For: Aclyonev
Author: Octavius
"Start with something familiar," Madara whispers in his ear.
Familiar like...standing out on the dock, looking up at the face of his father. Twin sensations overlapping at the sight of the great face. Revulsion in his gut knowing that the man is dead, and underneath the sort of childish fear and apprehension he'd always had as a child.
"Remember," the still breath from under Madara's mask came up fetid and hit his face, "remember the way it was when your parent's died and you saw every moment of it in black and white." He put his hand on the back of Sasuke's neck, ignoring the way he flinched away at the touch.
"Remember."
The world inside the kaleidoscope turned upside down; colors inverted, the blood red moon his brother's black silhouette, like the shape of a scavenger crows that sat on the line of telephone poles on his way home from school.
"I know you remember because I was there."
He sees himself seven years old and barefoot, the crack that spread up through the Uchiha fan like the fanning branches of a tree. The day he had run out of the hospital, the blood stain on the floor had had no shape, no sense to it. Only the chalk outline drawn on the floor had delineated all that was taken from him.
He took another breath and set his teeth the way Madara had taught him so he wouldn't bite off his tongue in surprise. Madara was a puzzle he still hadn't figured out, continually sat on the realm of existence and the abstract; he had insisted Sasuke begin his training for Izanagi they day after they had returned from the attack on the five kages and his final fight with Danzo. Madara had only leaned over Danzo's afterward, and kicked the mutilated arms out from underneath his chest. Sasuke wouldn't be unsurprised if under the mask was nothing, a shadow in the shape of a man's body. Just a raw incarnation of vengeance.
And then he nearly chokes as the chalk outlines rise, separate, combine and gain depth. He feels their first intake of breath shudder through him like a thread pulled taunt between his body and the other. As he spun out the illusion, filling in old smells he pondered over as a child: blood, his mother's lemon dish soap someone had used to try and wipe down the tatamis, the deep cold of a large house without bodies to warm it. Disgust rose thick in his throat and he felt the world splutter like a candle flame caught draft. Madara hisses and digs fingers into the back of his neck, "Focus."
His mind reeling, seized on the way Madara had come out of the dark the first time, the muffled sound of his voice behind the mask as if he were coming forward out of the ages. "We've met before as enemies." The sounds shifted into his brother's surprised grunt when he'd stabbed him, the long threads of hair stuck to his palm. That he knew was his brother's, that he found later after Madara had told his story, that he'd pulled so close around his fingers they had turned purple and Karin had to cut later, like the knot he pulled tight on the front of his parent's funerary cards. He'd walked the whole way home from the graveyard to his new apartment in the rain, where the idiot from his class had set something in the kitchen on fire. Smoke smells invading the solitude of his room, blending with shrine incense. The rough skin of a dried oranges offering under his fingers, the smooth glaze on the jar of ashes. When he opens his eyes his father's funeral tablet is standing in front of him, as if it had been plucked out of the graveyard-even though he knows that graveyard no longer exists. Madara walks around it appraising, squatted behind it and gestures for Sasuke to come join him.
"Look." he points. From this angle the slab was thin as paper, "You haven't realized objects have more than two dimensions. You're still thinking in terms of the laws of this world." He got up brushing dirt of his knees and leered close. Sasuke pulls away, but Madara grabs his hair and holds him there, "You're also not used to the idea of your father alive yet. Who knows if you'll ever be. Next time try someone still living."
Although chakra requirements to perform a basic genjutsu are low and the theory relatively basic, the difficulty of this technique lies in the practice of continuing a scenario in such a way that the opponent's mind accepts and believes it. A well trained shinobi mind will automatically detect sensory errors such as smells, sounds, tastes etc. within an illusion, which they will use to negate the jutsu-the best deterrent is not give the opponent reason for disbelief at all. For this reason, genjutsu has come to be regarded almost as an art form, as the level of control and detail required for a convincing and lasting genjutsu are beyond the skill set of a standard jounin—forgoing the advantage of a kekkei genkai. Kunoichi have been found to have a greater affinity for this jutsu due to their more strategical approach, empathy training, and attention to detail. Regardless of the practitioner, once the mind accepts a genjutsu scenario it is one of the most powerful and precarious forms of ninjutsu.
