Wooow so I'm back to actually writing fanfics. This has been sitting in my Google Docs for, what, a year now?
IDK LOL
I really don't know. Please enjoy this foray into a possibly insane mind.
Death to the Traitor
Sakura woke to the feeling of a warm arm wrapped comfortingly around her middle, the other tucked behind her head to nestle her comfortably into the crook of a neck. Content, she smiled and gently blew away the few soft strands that been tickling her cheek, prompting a grunt from her sleeping husband. Sakura watched as one jet-black cracked open before crinkling up into a smile.
"Good morning," Sasuke's voice was low rumble, slightly rough from a night's disuse. The hand that been cradling the back of her head came around to cup her face, his thumb sweeping across her cheekbone in an affectionate gesture. She nuzzled into the large, rough palm with small sound of happiness, eliciting a snort of laughter. The alarm, being annoying as ever, chose that moment to chime.
"DATTEBAYO!" It screamed once before being decisively silenced by an angry backfist. Luckily, the poor ramen-bowl-shaped thing was not crushed and would live to shock its owners awake another day.
Her warm moment shattered, Sakura started to force herself out of the soft confines of the futon before something grabbed her about the waist and hauled her back. She huffed in annoyance and tugged at the arms that kept her resolutely from her most immediate goal, which was get-a-cup-of-strong-coffee-so-she-wouldn't-go-berserk-on-all-of-humanity-
Here her thoughts screeched to a stop as Sasuke planted a kiss on her forehead. Taking advantage of her momentary lack of resistance, the raven-haired man folded her back into his arms. He released her moments later with a laugh when his wife began growl, yes growl, angrily. The bed sprung up a little as Sasuke got up and Sakura waited until she heard him enter the bathroom before rising as well. Propped up on her elbow, she tried to rid herself of the worst of her bed head by roughly finger-combing her now waist-length pink hair. When that failed to flatten the loops standing up all over the back of her head, Sakura sighed and twisted around to call for help from her husband.
"Anata, could you please toss me m-" A flash of broad, back was all she caught before she whipped herself back around, ear-tips turning red.
"Still shy, Sakura?" She heard him ask, voice obviously amused at how his wife still blushed and squeaked and hid her face whenever he walked around the house shirtless. His right hand shot up adroitly to catch the projectile that she sent flying his way in anger.
"Hn." Her apparent aggravation proved ineffectual as Sasuke left the room, seemingly unaware that the pillow was still in his hand until it soared back into the room seconds later. Sakura didn't trouble herself with picking it up. Padding silently across the smooth oak planks, she slid aside the shoji and stepped onto the engawa that was already warmed by the same sunlight that had filtered in. Birds chirped, the stream gurgled, and a passing breeze made the leaves of the Momiji in their traditional-styled garden rustle.
Sakura smiled. All was well.
"Hinata-chan!" The raven-haired girl whirled around, milk-white eyes widened in slight shock.
"Sakura-san!"
Sakura smiled widely and hurried forward, one hand resting on the woven basket slung over her arm to steady it. The fresh lettuce and turnips inside rolled around merrily but she was able to keep them from falling out as she approached the Hyuuga heiress.
"Getting big, huh?" She asked teasingly, eyeing her friend's bulging stomach.
Hinata blushed and averted her eyes, though one hand came up to lie protectively on the bump that was her unborn child. The beatific smile that tugged at the corners of her lips made her look like the happiest woman in the world. Sakura's answering grin was not quite as serene, but it lacked no small amount of happiness as she hastened her pace just a little to catch up. When she did, she began to natter about the little bits and pieces of advice she had heard from fellow nurses and doctors at the hospital about being a new mother. Hinata listened with good humour and even posed the occasional question when Sakura got onto the controversial topic of when to begin training the child in the ninja arts. Both women consented on the age of six as that was the age when most children entered the academy, though they also agreed somewhat ruefully that their husbands would want to push that date forward at least two years. Once the wealth of information that was the brain's pickings of hospital nurses finally ran dry, Sakura let the conversation lapse into a comfortable silence and simply revelled in the warm air of a summer morning that promised a hot afternoon.
