Name: Conditional Blindness
Word Count: 556
There are none so blind as they that won't see.
- Jonathan Swift

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He stares at the horizon and watches the fires from the village burning in the distance reach up and claw at the night sky and at the moon like the unsteady, wavering hands of a thousand crack-addicts would reach out for the benedictions promised by their disease; their arms and their wrists and their fingertips shaking and convulsing with the want and the need and the hope of a man who's known the taste of heaven and would willingly subject himself to hell for a holocaust.

His mind is racing as he is watching the scene unfold before him; his heart pounding in his throat as the sour-sweet scent of burning flesh and wood and feces races on the wind like a dirty, senescent breath, and, much like the inferno before him, Naruto feels the blood in his veins run so fast and so hot that clenching his hands into fists enough to stop them from shaking so hard that they hurt.

"Uzumaki," a stern voice calls out to him from the ground, cutting through the thick air like a knife. "What are you doing up there?"

Naruto looks down at the ground -- at the scorched earth and the bodies of the dead as they are being piled into mass-graves that cut through the forest like pythons; thick and wide and filled to the brim as if they had just eaten and were not ready to lay still beneath the sun and rest -- and signals, quietly and efficiently as the ANBU were taught to do, that he's keeping watch.

"For what?" Neji asks him, pulling his mask back so that Naruto can see his face from where he's standing. "We've finished the mission already, Naruto."

The blond gracefully leaps down from the tree and lands right in front of Neji with a small grunt, causing the Hyuuga to notice (rather belatedly) that Naruto's mask has been cracked down the middle, as if he had been struck there (which was impossible), or had gripped it so hard it had bent (which was far, far more likely, and made Neji worry about what was wrong.)

"...No, we haven't, Neji," the ANBU Captain says after a moment, glancing down at eyes so wide that he can see the moon and the earth and the stars reflected in their infinite blackness as they stare up at him from the ground, the pupils as lifeless and void of light as the universe he equates them to. "There are still people here that need to be looked after; still things we need to look out for."

"What do you mean?"

"We need to look out for this, Neji," Naruto snaps, pointing to the child's body at their feet and stopping Neji's train of thought. "We need to stop this from happening to us," he continues, pointing at another body. "For him," and another. "And her," and another, "...And them; all of them." at every single body in every grave around them, his arms cast up to the sky. "This isn't right!"

"We...," Naruto trails, turning his back on the Hyuuga. "...We're not...We're Not supposed to be like this, Neji. This is wrong! Can't you see that?"

...Neji takes a look at the graves. Then, looks back at his captain and frowns, not quite understanding what Naruto wants him to see.

XXX

- Fin

XXX

"...They're just bodies, Naruto."