That night his father's ghost walks by the foot of his bed.
The figure is some ways in the distance, ghostly pale. Just the shape was familiar enough to identify him, like the silhouettes they had had at the academy pinned up for target practice. There too the shape was enough to identify, to classify its weak points for attack. Head, heart, neck. He'd been good at it. Cutting down imaginary enemies with his practice shuriken until he was so exhausted he had to flop down on his back and take a breather. He was looking for cloud shapes when his mother had come out to take down the laundry and found a whole army of slain shinobi on her clothes lines instead, "You fighting your own private war now Sasuke-kun?" she'd laughed.
Then wax paper had been no match for a real opponent. Just like the academy's rudimentary courses on weak points were no match for the lab rooms in the basement where Orochimaru taught him anatomy and where he'd encountered Juugo for the first time. It had taken him some time to be able to walk through the lab rooms looking for Kabuto and not wince at the smells of putrefaction. Sasuke had glanced in to one of the rooms and shrugged disinterestedly at a half-transfigured boy opened on the operating table and the man who sat in the corner crying. There were still specks of bloody spittle on his the boy's face from his death snarl, something he barely noticed before a fist the size of a hammer smashed into the tile wall. The low light reflected on Juugo's transforming face and ithen/i Sasuke had seen him, the disfigured physiognomy of an underworld god laboring over his anvil, pounding his guilt into other forms.
His transfigured hands continued to beat the wall where Sasuke had been standing until his hands broke through to a neighboring room...it must be something, he'd thought at the time, to fear your own strength.
And now he was sitting watching his father's ghost come closer. He sees the familiar heavy jowls and the high pale forehead Itachi had inherited. He tries Itachi once and fails miserably. Madara tells him its because he's too upset and can't clear his head. Sasuke spits back that he doesn't get upset. Even when he was young his mother had commented on how quiet and well-behaved he was. The rooms in the clan house had once been a stronghold of whispered conversations and secret meetings, of overhead words his child's brain had dissected seeking meaning, the way he had mistrusted Itachi for a few misplaced feelings of achievement.
Fugaku had never spoken to him as a man or as an equal. The deep grooves around the man's mouth more a symbol of his silence than if a seal had been tattooed on his tongue.
He felt the outline of the ghost getting fuzzy, then dissolving like rice paper dipped in water.
The ghost does not come again and the long hallways of the head house remain empty free of whisperings, a sounding board for other more complex figures.
"Itachi was a master of genjutsu." Madara tells him later. They're sitting on a boulder near the practice field and Sasuke is eat Ramen. "I saw him turn a man to paper and burn him alive, and when the man blinked he was whole and burning again."
"So now you've come for the lesser Uchiha" he says wiping blood from the corner of his eye before it can fall in his soup.
"You're not even trying. Children see things differently than adults your depictions are-distorted and unstable, colored by too many emotions. I told you before you need to try someone living."
As he improves the house halls narrowed to his room in the academy apartment complex, the sounds of his father's sandals on the deck replayed themselves up and down the scale were familiar... like the small iplinks/i against the glass of his bedroom window at 2 am. The idiot would be standing there grinning and they would clamber down the building all boy-limbs, racing each other, sweating and cursing in the early morning hours to the complains to tenants as they skidded along rooftops, and threw tiles at each other off the roofs of the pompous clan houses. Ending only at sunrise where Naruto would nudge his shoulder and offer him rice crackers or the occasional slightly squashy tomato.
