Work Text:
1. Sasuke feels as if he were born angry sometimes, but he knows that’s not true. He knows there was a time when the Naka river ran clear, and the heat of summer would ripple through Konoha in saturated haze, his cheek pressed to a cool window pane, skin indistinguishable from light. In his mind, he tries to revive that sweet, permeable ghost of his boyhood. Pencil shavings, scrunched up tissues, sticky plates of cut up pear laid lopsided on uneven slabs of tatami floor. How his mother used to tend to his sickness as a child. The deftness of her fingers. The soothe of her voice like a cold dripping towel laid on a hot fevered forehead. What was that song she always used to sing? When he was younger, he knew.
2. The shadow of his brother looms monstrous at his feet. Ahead, the moon slings low beneath the tree tops of the garden like a ripened fruit. Itachi twists his mouth in a way that Sasuke has never seen before and says to him, find me, the words falling from his lips like weighted dice. Kill me if you dare.
3. The scrape of wooden sandals over river-bank-wet gravel. Blood in the water.
4. Sasuke’s dreams after awakening the Sharingan are red. Scarlet red and lucid as fear. He dreams himself running. Blind. Something large and hideous gaining at his back, faster than he. And then Sasuke is no longer Sasuke. He transforms into what is chasing him, his skin rupturing to skin, bone reshaping to bone, and when he stops and runs these hands over the new, strange grooves and crevices of this body he has become, he knows whose hands they are.
5. Used to be that his dreams would run away from him, and not after. But that was before Shisui, before Itachi. Before Wave, with its quick, desperate hands and blood-filled mouth. Sakura’s disquiet. Naruto’s monster. The taste of real fear. When he had been submerged beneath the surface of the lake, suspended in mid-fight, the water had washed over him with such indifference it had made him feel nameless.
6. But then he also had July with its ever-shortening days and brief flashes of rain. A pair of eyes, a knee bruised to all the colours of the sky, a half-remembering of a spring long departed. An almost-softness grazing the cold of its palest evenings. Naruto meets him at the training ground when he has enough anger to spare. The two of them, bruised by nighttime, lying breathless in a grass-stripped field beneath a sky gone dark hours ago.
7. Kakashi-sensei holds him against the slow beating earth of Konoha, just as he is about to depart for Oto. He thinks it must be easy for him, hiding behind his mask, behind his stolen eye. Hands that were born to confine. Electricity runs over Sasuke’s tongue and along the ridges of his teeth, and he’s so angry, he’s so angry he wants to spit it out at him. Sasuke, he says. Is this something you really want to do?
8. His body, stone. His resolve, trembling. Naruto’s hands turning his fists to blood. The water of the valley whispering through his skin, quick like moonshine, and for a long, long moment, everything was so, completely, still.
9. Rain courses through the heart of the valley of the end, and before him stands the body of Naruto Uzumaki, which is also Naruto Uzumaki’s will, which is also a direct line to the ear of the Gods, and he is shouting and spitting and half-mad, and he’s asking him what it is he wants. You idiot, Sasuke had thought. Rain in his throat. Naruto’s hand tightening around his wrist. It’s never been about what I want. Sasuke looking down to the waters of the valley churning into a black and viscous thing around his ankles, and upon stumbling back, finding he is no longer at the valley of the end, but a silent, shadowed room in Otogakure, and Naruto Uzumaki is gone.
10. Rain flooding his eyes, corrosive on his tongue. Once, while he was walking home from the academy, he had stopped still on an open empty road and stuck his tongue out to taste the rain. The electric heat of hot, heavy summer. The world in flux beneath his feet. So aware, suddenly, of the fragility in his own physiology, the flood beating down on the tendons knitting together his young bones. Later that evening he would come home to his mother scolding him for his rain-matted hair and soaked-through shirt. His waterlogged shoes, his half-breaths, his shivering skin, his mouth still tasting of rain. He can still recall how his mother’s wooden switch had kissed his skin, its sting. It tasted like rain too, he remembers. Or used to. Long time ago.
11. Go on, Orochimaru says, Sasuke’s sword to his neck, steel molten to heat in his chest. I know there’s a killer inside of you somewhere.You wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t.
12. Blood tastes like rain when there is nobody there to witness it. Orochimaru gasping for air, the window glass gone black. Even he sounds human when he is dying.
13. Ouroboros: all violence ends where it began.
14. A body in the basement. The sky crumbling at its head. The shadows of Otogakure coil around him like creatures of her late Kage. Orochimaru’s prisoners are silent as Sasuke unlocks their cages. Twitching, fractal and dendritic like sickened trees, their curse marks reach for his own and he stumbles back, clawing away at the skin of his shoulder. The stench of mildew wet walls, encroaching. A strange, lingering solitude.
