LOCATION: KONOHA – UCHIHA COMPOUND, OUTSKIRTS
The moon was a sharp sliver in the sky, casting bone-white light over the silent, decaying grandeur of the Uchiha district. The streets, once bustling with life and the distinctive chatter of the clan, were now tombs paved with memory. Weeds pushed through cracks in the flagstones. Paper lanterns, faded to grey, hung tattered from eaves. The air was still, heavy with the scent of damp wood, old incense, and the profound, echoing silence of absence.
On the roof of a watchtower overlooking the compound's main gate, three figures waited, shrouded in shadow.
Uchiha Sasuke stood at the edge, his black cloak whispering in the faint night breeze. His arms were crossed, his posture rigid. The new, jagged Sage markings around his eyes were faintly visible, giving his already severe features a predatory cast. His Sharingan was not active, but his gaze was fixed on the dark windows of a specific house deeper in the compound—the main family home.
Behind him, leaning against the tower's central pole, Hatake Kakashi watched his student with a single, concerned eye. He was dressed for combat, his forehead protector tilted to reveal his own Sharingan, a constant, painful reminder of another Uchiha's choice. To his left, Uzumaki Naruto fidgeted, his usual restless energy contained into a tense, coiled readiness. The tiny red pinprick in the center of his blue eyes—the visible sign of his fragile truce with Kurama—glowed faintly.
Naruto: "You sure about this, Sasuke? It could be a trap. A real one, not just… a talk."
Sasuke: (Without turning) "Itachi does not set traps. He engineers inevitabilities. A duel to the death is the inevitable conclusion he has always planned for us. The location is merely… sentimental."
His voice was flat, devoid of the blistering hatred that had characterized it for years. This was colder, sharper. It was the voice of a prosecutor assembling evidence.
Kakashi: "The message said to come alone, Sasuke. He will know you are not."
Sasuke: "He will have anticipated it. He anticipates everything. But he will also understand that I am not the fool who walked into an ambush seven years ago. You are my contingency, not my intervention. You will stay here. You will not interfere unless an Akatsuki member other than Itachi reveals themselves. This is between Uchiha."
Naruto: "But what if he—"
Sasuke: "Naruto." Sasuke finally turned his head, just enough for Naruto to see his profile, etched in moonlight. "This is my fight. My justice. Not yours. You are here because I trust you to handle anything else that might come. Not him."
The words were delivered with finality. Naruto swallowed his protest, giving a sharp, reluctant nod. "Alright. But if things go south—"
Sasuke: "They have been 'south' since the night our clan died. Tonight, we merely chart the coordinates."
He turned back. In his hand, he held a single, jet-black feather. It had appeared that afternoon, drifting down silently onto his training log as he meditated. A crow's feather. Tied to it with a strand of hair fine as spider silk was a tiny scroll, no larger than a matchstick. Unfurled with a pulse of chakra, it revealed four lines of precise, elegant script—Itachi's handwriting.
Little Brother,
The path ends where it began. Our home. Come alone. Let us finish what was started. Let us give each other the death that has been waiting.
— Itachi
No date. No time. Just the understanding that it would be tonight. That Itachi would be waiting.
Sasuke's fingers closed around the feather, crushing it. It dissolved into a wisp of black chakra smoke. He didn't need a guide. He could feel the pull, a familiar, agonizing thread in his chest leading him to that house.
Sasuke: "Stay. Watch."
He didn't wait for acknowledgment. In a silent, fluid motion, he dropped from the tower's edge, landing on the street below without a sound. He didn't use Body Flicker. He walked. One deliberate footstep after another, each one echoing in the profound silence, a funeral march for the ghosts lining his path.
He passed the charred remains of the police headquarters. The playground, its swings creaking emptily. The shrine where they'd held festivals. Each landmark was a knife-twist, but his face remained a mask of cold marble. He was not here to mourn. He was here to audit.
