a im.
chapter one.
"human heart--the software"
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"What did they genetically modfuck you with? A pigeon?"
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In life, there are no such things as clean breaks. Everything is the way your leather shoes slap the slick iced asphalt during winter; the way fine wine tastes drunk out of cheap 70 cent plastic cups; the way knives feel in cotton pockets, something constant something secured; the way women and their cheap plastic lips kept throwing themselves at his feet for a quick fuck.
Life is a fucking war! Sometimes won sometimes lost sometimes bribed sometimes bought; drugs in the bedroom children in the next; lungs being fried cigarette after cigarette. There is no exclusive esoteric high class purpose to life, no explosive arcane answer to that one big question. Education is preprogrammed, careers defined with memory chip swaps.
He sneered at the third prostitute to approach him that day, baring his teeth like medals. They were coming down on him like insects drawn to light, children drawn to candy. The whore backed off, her yellowing eyes blank with the same overused help me save me! propaganda he kept seeing in every other whore on the street.
He spat on the asphalt floor, his spit swirling with the ice and snow. He didn't give two shit about damsels in distress. He was Uchiha bloody Sasuke, lover to never, heartbreaker extraordinaire.
He made his way down the narrow path, a seductive fissure in between the grand cathedrals and towers of the rotting city, bourne of liquid cement and metal pipes. An alley, a shortcut to the pub he was meeting that blonde idiot Naruto at.
Under the swirling lights of the spluttering street lamp his skin illuminated a wicked milk-white, God's forgotten angel, heaven in hell honey.
He basked in it, this addicting sense of divinity like an addict to crack, something ugly something beautiful…
Like a trip in the wire the angels abandoned him and he was human again, left in the dark alley in his wet shoes and gelled hair. He felt mild anger at the foreign presence at the end of the alley that had caused the disturbance, but the anger cleansed off him in his next exhale, as he regained his mask of cruel indifference.
Nothing but lowly street punks, fools weakened by the coarse brutality that defined the modern way of life. He dismissed them the moment he glanced at them, his darkdark gaze shredding their festering insecurities open with a mere narrow of his eyes.
Abruptly the fourth figure of their pathetic four-man association broke ranks, and he watched in slow motion as the figure ran barefooted away, the vanilla white of her slim legs betraying the veil of animosity the thin flea-infested blanket over her head provided.
Malnutrition and the chill of winter caught up with her as the smooth planes of her legs slowed down. The men easily caught up to her then, rewarding her with a red print across her cheek. "Bitch!" the bald one screamed at her, raising his hand again.
It wasn't a rarity for gangsters to hunt down particular streetcorner prostitutes to satisfy the perverse need of their superiors. Sasuke walked away from the sloppy tragedy quietly, exhaling on an air of boredom. He was no savior, no man liberal with the luxuries of time. He had none to spare saving strangers.
The crass ripping of fabric floated to his ears as he glanced back on a whim. It was a rare occurrence for Uchiha Sasuke to be surprised but he was. Astonished, even. That cheap malnourished streetcorner prostitute had strawberry hair. Strawberry hair and angel wings, soft as cotton and real; no illusionment, no fake promises from the devil.
Genetic mutation in the deoxynucleic stand, his preprogrammed education system, UCHIHA, whispered.
Angel, his own personal subconscious rasped.
Just.
Like.
You.
His slim fingers were ripping the windpipe out of the bald man's throat before he could truly register anything, shoving the mortal mass of a man aside to have a better look at the girl.
"You," he whispered, lost and found at the same time.
Her hair was flying loose around her head like gentle corals in the sea and she was folding herself to conserve heat, the chill of winter powdering her lips blue. Even in the shadows there were no mistaking those tiny wings…
There was inane chattering directed at his back, but he couldn't focus on the gibberish that spilled out of these human trash at the moment. He dodged the predictable arc of cheap metal as the two men stumbled forward waving their store-bought weaponries, easily slamming both their heads hard enough to crack diamonds against the wall.
