi-sensei says, eye curving in a bland smile. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”
____________
He surprises Kakashi twice that he can tell during the test. The first is their brief hand-to-hand combat, Kakashi’s strikes at his blindside not getting him the easy hits he tried to take advantage of. The second is when Sasuke senses his chakra underneath the earth, cold and humming like sticking your finger in an electrical socket, and hops away in time to avoid the Doton jutsu.
He gets hit a moment later, sensing movement but not able to move fast enough to get away from it, and ends up on the ground anyway, forty feet into the trees and head first in a bush. He’s picking twigs out of his bangs when Sakura finds him, trembling from her own run in with Kakashi-sensei, and they work their way back to the training field where Naruto has just been tied to the log.
Naruto looks longingly at their bento, and eyes Sasuke with almost as much interest.
“Hey, hey, what did happen to your eye though, huh, Sasuke?” he asks, feet dancing on the dirt, as though without his body weight to hold them down they plan to take off on their own.
Sasuke stuffs onigiri into his big dumb mouth just to shut him up, and then looks over his shoulder to check if Kakashi-sensei’s anywhere near by. His range has gotten better, he can sense pretty well almost 50 feet around him on all sides without using Kanchi. For now he can’t feel Kakashi-sensei’s in that area, and he doesn’t see him anywhere.
He feeds Naruto more rice when it looks like he’s done choking on the first mouthful, and says “We’ll all need our strength if we’re going to take him on this afternoon, so shut up and eat, dumbass.”
Sakura blinks in realization. “Oh, of course! If we work together, we can cover each other’s blind spots!”
There is a long pause.
Sakura goes dead white and Naruto snorts rice out his nose. Sasuke rolls his eyes and checks again for Kakashi-sensei.
Sakura covers her blunder with rage and starts force feeding Naruto too, and then Kakashi-sensei is coming, and fast, so fast that Sasuke drops his bento to get into a defensive position. He hasn’t even settled into the pose before the leaves are swirling and Kakashi is leaning over all of them with a look of doom visible even through his mask.
“Aren’t you all full of surprises?” asks their terrifying jōnin-sensei, and then his eye winks up into a grin and he passes them all, surprising them right back and leaving them windswept and a little breathless with fear.
They leave Naruto tied to the post, bento just out of reach, so he is properly motivated to untie himself.
____________
Father doesn’t look particularly pleased to hear his jōnin-sensei is Hatake Kakashi. As a matter of fact, he turns to the side and spits on the floor when Sasuke announces who his new commander is, and Mother shouts in affront. Neither of them will explain why Father is so angry.
He and Itachi don’t fight this time, but Itachi does make a point of telling Sasuke what a strong shinobi Hatake-san is, and how proud he is of Sasuke passing his test. “He’s never passed a genin team before,” he says, just loud enough to carry to the other room. “You must have impressed him greatly with your teammates. If you work hard, he has a lot to teach you.”
“He only has one eye,” Sasuke mutters, trying not to let his voice carry. “He’s still strong?”
Brother smiles, his eyes soft and tender and proud. “One of the strongest in Konoha. But don’t be fooled by what you see. You’re not the only one with secrets,” he says, poking Sasuke in the forehead, like a jerk.
____________
Sasuke’s one-eyed jōnin-sensei has two eyes, actually, and one of them is a Sharingan. He uses it with all the ease of a natural born Uchiha, and Sasuke finds himself touching his eyepatch without thinking about it as he and Sakura and Naruto watch their sensei fight. He pulls his hand away when Naruto turns to look at him instead.
Kakashi-sensei almost finishes off the missing-nin, but he’s thwarted by the boy in the mask, senbon flashing out and diverting his attack. The two of them are gone before Team 7 can blink, and then the genin turn on their terrible client, while Kakashi-sensei dusts his hands off and eyes them all speculatively.
Their terrible client takes them to his home, introduces them to his nice daughter and his terrible grandchild, and sits them all down for dinner. Kakashi-sensei stops them as they start to dig in and says “Zabuza isn’t dead. He’ll be coming back as soon as he recovers, so you three will be training in shifts, one of you with me watching Tazuna-san always. We need to be ready.”
Sakura goes a little pale. “That boy in the mask, wasn’t he a hunter-nin? I thought they track down missing-nin.”
