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nonpareil
Author of 28 Stories |
This is how I prepare for the AP English exam tomorrow. It does so help me hone my essay-writing skills. Hmph.
Anyway, this is I think the most angsty thing I’ve ever written and I’ve no clue as to whether or not it sucks, so this is just an experiment for all of us. Ahem. Moving on.
Spoilers: Up to the current manga which is at chapter 353. Naruto and Sasuke are both searching for Itachi, and this is my little vision of that whole encounter. It’s filled with angst because I think that if Sasuke ever really does kill Itachi, he will completely break when he does so.
Warnings: Blood. Lots of blood. XD
The farther I fall I’m beside you
As lost as I get I will find you
The deeper the wound I’m inside you
Forever and ever I am a part of you
The night was restless and churning with a brewing storm, the wind whipping through the trees, filled with the delicate fragrance of rain. Every now and then thunder could be heard rumbling in the distance, a slow cacophony warning of danger. It was beautiful and filled with rage, both a glorious display of nature’s power and a horrible example of man’s hate. For the wind carried on it the stench of blood, so heavy that droplets of crimson must have been falling with the gentle patter of fresh rain, so vile that the lightning must have been jolting the dirt with it, fresh blood straight from the heavens, cracking open the sky and showering the earth.
Naruto had always wondered if the Sharingan, if his own red eyes, glowed in the dark, like burning embers in a dying fireplace. They did not, as he witnessed; they were just like any other eye color in the dark, barely visible except for the spots illuminated by the moon. It was surreal, like a nightmare, but it was real, because he was coughing and wheezing as blood poured into his lungs, as his chest burned with the raw heat of chakra as the Kyuubi scrambled to heal him.
It had happened in mere minutes, mere seconds. Naruto had awoken in the tent, Kakashi and Sai snoring next to him, had gotten up to take a leak and had had a horrible shivering feeling that something was amiss. His adrenaline surged and his instincts took over, and he only had to go a few miles before he saw the aftermath of the fight: an unidentifiable body laying on the ground in various places, pieces of flesh and bone scattered over the grass; a torn cloak muddied and virtually unrecognizable, but still not going unobserved by Naruto, who was so attuned to those red clouds that he could sense their approach even in his deepest of slumbers.
His first thought was one of panic, that Akatsuki was nearer than his team had predicted earlier that evening and that they were going to attack, that this was a clever tactic to fool him, that any minute they would leap out from the trees and grab him and take him away. He was too terrified to move, looking around and barely breathing from nervousness, when he heard another groan and a clang of metal hitting a rock, and saw another figure he hadn’t seen before crash to its knees and clutch at its side. Naruto took a few steps forward, still cautious, and nearly collapsed from shock upon noticing the same spikes of black hair, the same delicate curve of white skin, the same ragged breathing that he’d seen and felt and heard so many times before.
And so Naruto approached, in complete shock and almost in a trance, trying to decide what to say and how to say it, whether to smack Sasuke or crush him in a hug; but his thoughts were interrupted as Sasuke reacted to his presence, and in a flash of lightning which Naruto couldn’t tell to be natural or formed by chakra, had shoved his katana straight through Naruto’s chest and out his back, piercing his left lung and prompting Naruto to stab him in return, all in seconds when they didn’t understand just who they were trying to kill, when the only instinct was survival.
They stared at each other, red meeting red, spraying each other’s faces with the damp bloody breath emanating from their mouths, until Naruto spoke first, as always, uncomfortable with the silence.
“Sasuke… how… what…”
It lacked eloquence, but Naruto’s body was on fire and his mind was a mess and he needed an explanation before he could do anything else.
“Revenge. I’m an avenger. I got my revenge. Itachi. I killed him… I…” Sasuke was speaking quickly, the Sharingan wheels spinning feverishly and with such great intensity that Naruto thought Sasuke’s eyes might spin right out of his head.
“Revenge…” Sasuke whispered again, looking purely possessed and sweeping his left hand over the field as much as he could, the pain in his chest severely limiting his movements. “This is all that’s left. I defeated him. I’m stronger. I’m an avenger.” He kicked at something next to his left foot, which Naruto realized with horror was an arm. “I destroyed him.” Sasuke’s heart was speeding up, and Naruto could feel the beats pulsing through the kunai still in Sasuke’s chest, still in Naruto’s hand.
