Disclaimer: Naruto is the property of Masashi Kishimoto, etc. Borrowing for the purposes of entertainment, procrastination, and basically, escapism.
Warnings: Possible spoilers for Naruto 1.
Undertowed
He opened his eyes.
Daylight.
The cutting clarity of life around him sped deep into the heart of his brain, electrifying his every cell from head to limbs, emblazoning the endless blue firmament in his memory. Blood thrummed fiercely in his vessels, urgently pumped by his heart in anticipation of danger and challenge. He would stand and fight, of course, and already his senses were heightened—every blade of grass could smoothly incise bone, every passing bird was marked for judgement, was flying blissfully on its way because he chose to let it do so.
Instantaneous with his will, his muscles jolted into activity, plunging his battle-heady body from patient observation to swift action. He moved, faster than the eye could see, his body whizzing through the air, dancing with the tiny floating particles that comprised this invisible, inaudible, intangible immensity. Inertia, momentum, gravity, and heat... Humans have given names to these forces, and to some they did not bother to do so. Some, they simply called "opposing."
But he was named: Uchiha Sasuke.
His opposite was named: Uzumaki Naruto.
In this vast space, only they existed, only they in their battle of wills and beliefs and everything they ever held dear or of importance. He could not remember when the homey brown of wooden village houses, vaguely strung together by variously hued fabrics or plastics, morphed into the stark earth brown of the titanic fracture in this otherwise featureless land. The forbidding crags that tore the vastness of the sky overhead, the thunder of plummeting water from upstream, the sparkling coolness of the river as it inexorably carved its path, the impassive green that lined its length and hid hundreds of seeing eyes... all were reduced into a mere backdrop in face of their colossal confrontation.
He tensed. He was ready, was poised on tiptoes at the point of no return. Everything was hinged on this last meeting, this wordless debate. Everything they could possibly give was contained in this one blow: life and death, victory and defeat, love and hate, the future and the past, the inviolate and the profane.
Their crash would birth an answer.
Power exploded, dwarfing for a moment even the godlike strength of the waterfall that, amidst their struggle, insouciantly continued to fall the way it has fallen for millennia. The towering walls of earth looming above them grumbled and roared when one of them barreled unto the cliff's ragged face, but in their minds—in his mind—there was only self, and there was only the enemy.
I am right. I know I'm right. I must be. You must be wrong.
But you say the same thing. You are right. You know you are. You must be.
Perhaps, I am wrong, then?
No, it has already been decided.
When the dust cleared and the rain stopped falling in arches, he was the one standing. Impassively, he accepted that he was right, oddly without a sense of triumph, only with a lingering sense of profound loss. His heartbeat slowly dwindled to a peaceful pace; his breathing deepened and relaxed.
His counterpart was obliterated. Out of two, there was now only one. The opposites did not negate each other, as always it had been taught by science. The opposites did not coalesce, did not meld into a balanced consensus, as always it had been uttered in myths.
One survived.
One didn't.
It has ended, has it not?
He stared as his opposite impossibly rose from deathlike repose. The opposite leaped to its feet, catlike and grinning, vicious and demanding. He dove towards the enemy with a snarl, and Sasuke dove to meet the attack headlong but—
Naruto's aim was not his head.
The bedraggled piece of cloth at his feet? His hitai-ate headband? The iron shackle that held him from his ambition for so long, from the power he needed to smite the seed of all his misfortunes? And that blond young man, that runt, was running away now. Away!
Cheated! Sasuke hissed with rage. The fight was not over yet. Instantly, he was on the move.
Strangely, the knowledge was good. His heart beat fiercely once more as he chased the boy who had sworn to drag him back to that so-called home, that glamorized gaol.
The fight must be decided.
Opposites must be weighed.
Gradually, the confident bounding leaps he used to climb the steep ravine, to sweep through the bleak steppes, to hurtle through the thickening vegetation, was reduced into impotent pattering little steps.
All was as it should be. His opposite still sped before him. With his gold-touched bristle of hair, bright blue eyes, and berry red tongue, the other child seemed to shine as he mischievously cast taunting glances at his wake. Frustratingly, the whiskered little boy remained out of Sasuke's reach, his stout little legs pumping hard, his little feet snapping twigs and avoiding the bigger rubbish cluttered in his path.
