Yukimura couldn't help but feel like he was always spinning.

He had never been a lethargic child, of course - quite the opposite. Sasuke had told him all the tall tales about his boundless energy and where it led him, whether it was climbing cabinets or jumping off swingsets. He lived for the movement, could only really breathe when his heart was choking his lungs and vibrating his skull.

But there were times when it seemed like his lungs were drowning in the kinetic energy, times when it felt like he couldn't dam the flood as it rushed over him, times when he kept whirling around and around until he was sick to his stomach - only for the ground to snap back into place, yanking his feet out from under him as he realized he hadn't been moving at all.

Maybe it was just restlessness. He had found that he was most susceptible to the unbridled sensations in the rare quiet moments when his mind had drifted elsewhere, so he resolved to be more active than ever. He made an effort to always focus on something; the subject didn't matter as long as his brain and body were occupied.

Even someone with his stamina couldn't fight off the fatigue forever though, and as he began to lose sleep due to his habits of constant concentration, he found that it was becoming more and more difficult to maintain his attention span. Without even being aware of it at first, his train of thought would begin to wander and he would lose himself once again in the spin of the hurricane that only seemed to exist inside of him.

He spent so much time avoiding the issue that he completely skipped the eye of the storm. Maybe it just never occurred to him, or maybe he feared the source of whatever was disrupting his energy flow; either way, he didn't notice the colors until an unremarkable evening as he sat at his desk, trying in vain to study for an exam he had the next day. He was exhausted from an especially intense game of soccer earlier, and it only took a few minutes for the words on the page to blur together.

He was distantly aware that his head was falling forward but he did not have the strength to stop it. His vision swam and fireworks were sparkling behind his eyelids, Spanish blue dashing through the confusion like a knife slicing through butter. Scarlet was quick to follow, soaking through the scars left in its wake, filling in the holes and then some, rising ever higher and higher, submerging the electric cerulean—

He bolted upright in his seat, bleary, startled. He dismissed it as a daydream and decided it was time for bed.

That was when the oscillations began to twist so rapidly that they appeared to morph into shapes. More and more, he felt like he was being rolled flat on a movie tape with no control over when the film paused and when it played.

Mostly all he saw were the colors, intertwining, dancing. But sometimes the hues arranged themselves like constellations depicting fragmented stories and fractured faces. They were so real he could reach out and know the burn of the sun on his eyes, the slick of sweat on his skin just as well as he knew his own name. And yet they too were fantasy strictly within his own mind.

He shouldn't have wanted a fantasy. He should have been satisfied with reality as it was. But in the dreams, in the snippets of a life ages past, there was always someone at his back, someone calling out to him, someone whose voice always seemed to be dissolved in the torrents of wind.

But no matter how many times he turned, no one was ever there.