Chapter Text
The captain of ANBU comes to the tower the day after the massacre and says, “We searched the whole property. There weren’t any survivors.”
Hiruzen gazes out of the window, back turned, arms folded behind him. Shuts his eyes for a moment. Opens them again. “Even the sister?” Guilt coils in his throat, and settles in the vertebrae of his spine. He asks, “Did you find her?” Means, Did the boy change his mind?
A pause. “What sister?”
Beyond the glass, beyond the monument, the sun rises golden in a cold winter sky. “Find them,” he says. “Bring the girl home, at least.”
One disaster’s stopped at the expense of lives broken. Somewhere in the woods past the walls where life’s wild and unsafe are a boy and his sister running. Hiruzen breathes deep. He releases. This might not have been at his order, but he did nothing to prevent it. But he’s the Sandaime with this village at his protection, and he can let a child fall to ruin if it means peace for the rest.
Says the captain: “Of course, Hokage-sama.”
Down below, Konoha begins to stir towards wakefulness. This is the Sandaime, and he thinks the girl might’ve been better off dead.
There’s a boy. There’s a girl clinging to this boy’s hand.
How identical they are, with their long black hair and blinking dark eyes. Pale skin like people from the Lands of Earth, or Iron, or Frost. Leftover aristocratic features from days when sun-marked skin wasn’t considered class appropriate. There’s gauze across her face, tapped down. The boy has a frown tucked in the corner of his mouth. The girl’s is red, bitten from worry. In the half light of the hidden basement, they look inhuman, sculpted from ice, deadly and delicate and brittle all at once.
The boy enchants the others. Someone that looks like this shouldn’t be able to do all that, they think, though all with different words with different tones. Of the girl they think nothing.
The leader, he says, “We have an opening.” It’s from a script, written by the man in mask. He glances to the girl, noting her, and the way she’s an extension of her brother. “Well. I’m sure we can find something.”
“Thank you,” says the boy. His name’s Uchiha Itachi, and he tightens his grip on the girl’s hand. Obedient as she promised, she parrots him. “She won’t be a bother.”
They watch the others. The others watch them. Uchiha Itachi regales his sister to position of She. She, the girl with the red bitten lips, laces their fingers and doesn’t understand.
Stories of Uchiha Itachi spread quickly, about how he killed his family in a single night, about how he stole his sister away without a trace. Changes to the system are made, and suddenly villages create new rules to protect innocence and childhood, to avoid causing any other mind to break. No more killers of seven or nine or five.
They had it coming, everyone says. Says everyone, We’re doing what we have to.
As if it isn’t to make them feel better about themselves. As if they care about the boy they turn into a ghost story, and the sister declared dead after a single year. She’s cast out, abandoned. Better off dead. At her funeral, most attendants hope it’s not a memory of a living girl they’re burying, and that she didn’t suffer too much. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn’t. There’s nothing to do about it now.
Uchiha Itachi stays in public legend on an international scale. Uchiha Sasuke disappears to something less than an afterthought to his story.
For them, it’s better this way.
Two countries away, a girl named Terasu is raised by a small troop of outcasts and a man calling himself Uncle who care for her more than they meant to. Under their watchful eyes, she grows at the old pace only a step behind what her brother, now a friend, did once, in a life they aren’t supposed to talk about. Orphan’s too close to the truth, so they don’t call her that. You were left by your parents to die, reads her past now. We took you in when we found you alone in the rain.
“That sounds a bit fairy tale,” she tells her brother at seven.
“That sounds a bit safe,” he says at thirteen, and kisses her hair.
At eight she says, “I make a better Terasu than I do Sasuke, don’t I?”
He stares at her blankly. The humid air of the Land of Water pulses are them, thick with mist and sea salt. He thinks he never should’ve brought her along. She thinks there's no other place she’d rather be than here.
From down the beach, Kisame calls for them. Itachi stands first, and helps her to her feet. Then she disposes of the sweet ice, licking away at the flavoring still dusting her fingers, and follows him, always one step behind.
Of the others, one likes Sasuke, or Terasu, or She, or whoever she is, better than the rest. He likes her eyes when they aren’t dark, but the color of aged wine, standing out starkly against the white of her skin, and the darkness of her hair. Though Itachi’s stronger, she’s more accessible. This is good, or maybe bad. Want and jealousy gnaw at Orochimaru with more persistence than a snake latched to its prey.
She’s sweet, and kind, and intelligent for her age, but young. Her desire to be like her brother’s transparent. Orochimaru, cunning in the matter of temptation, takes this and uses it. Little girls like her burn fast; it's better for everyone if her failure can be salvaged by him, when it’s time.
