MULTI | the shinobi gothic — entry #01: red eyes, ruined houses 🕯️
ft. itachi uchiha, madara uchiha, obito uchiha, sasuke uchiha, shisui uchiha
summary: five gothic romance vignettes for the men the uchiha clan could not bury properly
word count: 3887
content: gn!reader, multi-character x reader, gothic romance, dark romance elements, horror imagery, canon-typical violence, cliffhanger endings, individual content tags are attached to each mini-story
🖤 series masterlist
ITACHI UCHIHA — the doomed saint content: injury and blood, wound care, death imagery, self-sacrifice, canon-typical itachi angst
You found him where the road ended and the cedar trees began.
It was always a place of endings. A shrine too small to appear on maps, a bell with a cracked mouth, stone foxes furred in moss and old rain. Travellers left paper prayers there when they feared they would not return home, and shinobi avoided it because shinobi hated admitting they believed in anything that could not kill.
Itachi sat beneath the eaves with blood darkening his sleeve as crows gathered in the branches above him.
He looked less like a missing-nin than a beautiful mistake grief had made and failed to correct. His cloak was torn at the shoulder, hair clinging damply to his cheek, and one hand rested against his ribs, too still to be casual, too careful to be painless, and when he looked up at you his eyes were dark.
No Sharingan.
Worse.
Human.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he stated.
“You always say that.”
“And you never listen.”
The bell’s rope swayed though there was no wind.
You crossed the shrine’s courtyard and knelt before him. He watched you with that terrible gentleness, the kind that made every practical motion feel ceremonial, every kindness feel like an offering laid before a god who had long since refused worship.
You pulled bandages from your pack.
Itachi’s fingers closed around your wrist before you could touch the wound.
“Don’t.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Yes.”
“Then let me help you.”
His hand remained around your wrist, loose enough that it couldn’t hurt, tight enough that it couldn’t be ignored.
Above you, the crows shifted together, a single dark thought passing through the trees.
“It will make no difference,” he responded.
You hated him for how calmly he could say things that broke something inside you.
“Then let it make no difference after I’ve done it.”
For a moment, Itachi only looked at you. Then, his fingers released.
You worked in silence, cutting away ruined fabric, cleaning blood from skin gone too pale beneath the lantern light. The wound was deeper than it looked. Older bruises shadowed the side of his abdomen below it, yellowed at the edges, violet near the bone. His breathing did not change when the antiseptic touched his flesh, but his gaze drifted up towards the treeline, towards distances you could not follow.
Inside the shrine, incense began to burn. You had not lit it.
The scent curled through the damp air, bitter and sweet.
“I brought food,” you offered, because talking about rice balls was easier than saying you were afraid that one day he wouldn’t be sitting beneath the eaves when you arrived.
Itachi’s mouth softened. “You shouldn’t.”
“You’ve mentioned.”
“You should forget this road.”
“I have a good memory.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
When you tied the bandage tighter than necessary, his eyes returned to you.
You saw it in his face then, that slight fracture in his composure, so delicate anyone else would miss it. You, however, had learnt the language of Itachi’s almosts. His almost smiling, almost reaching, almost staying.
A crow dropped from the cedar branches and landed beside his knee. In its beak was a strip of red thread. Itachi took it before you could ask.
“What is that?”
“A warning.”
“From whom?”
He looked down at the thread in his palm and when he spoke, it was soft, thoughtful. “Someone who still believes warnings can change fate.”
The shrine bell rang once. Far away, another bell answered. Then another. The sound moved across the forest like grief being passed from hand to hand.
Itachi closed his eyes. You felt the air change. He had made a decision.
“No,” you said.
His lashes lifted. “I didn’t say anything.”
“You don’t have to.”
For the first time, something like pain crossed his face openly. It was gone almost before it arrived, swallowed by discipline, by purpose, by whatever cruel altar he had made of himself years ago.
“You’ve mistaken me for someone who can be saved,” he said.
“I have mistaken nothing.”
His hand rose to your face, and stopped before touching you. That restraint hurt more than contact would have.
“Do not love me,” Itachi said quietly. “I am already leaving.”