“They do,” Kakashi-sensei nods, “but he wasn’t. He was impersonating a hunter-nin. He might very well be as talented as one, his attacks were strong enough to be, but he’s clearly on Zabuza’s side. He’ll be working on getting Zabuza back to full health, so my cute little students will be working just as hard, am I right?”
They nod in unison, and scarf down their food together, nerves suddenly heightened as they consider going up against the missing-nin again.
This is the first time Sasuke has slept with another person in the room since he got his eyepatch, so he sleeps in it, even though it’s uncomfortable. He can feel Naruto’s intrusive stare, and Kakashi-sensei’s curious glances, but he lays down facing away from them and pretends they don’t exist.
____________
Sasuke hasn’t quite made it up the tree before his first shift on the bridge. He’s had some experience channeling chakra to his body parts, but his feet and his ears are very different things, and the chakra needed to sharpen his hearing is not nearly the same as the chakra needed to stick to trees.
Sakura got it on the first try, so Kakashi-sensei gives her specific tasks to accomplish. While Naruto is still on his back hissing like an upturned cockroach, she’s running up and down, touching branches in specific orders, seeing how fast she can reach certain heights, walking backwards and upside down, and trying to climb as many times before she has to take a break.
The bridge is quiet, even with all the men at work on it, the sounds drifting out across the open water and getting lost. Sasuke sits next to Kakashi-sensei and closes his eye to concentrate. Just because he’s not on a tree doesn’t mean he can’t practice channeling chakra. He focuses his on his ears, and listens to an argument between Tazuna and one of his workers who is too scared of Gato to continue. He doesn’t have to use chakra to hear Tazuna’s swearing.
He switches his focus to his tongue, opening his mouth and tasting the salt air, the sweat of the construction men, the faint copper taste of blood still lingering on Kakashi-sensei’s clothing from his fight with Zabuza. He channels his chakra to his hands, feels the tingling in his fingers. He puts his hands down on the concrete surface of the bridge, and tries to tell how much is too much, what the limit is before his hands are repelled.
He opens his eye and makes the hand-seals for Kanchi, trying to match all the construction workers to their tiny, undeveloped chakra signatures. Even civilians have chakra, they just don’t use it, or can’t, but it’s a lot harder to distinguish them. Some of them are barely flickers, like a match up against the daylight. It doesn’t help at all that Kakashi-sensei is a crackling brand under the sensory technique, stronger and humming all the more vibrantly under his focused senses, and drowning out all the other tiny flares.
“Sense anyone?”
Sasuke doesn’t quite jump, but he does lose concentration, and the jutsu falls apart between his hands. He tries to make it look like he let it go of his own volition. He turns his head to meet Kakashi-sensei’s uncovered eye, and wonders at the fact that they’re both right-eye dominant. Sort of.
“No other shinobi within a 500 yard radius,” he says. He’s not sure how good of a range that is. Iruka-sensei has a pretty good range just concentrating, but neither of them have anything on an actual sensor-nin who could find specific people in a space the size of Konoha or bigger.
“You don’t meet many genin adept at chakra sensing. Did you start developing sensor techniques when you lost your eye?” asks Kakashi-sensei with a squint.
Sasuke huffs and tries to figure out if that’s a compliment. “I didn’t lose it.”
“Oh? Just set it aside for a moment, then?”
In a way that’s true. Sasuke takes his eyepatch off to sleep, and when Brother wants to train him. He can’t let it slack off, is Itachi’s reasoning, and keeping it functional could turn the tide in a fight when he least expects it. His left eye doesn’t adjust to light as easily, spending so much time in the dark, but it focuses and follows just as quick as his right eye. Still, it’s been a few months since one of those training sessions, and Sasuke hasn’t even looked at himself in the mirror with both eyes in years.
He folds his arms over his chest and ignores the question. “What’d you do to get your eye? It’s a Sharingan and you’re not an Uchiha. I should report you to the Elders.”
Kakashi-sensei frowns, suddenly cross and cold, and then his face relaxes just as quick. He sighs ruefully. “Aah, I shoulda guessed. Your Elders already know, thanks. But don’t let me stop you, if you wanna go running to daddy.”
Sasuke flushes hot and bright at the tone in Kakashi-sensei’s voice, condescending and bordering on cruel. He ducks his head and turns away, letting his hair fall to shield his face.
They sit in silence for a long stretch of time.
“It was a gift,” Kakashi-sensei says finally. “The Uchiha Elders don’t like it, but since I don’t exactly have a spare, I’m not about to hand it back.”