“Sasuke…” Naruto whispered, scared to death and worried sick about his friend, who was shaking uncontrollably and soaking the soil with dark blood.
Sasuke glanced up, looking as if it were the first moment he had seen Naruto actually standing there. He reached with his hand and ran his thumb along the skin right under Naruto’s left eye, barely brushing the lashes and sending a wave of heat and panic through Naruto’s blood. “Red…” he spoke with incredulousness. “But I… I killed him, there should be no more…” Sasuke’s breathing sped up and he looked at the body parts littering the field for proof of his actions from earlier. He stiffened for a few seconds before shoving Naruto away from him, the kunai leaving his chest and opening his wound even more. There was a groan and a hiss as the pain surged through his senses, but it didn’t stop him from staggering over to where some of the Akatsuki cloak lay, examining it frantically and looking inside, seeing if it were really empty.
“Sasuke!” Naruto yelled, trying to attract his friend’s attention, trying to snap him out of the nightmarish trance in which he was trapped. Sasuke froze for a minute, and turned his head slowly around to look at Naruto, those Sharingan wheels still spinning madly. Something clicked in his mind and he jumped up, still grabbing onto his side and now his chest as well, the blood seeping through his hands, little red rivulets trailing down his arms.
“My team,” he muttered, before becoming more frenzied. “My team. He… he killed… no… that… Kisame! He took them. My team…”
Naruto felt as if he were about to cry. He had never seen Sasuke so shaken and wondered just how deeply Sasuke’s pain ran, how intense and of what nature it was, to make Sasuke so crazed. “What team?” he finally asked, his knees shaking as he reached up slowly and extracted the katana from his chest with a grunt.
Sasuke didn’t respond, only fell back down onto his knees in the grass again as a small drizzle started to fall. He breathed heavily and looked intently at the ground while realization sprouted in Naruto’s mind.
“Why… why didn’t you come back to Konoha?” Naruto whispered, his eyes shut tightly to keep his tears at bay. “We would have helped you. You didn’t need a new team.”
Sasuke’s heavy breathing increased and he looked around, purely panicked, looking as if he were expecting some sort of ambush. The rain began to fall more heavily, and Sasuke slowly lay down in the grass on his back, trying to find a position in which he could catch his breath. Naruto began to pray that he hadn’t accidentally stabbed Sasuke right in the heart.
Shaking his fears aside, he dashed over to Sasuke’s side and knelt down next to him, taking in all of his wounds and injuries and trying to figure out what to do. If he ran to get Sakura, he could be back in twenty minutes tops, but in Sasuke’s state he had no idea if Sasuke would still be there or not. In his condition that wasn’t a risk Naruto could afford to take. He took a deep breath, inhaling the horrid stench of blood again, and glanced around the field.
Sasuke must have killed Itachi a while ago, Naruto decided, as he hadn’t heard any sort of fighting noise while he was running to the field from his campsite. Those last minutes before his arrival must have involved Sasuke virtually hacking his brother into pieces, completely broken and entirely crazed. Naruto wondered if Sasuke had felt the same way that he himself had felt when the Kyuubi took control of him, and thought that maybe he and Sasuke had even more in common with each other than he originally had thought. They both knew what it felt like to be possessed by demons.
And Naruto couldn’t ignore the chill traveling down his spine at seeing all the body parts all around him, realizing with horror that he now had a sliver of a taste of Sasuke’s pain, of his world. Naruto had hated Itachi with everything, absolutely everything, and yet even still, seeing his body in pieces like this was unnerving and slightly nauseating. If it had been someone he cared about… Naruto had no idea how he would survive something like that without losing his head, and Sasuke had seen that dozens of times over, had seen every single person he’d ever loved hacked and slashed and slaughtered before his very eyes, not once, but twice.