When the sunlight abruptly turned dark, she felt a chill chase itself up her bare arm and glanced up to check for clouds. Her searching gaze yielded nothing from the unnaturally gray-tinted sky until she turned to ask her companion about the odd weather.
With the sound of tearing flesh, the corners of Hinata's smile were tearing apart until the expression crossed her face from ear to ear.
Sakura reeled back, eyes wide, and with war-honed instincts interrupted her chakra but before she could so much as scream the world faded back to normal. Standing a little away, the raven-haired woman eyed her like she was the one acting strange.
"Sakura-san, are you alright? Is something the matter?" Hinata's voice came through distorted as if she was speaking through a long tube, causing the hairs on the back of Sakura's neck to stand on end. The unease didn't fade when she forced herself to nod an answer and realized that it wasn't just her mind playing tricks - her friend's mouth was a little wider than it was before.
"Come now, then. Let us get out of the sun before we burn up." Hinata said lightly, though not without worry, and turned to continue hurrying down the street. Sakura followed after only a heartbeat's hesitation though her skin still crawled with paranoia and remembered fear. However, as they walked, the strange episodes kept happening, each time bringing newer and more terrifying changes.
First was Hinata's eyes.
When the pair rounded the turn into the marketplace, they turned distinctly reptilian with red pupils though the milky white Hyuuga irises remained. All it took was a conscious blink to set the world to rights again, but Sakura couldn't shake the momentary terror that had smothered her for those few horrid seconds. The next time the sunlight turned freezing, the raven-haired woman's arms stretched until the outline of bones were visible and she resembled a strangely thin ape. Fortunately, because she was walking ahead, Sakura didn't have to look at her grossly disfigured face.
Eventually, the pink-haired woman came to the horrifying realization that the gruesome changes to Hinata's face were not completely going away each time she dispelled her hallucination. As the Hyuuga hmmed and hawed over a bushel in the produce section, her arms were so long that she had to bend them in two places in order to pick up choice fruits. When she turned to ask Sakura's opinion, the flesh on the apples of her cheeks flapped macabrely and were an angry red as if they were freshly sliced open. After a few more vain attempts, Sakura stopped slamming down on her chakra pathways and wondered exactly what Hinata saw in making herself look like she had just crawled out of a civilian child's nightmare. By the time both women had finished their shopping, all that was left of Hinata was the bump on her belly, though even that was strangely distended until it couldn't possibly be housing a human baby. Sakura felt equal parts disgusted and angry that her friend would do something like this, though part of those negative feelings melted into relief as they approached the large wooden doors of the Hyuuga compound.
"Would you care to stay for some tea, Sakura-san?" Hinata asked, shifting the brown bags in her arms, which slithered and moved oddly as they were much too long for the task. Sakura averted her eyes and forced a smile on her face.
"No thank you, Hinata-chan. I have to put away the meat before it goes bad." The pink haired-woman turned to flee, but an iron grip suddenly seized her forearm. She turned around with her mouth open in indignation, only to snap it shut when the strong scent of gore threatened to make her retch.
Where the baby bump once was a lump of pulsing flesh remained, and it was all Sakura saw before her vision turned red and she decided that she had had enough.
"Let go." The pink-haired woman snarled and wrenched her arm free with enough force to make the monstrous figure in front of her stagger, temporarily unbalanced. Sakura used those few seconds to whip around and stalk away without a single glance back to see if Hinata was okay.
If she fell, she deserved it for subjecting me to that. Sakura thought nastily over the guilty voice in her head that commanded her to at least check. Footsteps clipped in her anger, she returned to the Uchiha compound, slamming her front door with a vehemence that left it rattling on its hinges. After a small double take, she also locked it, bolted it, and activated both her and Sasuke's traps before putting away her groceries and throwing herself on the couch. The smell of blood still lingered in her nostrils despite her best efforts as Sakura covered her eyes and wished that Sasuke would hurry up and come home already.
