so hidden in sweet
miraa
A/N: Sasuke-centric. Pointless.
Where he lives, it is all deserts and sand and the horrible landscape of no horizon.
On Sunday afternoons he'd go to the market, bustling empty-faces vending eyeless fish and soul-less meat, white vegetables pulled from the ground before their time, like pulling corpses from the grave before they rotted. Cows have gone through rigor mortis before they walked; he is seeing the grim reaper roam the streets, scythe in one hand and circling his own throat for once. He's neither blind nor stupid – he knows he misses the trees and fields of grass – but he continues with his rounds and returns home hollow and a button sewn to his lips.
He's been away so long that he's forgotten what a leaf looks like, how long the flames of a fire lick a piece of firewood before they sink their teeth in. And just as an evolutionary precaution – they've disabled his ability for recognition. A long time ago a blond boy and a girl with pink hair would've run towards him with open arms, but now he just sits on his bed with a knife in hand, cutting his brooding thoughts between the lines. He's old, grown old (but tell me the truth, he's only sixteen going on thirteen going on younger and younger until he doesn't know what the world is anymore) and he's become cagey. He wishes for electroshock and fire burning his bones but this is not so, anymore at least.
At one point of his life he would've thought of preserving himself at six years old, but he hadn't the foresight now to do so. His life now is just slashing and cutting away at the river reeds – he's taking the job replacement for the wonderful reaper who's just retired. He's doing a wonderful job at taking wonderful people's lives. But he cannot take his own, nor the boy with whiskers nor the girl with green eyes, though he can't remember why.
We are connected by a string, we are told many times, but he wants mice to gnaw the chains, they are linked, we are strung. Books and scrolls line the walls. He walks into a history mine and sets off the fire alarms, he is drowning in the sprays of water, much like someone he knows or used to know, he wants to go back home (wait – home, what's home?)
Confused. He asks himself, because he hasn't talked to anybody in a while – what is my heart? He can't remember where he came from. He doesn't remember if his soul had died. He can't remember if he had grown, or if his hair had been cut, he can't remember – yesterday.
Goddammit. Goddammit am I frustrated.
He is sorry to report that at nights he is haunted by a pair of red eyes not quite like his own, and in this world he is caught between silver and red and black – do I choose the kunai the blood or the mourning clothes? (you're lucky, they come in a prepaid package.) He takes his sins and wraps them around his little finger, gives them as an offering, and asks, what am I looking for?
The land you do not remember. The land that you forgot.
All I've ever known is vengeance.
Do you know what a leaf is?
(Do you know what wind is? Put those two together and you've got that emptiness.)