Chapter Text
It was a fairly easy mission, in a small eccentric town alongside the Land of Fire’s seaside border.
They were there on a C-rank, a maintenance job where they were tasked with clearing out and rebuilding an old boat warehouse. It took four days, and while it was a lot of physical labor, it was hardly challenging, and their client was an old man who was very kind but very chatty-- so needless to say Sasuke was glad when they finally finished up.
On the morning they were scheduled to depart, Kakashi made some comment about feeling bad (he didn’t) that the three of them had worked so hard all week, and granted them an extra hour to explore before they would depart. Sasuke stifled a groan. But Naruto had bounced on his toes and taken off immediately, declaring he was going to search the seashore for crabs, and disappeared from earshot before Sasuke could argue against it.
“Go have fun, kids,” Kakashi said, waving them off, his face buried in his book.
Sakura grumbled under her breath as she watched Naruto scramble into the distance. “I hope the sea carries him away.”
“I’m not saving him this time,” Sasuke muttered.
“Be nice,” said Kakashi, unhelpfully.
Sasuke exhaled, turning to stalk off with his hands in his pockets. He really had no interest in being there for any longer than he had to. Sakura pattered after him, her pink hair bouncing around her shoulders as she looked at the scenery surrounding them. “What do you wanna do, Sasuke?” she asked, and the implication that he wanted to do something with her made him irritable.
“What I want to do is go home, but apparently that’s not an option right now.”
Sakura giggled, even though it wasn’t funny. “Well, it’s just an hour.” Her voice picked up a cheery tone. “Come on, it’ll be fun. Let’s just hang out without having to worry about anything for a while.”
Sasuke wondered what it was like to have nothing to worry about. It certainly wasn’t in his near future. But seeing no point in arguing, he made a small hum of acceptance and allowed her to lead him back towards the center of town.
“Did you see the market stands when we first got here?” she asked, a light skip in her step. “They had all kinds of weird stuff out. I think I saw someone selling enchanted beads. I doubt they’re real, but I kind of want to take a look at them anyway. Want to come with me?”
Sasuke kicked at a rock on the ground. “No, not really.” Then when her expression turned crestfallen, he added, “...but I have nothing else to do, so...”
Immediately brightening, she took hold of his wrist and practically pulled him along. “It’s not far. You’ll like it, I promise!”
She was right about it not being far. She was not right, however, about him liking it.
He could care less about what the street vendors had to offer. While she excitedly pointed out the stand with the beads, run by a middle-aged woman who appeared to be wearing an actual bird’s nest on her head, he glanced around just to see if any of the stands had something interesting. Swords, for example-- that was one thing he wouldn’t really mind shopping for. But upon his sullen observation, none of the vendors seemed to carry any sort of ninja tools whatsoever.
Then something else caught Sasuke’s eye.
At the very end of the lineup, there appeared to be a woman sitting down on a mat. She wasn’t at a stand like the others, and people seemed to be walking past her like she was filth on the street. At first, Sasuke thought she might be a beggar, but upon closer inspection there were wares arranged on the mat in front of her. She was a vendor too-- maybe a poorer one, but a vendor nonetheless.
“Sakura,” he said, pinching her sleeve to get her attention, “I’m going to go over there for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
“Okay,” she responded, half-distracted by her search through the beads. “Let me know if you find anything cool.”
Sasuke made his way over to the woman on the mat. As he came closer, he realized the items she was selling were all scrolls.
They looked lackluster, to be honest. However, she was the most interestingly dressed person he’d seen all day— her robes had an insignia on them, a small one embroidered on the front and on the cuffs of her sleeves. It looked like a clan symbol. Her gray hair was cropped short on the sides but long in the center, where it was pulled back at the base of her neck with a clip. And her hands and ankles were wrapped-- which suggested she might have been a shinobi, whether currently or in the past. Given her state, Sasuke leaned towards the latter.
Sasuke was uninterested in the scrolls she was selling, but out of a fleeting sense of obligation he reached into his coin pouch and pulled out a couple hundred yen to give to her.
She perked up in sudden interest when he approached. “Oh! Which scroll would you like, dear?”
Sasuke handed her the coins. “I don’t need one,” he said. “Just take it.”
