Some part of Sasuke, too-young and still reeling in horror, was trying desperately to reconcile this moment with all the ones that had come before: this seriousness on the face of a cousin whose laughter he'd grown up with, this task on the shoulders of a teacher he'd always known as fair.

"There was," he started, swallowed, and tried again: "There was a child. He must have been the son of the man I killed. He looked me in the eye when I sealed him, just -- looked at me instead of running, though I could see his hands shake."

And his own, the seal messy.

"I --" Said I'm sorry, as if that would change the fact of death. Sasuke looked down, noted the whitened ridges of his knuckles with a distance he couldn't shake, as if they didn't belong to him. They hadn't when he'd committed murder, but now:

But now they did. "I can't let you do this, sensei."