What If Itachi Raised Naruto and Sasuke as Brothers

An Uchiha prodigy chooses to raise both his younger brother and the village's jinchuriki after a massacre, binding their fates together under one roof. Itachi Uchiha stays in Konoha the night his clan dies, tasked by the Third Hokage with watching over Naruto Uzumaki and his own brother Sasuke in exchange for keeping his Sharingan eyes inside the village. The three move into the emptied Uchiha district, where Itachi sets out three bowls every night and teaches two traumatized boys how to be brothers. Naruto fills the silence with noise and dreams of becoming Hokage while Sasuke wrestles with grief and fever dreams that call for a mother who will never answer. As the years pass, the village's suspicion of both the last Uchiha and the container of the Nine-Tails forces Itachi to make an impossible choice: carry the truth of the massacre alone until his failing health takes him, or tell Sasuke before someone else twists the story into a weapon.