#i am thinking one cousin is transmasc and one is a genderfluid afab kid but thats just me and not yet relevant to specific plots

[whimsicorner]

When u go like "I don't want to write it I'm not writing it" but then one of the little guys in your brain starts talking and u are a little fucked because you get attached easy (saw some fics and meta posts about AU where Sasuke isn't the sole survivor of the Uchiha massacre and started thinking about it but idk if I'll do it for real because hahaha)

....but I want to yap about it for myself, too....I'm not immune to small Uchiha ocs

Putting under a cut since this is me talking myself through it

Itachi gets slightly different orders and so some of the Uchiha children are spared if they're

1) Sasuke

2) totally civilian

3) too young to have started training at the academy

All the adults and all the other kids with any official training are still killed off. I haven't looked into it but since I imagine a lot of them would have been encouraged to go to the Academy for various reasons, this means that even though Sasuke isn't alone, the numbers are still depressingly low...

This leaves Sasuke, two or three cousins in his age bracket, and a fistful of toddlers and/or babies

(Debating Danzo grabbing a kid or two for ROOT but maybe he wouldn't for now, since he's already stealing eyes from the adults? And if they know who Itachi killed and who he should have spared, it might be more obvious if their body is missing? Unsure....side plot about rescuing their cousin...)

What follows is unclear but I was thinking some small things:

1) someone suggests separating the kids into different foster families since there's enough that adopting them all together wouldn't be feasible, and the older kids kick up enough of a fuss about it that they compromise: the kids can stick together but an adult is assigned to check in on them periodically. This may or may not end well. They do still live in the Uchiha district since they want somewhere with enough space for all of them but it's a little better because it's not just Sasuke by himself

2) eventually one of the kids points out to Sasuke that despite everything Itachi said and despite Tsukuyomi Genjutsu Hell, Itachi must still care about Sasuke because he should be dead otherwise, as an academy student. This is distressing for all of them because Itachi's motives are clear as mud and they don't understand what he was thinking

3) One of the kids didn't really want to be a ninja at all but he feels obligated to push through to graduation for various reasons. The heck of it is that he's actually good at ninja school despite starting late, and he and Sasuke end up talking it over (Sasuke is left feeling oddly settled when they talk about how his cousin doesn't have to be a ninja or he doesn't have to be the kind of ninja that goes out and does dangerous stuff, he's not a coward or useless for wanting to stay close to home and build things, since originally he was going to be a tailor like his parents) (they agree that flashy ninjutsu are very cool though) (it's the blood and potential killing that he's not happy about even though that's part of what they do)

4) someone has to be the clan head eventually and there is a very quick game of Not It (Sasuke takes it even though one of the other kids is slightly older, because the other kid really does not want it)

5) these kids all have really very high separation anxiety but they have to get a babysitter while the older ones are at school and shenanigans ensue. Part of the worry is "what if Itachi comes back," but someone points out that if Itachi comes back they're too little to do much about it anyway, even if they're all together, and it's too scary of a thing to be scared of it all the time. Depressingly practical child.

6) if Kakashi stays still long enough he is getting adopted by small children because at least one of them aside from Sasuke has the Sharingan and he's the only one around that can show them anything

7) Sasuke survivor guilt (ongoing) when it sinks in that Itachi spared him but killed his cousins (some of the other survivors had siblings and all) and they have a bit of a harrowing moment trying to talk him down from where his brain goes off to (separate from the incident where they agree that Itachi probably still cares about him)

8) Sasuke vs his cousins on whether or not any of them are going after Itachi (Sasuke wants to do it but they don't want him to go alone but he doesn't want them to be endangered and etc etc etc this is an ongoing discussion because not all the cousins are big on revenge anyway—justice if it can be found, but revenge doesn’t help with the little baby cousins needing care)

9) if it runs long, Orochimaru is probably very stressful because there's more options than just Sasuke this time, though Sasuke is the best of them

10) Naruto and Sakura and the cousins would be funny if I could figure out what I wanted...

11) If it runs really long and i can finagle it, one of the cousins figures out that Itachi was kind of trying to get Sasuke to kill him someday and is like (face in hands????) (a picture has been slowly forming in their mind and they don't like it but idk if they're positioned well enough to do anything about it bc this is all very murky) (I think it would be funny for Itachi to get yelled at by the cousin who didn't want to be a ninja)

I want to reread Naruto before I get into it but I started thinking about the Uchiha cousins piling into Sasuke’s hospital room because of separation anxiety and was like (oh no) because one of them was talking about how he never counted all his cousins but he knows they're dead because there's no way the entire family of cousins could have fit. And also he can't cry because some of the nurses might be sympathetic but the grown ups might think he's too little if he cries, and he's trying to take care of things while Sasuke is still knocked out despite being, like, nine. Maybe ten?