Linger
Dust drifts from the blades of the ceiling fan, and Sasuke is reminded, for some strangely undefined but solid reason, of his mother. The clumps are almost purely white, like feathers or surprise snow late in the springtime.
If he had to choose one word to describe his mother, it would, without a doubt, be "spring".
When her hands fall loosely around his shoulders, his head barely reaching her middle, she smells of soap, milk, and the crimson-red poppies that bloom in the back garden. He chooses these moments to examine each of her long fingertips, her rounded nails, and the opal ring she wears, which is white gold or silver; he can never tell which.
He has always been captivated by the glow of her ring in the sunlight as her hands work moist soil, her knees in the dirt and sandals sliding off of her feet.
She is so perfect that it ails him. He is a growing boy who should be studying in the dimly lit corners, but instead he watches her, his range of sight turning to follow her out of every room.
On quiet nights, when he wakes with sweat trickling down his face, he is stricken with the fact that she is the woman who nurtured Itachi.
There's a reason Itachi is the way that he is—which, Sasuke notices every time he thinks this, he can't really put words to, even within the fragile confines of his own mind.
Itachi is simply himself.
-
Past the street merchants and the food stands, Sasuke runs to the academy every day before Itachi's graduation. His shoes, he ponders sometimes, are probably very worn on the bottoms from where he has skidded and stopped and persevered.
They collide in front of the schoolhouse, which stretches out like a tightrope between the trees, and Itachi grips him lightly, lightly, an arm dangled around the pile of jet-engine hair topping his child-sized head.
It is oddly reassuring to breathe in his brother's scent, something like rain and the weapons that his skilled hands hold so masterfully. The smells he carries taste like water, clear and free but bound within some type of containment.
Itachi's stare is reminiscent of the ink in bottles that line his desk. The ink is trapped but when the corks are pulled, it flows with the exquisite release of a stream gushing down from some great height.
His name is the first thing to leave Sasuke's mouth before morning and before slumber.
Sasuke doesn't realize the impact this will have on him later.
-
One of his earliest memories involves sitting somewhere at the same level of his father's boots, wiping clean a kunai that had been used to carve the Uchiha name into a slender, wiry tree near their home.
The heat of Fugaku's gaze drills into him, turning painfully like clockwork, taking hold of his insides, which twist around agonizingly slowly.
Unfounded disapproval hangs between them, but Fugaku watches and Sasuke works and all is (mostly) well.
A few steps away, Mikoto is crushed under the weight of Fugaku's heavy shadow, and she bites at her knuckles, trying to shove her fist into her mouth as she glances anywhere but at her youngest son.
The one thing he can never recall, the one detail that doesn't connect or align with the others within this dream, is where Itachi happened to be at the time.
His parents tower over him, but there is no Itachi. It's as if the boy had vanished from the far edges of the earth, and a veil of misplaced dread covers the three of them in the yard.
"Where is he?" Mikoto asks her husband in a hushed tone.
The weapon clatters uselessly to the ground as the wind spreads the smell of Sasuke's father: something like the musky air of sticky nights, like mint, like ash, and…like dust.
The thing that bothers Sasuke the most is the striking contrast between metal and dust, but then the memory is receding and all of the smells fade away.
-
Sometimes, when Naruto and Sakura are around, he ignores the pungent scents of spicy ramen and flower petals, and he is fool enough to believe that he's six again.
(But, forever there, caught between the past and the future, looms the memory of a dull kunai and two worried parents.)
Fin.