This was freakin amazing! I luved it!!
I just had one question. Did not-Sasuke kill Iruka?

this sure is a mind-fuck...
love your style... :]

Why do I find myself adding practically all of your fics to my favorites? This is worrying, because then most of my favs will be by you and... it's not wrong, but it'll cause a sort of imbalance...

You're viciously talented.

Yo. I added this story to my favorites ages ago and never reviewed, but I'm attempting to reform my non-review-ist ways. As such, I am finally reviewing.

First and foremost, DON'T add page breaks. Half of the beauty of this (in my opinion, at least) is the fragmented transitions and how they're right there, and we can see/feel it like Iruka does.

Second, I almost cried myself to a happy, angst-filled death when I discovered this story. Currently there are only three stories in the Naruto section that list it's two main characters as Iruka and Orochimaru. One of them is this. Another is one of mine.

I posted mine before you posted this, and it's kind of a mind-fuck fic too (though not quite to the level of yours- wonderful mind-fuck-age here). I kind of started writing mine because I saw a lot of potential in stories with Iruka and Orochimaru, but there was literally only *one* in existence. So I wrote mine. And then you wrote yours. And I almost died a happy, shocked death.

Then I read it. And proceeded to die a giddy, angst-filled, mind-fucked death. Because this is, simply, art. The worst/best kind of art, that pulls you in and turns you over and upside down and sideways and then ends by putting you right side up, except that when that time comes you're not sure if you really are right side up or not.

So thank you for this. Besides it being a dark, wonderful, mind-fucking piece of art involving Iruka and Orochimaru, I loved your plot too. It was believable and down to earth in the middle of all the surrealism, which almost made it that much more surreal. Iruka, too, was so in touch with how I see him (and how I wish others would see him) and the fact that he's a ninja above everything else and just, doesn't, break really fits him. Especially in that most everybody else writes him as overly emotional.

So, I hope to see more Iruka from you, and maybe even some more Iruka with Orochimaru involved. (One of my few reviewers for Captive Will expressed a desire for more, so I'm currently considering a sequel. Maybe. I'm not sure how I'd work it.) Just keep writing, your work is great.

—TS

Ok I'm confused... did Iruka die? I wanted him to die but instead it was a dream inside a dream? (As in was it that Orochimaru made Iruka think he was torturing him and then used a dream inside that dream to make Iruka think he was with Kakashi... but in the end Iruka is physically unharmed but mentally fucked?

W. O. W.
That was mind-fucking enough!
And really, really good. I liked the changes, and the way you write is really interesting and original ^^

Holy crap. That was some serious hard-core mind-fuckage, of the first degree (Never understood that saying, but it sounds cool). Very well written, but yes, this is very mind-fuck(Ing? Ish? don't know the proper ending)

The reason I first started reading this story is the amazing title you have, and the actual story definitely owns up to such a great, insensitive title. I like the distorted, blurred line between reality and dreams. My only confusion was the very, very last line: "And Iruka wakes up to the sight of the crescent moon overhead." Was the entire scene with Orochimaru killing Iruka just another hallucination, or is the very last line another dream of Iruka's, an escape from the pain and death? Maybe the ambiguity at the end is for the better; the whole story, after all, revolves around twisting perception. Good story.

"He thinks about Orochimaru's new redblack eyes and wish-it-wasn't-familiar smirk and decides he probably has."

How is it that a single sentence is all that it takes to undo me completely?? I sobbed--once and hard--at this little bit of narrative. It just...it was like driving the stake in...and yet it's so simple, it shouldn't have had so much of an effect. But then, that's what I've come to expect from you. ;)

This is the way I imagine it. The idea of their being tools of Konoha, the desperate nothing/everything in Iruka...it was a mind-fuck for sure. And I feel...strangely cold after reading it. (a good reaction, it means it cost me something to read)

I liked your characterizations, style, flow, and tone. The way you didn't explain everything, just let it happen. The things you hinted at, the things you stated bluntly, all very well timed and worded.

Basically...WOW! ^_^