Contradictions

I gestured to my wounded knee and calmly held out my hand. "Bag." I would deal with Fugaku later, now I needed to patch myself up first. I did not know exactly how long the time had passed, but do I know that I did not want to suffer from infection.

Sasuke frowned in displeasure, but he let the bag down.

I rummaged through it, searching for a first aid kit. One of the pros of living with a ninja family was that they were always prepared to deal with this kind of thing.

Sasuke breathed an exasperated sigh, an annoyed gesture that he seemed to only reserve for me, and beckoned his hand. "Here, let me do it."

I obediently plopped down on the ground whilst Sasuke fished out the necessary equipment from the bag.

Once the boy grabbed a bottle of water, I held my palms out and let the cool water run through them, washing away the debris. After that, Sasuke poured the water on my left knee. I used my fingertip to scrub the red crusts from the edges of the wound whilst the water washed the bloods away, thankfully there was no debris in the wound itself.

Sasuke grabbed a small cloth from the bag's front pocket and dabbed it on my palms. "How can you get hurt so much?" he lamented. "I only take my eyes off of you for a second and you're no longer there."

I shrugged. "I fell."

Sasuke lifted an eyebrow, unconvinced. "I don't know where you 'fell' but I'm sure it won't make your eyes bleed."

Wait, what?!

I suppressed myself from outwardly reacting even though my heart suddenly jolted at the information. "How red?" I inquired clinically. Is it subconjunctival hemorrhage?

Sasuke moved the cloth to my knee. "The whites of your eyes are completely red." The boy's stern gaze bored into mine. "You really should get them checked."

I pursed my lips.

I did not feel any pain or have any change of vision in my eyes, but it was worrying that it happened to both eyes at the same time. Although, thinking back about it, if I correctly estimated the force that the man exuded and took the duration of the strangulation into consideration, there should not be enough pressure to burst the blood vessels in both eyes. On the other hand, if I remembered correctly, I already lost consciousness within ten seconds flat. It was as if the man really knew the amount of forces that were necessary and which places that were needed to press to make his victim unconscious.

Was he a ninja, perhaps a civilian with prior self-defense lessons? But if he was, shouldn't I be dead by now? If by any chance he suddenly regained his senses and released me – which was unlikely – I should have regained my consciousness within ten seconds too, but all evidence suggested that I did not. If my airway continued to be blocked, even only for a few minutes after that, it would induce a cardiac arrest, which meant I should have been dead by now.

I gnawed at my bottom lip, what am I missing…?

"Nii-san?" Sasuke hummed in response, he did not take his eyes from his current task of applying an antibacterial ointment over my knee. "Red?" I pointed to my left cheek, where I have been struck.

Sasuke looked up. "No. Why?"

So there were no bruises or petechiae on my face. It appeared there was nothing out of ordinary except for my eyes.

"Nothing," I replied nonchalantly.

This was worrying. I remembered that when I checked the condition of my neck earlier, although surprised, I was glad that the damage was not extensive. However, considering everything that I had gathered so far, the lack of bruises or noticeable wounds were starting to look like a deliberate cover-up for the incident. Who would believe me if I said that I had been attacked when all evidence of said attack had disappeared?

I frowned at the thought.

My condition by far was too fine for someone who had been strangled into unconsciousness by a grown man. It heavily contradicted the evidence that I had gathered so far, which pointed towards the fact that my assailant was possibly a trained killer who was not sound in mind, thus made it unlikely for me to survive with a minimal amount of damage.

I only had one explanation for this, and it was that there was someone that helped me. But who was it? Did he or she find any internal injuries? I did not want to be led into a false sense of security by the lack of external injuries only to end up dead a few days later due to unnoticed delayed consequences. There was only so much that I would do to prevent the massacre. Giving up my life was not one of them.

I heaved a sigh and glanced back to Sasuke. It seemed the boy was done with my knee, the Band-Aid had been put and everything else had been returned to the bag.

"Thank you." I really meant it.

"Anytime," he assured. Sasuke then wrapped his hand around mine and pulled me up. "Come on, let's go home. If you don't want to go to the hospital, at least let your eyes rest. Maybe they will heal tomorrow."

It was unlikely that the blood would be gone by tomorrow, but Sasuke had a fair proposition. It ticked me however that I had to return to the compound again when I had not even spent a quality time outside. Being a child sucks.

Oh wait, other children were not imprisoned in their own house.

Speaking of which, "Is 'Tachi-nii home?"

Today was already Saturday. Last Monday, Sasuke had officially joined the academy, and on the very same day Itachi had gone on a mission with Shisui. I did not know what their mission was, however if I was going with Itachi Shinden's timeline, they should be on a mission that was given by Danzō, a mission to assassinate a traitor as Itachi's means to prove himself before he would be admitted to ANBU.

"I don't know." Sasuke shrugged. "He said he would be home this afternoon, but he isn't. Maybe he has arrived now."

It's definitely a possibility, I thought.

Hopefully he was already home, there was something that I had been planning to do since Fugaku announced that Itachi's application into the ANBU had been accepted and will soon become official. After all, it was the start of the chain of events that would lead to the clan's massacre.

It was when Sasuke and I were about to head home that I began to hear the strange sounds again, the sounds which I had wholly ignored until now.

Scratch, scratch, scritchy-scratch.

Only this time, it was accompanied by something that made the hair at the back of my neck stand.

Is that…

"Nii-san, do you hear that?" I whispered.

Sasuke looked at me with an obvious bafflement. "Hear what?"

"Those sounds!"

His expression turned blank.

"What sounds?"

I mirrored Sasuke's expression. I did not believe that it was simply my imagination.

From time to time, I would experience strange things. They were random, mostly innocuous, but they made me restless. I could not shake the feeling that someone was watching, waiting in the shadow. I attributed those occurrences to my anxiety, which I was not ashamed to admit had been unhealthily high-strung ever since I woke up in this place. The other strange thing was the scratching sound. It was always there, a background hum that followed me every day. It was never intrusive, thus I learned to ignore it.

But this…

Sasuke's lips were set into a displeased frown as he wrapped his fingers around mine. "Let's just go."

"But–"

"There's nothing. Stop making things up."

"I'm not lying!"

Sasuke turned around sharply.

"We've been through this already, why can't you just stop?!" he shouted. "You think you hear or see something, but guess what?! There's nothing!"

"You're too loud!" I hissed. My eyes darted around the trees and the bushes for any sign of… whatever it was. "This one, it's different." I insisted. "And I'm not lying." I clenched my jaw. "I never lie." At least not about this kind of thing.

Sasuke barked out a hollow laugh. "No, you're not. You're just crazy. That's why father locks you up in the house after all."