“No, no, no!” The woman shook her head, her beaded earrings clanking with the motion. “You get a scroll for your money, dear. Which one would you like?”
Sighing, Sasuke resigned himself to the situation. He crouched down to get a better look at his options. They all looked different-- no two scrolls had the same seal or paper tone. “What kind of scrolls are they?”
“They’re all jutsu scrolls I collected on my adventures.” The woman said this with a glow of pride in her voice.
“Jutsu scrolls, huh?” Sasuke made no effort to cover up the lack of belief in his voice. He picked one up and weighed it in his hands, then began to undo the string around it to take a look inside.
“No!” The woman darted her hand out suddenly to stop him. "No opening until you purchase.”
That firmly convinced him this was a scam, but Sasuke was planning to give the woman money anyway, so it hardly mattered. He glanced over the scrolls. There were eleven in total, all of different sizes and edging colors. It was hard to guess what any one of them might do, and highly unlikely that they would turn out to be anything special.
One of them, a medium-sized scroll with a uniquely complex orange seal, caught his eye. The paper was thin and cheap-looking and the wax used to make the seal was hardly extravagant, but the design intrigued him: it was like some kind of abstractly rendered serpent. “Okay. I’ll take this one.”
“Wonderful!” The woman clapped her hands together. “Enjoy it, dear. And be safe--don’t use it recklessly.”
The advice felt ironic coming from a woman selling completely unidentified scrolls to random children. Still, he nodded and offered a tight smile in response. “Thanks.”
“Have a lovely day!”
Sasuke made a tch sound under his breath as he walked away. He briefly considered tossing the scroll in the trash can by one of the other stands, but had enough decency to decide that would be rude. Instead, as he walked back over to Sakura, he more closely examined the seal design. It was about the size of a 100 yen coin and seemed to have been carefully pressed, though the faint imperfections in it suggested the stamp hadn’t been professionally carved.
When he arrived at Sakura’s side, she eagerly thrust a small paper bag in front of his face. “Check it out!” she chirped, and the bag clacked as she shook it. “I got a dozen of them. They’re a little ugly, but I guess it-- woah, wait, what’s that?” She lowered the bag, her focus completely distracted to the scroll in Sasuke’s hands.
“The woman over there made me buy a scroll from her.”
“Oooh. What kind of scroll?”
“She didn’t tell me.”
“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” She positioned herself right beside him so she could hover over his shoulder.
“It’s probably fake.”
“I still want to see.”
Sasuke sighed, only halfway annoyed. There was a genuine node of curiosity biting away at his brain, so he extended a finger and carefully peeled the wax seal back with his nail.
He unrolled it. Sakura leaned in.
The boldest thing the scroll displayed was a large, highly intricate jutsu seal that took up almost all of the page.
“Woah,” Sakura said, reaching forward to pull on the paper so she could get a better look. “It’s so complex.”
She was right. The seal looked far too detailed to be fake-- Sasuke didn’t know much about jutsu seals beyond the basics, but he’d never seen a diagram that looked quite like this one.
On the side, there was a string of kanji in incredibly fine print. He brought the scroll up close to his face to read it.
“‘The caster of this jutsu will receive the single greatest desire of their heart,’” he narrated.
Sakura failed to stifle a giggle. “That’s so cute! Well, if you don’t want to use it, I will.”
Sasuke hummed in response, the closest he would get to a laugh. He re-rolled the scroll closed and pressed the wax seal down. Then he handed it to Sakura and asked her to put it in his backpack. She kindly complied.
“I know it’s probably fake, but you should ask Kakashi-Sensei about that jutsu seal,” she said as she clipped his backpack shut.
For the rest of the hour, Sasuke was stuck inside his mind.
He thought and thought and thought. The seal was probably fake. He wasn’t dumb enough to truly believe it could work. ‘ The greatest desire of their heart’. It was a sad advertising ploy, clearly targeted at gullible, brainless young shinobi who were easily enticed by pretty words. Sasuke was not one of those people. He was not, no matter how much the phrase admittedly made his blood rush.
The greatest desire of his heart. He knew what it was beyond the shadow of a doubt. It made his fingers tremble to think about it, clutching into tighter fists at his sides, the pricking sensation of his nails digging into his palm the only outlet for the torrent of rage buzzing through him.
