Sasuke was running.
The Uchiha compound was silent in the way only dead places were—too clean, too still, a sterile void that felt like it was holding its breath. His sandals slapped against stone—slap-thud, slap-thud—that he remembered by feel alone. The texture of the ground was cold, polished granite; the tatami inside smelled of dry straw and old blood. Every detail was an assault because it wasn't exact.
The bodies were already there. They were always there.
The nightmare never allowed him the dignity of denial. He was small again, his lungs burning with a dry, acidic heat, heart pounding so hard it produced a rhythmic drumming in his inner ear. Above the rooftops, the moon hung low and swollen, a bruised, arterial red.
The door was ahead. The final room.
His hand reached out. No, he thought. Not again.
His nervous system didn't listen. It was a biological loop he couldn't break. The paper door creaked as his fingers touched it—a thin, fragile sound that felt like a needle scratching across his brain. He tried to pull back, but the dream dragged him forward, a heavy, invisible current of memory.
From the other side of the door, the voices rose—warped, layered, and wrong.
"Don't come in here, Sasuke."
Fugaku's voice. It was tight, protective in a way the man had never been allowed to be in life.
"Don't look, Sasuke."
His mother. Her voice was breaking porcelain.
"Don't fight, Sasuke."
The voices began to fuse, bending into a single, dissonant frequency that made his teeth ache. And then
"Don't live, Sasuke."
Itachi's voice slid in like a chilled blade, but it carried Fugaku's authority. A condemnation that felt like hot lead poured into his ears.
The door slid open. The moonlight spilled in, red and thick.
Die, Sasuke. Die, Sasuke.
The words hammered into him until they weren't sound anymore; they were pressurized commands that crushed his ribs.
He screamed—
In the hospital room, Sasuke's eyes snapped open.
He didn't see the ceiling. He saw red. He felt small. Trapped. Pain lanced up his arm where his wrist lay immobilized in a heavy plaster cast, the injury throbbing in time with his frantic heart.
The helplessness fed the heat.
Blue sparks crackled violently across his uninjured hand—crackle-snap—as instinct reached for the only tool it knew.
Fight.
Lightning screamed into existence, a jagged white-blue static that sounded like a thousand birds tearing their throats out at once. The bedsheets began to smoke. The scent of ionized air and charred cotton flooded the room.
Sasuke sat upright, eyes wide and bloodshot, the Chidori screaming in his palm as the nightmare tried to finish what memory had started.
Might Gai was already moving.
The chakra spike hit his senses like a physical punch to the chest. He didn't slow for the door; he burst through it in a blur of green, his sandals barely touching the linoleum.
The room was lit by a violent, strobe-like glare.
Gai took it in instantly. Sasuke—awake but not awake. Night terror. Chakra spiraling out of control. One wrong discharge and the boy would blow a hole through the hospital's structural foundation.
He couldn't grab the arm. The lightning would conduct through his own nervous system.
Gai stepped into the arc. He formed a single, stiff index finger, his posture suddenly stripped of all its usual bombast.
A One-Finger Vacuum Strike.
His finger drove into Sasuke's solar plexus with a muted, hollow thud.
The impact shattered the chakra flow at the source. The lightning sputtered and died mid-scream, leaving only a wispy trail of smoke and the sharp bite of burned fabric.
Sasuke gasped, his eyes rolling back as the biological tax of the Chidori—telomere drain and organ heat—claimed him. He fell back against the pillows, unconscious before his head hit the linen.
Gai was there to catch him, easing him down with hands that were suddenly careful, gentle. He pressed two fingers to the boy's neck.
Fast pulse. Steady. Alive.
Gai adjusted the blanket, his jaw tightening. "Rest now, youth," he murmured. "The nightmare is over."
For tonight, he didn't add.
As Gai stepped back into the hallway, a sharp sound cut through the sterile quiet. A startled, high-pitched shriek.
Gai pivoted, his muscles coiling. He saw Hinata Hyūga standing halfway down the corridor.
She wasn't in a combat stance. She looked lost, her eyes unfocused, her arms moving in strange, half-formed arcs as if she were trying to push away a wall of fog. She was muttering, her breathing shallow and uneven.
She turned abruptly and wandered toward the stairwell, her steps asymmetric and heavy, like someone walking through a dream that refused to let go.
"…Girls, right?" Gai muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.
"Poor girl looks like she's never seen a talking dog before."
Gai turned. Pakkun sat on the linoleum, his tail giving a tired little wag. The pug was posted outside the room where Kakashi lay—broken by a world he couldn't outrun.
Pakkun's paw pads made a soft, leathery scuff as Gai approached. The dog smelled of stale tobacco and wet fur.
"Pakkun," Gai said, nodding. "How is he?"
Pakkun's face scrunched. "Alive. Breathing is steady. But the mind..." He didn't finish. He didn't have to.
Gai exhaled—a heavy, aged breath that lacked his usual fire.
Tsukuyomi.
It was a biological rewiring of the soul.
Gai leaned back against the wall, the cool surface pressing into his shoulders. He looked down the hall—toward Lee's room, where his student lay in a chrysalis of bandages, then back at Sasuke's door.
The Third Hokage was dead. Itachi Uchiha had walked through the village walls like they were made of bruised glass. Now, every door needed a guard.
"My nose is better than your eyes in the dark, Gai," Pakkun said gently. "Get some rest. I'll watch the kids."
Gai hesitated, then nodded. He forced a low-energy version of his usual grin. "I leave them in your capable paws."
Pakkun snorted. "Get out of here."
Gai turned and walked away, the low hum of the hospital lights following him. Behind him, the pug settled in—alert, unmoving, guarding the broken remains of Team Seven.
Because the echo in the bone never really stopped. It just waited for the silence to return.