The words entered you cleanly, without mercy, and struck your heart.
You caught his hand before he could lower it and pressed his cold fingers against your cheek. For one breath, he let you.
The crows exploded from the trees.
The lanterns inside the shrine went out one by one.
When the darkness reached the doorway, Itachi turned his head towards the forest road.
Someone was walking towards you through the rain, wearing his face.
MADARA UCHIHA — the warlord content: supernatural horror, curses, blood imagery, shrine/ritual imagery, power imbalance, fate/possession themes, implied forced betrothal
The shrine had been dead for a hundred years, though the villagers still left offerings at its steps.
They did not pray there, not properly. No one rang the bell, no one clapped their hands beneath the rotting beam or bowed long enough for any god to mistake them for faithful. They came at dusk with rice wine, salt, wilted camellias, and scraps of paper inked with names they would not dare speak aloud. Then they fled before moonrise, moving quickly through the trees as if the forest might remember their faces if they lingered too long.
You were sent because you did not believe in curses.
That was what you told yourself as you climbed the cracked stone path with your lantern held close to your cloak, damp from the mountain mist. The trees grew too thick here. Roots strangled the old steps and branches interlaced overhead until the sky narrowed to a torn, black cloth with moonlight caught in its ragged seams. Somewhere beyond the shrine grounds, a murder of crows called once and then even they fell silent.
Inside, dust settled over every inch like funeral ash. The offering table had split down the middle, one half sagging beneath a scatter of old salt and brittle flower stems. Paper talismans peeled from the walls in curled tongues, their ink faded to brown veins. A statue stood at the far end of the hall, too damaged to identify, its face eroded smooth by time.
At its feet sat a bowl of water, untouched by dust and still enough that the moon reflected through a roof that no longer existed.
You stepped closer.
The water turned red.
The lantern guttered in your hand.
“Late,” a voice said.
You turned too quickly and nearly dropped the light.
A man stood beneath the broken torii gate where no man had stood a breath before wearing armour dark as old blood. His hair fell wildly around a face cut from arrogance, violence, and fatigue. His eyes were not merely red, they were ancient wounds opened anew.
You knew him before your mind ever permitted the knowledge.
Every child knew Madara Uchiha by silhouette alone. The warlord, the ghost of battlefields, the name buried beneath treaties because peace could not survive speaking it too often.
“You’re... dead,” you whispered.
Madara looked almost amused. “As are many things worshipped by cowards.”
The mist crawled around his feet. Behind him, the trees bowed beneath a wind you could not feel. The shrine changed with his presence, becoming taller, darker, more recalled than ruined, as though waking from a long slumber. The beams groaned overhead, the walls remembered their lacquer, the air filled with incense though none had been lit.
You reached for the kunai at your hip.
His gaze followed the movement with imperial disinterest.
“If I wanted you dead, little descendant of trembling men, you would not have had time to fear me.”
“I’m not afraid.”
At that, he smiled.
It was not kind. It was worse. It was pleased.
“You lie badly.”
He came forward, each step unhurried, and the shrine accepted him. That was the only word for it. The floor did not creak under his weight; the shadows arranged themselves behind his shoulders; moonlight caught on his armour and came away sharpened.
You held your ground because pride was the last poor weapon left to you.
Madara stopped close enough that you could see the fine cracks in one plate of his armour, the old faded scar at the corner of his mouth, and the strange weariness buried beneath his terrible composure.
“Why am I here?” you asked, though your voice came out weaker than intended.
His eyes lowered to your face. “Because history has a longer memory than the living.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It is the only answer you are prepared to understand.”
You should have stepped away, you knew that. Every instinct in your body understood that this man was not safe. Especially not in the ways a shinobi measured danger. He was not a blade at your throat—he was the mountain deciding whether gravity still pleased him.
His hand rose, slowly. He touched two fingers beneath your chin, so lightly it was almost reverent. The shock of it passed through you with humiliating force.
Madara’s expression shifted. Something in him had faltered, brief as lightning behind cloud.
“You were promised to me by history itself,” he rumbled, voice low and quiet in his chest.