Finally, he stood before the traditional gate of the Uchiha main family house. The Uchiwa fan, once proudly displayed, was now faded and chipped. The door was slightly ajar. A sliver of warm, lantern light spilled out onto the engawa, a shocking contrast to the cold moonlight.
Sasuke pushed the door open. The hinges groaned a protest he ignored.
The genkan was as he remembered, yet utterly alien. The shoe cupboard was dusty. A child's pair of sandals—his—still sat neatly to the side, tiny and surreal. He stepped out of his own sandals and onto the wooden floorboards, which sighed under his weight.
The house was clean. Not lived-in clean, but meticulously tidied, as if for a ceremony. The dust was gone. The air smelled of lemon and old paper, not mildew. Itachi had been here, preparing.
Sasuke walked down the familiar hallway. Past the room where his mother's koto had sat. Past the study where his father would pour over clan ledgers. To the central living room, the heart of the home.
The sliding doors were open.
Inside, by the light of a single paper lantern placed in the center of the low, kotatsu table, sat Uchiha Itachi.
He looked… older. Not just seven years older. Weary. The lines around his eyes, always present from stress, were deeper. He wore simple, dark Akatsuki robes without the cloud pattern, the red clouds seeming too garish for this setting. His hair framed his pale face, and his own Sharingan was inactive, his dark eyes reflecting the lantern's flame. He was pouring tea from a small, iron pot into two chipped but familiar ceramic cups—the ones their mother used for important guests.
He did not look up as Sasuke stopped in the doorway.
Itachi: "You came." His voice was soft, the same gentle baritone Sasuke remembered from stories before bed. It was utterly dissonant with the image of the monster from that night. "And you brought company. Kakashi Hatake and Uzumaki Naruto. On the watchtower. Prudent."
Sasuke: "You would have done the same. If you had anyone left to watch your back."
Itachi's hands, steady as they poured, paused for a fraction of a second. He finished pouring, setting the pot down.
Itachi: "Sit, Sasuke. Have tea. We have… much to discuss before we begin."
"Begin?" Sasuke remained standing, a statue in the doorway. "There is nothing to begin, Itachi. You issued an invitation to a duel. I am here. Draw your kunai. Show me your Mangekyō. Let us 'finish what was started.'"
Itachi finally looked up. His eyes met Sasuke's. There was an immense, bottomless sadness in them, but also a terrifying calm. "The duel is inevitable. But first, a conversation. You owe me that much. After all I have… taught you."
The word 'taught' hung in the air, loaded with unbearable weight.
Sasuke's lip curled. But after a long, tense moment, he moved. He didn't sit across from Itachi. He walked to the far side of the room, leaning against the wall beside a faded calligraphy scroll their grandfather had painted. He kept the entire room, and Itachi, in his field of vision. He did not touch the tea.
Sasuke: "Talk, then. Give me your excuses. I have heard the village's. I have heard the Hokage's. I have read Danzo's files. Now I want to hear yours. The butcher's rationale."
Itachi flinched, just a tiny tightening around his eyes. He took a sip of his own tea, the steam wreathing his face. "You have the files. Then you know the… pressure. The Council's fear. The coup was not a phantom, Sasuke. It was real. The Uchiha were planning to burn Konoha to the ground in a bid for power. Innocents would have died. A civil war would have left the village vulnerable to Iwa, Kumo, Kiri. It would have been the end of everything our ancestors helped build."
Sasuke: "Our ancestors." Sasuke's voice was a whip-crack. "Our family. Tell me, Itachi. When you raised your sword, did you think of them as 'ancestors'? Or did you see their faces?"
He pushed off the wall, taking one step into the room. The lantern light carved sharp planes of shadow on his face.
Sasuke: "How did it feel?"
Itachi looked at him, silent.
Sasuke: "How did it feel, killing Aunt Misako? The one who taught you calligraphy when you were four because you complained Father's lessons were too strict? She held your hand, showed you how to balance the ink. Do you remember? She always smelled of plum blossoms."
Itachi's cup clinked softly against the saucer. His knuckles were white.