First, he comes with a slip of paper, and says, “I think you’re old enough to know.” Expects it to crumble to ash like the rest of her family. Finds relief instead when it crinkles, drawing close together. “Your nature transformation is lightning,” he says. “I can show you that.”
Her smile still comes dimpled at the cheeks as she pushes her hair from her face. “Can you?” she asks.
Like a good teacher, caretaker, friend, he agrees wholeheartedly. She’s trusting like the child she is, and remains ignorant to her fate.
Terasu's nine. Itachi says, “I don’t trust him,” and then excuses himself before coughing so hard he spits blood. He’s been ill for the past six months.
She tells Orochimaru she doesn’t want training. Three weeks pass, and he’s thrown out for conspiring against the organization. Itachi, too passive, doesn’t have the heart to kill him. Meanwhile, Sasori takes little Terasu under his wing for a week as distraction, and trains her. At nine, she’s already deadly. He wonders how long it is before she kills for the first time, and whether or not she’ll like it.
In the wilds of the Land of Sound, he gets his answer. The man Orochimaru sends to capture her dies from a stab to the chest caused by a katana she can barely use. After, she cries. Itachi holds her. No, she doesn’t like it. But she doesn’t swear to never kill again, either.
That’s what’s important.
The masked man, the non-Uncle, ever scheming from the shadows, forces Terasu into a situation she can’t do more than occasionally play watch for. To stave off boredom, she makes a friend. Her first friend. He’s a Suna native. His hair’s like the sun in a child’s drawing. His eyes are the color of sand after the rain. He thinks she looks like a princess, because only royalty’s meant to looks so designed.
Everything runs smoothly until the final night when everything goes wrong. It’s an anonymous tip that sends the Suna-nin into the boy's backyard. Terasu’s good at defending
herself. She’s a product of outcasts, and it shows. Bent paper flies in shapes more dangerous than normal weapons. Electrified chakra strings twist and pierce as surely as real lightning. Most important, her eyes shine. Not aged wine. More like blood. Or at least, that’s what her friend sees.
Blood seeps from bodies onto sand and stone. She said she’s named for the Land of Fire's sun goddess Amaterasu, but with the lightning still sparking between her fingers, glowing her pale skin blue as her hair flutters around her like feathered coal, she looks much more like the spirit of winter storms. It’s the eyes, though, bloody and pricked with black, that the friend recognizes. He’s a shinobi in training, and Uchiha Itachi’s infamous. Pictures of the Sharingan dot the pages of updated history books already.
She looks to him, and he to her. Unlike him, she knows what’s coming. “You're the girl,” he says. “The sister with the boy’s name. Why did you kill them?”
No one’s supposed to see her, and no one’s supposed to recognize her. Leave no witnesses if they do, Kisame said in the early days. Said Konan, You’re not Sasuke anymore.
Sasuke, Terasu, says, “I’m sorry.” Then she cuts his throat. He thinks, My parents always said never trust a stranger, and dies.
It’s not until she’s screaming, eyes burning from the pain of transition, that it occurs to her she could’ve simply wiped his memory instead.
When Itachi finds her, he sweeps her up in his arms, and she flashes her eyes in silent admittance.
“It’s all right,” he says, pressing his forehead to hers. Tears slip down her cheeks, deviating from a straight path on her left from the scar of failed determent. The wind wraps sand around his legs, and brings with it the smell of death not far away. “Sasuke, it’s all right.”
A first friend is a best friend, in a way. The reward for killing him is somehow entirely worth it, and not worth it at all.
There’s no set number of Akatsuki members, though a three person partnership is new. The others throw Sasuke a cloak at twelve, and though Itachi tries not to be proud because of what it means, he is anyway.
He knows in that moment he’s falling fast, and she’s falling faster. As she zips up the cloak, decorated in a black sky with clouds the same shade as her eyes, she knows it too. There’s little point in caring, so she doesn’t. If she’s going to fall, at least they’ll fall together. She thinks in that moment she’d give him the sky, blue or black, if only he asks. At the same time, he thinks he’d give her his eyes if she wanted. It’s the only thing of worth he has left.
But, then—be careful what you wish for, be careful what you think.
The scheming masked man’s the whisper in the subconscious, saying, Have them switch. Nagato, wanting their best skill and also wishing for their health, asks, “Does it still work if the transfer goes two ways?”
Eye transplants are a risk, and Itachi only wanted it for his sister as a last resort. Terasu stares at him, watches him squint at something near to her and far to him, knowing it won’t be long for her too, and agrees. Signs herself away. Gives in to someone’s grander plan. It’s a loss of agency disguised to the presence of both parties. She might fall under the protection of these runaways just like her, but return, they take and take and take.