You sucked in a sharp breath. “No one promised me to anyone.”
His thumb brushed the corner of your mouth. Barely there, barely a touch at all.
The shrine’s bell rang, once, deep underground, and Madara’s gaze moved past you towards the statue at the end of the hall.
Its faceless head had turned.
Your lantern’s flame sputtered and died.
In the sudden darkness, Madara’s hand closed around yours. Not gently, but not cruelly. He took your hand as though the world had opened beneath you both and he had decided you would not fall alone.
“Then tell history no,” he remarked.
The floor beneath the shrine split open under your feet.
OBITO UCHIHA — false paradise content: unreality, dreamlike horror, captivity themes, stalking/surveillance, possessive behaviour, war/blood imagery, invasion of privacy
The house was not there yesterday.
You knew because you had walked this road every morning for three months, past the broken bridge, past the persimmon tree split by lightning, past the field where nothing grew though summer had come early. There had been no house, no gate squeaking on its hinges, no warm square of light behind paper windows.
Now it stood at the end of the road as though it had been waiting for you all your life.
It was a small house, perfectly ordinary at first glance. Dark roof, wooden steps, wind chimes singing softly under the eaves. Morning glories climbed a fence you did not remember planting.
Your name was carved into the gate.
You should have run. Instead, you opened it.
Inside, it smelled of rice, rain, and something almost painfully familiar. The entryway held your sandals, though you had never removed them there. A cup sat on the table, filled with the tea you preferred. In the corner, a half-mended tear in your old cloak had been stitched with clumsy, careful thread.
The room knew you, that was the first horror.
The second was that you wanted to sit down.
“You came home early.”
The voice came from behind you.
You turned, and Obito Uchiha stood in the doorway with flour on his sleeve and one visible eye curved in a smile.
This was not the masked man from rumours, nor the war criminal whispered about in briefings. This was not the thing that had crawled out of history carrying too many dead with him. This Obito looked younger around the mouth. Tired, yes, and scarred, and wrong in ways your instincts recognised before your heart did, but he smiled at you as if nothing terrible had ever happened.
As if nothing terrible ever needed to happen again.
“Where am I?” you asked.
“You’re home,” he stated simply, his smile thinning at the edges.
“This— isn’t my home.”
“It could be.”
The wind chimes sang.
You took one step back. The floorboards did not creak, nothing in the room moved unless he allowed it to. Obito watched you with aching patience.
“I made it from memory,” he said. “The parts you liked. That kitchen from the place you stayed in the Land of Waves. The window from that inn near the border. The garden from the village you said smelled best after rain.”
Your breath caught painfully in your throat. “I…I never told you that.”
“No,” he murmured softly, “you didn’t.”
Outside, the sky remained a perfect, tender blue. Too blue.
You went to the window and looked out. The road was gone. The field was gone. Beyond the fence, there was only garden after garden, all blooming impossibly. No insects. No rot. No distant smoke from war camps. No sound except the bell-bright chatter of water over stones.
A world without injury. A world without interruption. A cage made of flowers.
Obito came to stand behind you, not touching, but close enough that his warmth reached your back.
“You were tired,” he explained. “Every time I saw you, you were tired. Fighting, losing people. Pretending it didn’t matter because everyone else was doing the same.”
You stared out at the garden until the colours blurred.
“So you built a prison?”
“I built a place where nothing can take you from me.”
“You don’t have me.”
The silence that followed was the first imperfect thing in the house. Then Obito chuckled once, very gently. It was not amusement; it was damage learning how to breathe.
“No,” he conceded. “Not yet.”
You turned on him then and his expression had changed. The sweetness was still there, but behind it, something vast and starving looked as though it was trying to crawl through the seams. One eye red, one eye lost forever to shadows and old bargains.
“I made a kinder world,” he sighed. “Why are you afraid of it?”
“Because you’re the one who made it!”
He reacted to that as though you had struck him. You saw the movement, saw the boy beneath the monster flinch.
For one dangerous second, the house trembled.
The cup shattered on the table. The garden outside flickered, black earth bleeding through beneath the flowers. The far wall opened onto a battlefield slick with rain and blood, and for a moment, you heard screaming.
