Divine Office

Rating: PG-13, for violence and lots of implication.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Naruto, or any of the places and characters mentioned in that series and this piece of fanfiction. No profit is being made, I write for free.
Notes: SasuNaru, with a lot of angst and mentions of character death. Set in the not-so-distant future, when Orochimaru is preparing to take over Sasuke’s body. Based on the idea of The Canonical Hours, so this is supposed to be one whole day. I'd like feedback, as I'm not sure what to make of this. XS

Update: I spotted some errors when rereading this, so I’ve gone back corrected them all. And, uh… that’s it. Most people seem not to get this, so I had the urge to rewrite and elaborate somewhat; however, I decided not to. There’s something about this that sticks and I’m sort of loathe to change it. (I am worried that my mental state was less than healthy when I wrote it, though. XD)

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Matins

The weekends are the worst, particularly in the morning. Nauseous, sore, Sasuke wakes to the first chirrups of dawn chorus and always does things in a well-considered order: he cringes, then picks his new, polished forehead protector up off the tiny table next to his bed and places it carefully around his head, tries to keep as still as he can. During the week he is awoken earlier, fresh scars pulling painfully from inside the dirty jacket he fell asleep in or Kabuto calling him from somewhere downstairs, his voice grated thin through overuse. There is a different routine on the weekdays and Sasuke doesn’t have to carry it out for himself.

The weekends are the worst, thinks Sasuke, throwing up into the toilet and flushing it calmly. The Sound village isn’t quite the same when you want to be anywhere but there; but it’s the only location safe enough for him to be now, hunted by people from all sides but this one.

After that, Sasuke heads downstairs without bothering to change his clothes. The only place he can blend in is in a street full of blind, unhearing people, not ninja; sometimes they get blasted apart -- limb from limb from bleeding limb -- when an enemy ninja spots him, but Sasuke always manages to get away. He always lives and fights, runs, leaves corpses behind like a morbid skin he’s just slithered out of. It’s difficult to keep his mind off these thoughts, but he manages it and forces toast down with something red smeared on top like congealing blood. Sasuke doesn’t check anymore: he has come to trust the handful of people that are there to take care of him too much for that.

The weekdays are a five-day relief. Overworked, underslept, unpaid for his toils, Sasuke can kill as many of the Hokage’s snot-for-brains subordinates as he wants and be congratulated for it. The enemy are taken dead or alive, and they always end up in the morgue: bang bang, kunai in the back of the neck and they’re dead.

The weekends are when Sasuke suffers, his mind left to crumble under the repressive strain of freedom. So he sits in the corner of some anonymous, neutral shithole when he can manage to escape Orochimaru’s watchful eye, bedsprings jabbing him painfully in the thigh; and he tries to forget.

“--so sorry,” comes another thin voice from behind, and Sasuke stops fighting and just gets lost in the genjutsu.

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Lauds

It’s not really like a need, Sasuke tells himself. It’s more like something to pass the time, the eye of an inevitable storm where he can sit and be blind while the wind watches for him. He doesn’t have to see death here, or think of anybody but the blond-haired boy on top of him, one hand in Sasuke’s hair but nothing real getting through.

This is very early morning on Sasuke’s weekend, six o’clock, and he would be able to smell the piss in the bedsheets if not for his almost complete lack of awareness. Sometimes, Sasuke wonders if imagining himself back there is betrayal; but that’s always after, when he’s stumbling away and letting the indifference wash out of his mouth with the bile. If the war wasn’t on, this wouldn’t be the sort of place that he would be able to tolerate -- but it’s still better than “home”, with eyes forever on his back.

This ignorance is worth it all, certainly, worth more than diamonds and exploding tags and other ninjas’ blank dead faces. Time is always a bubble, Sasuke trapped inside and pressing himself against the edges to watch people passing him by. There’s somebody else in his bubble with feet that always step on him, and this is the only interaction with Naruto he really gets and he doesn’t even care to remember who gives him it.

Of course, Sasuke feels guilty when he gives himself the chance to think. There are others that suffer in this war, and they’re not taking such risky escape routes. In fact, he’s not even too sure what of they do to distract themselves, and he feels guilty for not knowing this too.

But right now, Sasuke’s very early morning, he’s too busy weaving his last threads of concentration into a veil of not-quite-sleep that he doesn’t feel hands roughly in his hair, or smell the rotten whisper at his neck. “I wish…” she says, but he doesn’t hear. “I wish you could come back.”

