5Summary: Sasuke is haunted, still, by his memories.
"Because the mansion's not a house but a tomb,
He's always choking from the stench and the fumes…"
My Chemical Romance, To the End
Once a month, Sasuke wakes up early and dresses in white. As the sun is reborn and the dawn awakens, a young boy pulls open the doors to his worst memories, his festering wounds.
It can't be healthy, this ritual of his, Sasuke muses with vague distraction as he steps inside the crumbling ruins that was once the glorious Uchiha complex. And it probably isn't, but somehow he can't quite bring himself to care.
Catharsis. The boy bares his teeth, surveying the proud wreckage. The cleanup squad, on the Hokage's orders, did what they could, but the bloodstained walls and mangled corpses in Sasuke's mind's eye cannot be erased with any amount of soap and water.
He was forced to grow up so fast, too fast for any sort of the stability he needed as a suffocating man to oxygen.
And one of the only two survivors of the Uchiha Massacre throws his head back and laughs, a high, hysterical, unbalanced sound that echoes in the emptiness of the room, the halls, the world. His world.
He laughs, because if he doesn't he'll have to cry, and Uchihas don't cry.
No, Uchihas don't cry.
So twelve-year-old Sasuke revisits a history no child should ever have to be subjected to, and he dies a little more, and then he changes into his usual attire again.
He is to be assigned to Sharingan Kakashi's Team Seven that day, and if anyone asks him about the slight wetness on his cheeks, he will not answer.
Because he is an Uchiha, and Uchihas—as everyone knows—don't cry.