Itachi gives.
Itachi gives, and so does she, and neither of them can stop themselves can screaming. Blood bubbles, and coats white faces. It sticks in their hair. They are, as always, each other’s mirror image.
“You can’t even tell the difference,” Kisame says later, helping Terasu wipe of her face under the impersonal lamp of the medical room. “Anyone who believes you’re just friends is a fucking idiot.”
I can see, Itachi thinks, and looks over to his sister, at her sharp edges and delicate smile. Sickness sits heavy in his lungs still, but at least now he can die with some dignity.
Too much time’s past for questions of morality or apologies by the time the kisses start. They’re alone on break in the Land of Waterfalls, and the taste of far away death coats Itachi’s mouth with every push and pull they try. Once he says, “We shouldn’t,” and Terasu shrugs and answers, “Who’s there to care?”
Rain beats against the inn windows in a lighter fall than the usual of the place they now call home. Maybe it was appropriate, naming her after Amaterasu. Amaterasu wed her brother Tsukuyomi, and together they shared the sky. These two share a bed when they have to, and a past nearly forgotten, and an appearance that must make this narcissistic, in a way. Itachi thinks all this as he brushes his hand across her hair, dried from time by the fire. It’s soft, like feathers.
“Sasuke,” he says. Calls her. Says, “I’m sorry I took you away from home. Konoha.” Means, I’m sorry for destroying your life.
She frowns fleetingly, then nudges his nose with hers, kissing him again. “Home doesn’t stay the same forever,” she tells him. Means, You’re it for me now.
Sometimes they’re brother and sister, but sometimes they’re friends, and now they’re something else, too. From the moment he lifted her the bloody ground of the place they once called home, this collision became an inevitability. It’s terrifying and wonderful and guilt inducing and careless simultaneously, and there’s not a person in the world who can remind them this is wrong.
Secrets never stay secrets for long. That in itself is a secret.
On a mission in the Land of Frost, Hatake Kakashi stabs a man through the heart with a chirping hand glowing blue, and hears a strangled scream behind him. Turns just in time to see a girl fade back into the trees with another man lying dead at her feet. When she sees she’s caught, she stops. Stands there real, but as a ghost, red on white on black. She blends with snow. He’s never seen her before in his life, but recognizes her all the same.
Then, from the distance: “Terasu!”
Itachi and Kisame won’t be happy to see Konoha-nin in this area, and the metal of the man’s forehead protector catches the dying light. Terasu lifts her finger to lips, conveying Quiet, Quiet, and disappears into the forest. The forest that’s untamed, dead to the civilized world.
Kakashi watches her go in shock.
Uchiha Sasuke’s alive.
A pale winter sun rises beyond the monument, over the clouds. “Are you certain?” asks the Sandaime. “There’re other black haired girls in the world, after all.”
“None that look that much like Mikoto.”
Hiruzen says, It isn’t possible.
Kakashi says, It is.
The woods that sprawl past the walls are wild and dangerous, and the girl truly was better off dead.
In Konoha, Uchiha Sasuke’s resurrected, and in the Land of Frost, Terasu moves the fabric of Itachi’s clothes with fumbling hands. The poor girl, say the citizens of Konoha, as they used to. She was so young she must not realize what she’s doing.
Outside the tent, snow mutes the forest. Clothes it in white. Itachi finds it easier when they don’t discuss the nature of what they’re doing. The cloak slides off her with ease; her leggings catch at one ankle. Cold raises small bumps across his skin, but not on hers until he runs his fingers down her side. For all that the Uchihas are meant to have fire in their blood and in their lungs, Sasuke seems to be made of something else entirely most days.
She loses her virginity like that, in the snow at thirteen, almost fourteen, and her bitten nails leave marks on Itachi’s shoulders the way the stonemason’s tools do on the memorial stone in Konoha when he scratches out her name. Miles and miles away, Uchiha Sasuke’s declared a hostage rather than a missing-nin, and tactical move as much as a hopeful one, and here in the tent, Terasu destroys her childhood. Itachi covers her in kisses and affection; she bites her lip so hard to keep from calling out she makes herself bleed.
Then, later, her hand slides through his hair and down his back. What do you think happened to the girl? the people of Konoha ask, and Terasu says to Itachi, “I love you.” Says, Do you love me, too?
Together, they’re everything and nothing. Blood spreads across her mouth like gloss. Blood pools in his lungs. He blinks her eyes, and she his.
