Fast Asleep
The creme rolled in waves beneath his feet, fluttering like a curtain on a hot summer breeze. Worn and bitingly hard, the hilt rolled between his fingers - suddenly gripped with a determination unbecoming to one so young. The burden of youth had never been something he suffered. A rosy color streaked like pastels across the sky, diving and merging with weaker reds and yellows - sleepless blues. Somewhere in the distance he heard a gentle tinkling
Wind chimes.
Air and storm and shadow whipped at his face - a tempest of his own creating - one he was not entirely sure he wished would pass. A drop of water made the sound of an ocean crashing against the rocks. Darkness lingered at his feet. Slumbered gloriously within his eyes. If he wasn't careful a stray wind, a sprinkle of wet would crumple his paper heart.
This world of paper and pastel would not crumple just so - it was his sanctuary.
If only he might stay. Where he wasn't afraid.
000
Melted.
The world melted, and like every time before, he felt a moment's sting of pain - quickly faded - his senses returning in all their sharp potency. They were thick. Scent, sight, touch - an overload deluging his brain with electrical charges and synaptic impulses. He despised this place. He despised its smell upon waking.
Industrial cleaner and too much starch on the sheets and blankets.
Sasuke blinked at the overhead panel - they always left the light on - and began a sluggish grope of the floor beside his bed, locating the object he was looking for. A rather clunky and thrashed Motorola tape recorder, the sides duct taped and neck strap long-ago lost. Without missing a beat he clicked the record button, and his low, deliriously masculine voice cut across the silence.
"I was there again," he paused, as if also groping for something else, something just beyond the wall - at the very corner of his eyes. "That place so peaceful I can hardly stand it. Can't stand it. It's fake." He stretched the last word out, strangely savoring it for the mixed truth it held.
"Because there's a darkness creeping at the corners of the photo, haunting me. Teasing me with glimpses of it."
He glanced at the fluttering curtains on his barred window, the sounds of traffic and late winter birds chirping indolently at the world below.
"Sasuke sir, they sent me to retrieve you for breakfast...but, do you wish a few more minutes?"
The sound of a voice didn't shock him anymore, something he found himself distantly proud of. He slowly lifted a hand, as if he'd needed a moment to process things, and presented five of his fingers.
"...Yes sir, I will return in five minutes."
Sasuke hadn't heard, mired in the imaginings of what everyone called his weakness of wit. What they didn't know was that he merely saw beyond the third dimension, an incredible genius mistaken for insanity. It was an easy mistake, and with all the medication father pumped into him, Sasuke could hardly provoke the fires of indignance over the slight anyway. Suicide would prove a simpler answer.
Weak child. Weak senses.
It was good he hadn't been born a girl. Re-clicking his voice recorder, he breathed deep and quiet, tasting the fact that here, with this, he could move at his own pace.
"How can it just be a dream...? When my eyes are open and I'm awake...?" His knuckles whitened with the death grip he had on his Motorola, voice trailing off into ambiguous silence.
Minutes passed.
"Hey!"
The laughter filled shout would have missed him, he was sure, if it hadn't been for the scent as well - tangerines and salt-water ocean. His vision darkened like a tunnel, running miles away where he couldn't find it. Though he desperately wanted to.
"Hey you!"
Sasuke turned to stare at the fluttering window, black iron casting black shadows across his arms and legs - splitting his face with a tentative duality. There was a boy peeking between the spaces, strong hands clinging to the bars and smiling. Smiling.
"They call that waking reality, you know? Whoever said anything was wrong with you!" The boy laughed, and Sasuke tilted his head to the side - trying to shake off this tunnel vision - before crawling lower on the bed, and lifting his face above the sill. The boy continued. "Man creates the problem, because man is a creature accustomed to the normalcy of his life and the pattern of his Plan. Anything else..." His blue eyes were startling in their clarity, but Sasuke couldn't remember the last time he'd felt startled. The boy slipped his hand through the metal cage, holding it straight up, palm out, with an air of expectedness that was confusing as it was perfectly clear.
Sasuke slowly matched it, palm to palm, his fingers just a millimeter taller than the boy's.
"- Anything else frightens and disgusts them. Every man with a thread to that place beyond the wall has been shunned and in that way has died. You can't stop it." He said the last part so conversationally that Sasuke found himself smirking despite his pill induced apathy.