A light but firm rap at the door woke Sakura from her slumber.
She peeled open one emerald green eye and debated the benefits of ignoring the sound altogether and returning to her sleep, but as the knocking grew more insistent she managed to heave herself off the couch with a groan. Padding silently across the solid wooden floors of her home, she unlocked the front door and cracked it open to squint at her uninvited guest.
To her surprise, she was met with disapproving blue eyes and an unholy amount of orange, though it was now balanced out with some black, white and red.
"Good afternoon, Naruto. To what do I owe the pleasure?" Sakura yawned behind a slender hand. When the man completely disregarded her greeting and intensified his radiation of doom and disappoint, Sakura knew something was wrong.
"Hinata told me how you treated me in front of the Hyuuga complex today." Naruto began, voice stern.
Ah. So that's what this was about.
"She said- " Sakura didn't even let him finish his sentence before she stopped him with a raised hand. She could feel her earlier anger and indignation bubbling up and tamping it down was a losing battle. Given how hospitable she felt at the moment, it was also a battle that she didn't want to fight
"Before you tell me what Hinata told you, let me tell you what she showed me," Sakura said in a voice that she knew scared the two most powerful ninjas in the village, her green eyes narrow in an expression that was purely unfriendly. Naruto remained unmoved and simply crossed his arms, waiting for her side of the argument.
"She put me under a genjutsu, a powerful one that wasn't easily breakable might I add, and dragged me around the marketplace looking like the mother of all nightmares while I had to do my best to act natural lest I come off as a fool." Here she slapped her palm on the doorframe for emphasis, "So, if you're looking for someone to chastise, you are in the wrong place."
Naruto brought a hand to his forehead slowly as if resisting the urge to facepalm, peering at her through his fingers. "That's ridiculous. Hinata-chan wouldn't ever do that, and now she's upset."
"I'm not going to apologize - I frankly don't care right now if it was all just some pregnant woman whim. Hinata, she is talented at genjutsu I'm sure, but that gave her no right to show me what she did. Did she tell you what she made herself into? If not let me tell you she-" Sakura trailed off as she searched for sufficiently strong words to convey Hinata's appearance. Then her words died entirely as she saw that Naruto's fingertips were sinking into his skull.
"Did she look like this?" Off came Naruto's face, the features bubbling like hot wax to drop with a wet noise on the stone path. In its place was her own, staring back at her through a patchwork of scars, cracked like shattered glass and oddly shaped as if it was repaired by a child. Distantly, she noticed that her counterpart was missing her right eye, the empty socket weeping blood.
No, that's not quite it, and does that come off? Was the irrelevant thought that penetrated Sakura's frozen horror as she gaped at the melted flesh still dripping onto her welcome mat.
Then, to increase the nightmare that was Naruto wearing her own half-destroyed face, his limbs began to retract into his torso as his body stretched with the sound of cracking bones until he resembled a snake. Sakura didn't stay to find out if that was what he had become. Turning on her heels, she fled deeper into the house, intent on putting as many obstacles between her and the monster. All the while, Naruto's voice resounded in her ears, screaming her name in an increasingly desperate litany that she struggled to block. Sakura stumbled as the world around her wavered like ripples on a lake.
What the hell?
The sound of furniture crashing behind her was growing steadily louder, but wherever she looked the ground was an undulating sea of polished wood and golden sand. Clinging on to the wall with her hands, Sakura glanced behind her to see something extending towards the tail of her shirt. Her heart was pounding so hard that she could feel it in her throat, then she felt the world right itself. Pushing away from the appendage, Sakura flung open the bathroom door only to find the master bedroom behind it instead. Regardless, she ran inside and jammed it shut with the chair from her vanity. When the sounds of pursuit faded, Sakura whimpered and slumped bonelessly against the bedroom wall.