“Oh, Sasuke,” he says. “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Alone in a village of his own design, a man paces the floor, imagining he can feel the organs in his body already failing. In order to stay how he is, was, will be, he needs to stay strong, and find someone stronger. With a kekkei genkai, he can manage. The Sharingan are a demon’s eyes, but he surrendered his humanity a long time ago.
The girl already avoided temptation of sisterly worship, but temptation comes in many forms. A slip of paper. A seal. Even a piece of food. Someone of his intelligence can make his own plans. Even now, the girl can’t be much older than her early teens, and her brother won’t live much longer. What a shame he wasn’t healthy enough to be used instead.
There’s no shame in perfection, and in order to gain it, Orochimaru’s willing to borrow the strengths from a source other than his own.
Outcasts raise the outcasts, and so things are lost along the way. The leaders says, “Go,” and Terasu, silent on her feet and quick in her thoughts, goes. It’s their first attempt on the seizure of a Tailed-Beast and she, they find, has stronger eyes than Itachi in this.
In the mountains of the Land of Earth the Isobu runs free, trampling wildflowers and breaking rocks that dot the small streams. Kisame holds the sealing jar; Itachi distracts; Terasu, by some luck, stops the creature in its tracks. Poppies and fairy flax curl around her legs, and in the silence of the aftermath, she looks almost innocent. Could be almost innocent. Image ruined by a jolt of cold frosting over the edges of her smile.
With the exhaustion of chakra depletion setting in, Itachi carries her on his back, down and away, and Kisame holds the jar delicately. From the shadow of a mountain ridge, a masked man watches. He sees this, in this one good eye:
There’s a man, angled in, older than the others. Protective. A boy who grew too fast, already on the edge of death, the best and yet most useless. Then, the girl—slight and young and idealistic, growing still and bursting with life. Who has the eyes of a demon, but has the possibility to grasp the hemline power of gods.
Orochimaru, isolated and situationally ignorant, believes he’s meant to be temptation. What he doesn’t understand is that’s a role only to be filled by family alone.
On an Academy field trip in the northern Land of Fire, Naruto meets a girl in a market who eats a tomato like an apple. “Don’t take that one,” she says when he reaches for an orange in the fruit stall. “Look at the discoloration near the top, where it’s brown. Sure, it’s not mold, but it’ll be dry on the inside. One next to it’s good, though.”
His hand remains hovering, indecisive, as he stares unchecked for social norms. He thinks this girl is the most beautiful person he’s ever seen. “Uh, okay,” he says, regaining a semblance of politeness at quirk of a single corner of her mouth. The orange sits heavy and cool in his hand. “Thanks. I usually just guess.”
With her black hair twisted back and held there by a comb, and the yellow sundress more feminine than anything Yamanaka Ino owns, the girl looks so very civilian. Then he looks closer at the straightness of her back, and burn scar across her arm, and doubts. “Fruit’s expensive around here,” she says, and tosses the tomato away. There’s red staining under her nails. “You should check what’s good or bad, or it’s just a waste of money. Isn’t that right, Haru-san?”
The man behind the booth stands still, watching and expecting. Terasu-san’s been a loyal customer this past week, and he’ll be sad to see her go. As the boy pays, she turns and leaves without a goodbye, raising a small cloud of dust from the path as she walks.
“Thanks,” says the boy with a smile. Then he turns to look for the girl, and his smile fades as quickly as it came.
Itachi teaches his sister to summon on a dreary autumn day in the Land of Rain, when the rain’s lighter than the weeks prior, and colder, too. Together, they watch a crow smaller than his fly in laps around them twice, wings cutting decisively through the humid air, before landing on her outheld arm. It looks to her, and she looks back. It blinks, and so does she.
My name is Yatagarasu, he says. You are nameless.
“I’m not nameless,” Terasu says. “I just use a second because it’s safe.”
Now the contract’s signed and they’re bound together, this girl of two identities, and crow appropriately named. After he disappears, Itachi leans into her, and kisses her soundly. Long, long ago, a goddess of the sun wed her brother, the god of the moon, and her new name is prophetic.
They each forget that in the end, Tsukuyomi and Amaterasu were ripped apart, and no amount of humanity can change that.
As Itachi lays dying, his life expelled in slow torture, Orochimaru searches out Terasu, or Sasuke, or whoever this girl of fourteen is, on a mission in the Land of Rivers, and says, “I can teach you to bring him back.”
The words wrap inside her lungs, constricting her breathing like lacing pulled too tightly against her ribs. Without a word, she sends a rush of lightning in his direction, the force strong enough to rock him backwards. “I’m giving you one chance,” she says. “Get out of here, or I’ll burn you alive, and there’s nothing you can do to stop that.”
One moment he’s there, and the next he’s gone, intelligent to know what she’s capable of.
