'Day In, Day Out' omake for everyone who wondered what Sasuke was up to in the Uchiha manor and also my submission for Drabble Tuesday which I think is probably early for a lot of people but its Tuesday in my part of the world so yaa~

Enjoy~

Inside, the house smelt musty and old and for a long while Sasuke just stood in the middle of the large kitchen and living room and stared around the dark area, not bothering to walk over and open the curtains his brother had never had the chance to open himself. Dark eyes followed the line of the cracked kitchen bench top, the sight before him flashing bright and warm as he did.

A woman with familiar, gentle eyes looked up from the food she was preparing in the kitchen and smiled fondly in his direction as the ghosts of two boys breezed past Sasuke's frozen form. One was already tall, his long hair tied neatly back in a low ponytail that bounced between his shoulders as he ran past, the younger of the two in eager pursuit. They came to a halt and leant over the bench, the bigger boy observing his mother peeling potatoes quietly while the smaller chattered spiritedly, still out of breath. The woman laughed, petting the child's hair before looking up again and Sasuke shivered as the echo of a man walked through him, all wide shoulders and proud, straight back. He joined his family, one hand settling atop the head of his oldest boy. Their mouths moved in silent conversation that Sasuke knew every word to.

He blinked and the scene was gone. The room returned to dust and wear and Sasuke's air rattled as he breathed it in. All the bits and pieces from the kitchen cupboards were long gone and the glass fronts smashed, leaving jagged edges. Any furniture they'd had in the living room had disappeared leaving the space empty. It was hard to believe that anyone had ever lived so comfortably here. That he had lived here.

A soft ache started in the young man's stomach and then slowly grew into his ribcage. Uncomfortable but not painful, not something he was even really conscious of. The same feeling he always had when someone had walked past with daffodils, his mother's favourite flower. Almost like nostalgia. Sasuke turned a full circle, scanning the room, jerky and awkward with his one crutch. This was his home. But it didn't hurt like he expected.

The memories.

The struggles of opening such heavy curtains every second morning and in the end having to be assisted by his brother anyway. That laugh that Itachi always let slip as he leaned over his little brother and pulled at the curtains from higher up while Sasuke pulled at the bottom.

The ache spread across his collar bone and into his shoulders. Weighing down a little.

Sitting atop that same kitchen bench while his mother washed lettuce and sang to him as he swung his legs over the side in time, drumming out the beat with his heels thumping against the cupboards underneath.

His father calling for more tea and Sasuke skipping alongside his mother while she brought it to him.

The memories.

They didn't hurt. Yet.

He sighed long and unusually loud into the silence.

It didn't matter if it hurt or not. This wasn't what he was here for.

'Naruto.'

Blinking away Uchiha Mikoto's long swishing skirts Sasuke leant into his one crutch and made his way slowly down the hallway, passing a bathroom that reverberated with the splashing of his former self's bath time antics, playful warnings that he'd get soap in his eyes if he wasn't careful from Itachi. With some difficulty, he ignored the sudden pang in his chest, setting his teeth.

'Ahaa… It gets worse the further I go in? From just the living room to here, it's so quick.'

He should have expected that.

In a spare room that he and Itachi often spent time together reading books and playing games, Sasuke brought his teeth to a fist and bit down to counter the abrupt urge to vomit. His eyes stung.

'It's nothing. I'm fine. I can do this. Even if it comes so suddenly, I'm fine.'

He took another blow to the chest when his eyes formed a hazy vision of his brother hooding a fluffy towel over the head over a much younger, freshly bathed Sasuke in the hallway, ruffling his hair dry.

"You'll catch a cold if you stay like that, Sasuke."

Now it hurt. But even so.

Up the stairs one agonizingly painful step at a time. The handrail that had once been there had had pieces hacked out of it and offered no assistance. At one point, the slippery wooden foot of the crutch slipped and Sasuke nearly toppled backwards.