Through the delicate paper panels of the shoji, the waving branches of the Japanese maple trees shook like claws and she thought she could see things scuttling under the bed from the corner of her eye. Her breath was rasping in her lungs and Sakura began the careful process of erasing her physical signals along with her chakra signature. The former was easy, but the gaping pit-like feeling in her stomach grew when the energy, ever-present and coursing through her like blood, was absent. Though she didn't think her panic could get any worse, Sakura's breathing miraculously began to speed up again when careful probing of her chakra networks revealed a tangled mess as if someone had intentionally overfilled them until they burst. By all rights, she recognized dimly, she should be in intense pain but there was only an almost euphoric buzzing sound at the back of her mind. It soothed her worries and made everything oddly surreal.
Depersonalization, that was what it was called.
"SAKURA."
Naruto's voice sounded awfully pained and hysterical, almost begging for her to reveal herself. An uncontrollable shudder wracked her body and she curled into herself, terrified and unbearably confused.
"SAKURA NO!" Sakura squeezed her eyes shut and gave up on her search for her chakra. At least the absence of it meant that the creature wouldn't be able to sense her that way, though she ignored with desperate fervency the fact that she would also be completely defenceless should it happen upon her.
"SAKURA HOW COULD YOU." Naruto no longer sounded like he was in her house, but in her own head instead. The obvious pain in his voice tugged at her heartstrings, though she had no idea what she had done to cause him such distress. Sakura forced herself to lower the trembling hand that was inching closer to the door.
It was all a scheme to draw her out. If she gave in, there was only certain death waiting to greet her beyond the doorway. Around Sakura, the room began to undulate again as shadows began to move. With sinuous grace they crept forward to wind themselves around her wrists, ankles, eating at her vision as if she was about to lose consciousness. She batted them away to no avail.
HelpmeHelpmeHelpme
Her thoughts were an increasingly jumbled mess as too many stimuli flooded it at once. Terror, confusion, anger, it was all combining into a heady mixture along with the odd tug in her heart that told her this was familiar. A weight began to press down on her forehead, squeezing the sides of her head painfully as if it wanted to break her skull.
MakethemstopMakethemstopMakethemstop
A claw-tipped finger trailed across Sakura temple before digging in ferociously. The pain came as a starburst that originated from behind her eyes.
"SAKURA!"
The raw agony in this scream broke her tenuous control and without thinking, Sakura tore across the room. She flung aside the shoji that she had opened that same morning and bolted into the garden, except the sunlight was much too bright and the ground beneath her much too hard. Instinctively, she threw up a hand to shield her eyes. Behind her, the Uchiha compound melted into the scenery with a strangely oily sound until Sakura was surrounded by towering cliffs, scraggly trees, and the sound of rushing water that was nothing like the more temperate climate of Konoha.
An eagle screeched overhead.
It was familiar, and Sakura couldn't figure out for the life of her why. She probed the craggy rockface with her eyes, turning in a slow circle, until the scent of something metallic gave her pause.
A few metres ahead was Sasuke, head lolling as he hung with his arms crucified to the rock face. Blood dripped down the rocks in thin rivulets, extending from his lax hands like macabre talons. Another piece of metal, ragged as if it had been forcefully snapped apart, was rammed so deeply into his chest that only the gleaming silver tip was visible.
"Sasuke!"
Sakura picked up her pace and pressed forward against the bile rising in her throat. Within a few bounds, she was at his side. The scent of blood was so strong that the pink-haired woman almost gagged. Sakura reached out a trembling hand to cup her husband's cold cheek but found that she could only hover millimeters over his skin, unable to bring herself to touch the patchwork of nicks and cuts that marred his face.
"Sasuke?" She whispered tentatively, hoping against hope that there would be a reaction.
There was none. Tears began to stream down Sakura's face and she reached up to wipe them away, right hand coming away smudged with red.
What?
Sasuke's corpse began to cry blood so dark that it was almost black. The pink-haired woman tried to unclench her left hand, but found that she couldn't Her fingers, against her own volition, were wrapped around a shard of metal that fit perfectly with the one lodged in her husband's chest.