The image he pictured was his brother’s dead body at his feet.
It was a familiar thought. Something he had both daydreams and nightmares about. The one thing that would finally allow him to sleep at night, allow him to calm down, allow this weight of rage and responsibility to lift from his shoulders after the five years he’d been carrying it.
Deep breaths. He steadied himself.
The scroll was fake. Or if not fake, it was a trick, or at the very least falsely advertised. There was no jutsu that could bring him what he wanted. Nothing could give him that except his own hard work and dedication. He reminded himself of that over and over, willing his mind to stop thinking about it.
Eventually, their hour drew to a close, and Sasuke and Sakura met up with Kakashi in the plaza.
“Did you two have fun?” Kakashi said, standing up from the bench he had been sitting on.
“Yep!” Sakura chirped. She showed Kakashi her paper bag of beads. “Sasuke and I went to the marketplace. I bought these and he bought a cool-looking jutsu scroll.”
“Oh?” said Kakashi, raising his visible eyebrow. “A jutsu scroll, huh? I didn’t think there were any shinobi in this town.”
“There aren’t,” Sasuke said, an irritable pinch in his voice. For some reason, Sakura telling Kakashi about the scroll annoyed him. “Not active ones, anyway.”
Just then, a piercing yell split through the air, interrupting the conversation.
Naruto barreled to a halt once he reached them, shaking his hand wildly. It took Sasuke a moment to realize there was a crab stuck on his finger, pinching through the skin.
“Bastard!” he cried out, his voice cracking shrill. “Get off me!”
“Hey--” Kakashi began.
“Naruto!” Sakura interjected, stamping in front of him and snatching his wrist. She pried the crab off his finger and he howled in pain. Clutching the very upset crab in one hand, she grabbed hold of Naruto’s ear and yanked on it with the other. “Stupid! You’re such an idiot!”
Sasuke sighed for a long time. He caught Kakashi’s eye and the two exchanged a look-- which almost inspired a notion of amusement in him. Almost.
As his two teammates calmed down, he glanced at the road stretching out before them, eager to get going. It was a five-hour walk back to Konoha, and Sasuke looked forward to shutting himself away in his room again as soon as possible.
Kakashi seemed to notice this and finally closed his book, shoving it into his backpack. “All right, team. Let’s head out.” He said this in the same deadpan voice he typically used with them.
Kakashi was an unsurprisingly difficult man to read, and that went beyond the fact that three quarters of his face were covered. Sasuke could tell there was far more to him than what he showed his students, but it didn’t seem like he was a shell easily cracked, and frankly Sasuke had more important things to think about so he didn’t pay it much mind. Kakashi was an acceptable sensei and he was friendly when he needed to be. Sasuke didn’t like to complain.
He had to squash the voice in the back of his head that said Father doesn’t like it when you complain, because even after five years, he still had the nagging desire to be good enough for his parents.
“So, Sasuke,” Kakashi said, pulling him out of his thought spiral. “Let’s see that scroll.”
“What scroll?” Naruto exclaimed, attention immediately drawn over to the conversation.
Sasuke sighed and rolled his eyes, but opened his backpack and pulled out the scroll anyway. He handed it to Kakashi, who opened it as he walked. Naruto bounced up to look at it over Kakashi’s arm.
“We were wondering about that jutsu seal,” Sakura spoke up, “whether it’s real or not.”
Kakashi made a thoughtful noise as he looked at the diagram. “It seems to be a summoning symbol,” he said. “Where did you get this?”
“An old woman made me buy it off her. She had eleven of them, I chose that one randomly.”
Kakashi shook his head in mock disappointment. “Honestly Sasuke, I thought you’d be the last one of my students to submit to sales pressure.”
Sasuke’s cheeks prickled as Sakura and Naruto shared a laugh. “I wasn’t pressured. I was going to give her money anyway, and she insisted I take one in return.”
“You were going to give her money? An act of kindness, from you?”
“Wow Sasuke, I didn’t realize you had a heart,” Naruto chirped, which prompted another giggle from Sakura, and a huff of amusement from Kakashi.
“Whatever.” Sasuke actually felt himself blushing. “It’s not a big deal.”