He bent down and casually removed the wallets from their pockets, folding the deposit of cash they had been undoubtedly paid upfront into crisp squares before slipping them into his pockets.
"Follow," he bid quietly to the broken angel-human, leading her to the pub.
The pub was a smoky scene of stolen youth and stale cigarettes, as if there was a layer of dust covering up every surface top of the establishment. Swaying hips and too-old hookers approached him, but he had no time today for these third-rate citizens. Would never have time for them.
The floor was littered with cigarette buds and crash-burn dreams, discarded like yesterday's breaking news headlines.
"Naruto," he said quietly as he approached the familiar bar. "Do you believe in God? Or angels?"
Naruto looked up from his glass of bitter yellow beer, lousy in quality cheap in price. "Heh. You're asking a very embarassing question with a very straight face," Naruto jeered, completely missing the point, as usual.
Sasuke beckoned the girl forward with a sway of his finger, shoving her on the torn faux leather of the bar stool next to Naruto like a rag doll. His skin burnt in contact with hers, scorching like something holy melting the flesh of some second-rate spat-up sin.
"The jacket," he drawled. "Off."
She obeyed, peeling the thick heavy leather coat off her fragile (breakbreakbreak) skin, shivering with the explosion of cold. Her tiny angel wings folded into themselves, like shy children behind the safe pillar of an adults' legs.
"The fuck."
Naruto was paying attention now, absorbing the visual this angel-human provided like a vacuum hungry for more. "Holy shit," he awed, twirling her on the bar stool. "Hey, wait, you're so cold. Are you cold?"
The girl lowered her head, her hair splashing down her front noisily like a waterfall.
Naruto rubbed her arms comfortingly, trying to generate friction and heat. His meaty rough hands against her alabaster purity, those smooth marble of fine porcelain… Sasuke slapped his hands away in horror, worried that his sins would rub off on her, an ugly black smear against her skin, a sin in itself.
"I'll do it," he said uncertainly, his quiet voice injected with a whisper of horror and a hint of strange fascination. The rough palms of his hands found her smooth egg-shell shoulders, and he shivered. She was so cold she was fire hot, licking his skin like blue flames and danger.
"Do you have a name, miss?" Naruto brushed her hair away from her face, foregoing his anger at that asshole Sasuke for something higher in his list of priorities.
"Sakura," she whispered brokenly, her voice crumbling with lack of water. "Of the HARUNO chipset."
"No way…"
"She's one of us," Naruto announced proudly like a scientist on the cusp of a discovery. Idiot. "Definitely."
"A new model," that sloppy drawl could belong only to Hatake Kakashi.
Sasuke closed his eyes, leaning his head against the lumpy white-washed walls of the private clinic. He could smell the anesthetic, a foreign sense of familiarity blooming in his chest at the bitter scent of too many pills and solutions. He allowed the cool air of bottled ice and frosted sugar to soothe his nerves into something tranquil, forcing the whisper of something remembered out of his mind.
The memory rose like bile in his throat, rearing its ugly serpent head like a mocking reminder. He could remember the delicate simpering watery symphony of music box melodies in his ears like it was preprogrammed, an internal media player rusting to life in his system.
He used to fall asleep listening to it, his sanity slipping into the slippery edge of subconscious like a koi fish out of hands and into water. The music academy cheated them with melodic dreams, lulling them into a plastic sense of security with its fragile lies. A trigger.
Bang, bang, baby.
It wasn't uncommon to wake up bathed in the lukewarmth of fresh blood and the horror of what's done in those days. Even in the mangled present he woke up half expecting to find himself slumped against the twisted monstrosity of human anatomy like a lousy lover on sleazy motel beds, sticky with blood and tears.
And he cursed the empty echo of penitence, of memory re-runs like Saturday night bad soap opera on economical off-color TV screens.