He'd just say "I know you don't like sweets" and bite into a cream cheese cake. Then they'd get in an argument, likely wrestle it out. Naruto played dirty when he was angry, grabbing his hair and pummeling him, or trying to knee him in the crotch and Sasuke for the most part answered in kind. After they'd thrown an air conditioner unit over the side of the building there was an unspoken agreement to stop using chakra based attacks. Sasuke remembers those early morning fights almost as clear as if he had just returned from them. Shoulder's aching in their socket from twisting free, the ringing sensation in your ears after you've been punched, teeth cutting gums, cutting lips, cutting into his ankle when he'd put Naruto into a choke hold with his legs. Bony hips, bruised knees, the slow wet slide of boy skin and the noise that never failed to surprise him when they pulled apart. Naruto tended to wear his clothes loose and once or twice in the forests outside Konoha and they'd been soaked, and Sasuke guessed at the shape of the body beneath the orange jumper. In the summer they'd do it through wet clothes. Naruto pushing them into a pool or a pond. Sasuke unwilling to shed his shirt.
He starts awake and shakes his head as if to clear it. Madara is playing chess with himself in a corner humming three bars of a song. "You should get cleaned up," the notes of the song rose, "We're going to exorcise the eight tails this afternoon."
He muttered something and got up. In the shower he tried again imagining the water as cold sleet. It came easily this time, mind slipping into the familiar route to Izanagi. He felt the shift of wet cloth over his skin, the smacking sounds of wet jersey. He felt it rise up like a wave, like an inhale and then overtake him. The apartment roofs. The rough scrape of the concrete on his knuckles. Gasping, smells of fabric softener from the apartment vents and another mouth on his, lips chapped. Naruto grinned once and slid a brown hand down over his cock.
Usually termed a "long-range" attack the jutsu is versatile in that it can be used in one-on-one confrontation or in teams. Standard operating procedure calls for use of an illusion as a momentary distraction or camouflage so that physical and mental attack points become vulnerable. While initial usage centers on genjutsu as a tactical tool, in the hands of the right shinobi it is a cerebral powerhouse. Thus the importance of genjutsu should not be understated, advanced practitioners have been known to completely psychologically disable opponents, going beyond strategical uses to covert information gathering and highly effective applications in interrogation. One must understand that once an opponent is "caught" they are completely at the imaginative whim of the practitioner; in essence, the practitioner is a "god" in their own realm.
The big eyes of the summoning statue pivoted under their heavy lids and stared at him. Sasuke gives it a wary look, and walks over to the body between its giant hands.
"I can't feel my legs; maybe I should consider pegs," came up from the man followed by a bark of a laugh. Killer bee was lying on his side in a heap where he'd fallen after the eight-tailed beast had been extracted. Sasuke crouches down and twitched the frame of the shades away from the man's eyes. He had blue eyes behind the sunglasses-totally unexpected.
"Hey, kid. You're going to do this to the other one, right. The loud one."
"That doesn't even rhyme."
"Yeah well," there was a slight cough and blood bubbled up on his lips, "betrayal is a hard word to rhyme to."
He snorted and turned to leave, he'd seen enough "heroic" and uncomplimentary death at Orochimaru's. Besides the face of the summoning statue with its grin, and the soft suckling noises it made while ingesting the tailed beasts had always made his hair stand on end. Orochimaru—in one of his saner moments-had described his encounter with a Shinigami. It's hard for him to fathom that these things existed outside of legend. Sasuke held that if his theological soul was something malleable that could be rendered from his body like the head from a chicken, it was likely already gone. For Orochimaru in his mix of megalomania and superstition it had been a terrifying experience: a white demon, with matted hair, beads that clicked together, but for Sasuke it sounded childish like something out of the movies he'd seen growing up—almost pitiful.
But Madara and he were borne out of a mythology of vendettas and failures, contained in a story that would continue spiraling out of control like Madara's mask or the faint outline on Naruto's stomach. The worst kind of villains. The kind kids pretended to pick the noses of in movie theaters, and perpetually hated in myths. The kind who had no excuse for walking willingly into the dark for their own designs.