Sasuke: "How did it feel, killing Cousin Hiro? He was three years old, Itachi. He couldn't even form a proper fireball. He used to follow you around the compound, calling 'Ichi-nii! Ichi-nii!' and trying to mimic your shuriken throws. Did he call for you that night? Did he ask why you were hurting Mommy?"
The air in the room grew thick, charged with a pain so acute it was almost physical. Itachi's breath hitched, a tiny, almost imperceptible sound.
Sasuke: "And Grandmother Satsuki." Sasuke's voice dropped, becoming lethally soft. "Who always, always hid sweet rice cakes in her sleeve for us when Father wasn't looking. She'd wink and say, 'Growing boys need their strength.' She had arthritis. She could barely lift a kettle. What was her great crime against the village, brother? What coup did her frail, sugar-offering hands plot?"
Itachi: "Enough." The word was a whisper, but it vibrated with strain. The calm was fracturing. He set his cup down, his hand trembling minutely. "You think I do not see them? Every night. Every time I close my eyes. Misako's ink-stained fingers. Hiro's wide, trusting eyes. Grandmother's wrinkled smile. I see them. I carry them." He looked up, and for the first time, raw, unvarnished agony shone through—a crack in the porcelain mask. "Do you think I wanted this? Do you think I took any pleasure, any satisfaction in what I did? I had NO CHOICE!"
The last three words were torn from him, louder, raw. He stood up abruptly, the kotatsu table rattling. "It was the only way! The coup was a cancer! Danzo and the Council gave me an ultimatum: let the clan start a war that would destroy thousands, including you, or… or cut out the cancer myself and spare the village, spare you! It was a monstrous calculus, but it was the only one that left you alive! I chose the village's peace! I chose your future!"
He was breathing heavily, the composed Akatsuki member gone, replaced by a haunted, desperate young man.
Sasuke didn't move. He watched Itachi's breakdown with the cold, analytical detachment of a surgeon observing a symptom.
Sasuke: "You chose the village's peace." He repeated the phrase as if tasting something foul. "You keep saying that. 'The village.' As if it's a pure, abstract ideal. Let's talk about 'the village' you saved, Itachi. Specifically, let's talk about Shimura Danzo's 'village'."
Itachi froze, his agonized expression hardening into wary confusion. "Danzo is a traitor. He was tried and executed. I know what he did. I stole the files after his imprisonment. I know he manipulated the situation. I know he pushed the Council. I know he… he used me."
Sasuke: "You know the headlines. You don't know the footnotes. The fine print written in blood." Sasuke reached into his cloak and pulled out a small, sealed scroll. Not the original—those were locked in the Hokage's archive—but a perfect copy he'd made using his Sharingan's photographic memory during his own research. He tossed it onto the kotatsu table. It landed with a soft thud between the teacups. "You read the summary. Read the details. The experiments."
Itachi stared at the scroll as if it were a venomous snake. Slowly, he sat back down, his movements stiff. He unsealed the scroll with a touch of chakra and began to read. His eyes, rapidly scanning, widened incrementally. The color drained from his face, leaving him corpse-pale.
Sasuke's voice was a relentless, cold narration. "Section 4-A: Project Bloom. Senju cell infusion into 'volunteer' subjects to stimulate Wood Release. Subjects: twelve identified. All Uchiha civilians detained for 'questioning' about coup sympathies. All between the ages of eight and fourteen. Results: catastrophic cellular mutation. Death within 72 hours. Cause of death listed as 'floral asphyxiation'—their lungs turned into flowering vines. Notes from Danzo: 'Uchiha cellular resistance to Hashirama's cells is unexpectedly high. Disappointing yield. Dispose of remains via incineration. No traces.'"
Itachi's hand flew to his mouth. A dry, heaving sound escaped him.