15. I can do this mission without you, he says to Taka when the towers of Oto are long out of sight, then stills as a hand places itself on his shoulder. A sensation so foreign, so light, he cannot bring himself to shove it away.
16. And Suigetsu says to him: Sasuke. What do you want us to do for you?
17. What do you want? he imagines his brother saying quietly, voice pale and shaking and bleeding. Sasuke’s trembling blade a millimetre from his neck. Still living. Still living.
18. Justice for the dead. Punishment for the living. To pluck out the eyes of every crow and quench the moon inside his bare fist. To see the green in Konoha despite the red in his eyes. To say Uchiha despite Konoha. Say peace despite violence. Say home. Say family. To drink in the water of Naka without meeting the softness of his cousin’s bone. To shape this nebulous, useless grief into steel, sharp as the swords strapped to his belt. To store this violence inside him and let it grow until there is no room left for fear. To sweat it out of his skin like a midsummer’s fever. To taste the rain of his childhood again. To forget. To never forget. For there to be something beyond this. To be something beyond this. To be.
19. And just be.
20. In the end there is only fire, and he is only his brother’s brother. Even as a child, Itachi was a near-perfect ghost—invisible in the rain. He was the light dancing at the end of a knife. Sasuke doesn’t feel anything close to absolution when Itachi takes out his own eyes. He thinks about the taste of ash dry in his mouth as a red dust horizon stretches out to the ends of the earth like arms spread so wide they are able to embrace the whole body of his fighting. He dreams he walks out of the house where Itachi killed his last Uchiha and lets the moonlight sink into his skin, bright as a crow’s eye.
21. An odd memory that Sasuke cannot help but return to: him as a child, crying, knees pressed into the mud of a training ground, listening, as Shisui’s crows, perched on the fences, pluck out each other’s eyes. From above him, heavy sheets of rain fall from a clear, crisp sky that is perfectly dry and despite this, yes, he knows that it is raining, must be. Can barely see through his red swollen eyes, the dark height of his father’s figure before him. The distant blue ceiling of shame. Later in this memory, his brother finds him alone on the bank of Naka, and scrapes away the wetness on his cheek with the rough of his knuckle. They watch the soft glow of evening light skip over the river-surface like stones, and Sasuke tells Itachi he is ranked first in his class in taijutsu.
22. The blue of Naka. The red of sinking autumn. How bright the orange-lit surface of the river had looked against the both of them.
23. Somehow, he has managed to sharpen the blade of his grief into breaking in two.
24. Sasuke remembers when Hatake Kakashi was still learning to be a teacher, and, Sasuke understands now, human (though perhaps he will forever be learning to be human) and he was pinning Sasuke’s bruised, immobile body to the dirt of a Konoha training ground trying to make him listen to the words coming out from his mouth, which were lies (and perhaps he will forever be a liar also) and told him that everything would be alright, but it was not.
25. Sasuke briefly wonders what drowning is like. If it feels anything close to dreaming.
26. Rain becoming river. River becoming rain. All the crows have disappeared as if you had plucked and eaten them off the trees like pears. When you were eight, you think, or maybe you were nine, your great-uncle told you that when the moon is full, and it rises, and it reflects itself off the Naka river, and it is clear and still and perfect, both of God’s eyes appear to the Uchiha.
27. Someday you will no longer equate God with your clan’s massacre.
28. That is to say: imagine you come home someday to find that the river in your backyard has overflowed twice over, and because of this, your old family house has become half-submerged in a black murky water, the wood that had once held it together rotted and come undone from itself. Imagine that surrounding the fallen fences of the compound, hundreds of shadowed crow-eyed figures crouch—faces to the water, black-encrusted lips ajar like broken open windows—as their hands, one after the other, scoop the river water into their mouths with such ferocity they must be under some sort of compulsion. The Moon’s silver, warbling reflection in the water pushes its way inside of you as if your physical body were no more than an idea, and as it congeals and clots and thickens into the sounds of all your dead family and friends, a burden your body was born to break beneath, you realise that your fighting and your fate and your wounds were never holy after all, they were human all along, and you are, at once, filling the water and being filled by the water. You are both the thing consuming and the thing being consumed. And you are not fighting or breathing or crying or anything. You are not anything.
29. There is no one left alive who has ever seen you cry.
30. You do not know how to win this.
1. “Is it too much to ask for—” Sasuke begins. Clears his throat. Fiddles with the paint peeling off the hilt of his sword. “Is it too much to ask to be set free from this?”