I am BACK people! This time with a story I started a long time ago but have yet to finish. I am a lover of Mitch Albom's work, and The Five People You Meet in Heaven is by far my favorite book of all time. Yes, it beats Harry Potter, tying with LOTR. I thought it would work so well with Naruto in a fanfiction, with so many pained, flawed characters. It was just waiting to happen!
Afternoons with Her has been taken down for now, because I posted it a little too hastily. It still needs to be revised, but it shall return!
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto or 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven". All rights go to Kishimoto and Mitch Albom.
This is a story about a man named Sasuke Uchiha, which begins at his end, with Sasuke lying on a bed of grass dying, in a cemetery in a small cluster of gravestones. It's a little strange to start a story with an ending, but all endings are another type of beginning.
The last hours of Sasuke's life was spent, like most of his other years, at the local cemetery. The cemetery was like most other cemeteries, with a little registration and check-in building, beat up and unclean, in the entrance, and a wide road towards the many headstones that littered the grassy landscape. The names of many of them were faded, and the headstones themselves looked that way too. Most hadn't been visited in years. Sasuke knew that himself. There were a strange cluster of gravestones in a little abandoned piece of hill in the back of the cemetery that he had discovered several decades ago, and they haunted him ever since. Even as he lay dying, it still filled his mind. His death would later make the newspapers around the city for a few pathetic days.
At the time of his death, Sasuke had long since lost the appearance he had been famous for. Over the years he had let himself go into a state of disrepair and neglect. Sasuke was tall, but lacked the air of a tall man. He had a broad chest with angular shoulders, but thin arms that seemed strangely mismatched with the rest of him. His sharp defined jaw of his youth had slipped into a squared, jutting chin with a few white whiskers that dotted his rough skin here and there. His legs were weak and veined now, and his arms covered with liver spots and scars of days gone by. One of his ankles had been broken, and taken by arthritis years after, so he walked with a permanent limp. He had gone near blind, and his thick glasses obscured the obsidian orbs from public view. His shaggy graying hair was held in place with a loose hair tie, and he wore a simple robe that reflected the state of his hair. Squishy blue sandals adorned his feet. A lone badge pinned right under his collarbone was his only identifier. "Sasuke Uchiha", it said. "Graveyard Caretaker".
Sasuke's job was "maintaining" the graveyard, or cemetery, or whatever people called it these days. The boulevard of dead men, perhaps. He warded off the teenagers who snuck in for dares around midnight. He cleaned the too-dusty headstones, even if no one visited them. He trimmed the grass when it got too long, and weeded the place when it became overgrown. He looked for broken headstones and ordered new ones, if he could tell whose they were. He kept the names of the dead and maintained records, in case any identifying was needed. He registered the newly dead, found locations for new headstones, and directed people into funerals. Without him, people said, the cemetery would fall into ruins. He was often praised for his ability to keep track of the thousands of headstones that covered the lot. But to him, it was nothing to be proud of.
With an hour left on earth, Sasuke hobbled around the cemetery, nodding and grimacing at the people who came to visit. He never talked. A cemetery was no place for conversations.
He walked by an elderly woman; a widow, who visited her husband's grave six days out of seven no matter what kind of weather it was. He nodded at her silently. She nodded back with a wan smile. It surprised him every time how she could smile in a place like this. Leaving her to her mourning, Sasuke hobbled away, passing by a couple. Also regulars, they came to visit the tiny grave of a miscarriage that happened four years ago. Nodding at them and getting nods back, Sasuke hobbled on.
He was one of the faces that you assigned to a place. People knew him, or had to know him if they needed the cemetery, which, they always had to in the end. You couldn't go to the Konoha Local Cemetery without meeting Sasuke. People felt as if he had been there forever. To Sasuke, it also felt like he had.
It just so happened that today was Sasuke's birthday, his 87th. He had gone for a checkup last week, and the doctor told him he had shingles, and a variety of other small things that added on to his daily discomfort. He didn't know what shingles were, nor did he care. Once, he had been strong enough to hold up a coffin with one bare hand. But that was a long time ago.
A story had gone around about Sasuke. His relationship with his brother, Itachi, had never been a private thing. Their deep dislike for one another was no secret, and had been more than once a gossip topic for many a lady around the city. Once, at this very cemetery, Sasuke and Itachi had gotten into a fight about something not worth fighting over. But Sasuke had gotten so angry he lashed out with one sweep of his leg, and knocked an unsuspecting Itachi over. In the end, Sasuke was the one screaming himself hoarse for help, when Itachi lay bleeding with closed eyes, his head having cracked hard against a headstone. Itachi was sent to the hospital, and never quite recovered from the fall. Half the time he was perfectly normal, as if nothing had happened, and the other half he was absolutely delirious. In the end, Itachi's insanity had caused Itachi to murder their parents and run from home, never to be seen again. Devastated, Sasuke never forgave himself for it, even decades after Itachi disappeared from his life forever.
