Sasuke ran toward the island with the single heat in him that had been kept alive by hunger for vengeance. He had rehearsed the moment in a thousand ways on the road: the blade of his purpose flashing, the world reduced to the single point of destroying the heart that smiled while his shadow ate him. He had not rehearsed how fast his anger would be used against him as a blunt instrument; he had not rehearsed being made small.
He expected battle. What he found first was a voice, calm and disarmingly casual.
"Sasuke, wait," Naruto called after him from the pier, palms open as if stopping a child. The wind took his words and carried them like simple salt across the water. "I've got a better idea."
Sasuke ground to a halt, breathing as if he'd run from the inside out. His Sharingan hovered behind his eyes, ready. "Better for whom?" he snarled.
"For both of us," Naruto answered. "Two people. If you can beat them, you'll have the right to do as you wish." He let the pause hang where it would sting. "Choose the fury you'll be allowed."
Sasuke blinked. He had expected a wall of defenders, a dozen wardens to stall him, to give him the excuse to spill blood. Two people? He almost laughed; the laugh curdled into a dangerous little smirk. "Fine. Send them," he said. A part of him wanted to think this a jest—Naruto baiting him, tricking him. If it was a trick, then destroy the trick.
From the shadows the island's guardians unfolded like a slow breath. The shapes were not the hulking Bijū-forms he'd imagined but steady, human silhouettes stepping forward until the morning light revealed faces his memory cracked open like a door: Mikoto and Fugaku.
Sasuke's breath left him in a small, animal sound.
Itachi, standing a little distance away, felt it too—an old, private chord striking between brothers and memory. He did not move. He watched.
Mikoto and Fugaku did not look like ragged shadows of the dead. They had the grace of the remembered. Their eyes—Uchiha eyes—glowed with the soft, terrible light of memories who had been given form to speak and, now, to judge. As Sasuke watched, something older than rivalry shifted under his ribs: the terrible recognition that the world had given his elders another authority he could not cut with knives.
Naruto's voice was quiet. "I want you to understand what you tried to make me into. If you leave this island unchanged—if you win by breaking our people—then we will all be less. But I also owe those who came home a chance to speak. You said you wanted to test me. Fight the way you always have. Fight me if you must. But if your will is to hurt the people—prove to them you can stand alone."
Sasuke's hand found his blade. He lunged the way he always did: first, fast; the skill of a man whose whole life had been cut to edge. The first strike was meant to take the landscape of the battle, to paint his rage into the air. Microseconds later Mikoto's hand rose and the slap landed—open, flat—across his cheek.
It was so small a motion, so domestic as to be absurd. A mother's slap. Sasuke's body reacted the way muscle knows how to react to shock; the strike unbalanced his flow and, with it, a fraction of his chakra. Fugaku's palm hit the opposite cheek the instant his shoulder pivoted. Two small strikes, timed like a clock, and Sasuke's first technique desynchronized. The kunai clipped his sleeve and tumbled to the wooden jetty.
He expected violence that matched his fury—swords, shouts, procedural resistance—but Mikoto and Fugaku fought in the currency of shame. Their arm movements were precise, each strike timed to break the rhythm he relied upon. Each slap dispersed a thread of his focus; each corrective touch took a little more of the sharp, corrosive heat he kept in his chest. Sasuke attacked again and again. For every bold strike he made, Mikoto answered on the left cheek, Fugaku on the right. They did not scream. They did not slay. They eroded.
When Sasuke unleashed a more complex technique—a flash of chidori meant to cut through bodies and doubt—Fugaku's expression hardened and he countered with a whisper of Mangekyō that folded the flame into nothing. Mikoto's eyes shimmered and she redirected the recoil. What they used was not cruelty; it was surgical humiliation. Each public correction stripped off a layer of the armor he had built out of outrage. He tried tactics—retreat, feint, genjutsu—and each time the two elders were there, simple as grief, intercepting the thread before it could braid into something lethal.
It went on and on until the island's low sun traced new angles across the water. Sasuke tried and failed thirty-five times; each failure shorn off the raw edges of his fury. Sweat streaked through the dust on his skin; muscle screamed. He did not break. He hardened. Then he broke into anger and, from anger, into something deeper—shame—and it cut farther than any blade.
On the fourth turn, when he lashed out with a desperate Kakushi—an attempt at trick and vanish—two hands closed on him. Mikoto's fingers were iron in a mother's grip; Fugaku's arm locked like a stone. They did not speak. They only moved with the awful intimacy of those who had seen a child fall enough times to stop him.
They kicked him—not to maim, but to announce his humility. The action was quick, clinical, not a roar. The first kick sent him off balance; the second drove him to his knees in the sand. He felt the hot rise of blood in his face—less from pain than from the heat of embarrassment—and then the trickle of tears that he had never let himself shed when the world had demanded strength from him. Sasuke cried because a lineage he had weaponized against the world had become the instrument of his unmaking.