Why again was he, with the dark-hair, the dark eyes, and the serious disposition, running after this elusive boy? Ah! The blond boy had his satchel. Sasuke wanted his satchel back, the one where he put his scrolls and all of his important stuff in. An Uchiha would not stand for such disrespect! Why, what would his mother say if he went home without his satchel?
Sasuke suddenly stopped, flummoxed. The boy who stole his satchel had suddenly halted as well. There was a girl with him now. She wasn't pretty or anything, and she looked awfully pale, looked like she could get blown away by the wind. Her hair was untidily draped about her conspicuous forehead and was an unusual color of... Right! Cherry blossoms.
Sasuke's hand fisted indignantly, rightful anger building in his chest as he hid in the shadows of the giant trees. Those two kids were opening his satchel without his permission, undisciplined brats! But they'll get what's coming to them, he thought levelly. Sasuke won't even call Brother. Sasuke would deal with them both all by himself. And Father would be proud of him, oh yes. Father would be, wouldn't he?
Sasuke was jarred out of his vindictive musings when the girl squealed with delight. Annoying, Sasuke thought, ashamed that she had visibly startled him, for he knew a ninja's disposition must be undecipherable like the woods on a starless night. But... the annoying girl was pretty when she smiled, he admitted, when her eyes shone like dew drops on a leaf, when her pale cheeks blushed pinker than her hair.
The shining boy was holding out something to her, something that glinted in the rare shafts of sunlight able to pass through the intricate canopy above. Intrigued, Sasuke inched closer and saw that it was a bell jar and that it was stuck on a platform of sorts. Inside was some kind of plaything, a beast with snow-white fur and black, black eyes staring roundly back at the silent onlooker.
Was it really a toy? Sasuke stared at it hard, wondering what kind of animal it was supposed to be.
A baby harp seal, whispered the girl almost reverently, as if to answer him. Mommy said they're hard to find now because bad people often try to kill them.
My gift to you, declared the boy with a toothy, whiskered grin. Promise me you'll protect it?
Uhn, the girl agreed seriously.
The shining boy was pleased and his grin grew wider. Eagerly, he began to wrestle with the sealed container.
Sasuke was closer now, so inquisitive was he at how this boy would open the mysterious object. For some reason, he was afraid of the little glass case and the little harp seal inside. What would happen when they open it? Would the harp seal be happy? Would it be angry or afraid? Could it have hidden there to escape from the hunters the girl spoke of? Should they touch this fragile thing at all?
The shadowed boy thought they shouldn't. He thought that harp seal would die when the magic preserved inside the bell jar dissipates upon its opening. Wasn't that what always happened in Mother's stories? The disobedient children in the stories often did something like this, opened something they shouldn't have, then bad things happened.
But as much as the fair-haired child tugged and pulled, the glass remained adhered to the platform. Sasuke was relieved, but Sasuke was also disappointed. The curiosity was unbearable now, was roiling in his tummy like that time he stole Brother's share of omoochi and ended up sick and punished.
Perhaps, he should help this boy. Maybe knowing what would happen was worth the harp seal's death.
No, he firmly thought, Sasuke must take back his satchel, and that glass case, too. After all, the other boy took it out from his satchel, therefore the bell jar belonged to Sasuke, too, ne?
Suddenly, the girl brightened. From around her neck, she took a brass key.
There must be a secret door, she said.
A door? Sasuke echoed. He wondered why they didn't see that before. He had known it was there under the platform, though he couldn't explain how or why. There was a little door there with a little keyhole. It was labeled nicely: "pseudothyrum." Sasuke was proud he could read such a word. Mother taught him well, didn't she? Of course, he didn't know what it meant, but he'll find out once he got home.
The girl licked her lips eagerly, nervously, and carefully brought the brass key against the lips of the keyhole.
The shadowed boy stared at the hole as the key moved closer and closer. No, the key did not move at all. The hole was growing, expanding speedily in all four directions, moving in to invaginate him. For a moment, terror engulfed him. He tried to run away but he remained rooted on his place, legs petrified. Perhaps, this was his fate then, and he submitted. His childish flailing stopped, and, unresisting, he plunged down into that darkness, down, down, down into that darkness...