Just out of sight, the masked man smiles.
The masked man comes to the girl in the boy’s final nights. “I can teach you to save him,” Obito says in the quiet of the siblings’ bedroom, and she, with her face blank, accepts her hand.
Days later, Itachi’s dead and burned, transformed to ash with no hope of returning, and little Sasuke sobs in the arms of the last of their family.
In the story of Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, they split in anger, and created day and night. Loss isn’t night. It’s a scratched out name on a memorial stone. Blood staining snow. A black sky absent of stars.
Now, alone with her outcasts and crow, Terasu waits. Learns. Says to the masked man, the non-Uncle ever scheming, “Just because I couldn’t save him doesn’t mean I can’t save the rest. They’re more straightforward.” Says, Home is what you make of it, and mine isn’t gone forever.
The electric, humming light of the lamp above their heads, stuck to the low ceiling of a private basement not far from home, glitters off her eyes. She looks like a thing imagined, made. Unnatural. And so smiles the man, hidden behind masks one and two. “I can show you how,” he says. “The others might train you, but I can teach you past your limitations.”
She says, Do it.
Alone in a red tinted world, he shows her there’s no end to what their eyes can do. Sasuke becomes everything he is, and everything her brother never had the chance to be.
A woman with hair like a lavender bush says, “I worry about you sometimes,” and Terasu doesn’t listen. Days later, the masked man tears at her, and graphs in new skin.
Only a few miles away, Hatake Kakashi takes a shortcut through the Land of Rivers returning from a mission, and here, Terasu stumbles out, pained and confused. The others are scattered idly throughout the world, forgetting the roles of outcasts and caretakers means a little lost girl will regain her identity one day. In a market the town over, the masked man looks for food, thinking even if the girl leaves, she can’t make it far.
He misjudged the kindness of strangers.
Like a child’s doll with weighted lids, Sasuke’s eyes shut as she collapses shivering onto the frosted grass. Kakashi finds her here, still with her lips turned red from blood, the color of tomatoes, the color of apple skins. Her pulse’s faint when he checks, so slow she might dead, and her breathing shallow.
Without a second thought, he picks her up. If he hurries, he’s just a day away, and maybe she can even survive the trip.
First there’s a week unconscious in the hospital, healed by medics who can’t find the root of the problem, because everything’s in its proper place, of course. Then Terasu wakes, and spends another in a cell, interrogated. Did you hear? the people say. They found the girl. They said she was dying in the woods.
The interrogator, with his scarred face and hardened heart, is unnerved at the sight of her. At the mark across her cheek, and the indifference in her eyes. She’s an old thing trapped in a young body, tarnished. The rules of the new generation, created in her family’s honor, never touched her. He thinks she must have a few tricks of deception at her disposal, and he won’t fall for any of them.
Yet fall he does.
Outcasts are always left behind, in the end. Terasu, now Sasuke, shields them, but sheds them, making no move to leave. She carves her own expressions, plays equal parts confused and afraid. “The Akatsuki?” she says. “Never heard of it. My brother never liked to tell me where he was going. All he wanted to do was protect me.”
Two countries away, a blue skinned man with sharp teeth and a sharper mind says, “It doesn’t matter if the body’s still there. They’ll be turning her back to Uchiha Sasuke. Terasu’s gone.” And the outcasts mourn.
“He said I was in danger, and needed to hide in the woods,” Sasuke tells her interrogator. “Someone else did it. Itachi would never kill our family.”
Little Sasuke the hostage, sweet and naive, kept in the dark for seven years. It’s out of pity that people believe her. It’s out of fear and a need to survive that she lies.
Winter comes to the village with an exceptional brutality, coating it in white and seeping cold through the ill-fitted windows in the orphan apartments. Sasuke, born in July, arrives with the weather as though she’s the one who brought it. Kakashi says, “You can leave either when you’re eighteen, or if you decide to become a kunoichi.”
“Will they let me?” she asks.
“I don’t see why not,” he answers.
Three weeks later, she has permission and signs herself into the Academy. She’s bored and skilled and needs to know what her uncle did to her. Kakashi, invested through the connection of savior and damsel, assists in the details.
So begins the third chapter of Uchiha Sasuke’s life.
Yatagarasu blinks his beady crow eyes, and digs his talons into the girl’s forearm. She’s slight. She’s young. Between her skin and her hair, and her eyes dulled black, she blends with the moonlight and the night. With Tsukuyomi.
There’s no question in her mouth of own her face. Still, he says, You only have one name now.
Mildly, she says, “Do I?”
This is a girl who grew in dark, and was named for the sun.
Terasu is dead.