Chapter Text
Naruto –
I don’t know how I woke up in the Konoha hospital, Kakashi’s face smiling down on me. Sakura said that the border guards found me passed out on the forest floor from chakra exhaustion. I could’ve died, apparently.
Saw the note you left me. It made me laugh.
“Come back to me. Don’t leave me all alone. Don’t die on me, you stupid son of a bitch. You goddamn fucking idiot. I told you to stay out of the damn fight! Why the hell don’t you ever listen? I fucking hate you. I hate you, you hear me? Don’t you dare die on me, because I need to kill you with my bare hands.”
Visiting hours are over and the loneliness is seeping into my bones. I’m staring at my hands. They’re just my hands, like I’ve always had, but…also there is something of comfort to them, because not that long ago they were touching your hands. How could they be ordinary hands and also hold that memory at the same time? Doesn’t make sense.
I can’t rest while I tell this. Too much to say. I’m going to tell you all, Naruto. Even the parts you know. I’m going to describe the shape of the monster that is devouring me.
And then I’m going to start again, and leave that monster behind.
There was…a... something out in the desert by the road. That wasn’t descriptive, I know, but… I don’t know what it is! It looks like…well, you know that evil tower in that movie we saw together one summer? It looks like a bunch of those. And all around the towers are these discs, or something, reflecting the sun up at the towers. Light so bright it’s almost heat. You feel warmed just by looking at it. What is this thing? It goes on for miles! The towers and these fields of heat and light – it’s the kind of thing we always assume the Akatsuki has stashed away somewhere in the great empty of the northwest for their world domination plans, but here it is, right by the main road, for everyone going, hopeful for a better life (or returning, exhausted and disappointed) to see.
This world has weird things in it. It has so many miles, so much space to put the weirdness in.
“Naruto, is that you?”
I don’t know why I asked that. But it was you. And the surprise of that seemed to justify the question.
You smiled. You looked like you always had, except a little older, like I looked a little older, incrementally, the way we never notice until we do.
“It’s me, Sasuke,” you said.
“Sasuke now, is it?” I said. “It was always nicknames before with you.”
“Who calls their best friend by their actual name, right?” You smiled. “Boring people, that’s who.”
“Well, I guess, if nothing else, you weren’t boring,” I said.
You took my hand and we paused there. My instinct was to enfold you, to bury myself in your neck, which was always the part that smelled most of you. But it had been a long time, and both of us just let it linger at our hands.
“I’m sorry, bastard,” you said.
Hmm.
“Sasuke is fine for now,” I said.
You took my other hand, turned me to face you.
“I’m sorry! This wasn’t about you at all, that’s not why I was gone.”
“A higher calling?” I asked.
“A lower one, I guess,” you said. “The lowest, darkest places. You know. You’ve seen them.”
“And you left to try to fix…whatever this all is?”
“To help fix it. Sasuke, bastard, the world is teetering. I’m trying to keep it sliding the right direction. Either way, a huge and terrible change is coming. But if it slides too far toward them…” you gestured with your eyes at the broken and twisted gates “…then it’s all over for people like us. People in love, people who feel .”
“Speaking of which, I am about to run into that town.”
“They’ll kill you,” you said.
“Maybe.”
“Sas, they will kill you to an extent you didn’t know a person could be killed. I don’t suppose I have the moral standing to tell you not to do this, but really, don’t do this! You don’t know how dangerous they can be.”
“Oh, Naruto,” I said. “I know. I know. I know.”
“Okay, then,” you said.
And then you pulled me toward you. You were the one who did that. Buried your face in my neck, and breathed in.
“Sas, I love you. I am your best friend, and you are my best friend, and I want to be with you forever. But…”
You pulled yourself back up.
“…forever can’t start yet. And in the meantime, you can’t keep looking for me.”
“Can’t go home, either,” I said. “I tried that.”
“I know,” you said. “I know, and I don’t know what to do about that, but I need to be out where I am, doing what I am doing. I need to stay lost for a while. You have to respect that. You have to respect me enough not to look for me.”
My heart beats differently just being near you. Just touching. Just briefly.
“Take me with you. Let’s do this together, I can help!”
Even as I said it I knew that it was impossible, and so I didn’t even feel disappointed when you shook your head.
“You’re right,” I said. “I haven’t respected you. What you did, disappearing, it was inexcusable. But so was my chasing after you like this, in a lot of ways. Just like what I did to you those years ago.”
“Two inexcusable men,” you said. “That’s us.”
You were crying. I realized I was, too. Had been since I saw you.
“Someday I will come back, if you let me,” you said, “and we will live out the rest of our lives. I promise that. I promise that. In the meantime…”
“In the meantime?” I said, “stop looking.”