The door opened.
Sasuke held the brass key in his hand, and for a moment, he felt foolish standing there, frozen in the act of reaching for the massive lock. A woman quietly peered at him from the shadowed doorway, her eyes as green and as hard as beryl. Not so diminutive, but she was slightly smaller than average. Slender and girlish, she was a deadly kunoichi who misled fools with her seeming weakness.
He entered and closed the door behind him. Walking past her wordlessly, he continued down the narrow hall of his quiet home. She glided to him in that semi-darkness, a specter borne of spring gone-by. Long fingers, so delicately formed that they looked so tantalizingly easy to crush for campfire's kindle, splayed and moved to caress his face... stopped a whisper's width from contact, just close enough for the tiny hairs on his skin to prickle, just far enough for a paring knife to whistle past their mutually hovering flesh without rendering trauma.
She had guts, didn't she, to try to pit herself against him. Oh, he wanted to punish her for daring to taunt him so blatantly, wanted to viciously ravage her for that insolence, wanted to destroy the infamous self-control he had perfected over the years.
Impassively, he continued to watch her with dark, hooded eyes, carefully closed off, formidably guarded, refusing to give her the satisfaction of eliciting the tiniest reaction. He would resist her. He would smirk at her ministrations: the removal of his soiled clothes, the exacting preparation of his meal before him, the achingly wonderful massage her mednin's hands would brutally administer.
And she smiled patiently as she did all that, as he did all that, for theirs was this game She knew of his feverish thoughts, of his suppressed desires that slowly danced their way to a crescendo, of his prideful facade that glowered at her. I don't need anybody, but please won't you stay?
And that's why she was there, wasn't she?
Enough. The next time her hand narrowly brushed against his, he caught it deftly. She gasped at the sudden contact, though certainly not in surprise. Obviously, the inveiglement was conscious, for when she turned to stare at his grip, he saw crimson blooming in her cheeks and saw her eyes, shocking green under the kitchen's dim light, glazing with anticipation.
A blue hand print would surface on her wrist, by tomorrow at the latest. She was sensitive that way, so easy to bruise, so easy to break. But she was so strong, too, and with a more timid hold she would be able to elude him, perhaps counteract him with a move that would guarantee her incontestible control. Besides, that was not the only mark she would receive from him tonight, and shortly she would avenge herself upon his body fiercely and undeniably.
Deliberately, he pulled her to him, ignoring the dinning table that separated their bodies. She grunted when the edge of the table punched her gut, and that was when she started pulling against him, imperiously trying to bring him to her instead. Her bosom heaved with her effort, enticing him with what her mussed yukata spilled. And they remained there, strangely squatted, locked in a standstill.
But then the door opened with a bang, and the sensuous tension about them crumbled. Ruefully, he accepted the signal of the game's ending. Other people did not understand their wordless banter, not even that little person who was almost in every aspect his miniature.
Or perhaps...
No, that child was not his miniature. That was him, wasn't it? Dark hair, dark eyes, serious expression... Was he looking at a mirror, a mirror that transcended time and reflected him in various stages in life?
He had relinquished the woman when her attention abandoned him for this newcomer. She smiled warmly at his other self and gestured for him to come.
This boy walked toward him then, and curiously, he kneeled down to meet this miniature. His other self was confident, was looking back unabashedly at his dark, dark eyes.. He walked to him till their noses met, till they breathed the same air, till he saw, without question, that this boy of three was not him after all.
He had her shock of green eyes.
He opened his eyes.
Darkness.
The muddled world took a brief moment to rearrange itself back into the severe features of the unlit quarters he had been assigned to more than a year ago. The stone floor and walls stared dully back at him, barely visible under the light that managed to dribble into that windowless, underground room.
That leakage came from the glowing slit that demarcated the foot of the doorway. The long, narrow hallway outside was always lit by low-watt incandescent bulbs, swinging from the undressed ceiling. The path eventually led to the lab—or an access to it, more precisely. Kabuto and his master naturally wanted their subjects of study easily available.