Sasuke doesn’t know who could have given him a Sharingan. Who does he know with only one eye? No one else in the clan, at least. What does Kakashi-sensei look like in his left eye? Sasuke has never been tempted to look before right now.
“Oh,” is all he says. “Okay.”
____________
Sasuke has two more days of tree climbing. One goes by slowly, and he spends it trying not to compare his progress to Sakura, who though short on stamina, is increasingly agile in the canopy while he plods along at the base of the tree, his kunai markings barely moving.
The second is a whirlwind of competition as Naruto comes back from his bridge shift raring to go and yelling the whole time. Sasuke gets swept up in the enthusiasm despite his best efforts. They’re both running full pelt up the bark, feet dipping in too deep, skidding over the surface, sheer momentum the only thing keeping them going.
They reach the tops of the trees, and Sasuke is exhausted and pleased and irritated that Naruto caught up with him so quickly.
Naruto oversleeps the next morning, even though Kakashi-sensei said they were all on bridge duty that day, and the missing-nin shows up again.
____________
Sasuke awakens his Sharingan for the first time in years, tries his best to save his stupid idiot of a friend, and thinks he’s going to die.
____________
That night in Tazuna’s house, Sasuke shuts himself in the bathroom. He takes off his eyepatch and looks down at the sink, running the faucet like he’s brushing his teeth, gathering his courage to turn his gaze upwards.
He looks in the mirror.
His hair is different. He’s been parting his hair to one side like his mother showed him for long enough that the middle part from his childhood looks unfamiliar. Other than that he looks the same. The marks from the masked boy’s senbon ring his throat, none of the half-ghosting that happens when his vision doesn’t line up. It’s strangely reassuring, how precisely those marks coincide.
He blinks his Sharingan on, carefully channeling chakra to both eyes, and his vision sharpens and condenses into perfect understanding. He still sees two different versions of himself, but now they are distinct, not overlapping. They are each whole and unique, and they both look a little chakra fatigued. Two tomoe in his right eye, one in his left. That’s lucky, he’d hate to have his more developed Sharingan in his non-dominant eye.
He cuts the chakra to his eyes, thinks about putting his eyepatch back on, and instead maneuvers back into the room he shares with Naruto and Kakashi-sensei with both eyes shut, extending his senses to navigate the narrow hallway. Naruto is already asleep, his chakra a warm waft of summer breeze thrumming low and unconscious. Kakashi-sensei is still awake, crackling and popping in thought and movement.
His chakra stops moving when Sasuke pushes the door open. Sasuke can feel the weight of his gaze. His bedroll is four steps to the left of the door and ten steps into the room, angled with the head facing the window and the feet towards the door. Sasuke steps precisely, hearing the floorboards creak beneath his bare toes, Naruto’s steady breaths filling the silence. He stops on the board that makes a short high whine with upwards inflection, and drops onto his bedroll precisely, rolling himself up in his blankets and feigning sleep immediately.
“Huh,” he can hear from the other side of the room, an almost involuntary breath of air. Kakashi-sensei putters around for a few more moments, before he too retires to his bed with a sigh.
____________
Sasuke wakes up to Naruto’s morning breath an inch from his face, and punches upwards without opening his eyes. Naruto falls back howling and clutching his nose. Sasuke knows where his eyepatch is, tucked under his pillow, and he has it in his hand before he opens both his eyes.
Naruto is orange and writhing. Kakashi-sensei, who Sasuke did not realize was in the room, looks about the same too. He’s more ragged, according to Sasuke’s left eye, like he was injured worse somehow, the lines around his one visible eye deeper with exhaustion.
He’s staring directly back at Sasuke. He pushes up his forehead protector and captures one glimpse of Sasuke looking back, before Naruto bounces upright, and both Sasuke and Kakashi turn as one to hide away their secrets once again.
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“Kakashi-sensei said it could have gone worse,” Sasuke says a little awkwardly when he gets home, filthy and exhausted and sporting more new scars than anyone expected. Kakashi-sensei had tried to show Sakura the basics of medical-ninjutsu, but he was pretty garbage at it, so she couldn’t do much to heal Sasuke’s senbon wounds. The medic-nin at the hospital said they were too far healed not to leave scars by the time she got to them. “The Hokage changed the ranking from C to A, but at least nobody died.”
Father looks torn between cooly congratulating his son on his first successful A-rank mission, and cooly storming out of the Uchiha compound to hunt down Hatake Kakashi and kill him.