Near the top he had to sit down, hanging his head low and staring down between his legs, sweat dripping off the end of his nose as he sat panting, his leg throbbing in pain. In front of him, halfway down the staircase, Sasuke listened to his mind replay his father's footsteps as he headed to bed. He'd take a left at the top of the staircase and quietly open the door to Sasuke's room and then pad along to Itachi's before turning back and going right to his and Sasuke's mother's room, checking the two were asleep before turning in for the night.

When the footfalls reached where Sasuke was sitting he had to force himself to keep looking down, wanting so desperately to look up and find his father standing there- all stern but somehow fond eyes and strong, broad shoulders, but knowing he'd be disappointed.

The ache had grown up through his neck and into his jaw where his teeth were clenched tight. His stomach twisted and turned painfully and Sasuke was beginning to feel the ghosts. Rather than simply walking past, paying him no mind, they were creeping up on him, wrapping arms tight around him, calling to him. He felt their pull deep in his gut. His father's footsteps walked up and down the stairs and along the top floor hall. His mother was spraying her perfume and humming from their room, His own ghost was reading a book aloud to Itachi. Sasuke supposed it was because the rooms he was close to now were more personal. They were smaller, held intimate memories more easily. His and Itachi's rooms, the wardrobes there that had been favourite hiding places. The dresser in his mother's bedroom that he'd hid in that night…

That night.

Sasuke barely remembered it. He'd been young and sound asleep when Itachi has quickly opened his door and rushed to his bedside, bundling the blanket he'd been sleeping under around Sasuke and pulling him into his arms, whispering into his younger brother's ear.

"Sasuke, you have to be quiet okay?"

"Eh, Niisan, what's going on? What's all that noise downstairs? I—"

"There are people in the house. Bad people. I'm going to take you and hide you, okay? Then you're going to stay there until morning."

"What? What about you? And Mother and Father?"

"Just do as I say."

Itachi had quickly taken Sasuke's hand and together they snuck as quietly as they could across the top floor, past the top of the stairs and into their parent's room. Without hesitation, the older Uchiha pulled open the cupboard doors on his mother's dresser and ushered Sasuke inside, adjusting the other boy's night gown around him as he sat with his back pressed against the back of the cupboard and his knees to his chest.

"Now stay here, alright? Don't you dare come out, no matter what."

Sasuke had been crying, whimpering and wiping at his runny nose as Itachi smoothed sweaty hair off his face. In stuttering whispers, Sasuke had asked him where their parents were, what was going on, who the people were. But his brother hadn't replied, only leaning into the cupboard to press a hard kiss to Sasuke's forehead and telling him, eyes boring into Sasuke's, "I love you, Sasuke" before roughly stuffing the blanket into the cupboard too and forcing the door shut. Sasuke screamed against the blanket but it was too muffled to be heard and he stopped at the sound of the room's door being thrown open and people storming into the bedroom.

"… no matter what."

Voices and the jingle-jangle of his mother's jewelry. Itachi telling someone that this was all they had here. That as such a noble family they would hardly keep their valuables in the house. The other voices had taken Itachi back downstairs and Sasuke had waited, wide eyes and racing heartbeat, until morning.

After that, Sasuke didn't remember much else. In the morning he'd tiptoed out into the empty house and lived in it for a while before he'd taken to the street. He didn't remember what he'd seen in the house, the only memories remaining from that time being mostly of him trying to get up onto the counter to look for food in the high cupboards and talking to himself as he got dressed, wearing the only remaining piece of his mother's jewelry- a beaded bracelet that was later stolen from him by slave takers- around his wrist.

At some point along the way, Sasuke had worked out that his parents had been murdered downstairs while he slept that night and that the men who had killed them had either taken Itachi with them or killed him too…

It was all a very long time ago now.