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Terce

On the treetops, up in the clouds, Sasuke can feel things again and it’s bittersweet. Of course he loves this, wind and water in the sky, earth under his feet and fire in his lungs; he just doesn’t like many of the sights below. Sometimes he’ll see a flare and know that another house has been burned to the ground, and it’s probably mad bad Orochimaru laughing away somewhere at the carnage. But he doesn’t stop now, not for the world, because he feels more shackled to the sky than free and it’s a relief.

Sasuke finds that he has lived his life wishing to be other people. Anyone, in fact: he would sooner be Orochimaru, chained to his undying hatred, or Sakura, attached to forethought and organisation, or Tenten, locked firm in the ground’s blossoming hold, or Lee, unable to move from his grief and the rows of cold, intruding stone -- and Sasuke knows because he watches Konoha’s trials unfold from his palm like an origami lotus. “Anyone but me” is Sasuke’s philosophy, and it makes sense that he should think of those people without a memory, enough to leave them free. Sometimes, he wishes he could blow his own thoughts out the back of his skull, and he gets as far as moulding chakra to a point in his palm before he’s being interrupted by another murderous ninja.

Funny, and Sasuke laughs without moving his mouth. I was just about to do the job for you. And when he fights, it is only half-heartedly, but Sasuke still wins and gets the pleasure of returning to Kabuto to report another victory.

The rows of ninja waiting to execute is already set up, and he doesn’t stay to watch.

Where is Sasuke’s courage now? Friends just mean he feels the need to go on; bedpartners are another way to waste his life and his energy. Why make friends when he can kill a few more ninja, keep pushing Konoha’s losses higher and higher? Why have sex when he can waste his life elsewhere, with a face he doesn’t remember when it’s done and his money untouched on the floor?

Whoever she is, Sasuke is glad that she has enough sense to not remind him.

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Sext

Sasuke’s lunchtime goes something like this: grey rice from a chipped bowl in his room, and he listens to a girl sing in the next room, depressingly out of tune; he thinks far too much while he chews, and he drinks something equally grey from an equally chipped mug. This is how his weekend lunchtimes always go, and Sasuke doesn’t think, I could be doing something with this time. Everybody knows he deserves two measly days off a week -- he’s putting his neck on the line the rest of the time, and it’s a chance for him to sleep and recover his strength.

Rather than do anything constructive, Sasuke watches the sun move across the window, the stains on the wall, his own stunted fingernails. He wonders if Naruto would have been this bloody-minded in this situation, and whether he’s killed anybody yet. It’s almost impossible that he wouldn’t have, he tells himself, because after all the mark of death was slashed into his lips with every twisting smile.

Sometimes, Sasuke pulls the curtains closed with such a force that they rrrip, and the sun slants through the holes he’s made and cuts him into little pieces. He’s reminded of the academy, when a perpetually unsmiling history teacher mentioned Vlad the Impaler; she taught them briefly of his life and that his legal name was Vlad Dracula. Only his enemies called him the Impaler; when he signed documents, it was always Vlad Dracula. That’s where the myth came from, don’t you know? Vlad Dracula used to dip his bread in the blood of his prisoners, who would hang from metal poles with rolling eyes. Sasuke wonders whether being impaled by chakra is like being speared by sunlight, and decides that it probably is. Nothing like a javelin through your middle, though -- the chakra would be more like separating your insides than shredding them.

“These times are a chance for you to recover your strength,” Kabuto says with a smart, sour smile when he watches him flit about the house like a moth. “Use them.”

Yes, Sasuke does think. Yes, my strength.

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None

There is no backdrop to Sasuke’s dream when it comes, just black fading into grey, but there’s always enough colour in the subject to make up for it -- blond hair, and orange pooling on the floor, and the vivid blue that glows like neon in the gloom. He almost always laughs at the pink in Naruto’s cheeks, and his voice is oddly choked.

Sasuke’s eyes open against the backdrop of tiny scars and black hair and sleeplessness, and when he blinks it’s sort of hard to close his eyes all the way for fear of missing out any details. The sight wavers around him; Sasuke presses his fingers tight against his calves, waiting for the spindles of fingerprint to grow into deep dark bruises that he can fix up later on. Chakra, power in his blood to call upon when he needs it. There’s no way he’ll give it up, not for anything, though Naruto’s face is clear in his mind.

So Sasuke closes his eyes and takes a trip back to the academy, where any unauthorised jutsu was treason in the halls, and it’s not at all like this. With Naruto far away in the past and fading further still, and it’s all Sasuke can manage to keep his memories burnished bright. Sometimes it’s like he can taste chakra in the air and his tongue tingles, burned but eager for still more heat. Like he can see chakra in the static behind his eyelids, when he sways and pushes against the wall to stop from passing out. It’s in the dust on the banister, that girl’s voice, the curling pictures still tacked to Sasuke’s wall.

