(Things breaking)
Maybe it is in the limbs, Uchiha Sasuke thinks as he tries to contain the slow crawling shudder trying to sneak its way up his spine. Something about the way the elbows and knees bend- the sound is more that of two puzzle pieces parting (snapsnap) than limbs bending. Like breaking a twig (or a bone). Put the tips of your thumbs together and push. Hear the slight creak and feel the crack as the bone breaks in two.
With a squelching sound, the earth opens and spits out a small boy with hair like egg yolk. The gaping wound in the muddy ground seizes and with a slurp draws itself shut. Sasuke doesn't look, holds himself rigid with eyes blindly on the rich pink and blue pushing down on the slit that marks the separation of earth and sky. It is better not to (his mother's voice: look never look never ever ever look Sasuke do you hear me do you hear? You mustn't ever look-) pay the other boy ('boy' implies 'human', idiot) too much attention, lest he repay you in kind.
Footsteps like a rhythmic fall of something fleshy draw closer. Sasuke has to quell a tremble that tickles his palms with every plop of sound, and he very carefully doesn't look up even when it comes up beside him, looming despite its short stature. Breathing into his ear, the undiluted stench of decaying things on its breath (too many spiky pikes for teeth, a tongue that bent the wrong way, the base attached to the back of the lower row of teeth and slithering down its throat.)
It gurgles at him, a gob of red dribbling out it's mouth, and Sasuke's eyes flicker without his consent to collide with cat-like eyes that aren't really eyes at all. And he thinks that whatever made this monstrosity, whatever hell spat it out, at least it made its eyes somewhat normal. (The fact that there was even one normal feature should have been comforting. It was not. Instead it was an unsettling dichotomy to see something so human in a thing that was very much not so otherwise. Summer-sky marbles and sulfur breath.)
Sasuke looks away. He feels those deep-sea eyes stare at him unblinkingly, forcing abnormality even into that one normal feature, and he closes his eyes.
Sakura stops at the cardinal-colored bridge, fingers carelessly tugging at her hair in a gesture that used to be habit, but is now something like an ineffective sign to ward off evil. It covers the side of her face for a moment, hiding the outside world from her peripheral view. (there was that saying: See no evil.) She doesn't greet Sasuke where he stands, because he's much too close to the third member of their team (so shrieks Inner, who is not as she had once been: he's not a member of their team he is something else oh god something horrible he is something-)
She doesn't remember if it had a name or not. (This kind of fear causes fissures in her mind and memory.) Do monstrous thoughts bound in flesh have names? He smiles at her, bone-white teeth tearing his gums to shreds as they rotate behind his chapped red lips and Sakura is sure her face does something in response, but knows it can't possibly be a smile. He echoes something back at her, something like a nightmare she used to have as a young child, and for a moment Sakura's frozen-still body forgets the art of breathing.
A crack slowly opens from under his jaw and spreads skin and flesh to reveal his larynx. Sakura doesn't dare turn her eyes away, stares into the gaping slit as the tip of that backwards tongue slips out and waggles at her, a friendly greeting. "How are you today, Sakura?" it says with a smile. (-you today, Sakura? How are-)
She nods back at him, lungs expanding and expression glassy-eyed as the fear inside her inverts like the negative of a photograph until it is an unnatural calm settling in her stomach, heavy like lead, enabling her to actually stand in his presence without throwing up. Sakura watches the tongue slide to the side and the larynx vibrate as he hums. (The sound is that of cloth being torn in two, but she's learned to translate the noises to human terms.)
With what could be a frown or a grin or maybe just the shifting of restless open flesh, he crouches down by Sasuke, and had she remembered that she was supposed to have a crush on the Uchiha boy she'd surely (surely) have felt bad about the sick relief trembling through her when the egg-yolk-boy's attention was diverted.
Naruto hums, staring down at the ground next to Sasuke's feet where the air pulses in red strings from the soles of his shoes and spiral outwards. It is the beat of a drum-heart, the sound of war that calls the dogs out to play WITH ME and it makes Naruto very happy to know that Sasuke will be joining him soon. It's all about ripples, he says cheerily to himself, and not really spirals. Crashing against each other, meshing and weaving together like the notes of a song or the steps in a dance or the 24 different ways to slit a throat. And Sasuke ripples beautifully, with the grace of a perfectly severed jugular vein. Naruto would know; he's practiced on himself.
He wriggles his tongue deep down in the tunnel of his throat and tastes sour-hot, and takes great pleasure in how warm his insides are. His skin is terribly cold to the touch and has been for a while, ever since his heart was replaced with the head of a small fox, a putrid maggot-ridden pacemaker rotting in the cage of his ribs.
The Hate reclining there looks up at him from within Sasuke's ripples and Naruto smiles, gums reforming in the moment after his OTHER teeth tear them to fine threads of meat that slide down the slope of his tongue into his stomach. (THERE IS SOMETHING IN THERE.) The black-haired boy does nothing when Naruto's long, boneless fingers wrap like a fleshy film around his slim ankle, breathing on the ripples that rise up to greet him, and Naruto is really very thankful for that. Screams make him seethe INSIDE.
It is in everything's given nature to grow, and Naruto always liked gardening. He waters the ripples with his breath (THERE IS SOMETHING IN THERE) and they sigh at him, a sweet chorus like a spring breeze over opaque water, and behind cold eyelids he watches them swell into bloated waves before shrinking back into ripples, refueled and just a tooth larger than before.
His breath resounds with the growth.
Naruto swallows a breath for himself too, feels it travel down to his fox-head core and settle in there. (THERE IS SOMETHING MORE IN HERE.)
–
That was not how it began. There was a birth, the death of a sun, a trial by fire - and that was when the world split apart. Man was not meant to play the games of gods, and the most magnificent seal ever made by man was a crayon's scribbles in the face of eternity.
Everything dies.
DEATH could not be summoned, because death lay dormant in the core of everything living, a pulse beating a shadowy echo in every heartbeat. And so when the shape of what these humans saw as DEATH coalesced in front of the baby sun they followed with the fervent, vicious loyalty they were raised to, they cried out in victory. They were saved, praise the Flash!
And in that moment the world tore itself in two. Because here was a man who was a god by any human's definition, and in this moment that belief held true for more than just humans. DEATH could not disobey this new god for the short duration he was of DEATH's descent.
DEATH does not take kindly to gamblers. They were to seal a demon into a small human; that they could do. That was all they would do. They would not push to prevent anything from happening - and there were so many happenings hovering in the wings of everything. They saw this false baby god look down upon the creature that would have been his son, and they knew he would go gently into their good night. DEATH smiled at that, and the light died.
(Inside their stomach, there lay a fading sun.)
A/N: Confused? You're meant to be. Uncertainty adds to the atmosphere in horror stories, in my opinion. *clears throat* First horror story... ever. Kind of nervous about posting it, actually, so I'd love some feedback. This is technically a one-shot, but I'm thinking more will be tacked on later. I've never written in drabble format before; how do you think that worked here?