The warmth of a Mediterranean ocean ripped and swirled against his legs, dampening his feet. The sand was warm. It was inviting.
He was surprised at the sound of his own voice in relation to someone else - the bizarreness of a dialogue when formed.
"It melts eventually." Sasuke curled his fingers, watching as they wrapped and engulfed the tan fingers beneath them. He'd always hated how wide his hands were. "Tonight."
The boy grinned and leaned forward - bonking his head against the bar, but hardly noticing - trying to get as close as possible.
"Tonight."
The tunnel widened and brushed it's blindingly white light against his face and dark eyes.
"Master Sasuke? Are you ready now?"
He blinked and slowly looked up at his window - rolling curtains and metal bars - comfortably hunched against the wall below it. Sasuke swung his feet off the bed and, as if he were stuck somewhere no one else could see, stared blankly for a long, quiet moment.
The maid cleared her throat. "Sir?"
He stood, and floated past her out the door.
000
"You look better this morning, Sasuke honey."
He was silent in response, hard pressed to find a word for the frail looking woman sat across from him. His beautiful mother. In a small way he wished she looked like before - young and happy like the old photographs under his bed. It was a sad wish, he knew. A pitiful one. Her hair had prematurely silvered instead, the hollows of sleepless nights beneath her dark eyes - so reflective of his own eyes - and Sasuke could only watch as she mashed and picked at her food. She ate so little all ready.
"Mikoto leave him alone. Why don't you go paint or something, dear?"
That flicker of pain so reflective of his own. Resentment built like an inferno in his gut, but was erased so quickly at the viscous chomp and swallow of his food, Sasuke wondered if it'd even been there at all. His father was just...father. Nothing more, nothing less. He looked up at the almost sad scratching of chair against floor, his mother swaying slightly before wondering off in a daze.
Sasuke found he wasn't hungry anymore. In a dead voice he muttered something to his older brother, sitting with calm repose in the chair next to him.
"Itachi, would you please get those things for me when you come home..."
Then, summoning the vestiges of his filial duty, spoke to the last family member present. If the routine hadn't been so ingrained into his memory he perhaps would've left it. "Father."
The man - his juttingly strong chin clenched in a frown - merely shifted his newspaper, little black eyes never leaving the page. Sasuke blinked and turned, wanting for some unknown reason to join his mother for a while.
"One hour son. You have that appointment with your Doctor today."
Sasuke only paused a few seconds before continuing through the dining room doors. Cherry wood carved with angels and beings of light leading the souls of purgatory toward the gates of heaven. Antiquated and an ignorant wish that touched on the Catholic faith - none of his family had ever been a pioneer of organized religion, and Sasuke found himself grimacing at his father's unabashed pretentiousness.
It was a hollow prison.
000
Sasuke followed her smell more than anything. A subtle perfume and an indescribably 'mothery'scent that lingered on the air, creating a shimmered path of gold just for him to follow. They played this game so very much. His mother had gone to the solarium, with it's circle of clear windows letting in the unfiltered sunlight. To paint. Everyone seemed to know and agree on how badly she did, but the silent consensus was that there was no need to tell her.
Sasuke never thought she painted bad, because no one saw her real work - no one - except for him.
Maybe, in a far corner of his mind, he realized he was truly going there to say his goodbyes.
The water swished around his toes, a slow, gurgled draining that eventually swallowed every drop. Wet footprints stained the wooden floors as he trudged into the carnival room. A carousel of light. He watched the plants climb across walls, in and out of grilles, slithering over each other and sprouting with vibrant flowers - they smelled sickeningly sweet. In the center of the maelstrom was his mother, painting with loose and simple brush strokes. She tired so easily that Sasuke almost wanted to hold her hand up and help.
It was at that moment he decided - with very little preamble - he would act like her son. Just this once. "Mama."
She gasped and dropped her brush with a soft clack and spatter of paint, and Sasuke couldn't help the slightly amused smile that curved his lips. Today was a good day because he'd thrown up his usual cocktail of meds that morning.
Already things looked clearer.