When Sasuke finally found the strength to stand, the pain in his leg easing off but still throbbing dully from thigh to calf, he took a right at the top of the stairway and stared into his parent's room. The door was missing but the dresser, too magnificent and heavy to be stolen away by common thieves, remained. The young man hobbled forward and looked down on the dusty top. All Mikoto's things were gone from the draws that hung open but it was still undeniably, his mother's. The Uchiha blinked slowly and his hand lifted on its own accord and reached out to trace the scratch Itachi had made as a child with the hooked end of a nail file. Dark eyes wandered the swirling pattern of the rich wood and he hummed very softly under his breath, lips fumbling words he traced the sharp corners of the draws with his eyes.

'I wonder if they still smell like her perfume…'

Hypnotized, the Uchiha dipped into a bend, the crutch driving into his underarm and forcing his elbow up at an odd angle. But he barely felt it. He bent, gaze fixed on the floral draw liners that were now yellow and faded. His knee began to give as he lowered closer and closer. He could hear Mikoto's humming and Sasuke felt himself sinking into her warmth as he moved through where she would have sat before dresser.

'Mama! Look Mama! Look at me!'

'In a second, Sasuke, Mama is busy right now making herself pretty.'

'You're already plenty pretty, Mama!'

'Ah- Sasuke, don't touch that perfume it's very—'

A sharp pain suddenly shot through Sasuke's bitten leg and he froze where he stood, shaken by the pain, breathing hard and fast, half lowered to the draws. His mother's warmth melted away, chilling the sweat on his skin. His ears rumbled with emotion that he swallowed down as he struggled for air. His fingers at the file marking curled to fist against his palm as he slowly closed his eyes.

'No.'

This wasn't why he was here.

'Naruto. Naruto. Naruto.'

A chant and the throb in his leg to keep him sane.

He rubbed his fingers over the smooth wood once, twice—'Stop it' before, with some difficulty, he lifted his hand away and turned, beginning to pace across the room to where the window was, taking deep breaths and feeling the hold the dresser had on him loosening from around his chest.

'Naruto. Naruto. Naruto.'

Walking around where Fugaku and Mikoto's bed used to stand, Sasuke struggled to his knees, the flesh around his drained bite burning as he began counting out the floorboards.

"One, two, three…" Shuffling along on his knees. "Four, five, six, seven…" The eighth floorboard out from the window rested under his fingers and Sasuke breathed the last count in a whisper, licking his lips.

'Right here… Please…' He was sure this was it. He didn't know how he knew, perhaps Itachi had told it to him once since his father would never trust him with something like this. But this had to be it. If it wasn't, coming here, walking through the ghosts of this house, would have all been for nothing. Lifting his hand high and hoping for precision, Sasuke brought his fist down, hard and heavy on the waiting wood. Purposely thinner than the other boards, it snapped with a loud CRACK! spilling splinters left and right and leaving a long hole in the flooring. Panting and nursing the edge of his hand, Sasuke steadied his breath and leaned over, peering down into the deep hole. He reached out trembling hands to dig into the gap in the flooring, clearing away the broken wood, eyes flitting back and forth over the dark opening, fingers venturing cautiously down, trying to avoid injuring his hands even more on the shattered boarding.

'Please…'

At first there was nothing. Just Sasuke's hand anxiously groping around in the chilly darkness.

And then something.

He leaned further in and found his knuckle brushing against something cold next to where his fingers had come to grip the coarse fabric of the opening of some kind of bag. He froze and moved his hand aside a little to see, stabbing himself in the wrist in the process but ignoring the blood beading as his heart began to race. There, in the weak stream of light pushing through a gap in the curtains, was something shiny and gold and Sasuke's heart skipped a beat of its quick rhythm and then felt like it had stopped altogether. His mouth went dry.

This was it.

He had to smash through a few more floorboards to widen the hole enough to drag the heavy bag through, wild pieces of splintering wood cutting his hands, blood staining the boards. By the end Sasuke couldn't move his pinky finger on his smashing hand, but when he was sitting back on his knees, trembling with effort, breath ragged and eyes itching with tired tears, a full to the brim bag of shiny gold coins before him, all he could say was,

"Thank God."