Then Obito closed his eye and the house became whole again.
“I can make you happy here,” he said.
“No.”
His gaze lifted.
In the hallway behind him, a door appeared where there had not been one before. Your bedroom door from childhood.
Obito looked at it, then back at you.
“That room was the hardest,” he said. “I had to guess what you dreamt about.”
As the words left his lips, the door handle began to turn.
SASUKE UCHIHA — the last heir content: supernatural horror, haunted house, massacre and death references, ominous presence, claustrophobic atmosphere
The Uchiha compound did not rot.
That was the worst part.
Rot would have been merciful. Rot would have softened the beams, swallowed the blood, turned grief into earth and fungus and something honest. Instead, the compound endured. Roof tiles remained aligned, doors slid open on well-oiled tracks, the pond still reflected the moon. Even the wind moved through the streets as if afraid to disturb what had happened there.
The dead had kept house.
You arrived at dusk with a key from the Hokage and a task no one else wanted. Inventory, preservation, and removal of unstable materials. Careful bureaucratic phrases for walking through a massacre with a clipboard.
Sasuke was already there. He stood in the central street beneath the black skeleton of an old lantern post, his cloak lifting in the evening wind. He did not turn when you approached.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“I was assigned.”
“So was he.”
You did not need to ask who. The compound listened for your answer.
That was how it felt from the moment you crossed the gate. Every wall seemed alert, every window dark but aware. The place had the awful intimacy of a room where an argument had just stopped.
“I can leave,” you said.
Sasuke’s shoulders moved almost imperceptibly. “No.”
It was not welcome. It was not a refusal. It was simply the only permission he knew how to give.
You worked through the first house in silence. Records, weapons, ceremonial clothing, framed photographs turned face-down in drawers. In one room, a child’s wooden shuriken lay beneath a low table.
Sasuke saw it before you did. His hand twitched, then went still.
You looked away.
Outside, crows gathered along the roofline and by midnight, you had reached the main house.
The air changed at the threshold. Sasuke stopped moving.
You felt it before you understood. Heat without fire, pressure without movement, the sensation of standing before something that knew your name and disliked the sound of your breathing.
“This house remembers everything I tried to forget,” Sasuke breathed. His voice was flat. His hand was shaking, but only slightly, only because the house saw him too.
You stepped inside first.
The entryway smelled of dust, cedar, and old smoke. A pair of sandals sat neatly by the wall, too small for him now. A crack ran through the mirror above the washing basin, splitting your reflection from throat to brow.
Sasuke entered behind you, and every lamp in the house went out.
Instinctively, you reached for a weapon. His hand caught yours in the dark.
“Don’t.”
The word was close to your ear, closer than he had been a second ago.
For a moment, the only living thing in that house was the warmth of his palm against your knuckles.
Then something moved upstairs. Not a footstep.
A drag.
Sasuke released you and his sword whispered free of its sheath. You could see nothing but the faint outline of him, black on black, breath held so tightly it seemed the air itself might bruise.
“What was that?” you asked.
“Just the house settling.”
You raised an eyebrow at him in the dark. “You don’t believe that.”
Sasuke hesitated. “No. I don’t.”
A door slid open above you. Then another. Then another.
The sound moved down the hall in sequence, slow and deliberate, as if someone were passing through rooms and leaving them open. As it went, the dragging continued.
Sasuke started towards the stairs, but you caught his sleeve before he could begin his ascent. He looked down at your hand. In any other place, he might have pulled away. Here, he let the contact remain.
“Don’t go alone,” you pleaded.
His mouth tightened, flattening into a line. “I’m always alone here.”
“No,” you said, shaking your head. “Not tonight.”
The words altered something.
You felt it and so did he.
The house…exhaled.
A lamp at the end of the corridor flared to life, blue-white and sickly. Its glow revealed a wall you were certain had not been there before. Fresh wood, no dust and a paper charm nailed to the centre with a rusted kunai.
On it, written in a hand identical to Sasuke’s, was your name.
Sasuke stared.
“That wasn’t here before,” you whispered.
