Chapter 1: Blood Tears
The first sensation wasn't sight, but the scratchy, unforgiving roughness of cheap linen against his cheek. A groan escaped him, thick and alien in his own throat, laced with disuse and a deeper, hollow ache that seemed to resonate in his bones. He forced his eyes open, blinking against the weak afternoon light filtering through a high, narrow window. Plain wooden walls, a low table, a single scroll discarded carelessly on the floor. Utterly, chillingly unfamiliar.
*Where…?* The question shattered before it fully formed. A splitting headache detonated behind his temples, a white-hot spike driving deep into the core of his skull. He gasped, clamping his hands over his ears as if that could stop the internal explosion. It only intensified. A raw, guttural scream tore from his throat, echoing with desperate terror in the small, sparse room. He curled into a tight ball on the thin futon, the scratchy fabric forgotten against the consuming agony in his mind.
Then, the dam burst. Memories, not his own, flooded in like a tsunami. Not sterile labs and glowing screens, but visceral snapshots saturated with the scent of rain-wet earth and iron, the sharp *clang* of kunai, the warmth of a mother's embrace, the stern pride in a father's gaze.
**Uchiha.** The name struck him like a physical blow. *His* clan. Images flickered violently: training grounds echoing with shouts, the proud Uchiwa fan emblem, stern faces… and two faces, achingly familiar. Kind eyes crinkling with a smile. Strong hands ruffling dark hair. *His* hair.
Then, the crushing scene: summoned to the austere, imposing Clan Head's house. The air thick with incense and suffocating dread. Fugaku Uchiha's impassive face delivering the death knell. "Your parents… their A-rank mission… they did not return. Their sacrifice honors the clan." Words like shards of ice. The world tilting on its axis. The desperate, childish plea tearing from his throat: "I need to see them! Please!" The grim, silent procession to the clan morgue.
The memory slammed into him with the force of a falling mountain. The sight of them. His mother, her vibrant life force extinguished, lying unnaturally still on the cold stone slab. His father, the strong lines of his face slack in death, a brutal, fatal wound stark against his torn flak jacket. The wave of grief that followed was pure, obliterating despair – a tsunami that washed over the small boy… and swept him away entirely. The darkness that swallowed him as his small heart simply… stopped.
*That's why I'm here,* the horrifying realization dawned amidst the torrent of borrowed sorrow. *He died. Right here. Of a broken heart. And I… I woke up in the corpse.*
The grief wasn't his, yet it filled him to bursting, a suffocating tide threatening to drown his own fragile consciousness. He wept, the tears hot and shaming, mourning parents he'd never known for a life he'd never lived. The disorientation of his displacement warred violently with the overwhelming, inherited anguish of the boy whose body he now inhabited.
Just as the tidal wave of memory seemed to crest, threatening to shatter his mind completely, a *new* agony erupted. Not in his head, but *behind* his eyes. Molten lead poured directly into the sockets, searing nerves he hadn't known existed. He screamed again, a higher, more frantic sound, clawing at his face, nails digging into skin. The instinct was primal: *rip them out, end the torment!*
He pressed the heels of his palms hard against his closed eyelids, rocking violently back and forth. The pressure was useless. The pain escalated into a blinding, incandescent inferno. Then, he felt it. Warmth. Wetness. Trickling down his cheeks, thick and coppery-scented.
*Blood.*
Trembling, he forced his hands away. Through the agonizing red blur, his vision… *shifted*. The sparse room snapped into impossible hyper-clarity. The grain of the wood on the far wall became intricate canyons. Dust motes danced like distinct stars. Everything was bathed in a deep, pulsating crimson haze. He could *feel* the low thrum of chakra in the walls, a sensation utterly alien and terrifying.
Panic warred with a horrifying fascination. He staggered towards a small, tarnished mirror hanging near the door. The reflection was ghastly: a small, pale boy with wild, dark Uchiha hair, cheeks streaked with twin rivers of blood flowing from wide, terrified eyes. But the eyes themselves… they were no longer brown.
They blazed **crimson**. And within that unnatural scarlet, a single black comma-shaped tomoe spun lazily near the pupil. As he watched, breath hitching, a second tomoe materialized beside the first, spinning faster. The pain intensified, a grinding, crushing pressure, and a third tomoe snapped into place, completing a whirling, unstable pinwheel within each scarlet orb. The Three-Tomoe Sharingan. Fully awakened.
He gasped, the shock momentarily eclipsing the agony. *It's real... the Sharingan... the Uchiha... all real...*
But the reprieve was a fleeting illusion. The three tomoe vibrated violently, straining against an invisible, immense force. The grinding pressure behind his eyes became crushing, unbearable. It felt like his skull was being compacted in a vice forged from pure chakra. He doubled over, a choked whimper escaping his blood-smeared lips. The spinning tomoe blurred, their edges sharpening, elongating… reaching *for* each other.
*No… no, not that… too soon!* The desperate thought – half his own terror, half the inherited knowledge screaming from the Uchiha bloodline – echoed uselessly. The pain transcended physicality; it was the soul-shattering grief of the dead boy, the existential horror of his own displacement, and the violent, unnatural evolution of a Kekkei Genkai demanding its brutal tithe.
He couldn't scream. Only a ragged, wet gasp tore from his throat as his knees buckled. He collapsed forward, forehead striking the cool wooden floor with a dull thud. Blood dripped steadily from his chin, forming dark, spreading pools. Within the crimson hellscape of his vision, the three tomoe warped grotesquely. They stretched, connected, twisted into something new, infinitely more complex, infinitely more *hungry*. Sharp points emerged from the whirling chaos, converging towards the center, etching the beginnings of a terrifying, beautiful, cursed pattern – the Mangekyo Sharingan.
The door slid open with a sharp, decisive *clack*.
A tall figure, silhouetted against the hallway light, filled the doorway. The air crackled with sudden, intense chakra. "By the Sage!" a deep voice boomed, thick with shock. "Uchiha Ren! What—? Your eyes! The blood... MEDIC! NOW!"
The silhouette surged forward, urgency radiating from it. But the boy on the floor, drowning in blood, borrowed grief, and the searing agony of a power violently born, was beyond hearing. The world contracted to the white-hot forge behind his eyes and the terrifying pattern solidifying within them.
As the first heavy bootstep landed just inside the room, the last vestiges of consciousness fled. The crushing weight of the Mangekyo's birth, the overload of trauma, the sheer exhaustion of a soul twice displaced – it was too much. The crimson light in his eyes flickered like a dying ember. His small body went utterly limp, face pressed into the cold wood, surrounded by the dark halo of his own blood. The Mangekyo Sharingan, awakened in a storm of stolen sorrow, plunged its new vessel into merciful oblivi
on before its form could even be fully seen.