Work Text:
Sasuke gasps, shocked as Zabuza calls out for Sharingan Kakashi.
The skin at the back of his neck prickles.
Despite the warning, he is even more shocked when sensei pulls up his headband revealing a spinning eye.
Which is unfair because Sasuke is one of the last Uchiha left and he doesn’t even have his sharingan yet.
Honestly, Sasuke hadn’t thought much about the fact that you could see less than a quarter of Kakashi-sensei's face. At first, he had figured he was probably horribly disfigured.
All it took was one wrong fireball jutsu, too much backlash, and your face was gone-ish. Sasuke had seen it happen it just kind of dripped off. Tou-san always said he was so untalented he was liable to burn his face off.
After getting to know Kakashi, Sasuke thought that he was such a reclusive asshole he would cover his face most of the time, like a fucking weirdo.
Sasuke should've guessed. Wearing a mask all the time like that wasn't normal cryptic shinobi bullshit, if anything, it made Kakashi more recognizable.
Sasuke feels the familiar itch start-up. His skin is prickling like there are hundreds of eyes on him. Like Itachi is watching him.
How does Kakashi have a sharingan?
Whose eye did he rip out?
Was he put on this team, as a warning? Was Kakashi’s eye supposed to signal to him what would happen if he stepped out of line?
It’s a familiar thought pattern. The anxiety that someone is going to rip his eyes out.
When he had checked out books on eye removal his spy Yamanaka had told him he was being paranoid and he was safe. It was just like a Yamanaka to lie so blatantly to his face, like that, in a cruel power play.
In the beginning, he thought that Itachi left him alive as spare body parts. But then his spy ANBU guard had assured him that if Itachi needed more eyes, he could make more (gross) or he would have left someone more competent behind.
Sasuke had to agree with that last point. Every person in the Uchiha compound looked at him with pity, like he was a three-legged dog.
Itachi wouldn’t leave someone so weak as his pair of backup eyes.
Sasuke’s eyes were gonna be stolen by someone else by the time Itachi wanted them.
Should he kill Kakashi? It was his right, he was an eye thief.
Sasuke remembers bedtime stories of how eye thieves were burnt alive.
Kaa-san would look at him meaningfully and explain an Uchiha, whose eyes were stolen, death was meaningless. That they wouldn’t be welcome in the purelands so he should just quit school stay in the compound and get married to a strong women. That way he wouldn’t disgrace himself, the clan, and their family–including all their ancestors.
Itachi always used to glare at her when she said that. Looking back Sasuke wonders how he missed the signs of hate. His own brother didn’t want him to go to the purelands.
As they carry Kakashi back to Tazuna’s house Sasuke debates the merits of slitting Kakashi's throat. He will not have an opportunity like this again.
What if Naruto and Sakura find out?
Naruto would rat him out. The dobe was practically a walking advertisement for Konoha. The idiot would probably ask if catching ‘Teme’ killing sensei was grounds for promotion to Hokage.
Sasuke was stronger than Naruto. He could just beat him if it came to a fight.
But the dobe could be weirdly strong sometimes. Once during a spar, Naruto had been so angry and Sasuke swears his eyes flashed red, for a second. Dobe then beat the shit out of him.
It’s like he was hiding all this power. Was pretending to be weak and laughing at him.
Maybe Sakura would go for it. She was all about using people to advance her status. (Killing the Copy-nin could get them a position in another Village.) Like the way she befriended Ino and threw her away, to start following Sasuke around so she could be the wife of a clan head.
She had been so diligent in stalking him, Sasuke thought she’d been another spy.
There was something about her that freaked him out. All her polite niceties coupled with her violent outbursts, almost like she had two personalities. Like she was liable to just snap one day and pull an Itachi.
Sasuke twitches a little, the itch growing stronger.
He was being paranoid. Sakura is just a social climber and Naruto is just a loud-mouthed idiot.
Sasuke decides killing Kakashi is something a paranoid crazy Uchiha might do.
Kakashi had risked his life to save them or maybe it was all a complex manipulation to test loyalty…
The clan had always said, all the talk about them being crazy was just anti-Uchiha propaganda but then Itachi went and killed them all. So what did they know?
Whoever Kakashi had killed was probably crazy.
Besides, what if Sasuke needs an eye in the future.