: it calmly disdains to destroy us :

by fierymetis

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“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we can just barely endure, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy”

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Naruto’s eyes had been open for a while now, but only now did he truly see: bound in his chair, bound in the confines of his own mind, so helpless against what lay before him.

Sasuke looked little different from that first time they had met: a slip of a child, forever young but not so much a god as a stolen child enslaved to serve the inner demon: Ganymede, selected by that innocent brilliancy that so enamored the gods.

But Ganymede had been a sweet lad, even with his fall: stolen for innocence and its eternal allure. What innocence, he wondered dimly, what innocence is there in evil? — perhaps the ignorance of the deed’s malice, or perhaps the madness of it all, sparkling like a fallen diamond from the sky, bleeding like a new-cut ruby, weeping like a stolen sapphire —

Sasuke took a chair opposite him. He sprawled out with an easy elegance, wearing a dark set of clothes that Naruto had once known from forests and fields, with dark lines and dim shadows. Out of the gloom was his face, a pale moon in the starless night; hair hung as strands of that curious midnight, and then his eyes, a twilight of the mind, shattered by fate, two pieces, selected by consequence to haunt him now —

“Three seconds,” he said, “for the times you hit me.”

And — pain, red and black as only death ought to be, carrying him out and over gray oblivion in waves, washing over but then carrying him back to the sea to drown him all the more.

He didn’t know Sasuke waited until he took a breath through the haze of fear, burned away by terrible realization.

“Four,” he said, with all the cold clarity of a winter night, when the wolves howl and the stars burn and all is dead for lack of warmth, “for the times you called me ‘friend’.”

Pain is always new, no matter the amplitude, the frequency. It was an old acquaintance that Naruto greeted with a scream and entertained with the spasms across his body, until a parting of lingering moans, when — alas! — the visit was over.

Sasuke spoke again, the trumpets sounding Apocalypse in Naruto’s world: “Eight, for the times you saved my life.”

God, surely more — but he could not think of the number, only a beginning and its end, and the infinity that elapsed between, and that terribly finite time that stood as a watch hand, unable to hold itself back as the gears turned and it could only strike midnight.

“Ten,” — a voice, crystalline, a perfect lattice of elegance and calm, intuitive aristocracy that bonded together the terrible genius gone mad — “for the times I saved yours.”

Let it end, let it end — not even those thoughts sounded in the silence of his screams, for surely, it was silent, for Sasuke did not even seem to hear the sound of his friend, his lover, dying — that scream that never quite began but echoed nonetheless.

“Two, for the times you held me back.”

The pain was so horrible that he should never remember it; but the intensity of it burned itself into his mind, searing him with an unimaginable heat, even after it was over.

“Six, for the months you never came.”

I tried, Sasuke, he wanted so desperately to say. You know that I tried. Was it right — right of Sasuke, right of God to leave him here? Ah, the philosophical nonsense encountered while the mind dies —

“Nine,” he said in that satin serenade, “for the times you led me astray.” Naruto knew that it hadn’t been quite that way — Sasuke had always been astray; lost on a twisted path of self-destruction. It was a journey that Naruto had been willing to take with him, if only he’d been given the chance. When refused a place at Sasuke’s side, perhaps for his own protection, Naruto had done the only thing that seemed right to him — embarked on a quest of his own, to bring Sasuke home, away from his obsessions and his vengeance and the snake. Was that what Sasuke had meant? It was the most twisted definition of ‘astray’ that Naruto had ever heard.

“Seven, for the times you said ‘I love you’.”

Pain, pain, more pain than he could ever imagine or ever contain — white-hot and striking him; clawing at him and raking his flesh. His bones were aching and his throat was jagged and raw.

“Seven, for the times I said it back.”

The way he said it, in that carefully bitter yet soft-as-ash voice, one would think that Sasuke was disdainful of those words because they had been lies. Naruto knew that he had meant them, though. He had meant them then and he meant them still, even if those words never dropped from his mouth and into the darkness. Naruto felt a new ache now that he had suppressed for too long. It didn’t have the edge of physical pain — whereas the mind distracts the body, the body cannot distract the mind for but an instant.

He relived the heartbreak of the Land of Waves — of Haku’s broken mask and holding Sasuke’s senbon-riddled body close as he whispered how much he hated him. He felt the sharp pain of the Valley of the End — the waterfall and the rain that poured and poured until he didn’t know what was tears and what was rain as Sasuke left him for the first time; abandoned him in favor of a snake.

Sasuke was the cause of the hundred heartbreaks that had shattered Naruto every time. He knew, though, that he was one of the many causes of Sasuke’s one-thousand. His were the heartbreaks for which better men had wept, but he had not.

Naruto still loved Sasuke — but he hated himself for it. He hated Sasuke for loving him and not saying it and hurting him; but he loved him at the same time for loving him and hurting him because maybe he needed the pain to remind him of just how much he loved Sasuke, if that made any sense at all.

Death would have been sweet, but the haze that took him now was like the little sugar packets, low-carb, low-pleasure, but good enough for the unconcerned drinker.

Sasuke leaned forward, so close to Naruto’s throne of steel. Naruto couldn’t think anymore; couldn’t even concentrate on his pain. Sasuke was just too beautiful and there was nowhere to look but into his eyes. It was strange; but Sasuke had never seemed quite as real to Naruto as he had in that moment.

He lorded over Naruto’s soul now, the only realm left to him, though it was not a new concept. Naruto belonged to Sasuke; just as Sasuke belonged to Naruto. Each had known it — had known it, said it, reveled in it for a time. What had happened to them since that time? It seemed like only yesterday; but yesterday was years ago, a lifetime away. The memories washed over Naruto like the ocean breaking over his head; sweeping him out to an endless sea of deepest regret.

Naruto knew that his was not the only heart that was breaking as their world tore itself asunder. “And one,” he said softly, so soft, “for the kiss.” Those were the words that Sasuke knew would break them both.

If Naruto was the sun, then Sasuke was the moon — only close on the day of the eclipse, when they reached out across the cold, dead abyss; darkness flooding in their wake as they tried desperately, hopelessly, to touch.

A knife slipped closer, cutting his world in two as he saw it from afar — the cleaving of Sasuke’s mind, the deep cuts in his heart, self-inflicted, bleeding as he tore the scabs open again and again and again — and all for the love of Uzumaki Naruto.

And as the knife pressed deep, he wasn’t sure whether to be abhorrent or honored.

finis.

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A/N: This fic is a repost — some of you might remember it. I wrote it a while ago, and I apologize for the quality of this, one of my earliest attempts at angst.

If anyone who happens to read this attended Sakura-Con (the Seattle anime convention in spring 2007) and heard me read it during Fanfiction Bedtime Stories, it would be really cool to hear from you.