It’s in the bruises blossoming under Sasuke’s paling skin, and when he touches them he shivers.

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Vespers

Being friends with Uchiha Sasuke is like training a dog, and the worst part is that they’re all failing and he just keeps getting worse.

The first rule of behaviour training is: Never Let The Animal Be Praised For Its Mistakes. Sasuke can explode like he wishes and nobody whispers a word, he has every right to be frustrated, he can’t be expected to keep his frustration locked up all the time, he’s an orphan and he knows he’s about to die at any minute so let’s indulge him. Sasuke does explode like he wishes and people whisper comfort, praise him for doing so well under the circumstances; praise can’t cancel out bad behaviour, and Sasuke feels himself more angry by the day, the minute, this very second.

The second rule of behaviour training is: Reward The Animal When Appropriate/Justified. Give it a treat when it’s good and it will keep doing the profitable acts, curb the instinct to do the wrong thing. Sasuke thinks people should reward him for being indifferent, but it’s so hard when he’s poker-faced and people are screaming and crying for their lives and their pride is lost, and he doubts they want to forgive those unsmiling cheeks when he cuts their throats.

There are more, but Sasuke’s memory is slipping silently out through his mouth, shuddering breaths when he’s lying vulnerable on a strangely familiar mattress and not thinking. His every thought is strained, on edge, after five days of nothing he’s going to find something. Eyes unfocussed, Sasuke can barely hear the whispers – “so sorry, so sorry, so sorry,” – or feel the hand against his neck, because his mind is held blissfully still in the caster’s palm. She’s pressing her lips together with the break between every word, and he doesn’t care, senses curling up somewhere new like an animal in winter.

Sasuke doesn’t really think it’s an addiction, this need for a few old memories. He is too busy fighting the fight against control, fingers twitching through the pain and the peace of not being himself anymore. Sasuke needs chakra, needs it like the blood in his veins and sometimes it feels like it is unwinding from his mind and collecting in the pit of his stomach, vomited up with his breakfast and lunch and grey drab tea.

I wonder whether I’m forgetting, only at that thought he will open his mouth when he laughs high and cold.

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Compline

It’s like waking up, having the genjutsu thrown off. First he gasps for air, clutches his throat like somebody has just tried to duck him under a foot of icy water; then his eyes focus on exactly the same window smudge they did last time; and his ears pick up the clink of his money being kicked to the side. The details filter in slowly, layer upon thick layer of sounds and smells and feelings that make his throat close up and the scratchy fabric of his jacket prickle at his neck.

Sasuke never gets used to it, the too familiar grooves in his palms and dead air up and down his nose. Sometimes, curiosity gets the better of him after a minute or two of coaxing, and he tries to peer past the doorframe to watch her retreat, the dealer of chakra, somebody there to make him happy and guard him from the world.

Not this time, damp rot in the air and her sitting right there on the ground without even the tiniest glance up. Sasuke begins to choke on his own surprise and coughs, watching grimy money pass from hand to hand, and he knows that if Sakura doesn’t do or say something now then he will die because he’s not going to sit up so he can face just more feelings, and emotion is weakness he doesn’t want to can’t look at Sakura’s smiling mouth and not--

“How is it, Sasuke?” Sakura’s face is turned down, watching the money in her palms. “It’s been a long time since I was put under a genjutsu.” It’s like she’s trying to play it down, Sasuke’s utter dependence on the past, and the comically serious expression Sakura is wearing easily cancels her nonchalance out.

The time for Sasuke to speak is now, he knows it; if he wants Sakura to explain, he’ll have to ask, of course. Of course the truth won’t just spill from Sakura’s tongue without prompting.

“I’m sorry you can’t even look at me,” she breathes, lifting her nose to watch him, his arms spread out on each side of the narrow bed and hanging halfway to the floor while he stares intently at the stained ceiling. “I know you’ll hate me later, but if making you remember what you left behind was the only way to maybe get you back then I was prepared to try it.” Her face is set, jaw clenched, and Sasuke thinks that he has never seen Sakura like this before, not a Sakura that would sneak away from home to this nowhere, cast something on him just to make him realise past mistakes. It’s oddly, morbidly pleasing, and Sasuke feels disgusted at himself.

Before he can help it, Sasuke is laughing hysterically and, when he finally takes the time to check, Sakura has gone.

And Sasuke still thinks it’s funny when he’s remembering the joke later on, and Naruto yells something about Sakura-chan and hits him with a kunai in the back of the neck.

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