Sasuke sat up from his bunk, ran a hand through his head to draw away stringy strands of damp hair from his face. He was wet and hot, even though his blanket was slumped somewhere on the floor, having been kicked off sometime in his sleep.
If it wasn't a biological necessity, he would have forgone sleep every time. Any lax moment from his iron will rendered him susceptible to his mind's perfidy. In spite of himself, ambivalence had tainted his ambition during that time he wasted dallying with Konoha and its naivete. He had stamped his weaker side down the darker crevices below his consciousness, but occasionally, it still rose to confuse him, to distract him from his goal. His brain was treacherous that way; in all its sinister brilliance, it bombarded him with bemusing images at times he could not consciously fight them.
His dreams were certainly of the strange lot, or so he thought. He was a boy, growing into a man—it was foolish to deny or ignore the implacable course nature has set for all. He dreamed about the oddest things. Do people really dream about children and families and all those idealistic niceties? Do they really dream of sex and women and all those things that were expected but rarely asked about, seemingly forbidden but eagerly explored?
But since when was he normal, anyway? Normal boys didn't pledge their lives to kill their elder brothers. Normal boys didn't have elder brothers who wiped out the rest of the family for the sake of gauging self.
He bent down and picked up the white sheet crumpled on the floor before him. After wiping himself clean and dry with it, he pulled on a shirt he had discarded earlier that night and left the room.
The lab was not empty, of course. Kabuto was there. The mednin knew the importance of sleep, but he had ways to cheat the body of such needs he considered petty in light of his work, especially now as his master's plans continued to consolidate. It was this means of cheating Sasuke had come for.
The man adjusted his spectacles and looked up at him.
"Can't sleep, Sasuke-kun?" he asked congenially.
Sasuke did not answer. Wordlessly, he approached the vast work station that made little sense and had little importance to him. Kabuto was tinkering with the buttons and dials before one of the screens. Spherical shapes floated from different corners of the screen, various colors coming together in the middle to fall into some preset configuration. Sasuke watched as the little round things became denser in the screen, till corrugated plates were formed and ribbon-like projections twisted and joined each other, till there was but a meaningless mass that continually shifted and morphed. At a certain point, the three-dimensional puzzle shook, then exploded, scattering its pieces about dramatically, a kaleidoscope of yellows, cyans, greens, and magentas. Then, the process repeated itself.
"Does it amuse you?" spoke up Kabuto. "It gets tedious, believe me."
"Then don't waste your time."
"I'm not just playing, Sasuke-kun. I'm trying to design an enzyme, a catalyst. I've been trying to find a way to elicit a smoother transition between the stages of the curse seals. Yours is one of the particularly unstable ones."
"Aa." Then... "You are trying to find the best combination of molecules."
"Something like that." Kabuto straightened his glassed. "The stability of bonds between the molecules is important. Every bond carries potential energy. Enzymes sort of lend energy to make it easier for reactions to start. They break bonds or break apart themselves, but at the end of the reaction, they end up unchanged and can be used again."
"The stronger the bond, the harder to break, the more energy released when severed."
"Well, that's an oversimplification, like my explanation." The mednin smiled sheepishly. "I guess, it works, though."
"Aa." Sasuke turned to go.
"You need enough good sleep," the other called after him. "You know that don't you, Sasuke-kun?"
"Aa."
"Your output is affected. Orochimaru-sama has noticed the decline in the speed of your progress."
"I know."
"I have medicine to help you sleep."
Sasuke stopped. He turned to look at the mednin.
"Dreamless sleep."
Sasuke stood silently still for a moment, as if to consider this, then he continued on his way.
When he reached his quarters, he lay down on his bunk, closed his eyes, and willed the dreams to come.
And they did, sweet with vindication.
end- 23:49 041805
I've had this idea ever since I read the Naruto-Sasuke fight at the closing of Naruto 1, but I've never had the impetus to write something till now. O.o Actually, that's until I stumbled into this certain challenge at kurosakiclinic last Febuary. It was cross-posted to sasusaku, too, so I wrote a sasusaku-ish fic, even though I'm not a member of sasusaku community. (sweatdrop) The challenge was entitled, Mutiple Languages/In So Many Words.
Thanks for reading. Criticism welcomed and much appreciated. : )