“Yeah,” you said. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. Then we embraced. My whole world focused down to that point of contact. Colors dimmed, I only smelled you. We could have been forever like that, and I would have been satisfied. But then it was over.
“Soon,” you said. “Soon. And I guess I can only say again, please don’t do this.”
“I am going through those gates as soon as you leave.”
“I love you, Sasuke,” you said. “I love you. I love you.”
“I love you, Naruto.”
And then you were gone in a puff of smoke. My hands were shaking. I looked at the gate with its broken and worn sign. Around me was the vibration of the air and the sack on my back, all mass and potential energy.
I channeled my chakra to my legs, not releasing yet. I reached into my bag, did the one bit of preparation I had had time to think about. I let myself breathe a few more times. Felt the air go in and out, enjoying those moments in which that was still possible.
My skin was damp then. I thought of what I would do once I had crashed through the gate and my mind was a blank. I had no plan at all.
I let go.
I wonder if the weirdness of this emptiness is specific to our experience? Like, are our prairies and deserts special somehow in their distance? And is that why so much of the unreal crops up around them? Or is there just as much weirdness in, say, the cold desert out far north?
Do they see lights in the sky too, or just us? Do they drive that emptiness back and forth, like it was a page of words that could be deciphered if just gone over enough? Or do they leave that emptiness well enough alone?
Passerbys slow as they pass whatever these towers and fields of light are. Wondering. Wondering, probably looking around them, to find out the answer. I’m not going to, though. Not everything has to be known.
I wish you had seen it. The landscape and these menacing towers. Like the set of a movie about the end of the world.
But the world’s not ending. It’s just going through a transformation so fast and thorough that it is indistinguishable from ending to the humans living on it.
A sound like the yelp of a strange animal, and the gate tore off and I arrived into town. There were so many of those men with their ill-fitting skin and yellow tunics. Hundreds, maybe. I plowed through them and they went flying, landing at horrible angles before I had to skid to stop to avoid crashing into a building. The well-placed explosion might have taken out a lot of them but I needed to be alive to see this through, to make sure that none of this was left when I went.
The mob surrounded an abandoned building, sneering. One who had been hit limped toward me. The skin of his face had been torn off by the collision and underneath was a mealy yellow fat, dripping down over his chin. There was no sign of bone.
I considered my next move. My whole body glistened with sweat. I couldn’t smell the town, fortunately, but I could imagine a smell like tilled earth, like green things.
A whole glob of the yellow fat fell from the injured man’s face and landed on the ground, where he slipped on it. He laughed. A choked, broken sound.
All of the buildings in the town were covered with a thin film of oil. The whole town looked sticky to the touch.
Tied to a streetlight near the police station was one of the men, like all the others. He leaned into the ropes that bound him.
“Get him!” he croaked. His whole body was covered in knife wounds, but his eyes were alive and focused. “Get him!”
He bled mildew and must into the ropes.
The crowd parted, and him – the original Him – the Man in the Purple Cloak, the Hungry Man, he walked stiffly up to me.
“Oh, you can leave,” he said. “None of us are going to hurt you right away. And you aren’t any safer in the shadows.”
He was right. I stepped out into the light. It took a couple tries because my legs were shaking, but I made it.
“Look at you,” he said, “sweating like a lost child exhausted from running around searching for his mother.”
“What a weird metaphor,” I said.
“You’re on edge,” he said.
“I’m always on edge,” I said.
I wiped my forehead to keep my eyes clear.
“Welcome to my home,” he said. “We didn’t know you were coming, or we would have prepared better.”
“What is this place?” I asked. “Not that it matters. Not that it’s anything but a wound that must be sewn shut, but you know, the longer I keep talking, the longer before you attack me.”
“That’s a complicated story, and I’m not much for talking. Not like you. ‘Oh, Naruto! Hi, Naruto! It’s me, Naruto!’”
His voice, mocking, was like the accidental hollowing of the wind.
The other men had backed up, formed a circle around us, leaving the two of us alone in the center. I was his mess to handle, and he was ready to clean me up.
“You’re serial killers,” I said.
“We’re freedom,” he said. “Freedom can be good or bad. There can be terrible freedom.” He grinned. His teeth were faintly green. “ We are the terrible freedom.”
“You’re murderers,” I said.
“This world,” he said. “A place defined as much by distance as culture. You shinobi embrace its distances. Empty spaces and long trips, but there is always a price. We are that price. We are creatures of the void. We feed on distance, on road trips, on emptiness, bodies by the side of the highway.”
There was a sound, like applause, but softer. The crowd of those men sucking in and out on their cheeks, creating a faint sound of flesh.
“Don’t try to make poetry out of the blood on your hands,” I said.