His mother turned and smiled, warm, affectionate, everything he'd ever been missing. Sasuke sighed and felt the old bitterness of her being so sickly, so weak around his father, melt away into nothingness - it was hard, if not impossible to equal the strength of Fugaku Uchiha; fifty year old republican and politician. The man was what he'd been required to be - twice as ethnic and twice as American as any other office elect in the Government.
It required a man who descended from the elite Samurai serviced to the most powerful of daimyo.
The sun bounded across the window glass, spinning the room in that merry-go-round of light - spinning the sky. Sasuke forgave him. He forgave his father and perhaps forgave himself for what he had to do.
"You said you would paint me today. Will you...?" His voice was quiet, direct, and immediately held the attention of anyone he'd ever spoken too - though he could only count the number on one hand.
She smiled again, and Sasuke thought he'd never seen much of anything more beautiful. He sat down on the floor, spinning and spinning with light, his feet digging into the sand - rubbing against his toes - and said what he'd come to say.
His mother brushed and swirled without a drop in pace.
"I will miss you, mother. I wish I could take you with me, to that place," Sasuke paused, breathing deep at the endless black eyes she'd laid on him, silently encouraging him to continue. "But I can't."
Mother, beautiful Mikoto only watched him and he was struck with how much they were alike, how very much they were the same inside. She opened her rosily chapped lips, speaking softly. "I know. Don't let it hurt that paper heart of yours darling, because it's nothing to worry over. I've already seen it, and so now...now it's your turn."
Sasuke blinked and turned his head away from those gentle eyes.
She painted.
"Do you like it, Sasuke?" He heard the soft shuffling of canvas and easel being turned - a land of softness amongst the universe of thorns - and looked back.
Yes, he did indeed like it. Sasuke almost smiled at the navy-blue paint on his mother's cheek.
000
So far, so far and away.
He pressed his hand against the cold, tinted window, starring like a passing raindrop, a ghost who watched the magic of life begin - and end. His father, in turn, starred at him like a stranger, every now and then writing notes for his next great speech. Sasuke had heard him debate once and knew instantly the man was a genius - a genius that perhaps skipped Sasuke. Or, perhaps, it had simply been too much for him. Perhaps he'd never find out.
Raking his finger tips down the glass, he watched, isolated, as the streets flooded with glittering warm water. It lapped up against the desert sand where the people smiled at him like his mother smiled - where he could feel the warmth of those blindingly blue eyes as they danced down his face, across his body, on his toes. They didn't need to crumple their paper hearts with a clumsy things like talk. The silence already spoke volumes.
"We're here, son."
Sasuke jumped at the sound as a sudden urgency captured him - he wondered if it wasn't the meds finally wearing off - making him reach out and grasp his father's wrist. It was thick and strong, pumping with life. What he wouldn't give to feel the same... His father looked at him strangely, before Sasuke's words spilled over like a dam. "It's okay. I forgive you father. Tell Itachi your proud of him. Tell mother you still care. Please do that. Please."
Maybe it was his tone that reached his father, maybe it was the words, or maybe the man just wanted the uncomfortable moment to end, but Sasuke was satisfied with the slow nod he'd recieved.
"Inabi? Will you escort my son inside?"
"...Yes sir."
000
Whenever he came up here - one of the biggest and most expensive buildings in the city - it always seemed no one else was there - ever there in fact. Sasuke had never really concerned himself over this before, but now wondered if his father hadn't always planned it that way. He was ushered inside the soft oak door, pinned with many sloppy crayon pictures and Christmas cards and birthday cards, to the sight of his Doctor - Dr. Kakashi - leaning over to pat his dog.
He had a smile on his face, crooked and slightly lazy, that almost compelled Sasuke to do the same. Almost.
"Ah, Sasuke, why don't you close the door?"
He did and felt a dull ache in his bones at what also had to be said to his psychitrist - surrogate father and friend. It would have to be done soon, as well. The dregs of his medications were already leaching their way back into his consciousness, making him feel numb and disconnected once more.
"Have a seat then. How are you, hm? Eating well I hope, but if not, I've got a big fat burger in this bag and some greasy french fries too." He waved said bag with an enticing air, and Sasuke felt the corner of his mouth twitch, before lifting a hand.
"I didn't finish breakfast."
Dr. Kakashi tsked, tossing the bag towards Sasuke. He then waved an admonishing finger. "Don't tell your mama I gave you fast food though, instead of pancakes or something."