Forty five minutes left. Sasuke reached the main building, and when he entered the little bell above the door made the familiar 'ting-ling!' sound. The part-time caretaker, a lanky and cheeky young man who sat behind the counter looked up and broke into a half-smile. "Yo, Sasuke. Back from your morning rounds?" It sounded more of a statement than a question, part of their daily routine. The same conversation. The same words. It drove Sasuke crazy sometimes.
"Konoharuto," Sasuke grunted in a low greeting.
Konoharuto was the grandson of Konohamaru, who lived in a retirement home somewhere on the other side of the city. Named by Konohamaru himself as a gesture of the lingering admiration he had for the now dead Naruto, Konoharuto worked part-time as a caretaker, but Sasuke's possessive and jealous personality that stuck even now when he was 87 prevented him from doing any real caretaking work.
Like usual, Sasuke gave the room a slow once-over. The building smelled of its usual; the stale, faintish stench of what Sasuke imagined an abandoned morgue would have. It wasn't surprising, because usually people laid the coffin in the backroom in their building sometimes a day or two before the funeral started. There was no ventilation system in the building, and so in return the smell grew stale, and never really left. A stack of funeral-registration pamphlets lay on one corner of the counter. Next to it was a thin check-in-and-out book, left open for easy access for visitors. Behind the counter was the outdated phone, two old metal chairs, a ragged pack of cards with a few cards missing, and Konoharuto's half-eaten sandwich of the day. Against the wall as the bookshelf, filled to the brim with messily filed registration papers of the deceased, new headstone order forms, funeral planning forms, and old visitor logs.
Many times Sasuke in his youth, his middle ages, and now, he had wanted to leave the cemetery. He wanted to find a better life, a brighter life, somewhere away from the skeletons rotting below his sandaled feet. But the war had come, and Sasuke found himself always thinking, and never doing, and he felt his pants widen and his muscles leave him and then he came to accept it. He would always be there, he supposed, in a world filled with eulogies, regrets, the smacking of shovels against the dirt as they buried the newly dead, dusty gravestones, and weeds that got longer as the years went by. Unlike his father, or any of his family before him, and like the badge on his shirt, Sasuke was the caretaker – the head caretaker – or as the people called him, the "Graveyard Man".
"Hey, happy birthday, I remembered," Konoharuto called to him from behind the counter. His fingers were waggling in a suspicious way; was he texting again?
Sasuke scowled in return.
"No party, or anything? Ain't it boring?"
Sasuke glared at him so icily that Konoharuto chuckled awkwardly and looked away. There was a moment of silence before the part timer cleared his throat again, drawing Sasuke's eye once more.
"I'm leaving for a week soon, Sasuke. I'm going to Suna, starting Monday."
Sasuke nodded, and in an attempt to brighten things up, Konohasuke stood up and skipped and danced a little behind the counter.
"I'm taking Udone, remember, my wife? Grandpa Udon's granddaughter? We're going to par-r-r-ty!" Konoharuto grinned, and stopped dancing.
"You ever been there, Sasuke?"
"What?"
"Suna, ever been there?"
"For reasons far different from yours," Sasuke answered grimly. The last time he remembered going to Suna was more than sixty years ago, in the war against the terrorist group Akatsuki, which brought up horrifying memories he would much rather forget. His mood suddenly sour, he turned from the now confused Konoharuto, and left the building.
Almost unconsciously, and yearning just to go somewhere, anywhere, Sasuke walked towards a small irregular cluster of graves set apart from the neat rows of the others. Seventy years ago, It had been a secluded and empty clearing once, with a ring of trees and small white butterflies that danced among the dandelions that randomly sprouted in the middle of the clearing.
He brushed a hand across one of the graves. 'Kakashi Hatake' was written on the headstone. It was so faded Sasuke could barely make out the words, but after so many years of visiting the cluster, he knew he could never forget the names on the gravestones. The others brought him more wrenching feelings that came from the bottom of his stomach and traveled upward towards his lungs, which happened every time he came here. One wrote, 'Rock Lee'. 'Maito Gai' was next to it. Another wrote 'Iruka Umino'. Behind it was 'Shikamaru Nara', 'Ino Yamanaka', 'Chouji Akimichi', and even further behind it, 'Neji Hyuuga', and 'Hinata Hyuuga'. The one right in front of him wrote, 'Naruto Uzumaki'. He always spent more time around that headstone. But then came the smallest gravestone at the very back, with the words already faded from the beginning he could barely make out 'S…H…'. It had been a puzzle to him for more than fifty years. He had never figured out whose grave it was. There was no record of it in the logs, but he knew it was the first one to show up in the small clearing, before the others joined it. But he walked over to it and brushed his hand over it nonetheless.