Sasuke: "Section 7-G: Ocular Maturity Acceleration. Hypothesis: extreme physical and psychological trauma can force premature evolution of the Sharingan in pre-adolescent subjects. Methodology outlined. You'll appreciate its elegance. Sensory deprivation. Controlled torture via genjutmu replaying the deaths of family members—personalized, based on clan records. Chemical stimulants. Subjects: twenty-three Uchiha children. Ages: six months to ten years. The youngest was a week-old infant, Itachi. A baby girl named Naota. Her 'crime' was being born with particularly dense chakra coils."
"Stop," Itachi begged, his voice a strangled gasp. He was shaking violently now, his eyes glued to the scroll but seeing nothing, seeing everything.
Sasuke: "I won't. You need to hear it. You sacrificed our clan for a village that housed a man who was torturing our babies in dungeons to see if he could farm Sharingan! Results: Seven subjects expired during the process. Five developed unstable, single tomoe Sharingan before cerebral hemorrhage. The rest, including infant Naota, were terminated as 'failures.' Danzo's note: 'Uchiha emotional resilience is a hindrance. The curse of hatred is paradoxically a survival mechanism. Further research required on breaking the spirit prior to ocular stimulation.'"
Itachi doubled over, a ragged, awful sound wrenching from his throat. It wasn't a sob. It was the sound of a soul breaking. He clutched the edge of the table, his shoulders trembling.
Sasuke: "Section 11-F: Echo Chambers. Not a metaphor. Sound-proofed, chakra-dampened rooms built beneath the ROOT facility. Purpose: to isolate Uchiha clan members—those suspected of disloyalty, or those with useful knowledge—and subject them to continuous, looping audio recordings. The recordings were edited conversations, fake news, manufactured evidence of the Hokage's plans to exterminate the clan, spliced with the sounds of other Uchiha being 'interrogated.' The goal was to create a feedback loop of paranoia and rage, to artificially inflame coup sentiments, to make the conspiracy seem larger, more desperate, and more real than it actually was. Danzo wasn't just reacting to a coup, brother. He was gardening it. He was pouring fertilizer on every spark of discontent to create the very fire he then claimed needed to be put out."
He took a step closer, his shadow falling over Itachi's crumpled form.
Sasuke: "You spoke of a cancer. Danzo was the cancer. The Council was infected. The 'village' you saved was already rotting from the inside. You didn't cut out a tumor to save a healthy body. You performed surgery on a corpse at the behest of the parasite killing it."
Itachi was silent now, his head bowed. The scroll lay before him, its contents a silent, screaming accusation. When he finally spoke, his voice was hollow, scraped raw.
Itachi: "I… I did not know. The experiments… the children… I knew he was ruthless. I knew he saw us as tools, as threats. But this… this was not in the files I took. This was buried deeper. Sealed by the Yamanaka."
Sasuke: "Of course it was. The truth was too monstrous even for his own records to be fully accessible. But it was there. And you didn't look. You were so convinced of your own tragic burden, of your impossible choice between the clan and the village, that you never stopped to question if the village, as presented to you, was even worth the choice."
He finally walked forward and sat, not on the cushion across from Itachi, but on the floor beside the table, at a right angle, so they were not facing each other as family, but as two points on a bleak continuum. He picked up the untouched cup of tea, looked at its steaming surface, and set it down again without drinking.
Sasuke: "You asked me once what my 'hate' was for. It was for you. For a long time, that was enough. Then I learned about Danzo. And my hate had a new target. Then I read these files. And my hate… it didn't have enough targets. It became something else. A need for justice. Not the kind you dispense in the dark with a blade. The kind that requires sunlight, and evidence, and the complete dismantling of the machine that made our family's slaughter possible."
Itachi slowly, painfully, straightened up. Tears, real and unfeigned, traced clean paths through the dust on his cheeks. His Sharingan had activated without his conscious will, the tomoe spinning slowly in a pool of red. He looked at Sasuke not as an enemy, nor as a little brother to be manipulated, but as a witness. The one person in the world who could truly judge him.