He took my arm. I don’t know how he got that close, but he was there, and he did not grab; he took, like a dance partner, gentle but insistent, and then he pushed me up against a tree. His arm was against my throat.
Fear branched out through me like lightning, starting from my gut and ending with the thunderclap in my head.
But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t push down and he was wincing, his face wrinkling in disgust. He stepped back, wiping at his arm.
I gestured to my outstretched hand.
“This scroll,” I said. “Took it out when you weren’t looking. Tip from a friend.”
The Man in the Purple Cloak growled, and it sounded like a creature ten times his size. No human throat made that sound.
“You think that jutsu will protect you?” he said. He slapped me. The world went white on one side, and my left ear rang. “It will hurt me, but it will hurt you more.”
I didn’t respond with words. Instead I silently unfurled the scroll before he could realize I was moving. A flash of understanding. Arrows and circles and dotted lines ever-changing. I now understood what I had to do, what it all meant. I followed the hand signals and summoned the last of my chakra. I grabbed his face, wrenched open his rotting, gummy mouth, and I activated my Rinnegan.
“I also brought this!” I said.
He choked, heaved. His skin turned purple, as though his entire body was bruising, and I couldn’t believe it! I couldn’t believe it, Naruto! He turned and ran.
The other monsters around me froze. Didn’t seem to know what to do. The tied up one, a thick glop oozing from the wounds all over his skin, just moved his mouth like a fish, a faint sound like “ffuh…ffuh…ffuh.”
I did the only thing I could do. In the moment that they were frozen, I took off after the Man in the Purple Cloak. The only way out is through.
As soon as I started moving, the others moved too. I broke through a gap in their circle, but I could hear the off kilter rhythm of their running, and the thick moist gasps of exertion from all around me.
I just stayed with the Man, just followed the Man.
I chased him into a diner, the all-night restaurant. The inside of the establishment was full of rotting food. Milk tea and bento boxes, covered in mold and maggots. I was glad for the scroll in my hands, for the knowledge I now possessed. Only the glasses of soda, watery with melted ice, still looked like what they were, unable to age, unable to rot.
That Man, that thing , was already in the kitchen, headed for the back door, but I saw an opportunity: the walk-in cooler.
I put the last of my chakra into a sprint, and crashed into him as he made for the back, sending both of us sprawling into the cooler. I slammed the door and pushed one of the low heavy shelves in front of it. He flopped around on the ground, spitting out oil, his skin an angry purple.
After the heat of the night air outside, the walk-in felt like constant pin pricks. It focused me, like sobering up from a long night of drinking.
I turned to check the door, and when I turned back he was on his feet.
“Well,” he said. “Well, that bought you some time, didn’t it? I wasn’t expecting that. You got me to panic. Got me to run. But what now? What’s next?”
His skin blotched back from purple to the faint yellow. He stretched, and flexed, and I could see his strength returning.
The walk-in was smaller than it had originally looked. I could hear hands pawing on the outside of the door, and on the walls on both sides.
“You got me to run, but then what? What weapon do you have to finish the job?” he said.
He spread his hands expectantly.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing?” he said.
“I brought nothing. I brought myself. I’m going to kill you.”
He laughed, the deep laugh at the end of a good joke.
“You’re going to kill me? Hahahahahahaha. Oh, Sasuke. Let me explain death to you,” he said. And then he came at me.
Naruto, I’d never been so afraid. And that’s saying a lot, after the years I’ve had, after the things I’ve seen. I felt terror in every part of me. It froze up my limbs, locked up my joints, made my thoughts both too slow for planning and too fast to follow. I wasn’t a person anymore, just a container for my fear.
I thought about you, Naruto. About when I thought you were dead, and when I knew you weren’t.
I thought about the man on the side of the road, dying alone as decent people ate lunch not ten feet away.
I thought of a library by the sea.
I thought of a line of names, a murderer’s legacy on an ugly stretch of road.
I thought of a young girl doing her best, and just how good her best was.
I thought of a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars.
I thought of home.
I thought of Akira.
I thought of you.
And through all of these thoughts, a buzzing anxiety. Anxiety like electricity. And I knew, in that moment, that anxiety is just an energy. It is an uncontrollable near-infinite energy, surging within me. And for once I stopped trying to contain it.
I told my heart, beat faster. I told my panicked breath, become more difficult, and I told my fear to overtake me.
Make me more afraid. I am not afraid of feeling afraid. Make me more afraid!
All of that energy, I turned it outward. I pushed it into my arms, my legs, my teeth.
Fuck that Man!
When he hit me, I hit back. He was stronger than I remembered. It was like being hit by a planet. Mass without pity, just brutal physics. But I was hitting, too. Pounding at his face, his chest, slashing with my kunai, throwing myself into him.