Suddenly, with a huge thunderclap, it began to rain. It wasn't any normal rain. It was the kind that hurt when it hit your skin and formed sheets of visible lines as it passed. In a matter of minutes Sasuke was soaked to the bone. He watched as the potholes around the graves became visible. Some were shallow, but some were quite deep. The entire patch was starting to turn into a puddle of squishy mud. But Sasuke didn't move. Rain wouldn't keep him away from here.
Because the clearing wasn't just home to the graves of his most important people. It was where Sasuke had met Sakura.
Every life has one true-love snapshot. For Sasuke, it came on a warm summer afternoon seventy years ago, when he was sixteen years old, when the grass had turned back into that lovely bright green color, and the butterflies were dancing among the flowers. She wore a red cotton dress and white ballet slippers, with a red ribbon in her hair. Sasuke didn't say much. He was never a person to talk much, but he had felt so awestruck by her his tongue felt glued to the roof of his mouth. They sat and shared her picnic together, surrounded by the daisies and the small white cabbage butterflies that fluttered quietly around them. They walked into town together, and he bought her a strawberry ice-cream cone. She said she had to go before her parents got angry. But as she walked away, she turned and waved with a gentle smile, and her emerald eyes sparkled like real jewels.
That was the snapshot. For the rest of his life, whenever he thought of Sakura, Sasuke would see that moment, her waving with her delicate hand, her gentle smile, her beautiful rose pink hair that framed her small, heart-shaped face, and he would feel the same arterial burst of love.
That night he had gone home and smacked his older brother awake. He told him he'd met the girl he was going to marry.
"Go to sleep, little brother." Itachi grunted from underneath the covers.
It took till the next morning for Sasuke to realize Itachi hadn't called him foolish when he had answered him.
Ssssshhhhhhhh. The rain hammered away. Five minutes left to live.
. Sasuke rubbed the raindrops away from his cheeks. Were those really raindrops?
Sssssshhhhhhhhh. Sakura was like one of those wounds that stung if you touched it through the band-aid, and he had learned to not touch the band-aid over time. But he touched it once more at that moment, and it began to hurt all over again.
Sssssshhhhhhh. He hoped that she was somewhere alive and happy.
Ssssshhhhhhh. He hoped she had never forgotten him, just as how he had never forgotten her.
Sssssshhhhhhh. He hoped she still remembered the lovely but sad song she had half sung, half hummed to him. She had made it up on the spot during the picnic. He tried to sing it to himself, ignoring the loudness of the rain.
"I wish I never knew these feelings –"
Ssssssssshhhhhhhh.
"- we cannot meet again –"
Sssssshhhhhhhhhh.
"- want to see you, I want to see you –"
Ssssssshhhhhhhhh. Three minutes left to live.
"Even now, I think of the summer days when you were here."
Sasuke shuddered. It was as if the song had predicted exactly what would happen to them.
Sssssshhhhhhh. One minute left to live.
A particularly hard drop of rain hit him directly on the nose, and he jerked out of the song in surprise and irritation. Noticing that he had sunk at least four inches into the mud, Sasuke reluctantly pulled himself out, with one hand on Naruto's gravestone and the other holding his cane to support himself as he stood up. It was getting darker by the minute. Sasuke squinted at the black clouds that rolled in from beyond the mountains somewhere behind him. The water had filled up most of the potholes, and none were visible anymore. But with a bout of momentary forgetfulness, Sasuke started to walk normally, although with a limp, from the cluster of gravestones.
All it took was one wrong step. His foot sloshed clumsily into one of the larger potholes, and Sasuke's eyes widened before he felt the mud beneath his sandal send him sliding backwards, his head coming down onto the small gravestone he had been attempting to walk away from. Because of Sasuke's weight, the impact was incredible. A burst of bright white light blinded Sasuke for a few moments as he felt pain spread like quicksilver from the back of his head to cover his entire head, and shoot down his spine like white hot fire. His body crumpled as he slid down from the headstone. His neck formed some sort of an L shape against the stone, his chin nearly touching his collarbone.
The pain was retracting. Instead, Sasuke felt something warm spread underneath the skin of his head where he had hit the rock. Was it blood? He didn't know.
He felt two gentle, soft arms wrap around his middle. He closed his eyes.
And then, there was nothing.