Kakashi didn’t respond to that, going back to glancing over the scroll. “The caster’s greatest desire, huh? Interesting.” He said this like he knew exactly what Sasuke was thinking about. “It definitely seems to be a real summoning seal. I doubt it’ll do what it says it will, though. Probably safest just to leave it alone.” He closed the scroll, handing it back to Sasuke. “You don’t strike me as the type to keep random useless trinkets, so I trust you’ll deal with it responsibly.”
Sasuke tucked the scroll back into his backpack, answering Kakashi with a careless hum. Kakashi quirked his eyebrow at him, as if scanning his face for a further reaction, but received nothing of the sort.
They did not discuss the topic any further, and Sasuke was grateful for it.
They reached the village gates just before sunset, when the blue sky became tinged with a subtle deepness and the sun cast long shadows behind them as they walked.
Once they delivered the mission report, Kakashi dismissed them, and Sasuke wasted no time in leaping back to his apartment and finding his way to the shower.
He allowed the mission’s tension to melt off his shoulders under the hot water. The whole time, he stared at the wall, and his thoughts traveled back to the scroll.
The greatest desire of your heart.
He had to close his eyes. He forced himself to breathe deeply again. Shove down thoughts of blood on his hands, Itachi’s body broken and lifeless in front of him, repaying all the pain and horror he caused their family, taking back what he took from them--
His hands were shaking again.
He closed them into fists, resting his forehead against the wall.
There, he just let the warm water beat down on him, willing it to wash away his thoughts.
When he sat down on his bed in fresh clothes, he was still shaking.
He held the scroll, staring down at the complex ink diagram and the statement on the side. He unrolled it further and found there was a short list of instructions along with it.
It would be so easy.
Sure, it was probably fake. Or a trick. It could be any of numerous possibilities besides what it said it was. But Sasuke could not stop thinking about it.
His greatest desire. Itachi’s dead body at his feet. If it would be that, excellent-- his brother didn’t deserve a glorious death anyway. That, or it could make him strong enough to kill Itachi, and then he wouldn’t have to waste any more time before going out to end him. One or the other. Either way, he’d end up standing over his brother’s corpse and he would finally be able to let go.
That possibility was resting in his shaking hands.
Where was the harm in trying?
A half hour later, Sasuke was perched at an apartment window.
He knocked, and then a very surprised Naruto flung open the glass pane and pointed accusingly at him. “What are YOU doing here? Spying on me, bastard?!”
Sasuke simply leaned in, glancing judgmentally around his friend’s messy room. “You wish you were that important,” he said. Then he offered Naruto his hand. “Come with me.”
Naruto’s face instantly changed, from suspicious irritation to genuine curiosity. He took Sasuke’s hand. “Where are we going?”
“Remember that jutsu scroll I got today?”
Naruto nodded-- then his eyes widened and a smile split across his face. “We’re gonna test it?! Even though Kakashi-Sensei told you not to?”
“Quiet down, idiot!” Sasuke hissed. “Do you want the whole village to know?”
Naruto stopped talking, but bounced on his toes and stifled an excited giggle. He allowed Sasuke to pull him out of the window and together they jumped down to the lower rooftop.
“We’re getting Sakura too,” Sasuke informed him.
Naruto pumped his fists. “All right!”
With that, they began to leap and run their way to her house, which was located in a residential sub-section of the village rather than towards the middle like Naruto’s apartment building was.
Sasuke had given it some thought and decided that in case the scroll did turn out to be a trick, it would be best to have backup to help him contain the issue. He figured the worst case scenario would be that the scroll summoned enemy ninja or a similar threat-- in which case it was likely he’d need help to take care of it without anyone finding out. So he picked the two people he currently trusted most.
When they arrived at her bedroom window, Naruto hesitated and fell back, murmuring something about not wanting to seem creepy. Sasuke just shrugged and knocked on the window himself-- causing Sakura to jolt from where she was lying on her bed, her head whipping around to face the source of the noise. When she saw Sasuke, the fear melted off her face and was replaced by confusion as she walked to the window and opened it up for him. “What is it?” she asked, and Sasuke extended his hand to her. She blinked down at it, momentarily stunned.
