in my nothing, you meant everything to me

[chokuto]

[The world comes back in blinding white, an abrupt end to consciousness that isn't restful — he's awake, and everything is very wrong. In one tormented moment, panic is all that centers his mind. It overwhelms the torrent of thought and funnels it into instinct. He's somewhere else. He's in the past — on a medical table beneath articulate hands, syringe plunged into the vein of an arm as experimental doses of chakra-enhanced antitoxins flood his bloodstream. His body jolts upright, turned wildly on the clean and clinical bareness of his surroundings, fumbling for the buckled straps that should be holding him down. Except that when he reaches with both hands to assist, only one is there.

Sasuke stares straight down at his lap. His left arm ends in a sudden severance, sleeve hanging lank and loose, useless to his purposes. Slowly, the pulse of his heart like a rippling pool of water, he calms. Slowly, the rest of what has happened — pain and madness, dark gaps between loss with bright light at the end of a long tunnel — all of it drifts back into memory. He relaxes, easing back onto the cot with eyes turned up to the ceiling. His vision is divided in half by a veil of red; Rinnegan, ever-active, continues its gradual drain of chakra reserves. A drain that he notices is less severe than usual. Expected; he is imprisoned.

His head rolls on the pillow, fringe of hair swept across a brow, studying the room. It's unfamiliar to him. Logic skips in immediately after, because if he is imprisoned, shouldn't he be wearing the blindfold and the binds reinforced by fūinjutsu? Yet he is entirely unrestricted.

With what minimal strength Rinnegan possesses, he peers out through the four walls around him, glimpsing hallways that make no sense to him if he is still within Konoha's subterranean dungeon. More awake and alert now, reeling from the fugue of a dream he's certain wasn't real — What are you willing to do to erase your regret from existence? — it is then he senses it. Through the gauzy blankness of his perception, there are two chakra signatures in immediate vicinity of this room. One he knows well: cool and blue, colored in equal tones of assurance and guidance, the pillar of a man who had tried to reach him in his own way.

All of Sasuke's awareness swings, instead, on the dark red center of the other. The one of his nightmares and his dreams, the one he has chased for endless grief-ridden years, the one he would recognize blind and deaf and dumb at only a pale wisp of presence, the one that cannot be here, because he is dead, because Sasuke killed him with his own two hands.

Itachi.

He stumbles badly in his fit to stand, right hand knocking the small table beside the bed so hard the lamp on it topples and rolls off in a clatter. His concentration becomes singular, obsessive. He's at the door, into the hall, pitted like a hound upon that trail, following it in complicated path through rooms he's never seen in his life. None of that matters. Everything has become secondary to his destination.]

Comments

[blackfire]

（ the shock is ice and iron to his awareness — one moment, the only familiar chakra on the station is kakashi and a distant, glimmering awareness of the cultivators and haki-users. in the next, energy that tastes of ozone and ash, abyssal as an ocean that closes above his head and drags him into the depths becomes an encompassment. it is a glut of sensory perception, and in the throes of marshalling his own reaction, his right hand spasms faintly, knocking his inkpot askew. the ink becomes a tributary along the banks of dove-white paper, obscuring the poem by ito eiji he had half-copied out in a calligraphic hand.

('one can hear a hawk mourn/if one listens to the crying wind')

for a very long moment, he does not move. it is as if he could sink into the black river and disappear. at length, the paper is folded, and then folded again. ink has bled through to the desk beneath, a sheen like an oil slick. he should clean it, and stands to retrieve the necessary items from the small ensuite in his room. the motion is surety incarnate, but his mind is a tumult, fissures kept in check for a long year in this place cracking apart like a coal-seam set ablaze. cleaning happens in a daze of which he will later have zero recollection, mind shuttered like he's anticipating a storm.

sasuke. that he has regrets of his own is understandable — it seems to be endemic to all uchiha, as much as their cursed love. but a year's peace, and nara shikamaru come and gone, leaving only hatake kakashi to remain, had whittled down the speculation that sasuke would one day arrive on the ximilia to a distant possibility wrapped in impossible odds.

not so impossible, apparently.

there is nowhere on the station to avoid him — though viveca would likely offer him use of the north wing if he asked. the thought occurs, appeals, but is ultimately discarded. he is deeply enough in her debt already.

instead, he simply undoes the tripwires and the tags that bar his door, and begins a pot of tea. every nerve is afire, frayed, but whenever sasuke opens the door he will not appear to be so, seated in a room that is utterly devoid of all personality save the very faint smell of ink, lacquer, the sharp astringency of acetone and the indulgent gyokurou that is steeping. there is a bed, neatly kempt, plainly made, obviously never slept in. there is a bookshelf, lined with japanese poetry, science, the history of various worlds. most damningly, perhaps, is the book from konoha — a medical textbook, clearly quite old, careworn by the crack to its spine.

(there are other things. little touches, that live like sparrows in the eaves of this new life. in a drawer there is a pink plush toy. between the pages of a book there lives a hand-drawn picture, of the two here that have found their way into his threadbare heart. there are bottles of nail polish, gifted from others who do not understand the significance of the colour he wears, tucked in a box alongside the futon he does sleep on.

there is a very terrible neon-orange shirt that says 🇪​🇳​🇯​🇴​🇾​ 🇹​🇭​🇪​ 🇻​🇮​🇪​🇼​ hanging in his closet.)

yet — the fact remains, sasuke can be nothing save what itachi made him, shaped to a grim and terrible purpose. he is already prepared for a fight, settling into a skin that hangs oddly on old bones. he is not the man he was a year ago, and stepping back into it feels like a betrayal, though he cannot say to whom. even now, if he had any desire to tell the truth — he would not be believed. his own noose, expertly tied and twice over tightened. perhaps that is why his expression is darkly sardonic when sasuke flings open the door.

he knows, courtesy of shikamaru, that sasuke lives until at least nineteen. it is difficult to gauge his age except as older, but his attention does drop briefly to the empty sleeve where his left arm should be, and it sets the world askew. there are precious few people left living after his death that could have done such a thing. the intensity of his own anger surprises him, and is quickly cut from oxygen — he cannot afford to have a visible reaction to it. the rinnegan, which simply gets a faint hm as his eyes cut back to sasuke's.

will he sense the faint, distant flicker of a chakra not his own, that marks these eyes as belonging to another? how perceptive has he gotten, this little brother of his? ）

Sasuke.