Kinship and understanding
Sasuke didn’t understand his cousin. Everyone was dead, the whole clan, their whole family. Everyone was dead and she acted like it didn’t matter, like life went on anyway. Itachi had killed them all and laughed. Sasuke didn’t understand how she could refuse to spend every minute of every day training to kill him. Sasuke wanted him dead, Nagi just… pretended he didn’t exist.
She’d always been a bit odd. Quiet and withdrawn. Sasuke honestly hadn’t known her very well, but now she was all he had left, they should have been united in a single purpose and they weren’t. While Sasuke trained himself into the ground every day, and didn’t leave the compound except for school, she spent every waking moment she could away from the compound. She trained in the academy practice fields instead of the clan ones, ate at food stalls, or restaurants, or her classmates houses rather than coming home for meals, she slept over at her classmate’s houses whenever she could wrangle an invitation. She’d asked him to go with her a few times, but he’d refused. Friends were just another weakness for Itachi to exploit, a distraction from training, an intrusion upon his grief. Sasuke didn’t need friends, he needed vengeance.
Nagi had friends though. Which was odd because he didn’t remember her having many before the massacre. Now she spent every possible moment with them, and Sasuke didn’t understand how she could leave herself so open, so vulnerable. She had friends, and she’d told him, she didn’t care about vengeance, it wouldn’t bring anyone back, wouldn’t fix the hole in her heart where her family used to be.
It wasn’t that the massacre hadn’t affected her. He wasn’t sure how bad her physical injuries were, but he knew they’d been bad enough that Itachi had left her for dead, and Itachi was Anbu, he knew when injuries ought to be fatal. She’d lost an eye, and that was no small loss for an Uchiha. And it wasn’t just physical damage either. Her eyes, or rather eye, had changed, had aged a thousand years overnight, innocence replaced with a bitter understanding that Sasuke knew all too well.
But despite that kinship he didn’t understand her. Didn’t understand why when she’d woken up she had refused to answer to Uchiha Nagi anymore, had said her name was Chrome now. He didn’t understand how she could just discard the name her family gave her, one of the last solid connections she had to them. He hadn’t understood even when she tried to explain it, when she told him that she wasn’t the same person anymore, that she had seen too much to be the same person, and the name of the innocent girl that had never seen death just didn’t feel right anymore.
The worst thing was she wasn’t wrong, she wasn’t the same Uchiha Nagi any more than he was the same Uchiha Sasuke. Uchiha Nagi had been a quiet, sweet natured, unmemorable cousin, with no particular interest in violence, a relative he’d barely even thought about day to day. Now she clung to the ridiculously oversized trident she’d dug out of the family stores and refused to go anywhere without it. The worst thing was she actually wasn’t bad at using it, on the few occasions he’d managed to get her to stick around the compound long enough for a spar. Now she had a whole network of friends, a new interest in genjutsu, and a name that wasn’t even a proper name, and he thought about her every day, her safety, and happiness an unwelcome concern that he could never quite dismiss. She was the only family he had left and he didn’t understand her in the slightest, couldn’t bring himself to think of her as Chrome rather than Nagi, couldn’t manage to let go of that tenuous link to how things used to be.
He especially didn’t understand her choice in friends. He didn’t understand why she needed them, and he definitely didn’t understand why those ones. There was Sawada Tsunayoshi who was… fluffy, and small, and cute in a way no self respecting ninja should be. He didn’t understand why she was so drawn to him, maybe it was a girl thing, girls liked cute things didn’t they? But after a brief observation he concluded that no, that couldn’t be it. That whole academy class seemed to centre around Sawada, boys and girls alike. For some unfathomable reason, Sawada was the most popular kid in his class. It was bizarre.
Sawada he could live with though, him and all his crazy friends, weird though they were. He seemed relatively harmless at least. There were bigger problems in his cousin’s friendship choices. Specifically Rokudo Mukuro, who sent chills down Sasuke’s spine. There was something about that boy that reminded him more than a little of Itachi, maybe it was because he was a genjutsu expert. He and Nagi were almost always together, and Sasuke found it discomforting on a primal level. Mukuro was a year younger than he was, and no more skilled than the rest of his age group, but something about him registered as a threat. Sasuke had no idea why Nagi would want to be friends with that.
Maybe avoiding his cousin wasn’t the most healthy way of coping with the way she confused him, but she was distracting him from his determination to kill Itachi. She was all the family he had left and sometimes he thought, if he let her get close, he might forget the importance of what he had to do. It would be too easy to care, and caring was a weakness he couldn’t afford. Not when she lacked the strength to join him on his quest.