“Come with us,” he said, “we’re going to test the scroll I bought today.”
Sakura was used to playing the role of a respectful and responsible kunoichi, but Sasuke knew she had an affinity for mischief deep down. She couldn’t hide her excited smile as she took his hand and climbed out of her bedroom window. “Well, all right, but it has to be fast. I don’t want my parents to know I’m sneaking out.”
Naruto giggled again as they leapt away, waving his hands in front of his face. “This is gonna be so great. We’ll get to see Sasuke’s deepest desire!”
Sakura laughed lightly too. “I wonder what it is?”
Sasuke felt instinctive embarrassment creep into his cheeks as his friends made fun of him, but shut it down immediately by reminding himself of the real nature of the situation. “This isn’t a game,” he said. “If this thing actually summons my greatest desire, you two aren’t going to like it.”
That silenced the both of them. A tense awkwardness took hold of the air as they seemed to realize what Sasuke meant-- if only vaguely, as he hadn’t ever talked about his past with them in detail. They knew enough to draw a correct conclusion. Even Naruto knew better than to make jokes after that.
Instead, Sakura tentatively asked, “Where are we going, Sasuke?”
“Somewhere we won’t be found. And where we can contain it if the scroll turns out to be malicious.”
He led them to the forest on the outskirts of the abandoned Uchiha compound.
Sasuke hadn't been there in several years. He made a point to take a route around the compound rather than through it, as he didn’t want to be forced to lay eyes on his childhood home. In fact, he’d rather not set foot in the area at all, but the Uchiha’s forest grounds were undeniably the best possible place for something like this. No one lived around there anymore-- no one ever came near it except for the night watch guards.
Plus, it would be a fitting place for Itachi to be cut down. He could bleed into the same ground he slaughtered his family on.
He wondered briefly if his clansmen would be grateful.
His parents.
Sasuke shook his head. He couldn’t afford to dwell on that now. All that mattered was focusing on this self-imposed mission, staying alert just in case something went wrong. Afterwards he could think about the technicalities of it.
As the trio descended into the trees, the person following them did the same.
***
Kakashi landed silently on a tree branch and watched as his three students bickered about where to best launch their jutsu seal trial.
A small smile played on his lips underneath the mask. He rested his chin on his hand, looking forward to seeing how this might play out. Technically, he was here to make an assessment of their teamwork ability and problem solving skills-- but Kakashi was mainly in it for the fun of witnessing his kids make a stupid decision.
Even still, if anything bad happened, he had a decent amount of faith that they would figure it out together. In the marginal chance that they couldn’t, he would intervene. Everything would be fine.
The three of them calmed down and Sasuke began to read the instructions on the scroll out loud. Kakashi had gone over an introduction to summoning seals with them before, so they had a basic idea of what to do. The orange light of the sunset bled through the trees and cast dappled shadows over them. It was a pretty picture, honestly. Kakashi felt a small bud of affection for the three of them. The way Sasuke and Naruto argued and Sakura acted as the voice of reason-- it was like taking a look into his own past.
Eventually, they all quieted down and Sasuke crouched to the ground, laying the scroll out in front of him. Sakura and Naruto gathered close behind. He formed a series of hand signs, raised his finger to his mouth-- biting it-- then smeared the blood over the symbol.
In an instant, there was a bright blue flash, Sasuke was blown backwards, and a person appeared in the scroll’s place.
Sasuke woke up to hands clutching hard into his arms. He blinked, then blinked some more, his head and body aching with painful exhaustion.
“Sasuke.” He heard Sakura’s voice above him, a breathless whisper.
With a jolt, he fully remembered where he was and what happened.
The scroll. He’d used it.
He must have been knocked unconscious. How could it have--
When he sat up, his eyes slowly adjusted to what was in front of him. A person. A fully formed, dark-haired person, very much not dead, sitting on their knees on top of the scroll-- and Sasuke scrambled backwards into the bodies of Naruto and Sakura, terrified for a moment that it summoned Itachi alive, but why--
And then the blurriness fully cleared.
And then he realized.
Wide black eyes met his own. A soft, confused face, one that he recognized all too well, one that had been ripped right out of his only good childhood memories.
In a strangled voice, he spoke the first word that came to mind: “Mom?”