It did not stop overnight. Over days, the elders repeated their ritual without malice and without mercy. Each time he attempted to summon poison from the past—curse seals, copied jutsu, the remembered grace of Orochimaru's perverse training—they countered, absorbed, redirected. Mikoto used glimpses of her Mangekyō to calm the seals when they screamed like caged things; Fugaku's own ocular power made tendrils of shadow burn and fall away. Whenever a fragment of snakecraft slithered toward the shore, Fugaku's steady hand summoned Amaterasu's unblinking black flame to cauterize and end the serpent's movement; Mikoto's control shepherded the remainder into binding. The island's defenders did not revel. They repaired.
Itachi's expression never left him. He watched like a man reading a book he had already learned the ending to—complicated, patient, and profoundly sad. He did not intervene. He was there, at the edge, a silent brother-mirror, watching his younger sibling be made human again in the most humiliating, human way.
After five days and nights of repeated correction, of losing every little tactical skirmish and every inch of pride he thought immutable, Sasuke simply ran out of something to burn. His flashing eyes dulled. His techniques spat and fared poorly. At last he could not find the high, clean edge of rage; it had been chipped into a thousand smaller things—embarrassment, shame, the raw grief of a man who had loved a version of himself that never was.
Naruto returned just as the sun diluted into the soft blue dusk. He had been watching the island's pulse, letting those who had come home stand in the air they had conjured. When he crossed to Sasuke, the boy no longer held his blade. He would not have lifted it if it lay gleaming beside him.
"So," Naruto said, step-light and quiet. "Are you satisfied now?"
Sasuke's laugh was a broken thing. "You ordered them to—"
"No." Naruto shook his head. "I offered them the right to speak. They had a score to settle with you. If they wanted to punish, I let them. I set one rule: he must never be allowed to pick up a weapon while he is being taught. He must be disarmed of the first lie—the bladed truth. If he learns from being broken without blood, then perhaps he won't teach the next generation how to hate."
Sasuke tried to rise. His body was slow, rearranged by repeated knocks, by the stuffing out of anger. Mika—no, Mikoto—moved to his side. Her eyes were wet but they had the old, inexorable patience of mothers who had outlived tragedies. She used her Mangekyō not to punish now but to hold a stabilizing thread where the curse-wounds flickered. Fugaku's glare softened, and with an amaterasu-shearing gesture he cauterized the last serpent-threads that still writhed in Sasuke's shadow.
Naruto listened, then leaned in and lowered his voice so only Sasuke could hear. "I don't want you dead," he said. "I want you to be better than the shape of your rage."
Sasuke's answer was a sound the island had not heard before: a raw, human fury that lacked the shape of the assassin's calculus. "Then tell them," Sasuke said, voice shredding. "Tell them what Danzo did. Show them the ledger. Show them the bones."
Naruto frowned. "I will. But first, some practical things." He turned to Fugaku and Mikoto. "Tell them everything. Let him walk the length of the village gates and read what your eyes read. Let the world see that our people were used and lied to. Make it so he can never again believe in simple enemies."
Fugaku's hand, heavy and patient, lifted Sasuke. The boy's knees wobbled like a child's. Naruto's instruction was sharp, final. "Take him to the gate. Tell the council. Tell the market. Tell everyone—not as a spectacle, but as a confession. And after that, leave him at the Konoha gate. Let them decide what to keep."
Itachi's voice—dry and precise—cut through the gathering. "You will not take his life in public theater, Naruto. That is not justice." He looked at Sasuke with the faintest of pity. "Nor is this mercy meant to humiliate. It is a chance."
Fugaku's grip was iron as he carried the unsteady young man. Mikoto's eyes found Sasuke once, and there was a warmth there—an impossible forgiveness. They walked with him past the rows of villagers who stared; some wept, some bowed. The elders who had been wronged did not jeer. They simply let the movement be its own sentence.
When they reached the quay, Mikoto and Fugaku stopped. Fugaku's voice was low and the sound of it landed like a hammer. "Listen," he said, loud enough for the market to hear. "Below this man's anger were lies. Below those lies were men who sold us, cheated us, and fed on our blood. Danzo is not an enemy we make in secret; he is one we must expose."
Mikoto leaned in to Sasuke and spoke as a mother might give a final gift. "Tell them everything you know. Then step away."
They carried him to Konoha's gate. Before the gates, the two elders let him stand. They recited what Naruto asked: the ledger, the names, the chain of corruption. The words landed like stones that could not be unthrown.
When they left him finally—hands on his shoulders, faces hard and soft both—they did not push him into the streets to be torn. They left him there, a frightened adult in the open, and a scroll of truth in his hands. The message they had given him was not a sentence; it was responsibility.
Naruto watched the figure of his old friend stumble toward the open world and thought of the price of creating a home: sometimes you had to give back the truth to be forgiven.
Sasuke walked into Konoha like a man with his secrets not safely stored but public truth; the city took him in, and the world turned to read.
The island exhaled, and in the hush that followed you could hear the chanting of elders, the small laugh of children, and the distant, slow beat of a heart that had learned how to guard what it loved.