His sharingan opened in the dark and from behind the new wall, something knocked three times.
SHISUI UCHIHA — beautiful apparition content: ghost/haunting, unreality, death references, memory loss/alteration/manipulation, post-canon-death ambiguity
You met Shisui Uchiha three days after his funeral.
The village had buried an empty story and called it closure. There had been no body for most to mourn, only rumours folded into official silence, only ANBU shadows lingering too long near the Naka River, only Itachi standing beside the water with his face blank enough to frighten you.
Three days later, Shisui was sitting on the riverbank with his sandals off and his trousers rolled up to the knee.
“Don’t scream,” he said cheerfully.
So you screamed. Naturally.
Shisui winced. “That’s fair.”
You should have run for the nearest patrol, you should have thrown a kunai, you should have done any of the things shinobi were trained to do when the dead appeared at dusk, smiling as if lateness were their only crime. Instead, you stood ankle-deep in river mud and stared at him.
He looked alive.
Not ghostly, not pale, not transparent beneath the dying light. Alive. Warm colour in his face, dark hair slipping loose around his forehead, that familiar, beautiful quicksilver smile softening when he saw your shock giving way to something more dangerous.
Hope.
“No,” you breathed.
Shisui’s smile faded then. “I know.”
“You’re— you’re dead.”
“I know.”
“Stop agreeing with me,” you huffed.
That almost brought the smile back. You hated how badly you wanted it.
The river moved quietly between you, evening insects humming in the reeds. Across the water, the trees leaned close, keeping counsel. Shisui looked down at his bare feet, toes just touching the current.
“I didn’t mean for you to see me.”
“Then why are you here?”
His eyes lifted to yours. The question morphed into something else in your mouth.
Why are you here?
Why are you alive?
Why did you leave?
Why does the world look less unbearable now that you’re sitting in it again?
Shisui heard all of them, he always had. That was one of his cruellest talents, understanding the things you had not yet forgiven yourself for feeling.
“I missed you,” he stated. Simple. Unadorned. Like it was obvious.
A blade between the ribs would have been kinder.
You laughed once, because anything else would have sounded too close to weeping.
“That’s not fair.”
“No.”
“You don’t get to haunt me and say things like that.”
His gaze dropped to the water again. “I’m not trying to haunt you.”
“Then what are you trying to do?”
The river darkened as the sun sank behind the trees.
For the first time, Shisui looked afraid.
Not of you, not even of death. He was afraid to speak the answer to that question aloud.
“I don’t know.”
You came back the next evening. And the next. And again after that.
Each time, he was there at the edge of the Naka River, alive in every way that mattered until dawn came too close. He told you things in fragments, but never enough, never the part that explained the impossible. He laughed when you were angry, went quiet when you were kind. Once, when you slipped on the wet bank, he caught you by the waist and his hands were warm through your clothes.
Too warm for a ghost. Too dear for a lie.
On the seventh night, you touched his face.
Shisui went still as stone.
His skin was damp from the river mist. His eyes searched yours with a grief so carefully hidden it could only belong to someone who had been beloved and doomed at once.
“You feel real,” you whispered.
“I am real.”
“Then why do I wake up every morning with river water on my hands?”
His expression broke open. Only for a moment, only enough to show you the terror beneath the charm, but it was enough.
“Do you?” he asked.
Your blood seemed to freeze in your veins. The reeds stopped moving and far across the river, a crow called from the dark.
You stepped back from him.
Shisui stood quickly, reaching for you.
“No— Wait!”
“What did you do?”
Shisui held his hands up as though in surrender. “Nothing you didn’t ask me to.”
“I never asked you for this.”
His sharingan bloomed red in the dusk, not as a threat but as a plea.
“You did,” he whispered desperately. “You just don’t remember.”
Behind him, the Naka River began to flow backwards.
a/n: as you can see, i got possessed by gothic literature and decided to make a series of naturo characters as gothic horror/romance tropes since the naruto cast is basically emotional asbestos wrapped in pretty trauma
i'll be making a tag list for this series, please let me know in the comments if you would like to be on it 🖤
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