Hark, the angels sing! Sasuke thinks—knows—that no matter how much Christmas carols and church choirs he treats his ears the beautiful deadly melody of that music box will always haunt him, drowning out the soundtrack of his future, the empty chorus of his present.
Cherry blossom splatters and cold bodies do not wash off your conscience, no matter how much soap or how much water met your hands.
In the academy the cold fingers of sanity were but a passing sensation a fleeting distraction, outstanding in the way foreign things were, leaving behind nothing but the inertial weight of something maybe-beautiful. The hysteria of delirium was easy to slip into, like a rock into water.
His lazy too-long days were filled with the saccharine swirl of grisly death, mixing in his saliva to form a bittersweet lie in his lips. Overhead the melodies would play, singing praises without lyrics to Orochimaru, their savior their beacon of glistening hope, their father.
Orochimaru. The name stretched his lips back into the dangerous sneer of a killer. That piece of no-rate shit bastard was the cause of everything.
Everything like the smile on his brother's lips as he slipped out of his berserk reverie, the warm blood pooled around his body like a perfect circle as his regeneration software crashed. Everything like your horror, his smile, and the unforgiving sonata of the future, ringing like the cruelest bells in your ears.
The future swayed with promises of a merciless solo, a wasteful path down the route of revenge.
"And what do we do now?" Naruto's voice wrenched itself into his thoughts, lodging into his memory like a weed, tenacious and indefatigable.
"We wait."
We wait. Like sordid housewives weeping at home for their adulterous husbands' return. To what level will they excavate him?
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
Bullshit. His mind hissed, clawing into the manifestation of his conscience like a seeping poison. Who does she think she is. Who the hell does she think she is.
"Our assignment—"
"Is not half as important as this."
"This is bullshit," he spat, his angel voice trembling with powdery anger. On some level he was aware her mere existence did not warrant the extended brunt of his asperity, but it was oh so easy to simply direct his anger at anything and everything.
The tension in the room rose warningly, alarm bells ringing like sirens.
As if scripted the door creaked open, wooden and solid. "She's a medical unit," Tsunade said quietly, some inner ghost lodging in her throat to morph her voice wary. "A medic unit modeled after me, actually. The YAKUSHI series must have been insufficient. She's the first successful project."
"How did she escape the academy?"
"Pure, unbridled luck, judging from her story. A few thugs who thought she had a pretty face and who failed to realize her true worth."
Some people were born under some god-forsaken shining star or something. It had taken him three years, hundreds of healed scars and failed attempts just to escape the hell hole. "That is true luck."
"Yes. I also removed her tracing chip."
Now what? Naruto shuffled uncomfortably at the new addition to their small last-minute alliance, this angel-girl who was sort of human sort of not.
Tsunade smirked at them, an abrupt twist of her glamor lips. "You should take her with you, you know. It might do you boys good. I scanned her memory card. She has a surprising amount of abilities, and an updated list of medical practices. The most updated one, actually, and the most complete. 3 terabytes!"
"We have regeneration softwares," Sasuke pointed out.
"That are liable to crash any day now. You don't seem to understand the fact that she's a HARUNO chipset, do you? You're not exactly a new model, and things are bound to rust any day now. She can fix that. She's a primary repair model and a secondary combat one. She's Orochimaru's ticket to cutting funds. He'll be pissed to know she was smuggled out."
"She's a healer." Tsunade finished patiently.
A healer. An angel. A monstrosity of research papers and fruitful experiments.
A savior.
Ange déchu.
disclaimer: this is purely fanmade.
a/n: any pointers? comments? questions? don't like where it's going?
tell me.
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ange déchu - French. fallen angel, if i'm not mistaken. correct me if i'm wrong. (:
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anon --
you're right! (:
kruu. yes, i was inspired by DOGS, which, by the way, is the best damn manga out there.
if you liked this you should read it, it's a thousand times better.