“Sasuke,” Naruto said with a whimper as he wiped his nose with his sleeve and wept. “Why didn’t you ever let me help you?” He stood up and took a few steps until he was at Sasuke’s head, facing away from him and glancing up into the restless black storm clouds. He turned back around and looked down, his tears falling onto Sasuke’s bloodied white skin which shone almost iridescently in the darkness. “We would have helped you, you bastard…” And Naruto fell to his knees, dizzy from his own loss of blood and his heart beating so fast that his chest was about to explode, his whisker marks growing bigger and bigger as Kyuubi fought to heal.
Naruto found himself looking straight into Sasuke’s face, his tears and the rain mixing and dripping down until Sasuke opened his eyes, which were a terrible mixture of inky blackness and crimson spots. The Sharingan reactivated fully, but stayed still, not spinning. He looked straight up into Naruto’s eyes, his weariness sobering him and his craze fading away. Naruto’s breath was coming out in soft little puffs on Sasuke’s forehead, and he realized finally just where he was and just who was there, just why he was having déjà vu, and that it was finally his turn to lay bruised and bleeding and half-dead while his rival walked away and left him in a puddle.
But Naruto didn’t leave, didn’t even budge an inch, and so Sasuke spoke. “Leave… Naruto, just… leave.” He could barely breathe from the pain, but had accepted it; he had lived his life to be an avenger and now he was fated to die, and he was ready.
“No… I… what the hell are you talking about! I’m never going to leave you here… like this… I can’t! I won’t do it! You can’t stop me now and I’m never going to let you die! I’m taking you back and we’ll find your team and… and… damn it, I’m just not letting you run away from me anym—”
Sasuke had wondered, during Naruto’s little speech, whether or not he was still partly insane, but it didn’t matter. He knew that he was going to die, and he knew that out of all the near-death experiences he’d had with Naruto, this was the one that mattered, that really counted. And with that in mind, almost in a trance, he reached his right arm up to the sky until it rested on Naruto’s head, and slowly pulled it toward himself as he shut his eyes.
Naruto hadn’t known what Sasuke was doing and was completely shocked when Sasuke had pulled him in, had touched their lips to each other’s. But he’d kissed back, because he didn’t know what else to do; stopping simply was not an option. And because it meant something, that in the rain and the mud, battered and bleeding, that they were doing this, because it meant that things would never be the same, and after so many years of fighting Sasuke and chasing him down, Naruto was definitely ready for a change. So they kissed, not hard and not soft, tasting the metallic tang of blood in each other’s mouths, their noses pointed toward each other, breathing into each other, keeping each other alive. There was salt in the kiss from Naruto’s tears (and were those Sasuke’s tears as well?) and it stung the cuts on their cheeks as they touched; but it didn’t matter, for they could have lost themselves forever in the dry scraping of lips and the soft caresses of tongues.
The kiss had sent a heady rush through Sasuke’s currently hypersensitive body, so much so that he was on the verge of passing out. As he skittered on the edge of consciousness, still rubbing his fingers gently in Naruto’s hair while Naruto kissed him again, he finally found the words that had been building ever since he’d decided to leave. “Naruto… I…”
Naruto’s lips were so close to his that Naruto could feel him talking, and keeping his eyes closed, he swallowed and asked Sasuke, “What is it?”
“I’m… sorry,” Sasuke choked out, his world swimming and starting to go black. “I never wanted… to hurt you.” He coughed, his body racking with motion, as blood spewed out of his mouth, and then he fell silent and fainted, while Naruto’s tears overflowed and the wind sliced his skin. Shaking, he stood up in the midst of all the destruction, and with great effort and no small amount of pain, he put Sasuke on his back and started running back to the campsite as fast as he could, wobbling and stumbling in the dark, blindly on a mission to find Sakura. Sasuke groaned in his unconsciousness sometimes from the pain and the blood which continued to flow from him freely, but it was all the reassurance Naruto needed.
As the black sky lightened to gray and the tents came into view, Naruto was still running and gulping down damp breaths with as much energy as he could muster, the tears still streaming from his face, but now with joy.
“I’ll never let you die, bastard,” he thought in his head with renewed passion and vigor. “I’ll never let you die.”
It’s something I have to do
I was there, too
Before everything else
I was like you
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