Wait-
Sakura tried to throw down the fragment with a scream, but it stuck fast to her hand. Behind her, the horrible slithering sound resumed.
WAIT
Something grabbed her head from behind and her vision went pitch black. In the back of her mind, a voice started to wail.
Sakura woke from the genjutsu to the feeling of cold steel around her wrists and ankles. Someone had a firm grip on her shoulders and was shaking her vigorously, the action making her trapped limbs chafe painfully against her confines. With the sound of a heart being torn apart, her blindfold was ripped off and flung aside. Bleary green eyes met mismatched blue and black.
What a familiar eyes they were!
Unbidden, a laugh bubbled up in her chest and she had no qualms about letting it loose. Sakura opened her mouth and cackled, a wild, insane sound that would have better fit a madman in his death throes. The person in front of her reared back in surprise as if blown away by the force of her mirth, his face going slack with shock. The action made his eyes widen, and in them, she saw herself.
Her face was beyond mangled, but that wasn't all. Her right eye wasn't green. It was black.
Not hers.
Sakura struggled harder against her bindings as her right socket began to burn and her laugh turned into a banshee's scream.
"Touch is the most intimate, after all. Will you really end me, Sakura?" Sasuke goaded, his expression twisted into a hateful leer. His arms, spread wide in a mockery of a welcome, were pinned to the stone face by kunai driven in so deeply that only their hilts were visible. All the same, black poles protruded from other places like between his ribs and through his thighs. Liquid far fouler than blood dripped from the gaping hole in his stomach.
Standing less than five feet away with the jagged remains of his chokuto, Sakura felt sick.
GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT
"Do it!" Kakashi shouted from behind her, "I can't hold him for much longer!"
She looked up into cold flakes of flint. They were both weeping, only her tears were clear and his were red.
"Sakura, no!" Sealing away Naruto's jinchuuriki abilities earlier in the fight would ironically be Sasuke's downfall, the boy being unable to escape from his captor without it. What little was visible of blonde boy's face was contorted with agony and disbelief as his hands clawed helplessly at the watery prison in which Kakashi had entombed him. However, even as he screamed obscenities and begged for their errant teammate's life, Naruto's blue stare met hers with like something like hope. The way he saw it, Sakura would not, could not, betray him and her once-Prince Charming. In his mind, she was still the innocent little girl whose forest-green gaze could always be counted on to look towards what's right.
Sakura closed her eyes.
"NO!"
GETITOUTGETITOUT GET IT OUT
She could feel the tremors that ran the length of the broken blade as his body automatically tried to expel the invasive object. His breath, hot and fast and heavy, feathered across her forehead.
Sasuke let out a low gurgle as he drowned in his own blood.'
It only occurred to her moments later, with her nose pressed into a still-warm chest and her arms around a body crucified against the rock face, that a chakra scalpel might have hurt him less. It was also the only thought she had time for before a hand grabbed her head from behind and smashed it on a nearby boulder.
Sakura's eyes rolled into her head and she slumped back.
Naruto staggered slightly as he retreated from the bedside of his only remaining teammate. In her first lucid moments in a long while, she had clawed at him wildly with her grossly twisted hands as with an expression contorted by agony.
It was like she knew who put her on the bed and in her restraints in the first place. He touched his remaining blue eye gently, almost reverently, as if the sensation of soft eyelashes and unscarred eyelid was foreign.
Naruto sighed.
With the scar bisecting his left eye, he carried a remembrance to the sensei he murdered. With the Sharingan hidden behind it, he carried an ode to Sasuke. In time, after Sakura inevitably killed herself with the cocktail of genjutsu that she used to pretend that everything was alright again, he would carry a reminder of her too.
C'est fini. Let me know if you guys found that good! I'm still trying to figure out how to write a character descending into madness, so any feedback would help greatly (aka begging for reviews, becaus :D)
Anyways, thanks for reading! Feuleur out~