Sasuke was silent, the sound of hungry chewing filling the empty spaces between them. He marveled, distantly, at the fact there was only one other person he'd ever felt such companionability with.
He tore open a little more salt for his french fries.
The memory came, hazy and warming, as he watched his psychitrist calmly toss a red rubber ball for Pakkun fetch. It was about how Dr. Kakashi had once managed to sneak him to a basketball game at one of those big hall places. Sasuke had drunk a lot of water and soda and, he supposed now that he looked back on it, probably diluted a good amount of his meds too.
Sasuke had never yelled so elatedly, never cursed so violently in his life. The energy of all those people around him had been incredible to feel.
He'd immediately raised Dr. Kakashi to importance status just a notch below his mother. And it had never changed.
"I get the feeling," Dr. Kakashi slowed his words with a solemness that oddly comforted Sasuke, "That today will be different. Much different than any other day, hm?"
Sasuke swallowed the last bit of soda from the bottle his psychitrist had also tossed him - eyes widening a little at how well the man could read him.
The curtain fluttered in the window behind Dr. Kakashi's desk, and he heard laughter that was neither here, nor there.
"Sasuke? Are you all right?"
He blinked and felt the blanket sensation of deja vu envelop him - how many times those words had been asked of him before...
Sasuke nodded.
Dr. Kakashi studied him then, a curious yet far away look in his black eyes, words slipping - what appeared unnoticed - from his lips. "Where do you go, I wonder? Is it better than here..."
Sasuke bowed his head to avoid answering the question. Not at the moment, at least. He watched as Dr. Kakashi lightly shook himself and sat up straighter in his chair, foot tapping against the floor. Silence reined for a moment before they talked. Talked of small things, and big things. Inocuous things.
The clock ticked a tempo in his head, sometimes going forward and for a split second backwards, and in the last five minutes of their session he said what needed to be said.
"Dr. Kakashi..."
The man looked up from the files he'd been reading, a curious grin on his face. "Hmm?"
Sasuke locked eyes with him - his true father if he was honest, because it'd been almost twelve years since they first met - and felt himself sigh. It was a deep sound, a sea brimming with regrets. "I wish the world was as easy and simple as every person seems to make of it. No," he muttered, annoyed, "Don't look at me like that. Because it's easy when someone is able to live, make their own choices. Enjoy their own freedoms. If that isn't simple I don't know what is."
He stood and slowly aproached his doctor's desk, one hand stuffed in a jean pocket.
"I'm tired of the bars, Kakashi. What everyone insists isn't real, but definitely is, because other people see it too. Maybe I'm a genius. Maybe I'm crazy, but what does it matter? I can poke at the air and create something of my own, without having it thrown back in my face. I can, but that doesn't matter now." He stopped to breathe, it was the most he'd ever said in twelve years. "What I need to know..." Sasuke pulled something, easily palmable, from the depths of his pocket and continued to speak. "What I need to know is if you believe me. Believe in me."
Sasuke watched as Dr. Kakashi starred at him - all smiles gone from his face - and blinked at the battle he saw happening in the man's eyes. Proffesional Kakashi, versus friend and father Hatake Kakashi. Sasuke wondered who would win.
The curtains ruffled and Sasuke felt strange at the sight of no bars. He heard the voices, engines and screetching of daily life just outside - beyond the wall, just beneathe the skin. Someone yelling for him, calling to him...
"Yes."
He was dragged back to earth, but this time he felt a second's confusion - the sensation of a ripping from what should be.
"What...?" He muttered, rubbing his eyes and squeezing the rectangular piece of plastic in his hand.
"Yes, Sasuke, I believe you. I never once thought you were insane," the man laughed, and it sounded strained. "In fact, I thought you were one of the most lucid people I'd ever known. More awake than anybody."
Sasuke didn't smile, didn't laugh, nor did he acknowledge anything else except for the answer he recieved - the one he always expected. Extending his hand and unfurling his fingers, he revealed a small plastic tape, which he slapped tightly into Kakashi's own hand.
"Tonight." He muttered, before responding to the soft tap on the door and turning to leave.
"Sasuke...?" Resplendent with questions and unspoken fears, Sasuke hadn't meant to scare his doctor. So he merely reiterated.
"Tonight."
