Chapter 543: The Objective Truth
"...That's most of it."
Adult Naruto's voice was very calm against the constant roar of the falls, but beneath the calm was a weight that was impossible to ignore.
Every word had gone into young Sasuke like a nail.
"He wanted to protect you -- I've never denied that. But his hands are stained with far too much blood for any reason to wash them clean. A reason called 'protecting my brother' doesn't make those deaths less real."
"I cannot accept the path Itachi chose."
Young Sasuke had interrupted many times during the telling.
Each interruption had been furious and barely coherent -- the kind of outburst that comes from someone trying to stop the words before they finish landing.
He had wanted to silence adult Naruto. Had wanted to throw himself at this person and rip apart everything being said. Had wanted his fists to drown out the words that were tearing something open inside him.
Each time, adult Naruto had subdued him with one hand.
A careless extension of the arm. A grip that allowed no resistance. The physical gap between them was so absolute that after the fury passed, all young Sasuke had left was a bone-deep sense of powerlessness.
Now he stood where he had been, no longer moving.
Those eyes that had burned with revenge were hollow now, the pupils holding nothing, focused on nothing.
"No... this can't be right..." He was muttering to himself, barely above a whisper.
"You're lying..."
"You... you don't have any proof... it's all made up... you invented all of it..."
"Evidence isn't the problem."
Adult Naruto gave him no gap to retreat into, no ledge to catch himself on.
"Right now I could take you directly to Itachi and have him verify it face to face. Finding him from here takes me a moment. And your brother is not my match -- in front of me, he has no room to lie or resist."
Young Sasuke's pupils contracted sharply.
"Or we could go and ask the Third Hokage. He wasn't involved in every part of it, but he knows far more than you think he does."
Adult Naruto continued, leaving young Sasuke nowhere to turn.
"Or I can take you directly to Shimura Danzo and let him tell you in his own words -- exactly what happened, what role Itachi played in it, and what those so-called conditions actually were."
He stopped.
He looked at young Sasuke's face, which had gone completely without color.
"Whatever evidence you need, I can produce it. Whatever you want to see, whatever you want to hear -- I can show you every corner of this truth, without decoration, without concealment."
Young Sasuke bit down on his own lip.
Hard enough that his teeth sank into the flesh. Hard enough that thin lines of blood welled up and slid slowly down the corner of his mouth.
He didn't feel it.
Or rather -- against what was churning through him right now, that particular pain wasn't something worth registering.
When the first wave of denial finally passed, when the final stubborn wall he had been holding up inside himself finally cracked -- the real grief began surfacing.
"This is... protection?"
His voice was shaking. "Even if I ended up completely alone at the end of it... this counts as protection?"
The redness was creeping into his eyes. Something warm was building in them.
"Why..."
His voice fractured.
"Why did Mom have to... what did she do wrong? Why did he kill her too... she didn't do anything wrong -- what did she deserve to die for?!"
Adult Naruto's account had been objective.
He hadn't beautified anything. He hadn't exaggerated the tragedy for effect.
He had only taken the things that had been covered and distorted, and placed them in front of young Sasuke one by one as they actually were.
Everything that Danzo, that Obito, that the phrase "necessary sacrifice" had wrapped in the language of justification and necessity -- in a straightforward telling, those things became what they had always been: killings. Plainly real, impossible to argue away, each one leaving blood on the hands of the person who ordered it.
That blood kept flowing. It kept staining the shell called "protection."
Until the shell could no longer contain what was underneath. Until it shattered, and the truth beneath it lay exposed.
"I can't accept this -- I refuse --!"
Young Sasuke's voice turned sharp and broken. "Itachi, he --!"
He raised his head. His eyes were a horrifying network of red, tears fighting to stay behind his lids through sheer stubbornness.
"He's just a madman!"
"A madman?"
Adult Naruto said it softly, without agreeing or disagreeing. "I think his environment had a great deal to do with it."
He paused, letting his gaze fall to the enormous statue below them -- Uchiha Madara, stone face stern against the falling water.
"Your brother was forced onto battlefields at three years old. He witnessed death more times than most people see in a lifetime. He has seen more corpses than there were living people his own age around him. Someone who grows up like that -- they stop measuring the weight of a life the same way."
Young Sasuke was somewhere far away from this conversation for a moment.
"So my life... was it all planned for me too?!"
His voice carried the tremor of something close to collapse. "In Itachi's plan... my future was already...?"
The sound went lower. And lower. "...Was I really going to...?"
"Yes."
Adult Naruto's voice cut cleanly through young Sasuke's last fragment of doubt. "Your brother decided the direction of your entire life. What you should do at each age. Who you should hate. Where you should end up."
He didn't stop there.
"He even prepared to use Kotoamatsukami -- a technique that rewrites a person's will without them ever knowing -- to force you back to Konoha if necessary. To make sure you walked the track he had laid out for you."
"Ugh --"
Young Sasuke's hand flew to his mouth.
A wave of nausea surged from somewhere deep in his stomach, crashing upward -- the physical urgency of something that needed to come out.
To protect him, he was willing to overwrite his will entirely?
Then was he... had he ever been... himself?
Those memories. Those feelings. That hatred, burning in him through every day and every night -- if all of it had been arranged, planned, engineered by someone else --
What was Uchiha Sasuke?
Itachi's little brother? Or a puppet set in motion by someone else's design?
Or --
He stood there, his young face filled with a kind of pain and confusion he had never worn before. The tears broke free at last, running silently down his pale cheeks.
But then --
Should he hate Itachi?
Itachi did save him. That much was real.
Should he forgive Itachi?
But what about the dead? What about the Uchiha civilians -- the ones who hadn't understood, the children, the ordinary people who had simply been living their lives without doing anything wrong? What crime did they commit? Why should they have died for the reason of "protecting Sasuke"?
Should he avenge them by killing Itachi?
That would mean killing the only living family he had left. Killing the person who had, in whatever twisted way, tried to protect him.
Killing his brother.
Should he let everything go?
How could he let it go. He had seen it. He could never forget it.
That night. The figures collapsed in pools of blood. His father and mother, lying in the red. The bodies of his clan spread across the ground. And at the center of all of it -- that figure, watching him with eyes so cold they didn't seem to belong to a person --
His brother.
"...I..."
Young Sasuke's voice dropped until it was almost inaudible. "What am I supposed to do..."
He was murmuring it helplessly, and the eyes swimming with tears held nothing now but boundless confusion and pain.