I didn’t feel pain. I was so full of fear that there wasn’t any room for anything else. I fought using every wave of terror inside of me.
The Man laughed when I hit him, and he kept punching, as thoughtless and inhuman as a rock slide on a highway. But I kept hitting too, and he stopped laughing. I clawed at his face, and his skin started to go, and that yellow fat oozed out.
He grunted, growled, flailed at me. He was no longer toying with me; he wanted to destroy me.
But I stayed on my feet. I tore at him with the last of myself, and finally, he was the one that fell, his teeth mashed into his cheek, shouting incoherently.
I went knees-first into his chest. I hit, and fired a Chidori, and hit…
And then he was dead. He was dead! I had done it! I had won!
Adrenaline pounded through me. I couldn’t turn off the energy I had found in myself, and I was in pretty bad shape. Bruises, probably a broken rib, definitely broken arm. But that man in that tattered purple cloak laid there, his head a pile of fat and pulp that smelled like mushrooms.
I threw up. Half on the floor, and half on his body. It was horrible.
But I felt victory like I hadn’t felt in years. With my own hands, I had ended this. I had fucking won!
There was a tapping at the door. A soft scratching on the walls. And I remembered that I had only killed one of them. I was surrounded by hundreds more.
“Let us in! Let us in!” a ragged voice sang, every note in discord with the note before.
A skittering on the ceiling, like an enormous spider. The lights went out. In the darkness, I could hear moaning and whispering from the walls. A voice I recognized as that of the stabbed man, sounding like it was in my ear.
“Ffuh! Ffuh! Ffuh!”
Then a new sound. I felt it in my stomach first. A thumping sound that hadn’t been there before. Gradually it slid from my stomach to my ears, becoming audible. Footsteps. Many footsteps. The sound became clear. The sound of people, and then chattering. There was someone in this world who could help me.
The whispering stopped. There was scrambling on the walls, like a dog slipping on hardwood. Then, nothing. Nothing but myself and the darkness of the walk-in.
The door burst open, knocking over the shelf holding it shut. A square of light with a figure in it. Gradually I understood the shape as a woman with a ram mask, a small bag slung over her shoulder. I’d never seen this woman before.
She looked past me at the body on the floor.
“Holy shit!” she said.
She looked at me again, closely, with something between awe and suspicion. She clicked on her radio. “You’re not gonna believe this,” she said, “but Vector H is down.”
There was a general sound of disbelief or excitement from the radio, but she clicked it off before it could be understood as words.
“Come on out. Those things have run for now,” she said, gesturing but not touching me. She seemed to want to give me distance.
She glanced again at the Man in the Purple Cloak, the Hungry Man, the corpse. She gestured me through the rotting diner and out onto the streets. Masked shinobi congregated at the entrance. Women and men in uniform sweeping the houses.
But the figures did not look like anybody I knew.
“Who are you all?” I asked the woman.
“You did a very good thing today, Sasuke. A very good thing.” She shook her head. “Maybe an amazing thing. But now it’s time for you to leave.”
“Who do you work for?” I asked.
“Who do you work for?” she said, confused.
“What?” I said. It was the only thing I could think to say, so I said it again. “What?”
“You’re lucky Naruto sent us.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I stood there, feeling like a drained battery.
“Sasuke, listen,” she said. “They ran when they saw us coming, but they won’t be gone for long. It’s truly incredible that you handled one of them, it really is, but you need to go before the rest come back.”
She was right. I let her lead me back towards the gate.
“Goodbye, Sasuke,” the woman said as I began to leave, slowly and with some difficulty because of the injuries. “You’ll hear from us again, I’m sure. Until then…” she thought for a moment, shrugged, and said, “I don’t know. I guess just keep doin’ what you been doin’. It’s kept you alive this far.”
Got another visit from Sakura a few hours later. She pretended like I hadn’t arrived home one foot in the grave at the gates of the village.
They want me to rest and stay a few months. Rest and rest and rest.
Which brings me to this strange predicament.
I’m not going to look for you, Naruto. I will let you be lost until that moment you want to be found. But I’m not done. I know now that the anxiety within me is also unbelievable strength. And I can feel it now, that energy.
So, new plan. I’m going to find out what the hell is actually happening, and why I could suddenly read the scroll and why that would make those men run at just the mere touch of it. I’m going to find out everything.
And in the meantime, I will rest, and then I will be back out in the world, somewhere else.
Which is to say that I’m going to keep moving.
I love it. I love it so much.
Are there worlds beyond our tiny plane of existence? I don’t know yet. Not yet. But I will.
All I know for now is that this isn’t the end of my story. This isn’t the end of my journey.
– Sasuke