Itachi: "All this time… I believed I was bearing the weight of the world. The necessary evil. The stain on my soul was the price for peace. I wore my crimes as a badge of honor, twisted as it was. I thought I was protecting you from the truth, from the hard choice. But I was protecting you from a lie. I was the blade in the hand of the liar."
He let out a shuddering breath. "You asked how it felt. It felt like dying. Every time. Every single one. I died with Misako. I died with Hiro. I died with Grandmother. I have been a ghost wearing my brother's face ever since, serving the very darkness that engineered my family's destruction. The Akatsuki's goal… Obito's dream… it seemed like a perverse kind of justice. A world without lies, without pain. An illusion to end all the real suffering I helped cause. It was the only path I saw for a ghost."
He met Sasuke's gaze, his Mangekyō pattern—a complex shuriken design—swimming in the red. "But you… you are not a ghost. You are alive. And you are not seeking an illusion. You are seeking… correction."
Sasuke: "Yes."
Itachi: "And our cousin. Indra. He is building a fortress against the darkness. Not an illusion. A reality."
Sasuke: "He is."
A long, heavy silence stretched between them, filled only with the faint pop of the lantern's wick. The confrontation had evaporated, replaced by a terrible, shared understanding of a catastrophe whose true scale was only now becoming clear.
Itachi: "The duel…" He began, then shook his head. "It is pointless. You have already defeated me. Not with power. With truth. My life is yours, Sasuke. To take, or to… command. I have no purpose left. The Akatsuki's goal is a hollow fantasy built on my own despair. Obito is a broken man weaving a tapestry of lies. My only remaining mission was to die by your hand and make you a hero. But you don't need that. You never did."
Sasuke studied his brother's broken form. The all-powerful, terrifying Itachi was gone. In his place was a shattered young man, drowning in regret. The cold fury in Sasuke's heart didn't vanish, but it morphed, crystallizing into something harder, more purposeful.
Sasuke: "I don't want your life as a trophy. And I don't want you as a servant." He leaned forward, his own Sharingan now flashing to life, the tomoe sharp. "I want your testimony. I want your memories. You said I owe you a conversation. Fine. Now, you owe me the truth. The whole truth. Not the edited version you told yourself to survive. Show me. Show me that night. Show me the 'choice' as you lived it. No lies. No justifications. Just the data."
Itachi stared, understanding dawning. Sasuke didn't want to kill the monster. He wanted to dissect it. To understand the precise failure points so they could never be replicated.
After an eternity, Itachi gave a slow, solemn nod. He raised a hand, fingers coming to rest near his own temple.
Itachi: "You will see it as I did. You will feel it as I did. The pressure. The fear. The… monstrous calculus. It is not pleasant. It may break you in a different way."
Sasuke: "I've already been broken. Show me."
Itachi's Mangekyō swirled. The air grew dense with oppressive chakra. "Then look into my eyes, little brother. And see the birth of the ghost."
Sasuke didn't hesitate. He met his brother's gaze, and the world dissolved into a storm of another night, seven years past, seen through the eyes of the prodigy who became a butcher.
The lantern light flickered, casting the long, intertwined shadows of the two brothers—one reliving his greatest sin, the other witnessing it—against the walls of their childhood home.
Outside, on the watchtower, Kakashi's Sharingan throbbed. He couldn't see the genjutsu, but he could feel the profound, psychic upheaval in the chakra emanating from the compound.
Naruto: "Kakashi-sensei… what's happening? It doesn't feel like a fight."
Kakashi: (Voice low, grave) "No. It's something more dangerous. They're not fighting each other, Naruto. They're confronting the past. And when Uchiha confront the past… the future changes."
He wrapped a hand around the headband over his own eye, thinking of Obito, of Rin, of the chain of pain that seemed to bind them all. Perhaps, just perhaps, this night in the ghost town of the Uchiha might finally snap one of the links.
Inside the house, the shared memory began to unspool. The stage was set not for a climax of violence, but for a devastating truth that would redefine both brothers, and shake the foundations of the war to come.
End of Chapter – 92.