Summary: Because all that glitters isn't fishscale, or gold; or whatever the goddamn phrase is.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
Note: I feel like such a bad person right now. In between university open days, breaking up from school very late and various other things I have neglected stuff. Then I came online, read a message from beautifulgeek11 and sat there just thinking how horrible I am sometimes. So I have decided to upload this prologue now, just so everyone knows I have not died or anything. Sorry for my absence! T^T
Warning(s): AU. Bad language. Angst. Slightly crack!pairings at points.
Salt Air
- everything that glitters ain't fishscale. -
Sasuke is the kind of beautiful that breaks down centuries.
He is the beautiful that was old when the world had just begun, the same way epidemics are gorgeous if you look at them in the exact split second they spread the most ruin; the beautiful that watches ancient civilisations crumble and sees a masterpiece in the skeletal remains. He has the bare bones of something stunning. Ino has never cared for aesthetics but when she first meets Sasuke she knows it will be him she loves.
"You are the most important thing he has ever taken from me."
He says, turning his favourite glass in his hands. Itachi has a crevasse filled with dried blood where he bites his bottom lip every hour on the dot and tan lines from his smart shirts with rolled up sleeves to the elbows. His clothes are always this side of crinkled and he carries a pocketwatch because he says time isn't kept properly nowadays. But this isn't why she knows he is right; she knows he is right because he's the sort of person to care too much, and he is the one that she should have loved instead.
"That's because I'm the only thing he's ever taken from you."
But this is reality; and the one thing Ino has learnt from reality is that there is no such thing as really loving somebody. For all the words Sasuke has ever said, the majority have been lies tucked neatly behind his tongue and spat out like snake venom. After all, words are only words. And even if Itachi's words mean something, there is no better sinner than a young saint.
"Why do you turn everything into something ugly?"
Because, Ino does not tell him, I don't know how to live any other way. Because all that glitters isn't fishscale, or gold; or whatever the goddamn phrase is. Everything may have a smile, but it shows teeth; and if you really mean anything nowadays you'll get eaten alive.
"The same reason you make things beautiful."
For Itachi, making things perfect is his way of coping. He saw her too thin neck and bruised legs hidden in shame and saw something attractive he could turn into love. But like Eve in the eyes of God as she was banished, Ino is a scavenger at best, a downright whore; and she doesn't need to have beauty to be self loathing this time around.
"And when he gets bored, what then?"
Ino pauses. She never does equate things into the big picture. Maybe that's why she's a letdown. The tragedy, she used to say, was not that she disappointed people; it was that she ran out of ways to do so.
"I don't know."
Maybe it's that she knows he will wait for her, bated breath against the windows he wants to pretend she can't see him through as she walks back home at 4am – the time when you were mine he would say indulgently – or that she's waiting for the time when he turns his back on her; but she knows that even when she has forsaken him and Sasuke leaves her behind, she can always go back to his brother. She doesn't know what's worse, that she knows he'll get bored or that she accepts such an idea as being alright.
"You're a fool."
She knows what he says is true, but he is not one to speak. They're both fools for love, and even when she comes back tired of living he'll love her. It is this simple way of acceptance that drew her too him once, but never as anything more than friends. That was where they differed. He never quite could see her as a friend after he'd known what it was like to have more from her.
"But you won't stop me."
Itachi never has enough rhythm to write poetry, enough coldness to turn her away or enough hate to understand that loving her meant never letting her leave. But now, his eyes are a black pool of endless ink in the moonlight; and the glass in his hand has smashed. Crimson droplets stain her white feet and his floor, and he drags his spindly fingers across her cheek softly; a bloody caste mark, turning the traitor away from Eden. She shivers and pulls away from his frozen touch. Things have changed.
And dark is his path on the wings of the storm.
Brownie points to whoever actually manages to get any of the references in this.
Three Top Tracks #1:
Who's Next? – Curry & Coco
The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future – Los Campesinos!
While You Wait For The Others – Grizzly Bear
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