In a moment he was gone.
000
The darkness leaked through familiar bars, staining his sheets, as he stayed awake listening for the sound of his brother. Moonlight raced like silver serpants across the room, twining with one another before parting in a sudden flicker of movement - divided by a black neither could abridge without vanishing.
A gentle knock jerked him from that place, a shaky feeling settled in his arms and legs, and a terrible sickness built in his gut. Every mergence of these planes seemed to make it harder for him to assimilate the events in his mind - the road wasn't paved by sedatives anymore. It physically sickened and pained him to still be here.
"Not long now." He panted to himself, wiping the sweat from his forehead, and forcing the bile down his throat. "It's open Itachi."
His brother - tall, dark, and perfect - the first son, who'd put asside his weakness to become someone strong, something more. The eldest always shouldered the brunt of everything, forced, perhaps, to grow up too quickly. Sasuke took all this in with a single glance and could almost - if he strained a little - hear the paper of his heart tear. Maybe, if he'd been a better brother -
"That is neither here, nor there, little brother." The voice broke dark and oddly soothing across his fractured nerves, blunting them for a needed moment. Sasuke wondered if he'd spoken his private thoughts aloud, but decided Itachi was right and it didn't matter much anyway.
"What you wanted." His brother reached out to plop a crumpled looking paper bag in Sasuke's hand, before turning to leave.
It came out before he could stop it. In fact, he hadn't wanted to. "Aniki, thank you. Thank you for knowing me once."
Itatchi stilled at the entryway - or the exit way, as it depended on how one viewed these sorts of things - and turned his head to stare back at him. Sasuke starred just as steadfastly in return.
"Remember the boat we sailed on the Meditarranean sea, your eyepatch and my peg leg...The treasure we stole and the people we made walk the plank. The storms we weathered...and the ones we didn't." It came out more of a statement than a question, because Sasuke always had trouble forming the required emphasis for a question and because those words had been fact. Not a quasi-truth that needed someone's affirmation.
He watched as Itatchi looked away again, through the door and back out into the world his brother had always known. At least, almost always known, because once upon a time they'd pealed back the same layers and known what lay underneath the underneath.
It wasn't so now. It wasn't the same now.
Sasuke unrolled the brown paper in his hands, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and a bic lighter - a blue one he promptly flicked alight. The glow sparked and danced beneath his thumb, casting orange, bloody red shadows across his face. He glanced at the cigarettes and without pain or struggle, finally let a smirk form on his lips. Bastard. Itachi knew he hated Newports.
"I never thought I'd hear you call me Aniki again."
Sasuke slowly closed the bag - the locking of a box he couldn't open just yet - and looked toward his fluttering creme curtains. The smell of rain assaulted his senses, that cold tang blistering his tongue, and he found himself wishing bitterly for the right words to say. He'd never been a writer, or a painter, or even a man who prided himself through each action - though he realized an action's importance - no, he'd always been a better speaker.
Except no one knew, because Sasuke was also not a man to waste his words on anybody undeserving.
"Don't delve too deeply. You will probably never hear me say it again, Aniki."
The hands of shadow groped for his brother's body, one foot out the door, stuck in that in-between Sasuke could never save him from. Water spilled down the walls, pooling like ice across his floor where he could brush his feet atop the surface. A frozen lake to skate upon forever. He gripped the sheets like a drowning man at the sound of Itachi's words. "Good night...my little brother."
The shadows swallowed him then, its bottomless maw waiting for the taste of another.
Somewhere close, and yet far away, Sasuke could hear his father's ancient clock chime out the hour - he could imagine its pendulum drifting slowly back and forth.
...3...4...5...
He plucked a cigarette from the carton, twisting his nose in apparent dislike as he slipped it between his lips.
6...7...8...9...
Flicking the lighter once more, Sasuke puffed in the smoke, it's horrible taste lingering like a bad cold sore in his mouth.
10...11...12...
His hand, Newport dangling between his fingers, dropped to rest easy on the wool spread. He was awfully tired, and it wouldn't be much longer now.
13...?
A/N - I found these chapters buried in my files, and I decided I really wanted to post them, so I cut and pasted and trimmed, into something I, incidently, like. If you're a little confused it's okay. JUST REVIEW AND TELL ME WHY! HE HE HE!