It was not uncommon in older theaters where the screen was still set quite low to the ground for kids to throw up their hands and interrupt films, fingers acted out little pantomimes of ducks attacking dogs. Naruto himself had been quite adept; occasionally going so far as to clambering up to the false stage and mime the actions of the protagonist, or making out with the heroine after the rescue scene. His tongue wiggling in her black-and-white mouth, completely obscene. What Naruto liked best were the three feature silent films they played at night; the ones that didn't quite make sense, but where the eclectic wealth of someone's mind had been dumped. Sasuke thought it was a waste of time, cats leaping and yowling, a violin quartet blossoming in a garden, a short about hunting vampires. He'd almost never gone with the idiot, the only exception he made was when they showed The Legend of Izanagi. It was a massive multi-part feature that drew a particular crowd of highly excitable academy kids, jounin and genin who'd watched it when they were young, and a few occasional pipe smoking seniors. It was a silent film with scrolling subtitles, the effects were corny, the make-up overly dramatic. The man who'd played Izanagi had a bad habit of wearing his wig slightly askew, but more importantly it was one of the few things they agreed on.
They'd gone to see it about eight times. Most of it, the yelling, the spouting blood escapes him except for the end of Part I, after Izanagi had retrieved Izanami from hell. He would turn, not quite looking at her and the captions would scroll 'your loss means to me the loss of all' and the camera would pan around to show his face running with tears. Behind his head the first glimpse of Izanami began to appear, and then his head would turn too. He'd turn and seen her hideous face beneath the boils and makeup they'd put on her. His expression would change: 'MONSTER!' the text rolled, 'What have you done with Izanami?'
'But it is me' came the reply, the text floating in a sea of black. Her mutilated face like a pale moon above Sasuke. Still beautiful, but spoiled. Like a fruit with a rotten spot in it, you threw the whole thing away. Izanagi would yell and strike her, tears flying from his face as he emerged triumphant into the light. But his adolescent brain always dwelled on her expression when the camera panned back; her mouth open in silent horror at her own monstrosity.
Naruto had never much to say about it, always more concerned with the other action sequences parts of the triple feature: the fight of Izanagi's army versus his wife's horde of 5000 zombies, or the birth of Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and the surly Susanoo. Sasuke heard a dry cough from behind him and he turned looking for the source. Above him Susannoo was in the midst of destroying Amaterasu's rice fields railing against her in capital letters.
He felt the threads of the illusion change suddenly. Sasuke had seen a comedy movie once, pirates and heroes slicing through the movie screen to enter and Madara entered just like that. Amaterasu's rice field shifted to the place where memorial stone stood, but the movie kept on running. Amaterasu descending at the climax of Susanoo's rage where they would fight it out, but when she turned around it was a man with long hair, a younger version of the first Hokage, aface he'd seen daily carved into the mountain. The words scrolled 'So you're leaving?' Vertigo takes him and he pukes into the seat beside him. He realizes the image is old, like a memory where some of the details are too strong, like they've been reminisced too much and too often. The theater erupts in cheers as the two began to fight.
"Oh" Madara leaned over the back of their seats and stole a piece of popcorn from Naruto chewing on it thoughtfully, "didn't you know, once someone loved me like that too."
The risks for the user are twofold. Of course, the associated risk is that under stress the user themselves becomes vulnerable to physical attack, but the major weakness of the jutsu is that the intensity of sustaining a convincing illusion jeopardizes the practitioner's mental state. Common initial problems associated with the malpractice of genjutsu include hallucinations and paranoia, which can degenerate into schizophrenia, and finally an inability to separate real and fictitious events. Although it is possible to affect more than one person in a genjutsu, one must remember the strength of the jutsu relies on the belief of the opponent and the ability of a shinobi to sustain that belief. Two minds are harder to convince than one, therefore the chakra requirements for more than one person increase on an exponential scale. A useful axiom is as follows: increased jutsu complexity equals increased risk to the user.
"Sasuke," Naruto says.
He's lying on the ground out of breath and half-transformed to the curse seal. Gravel pressing into his cheek, the texture of it, the damp it leaves on his face. He feels hands turn him over.
Something Madara has to gently correct him on is that using an emotion to fuel a genjutsu is not a disadvantage, "In fact, for Izanagi it's a necessity. Think about it, in order to create something you need to sacrifice something of yourself. That's why the seals for summonings are written in blood."
"Now," Madara had told him moments earlier, "Try again." They were standing in an open field. Tall grasses brushing against his fingertips. He's become more aware of sensations, that there could be a difference between Naruto's rough hands jacking him off and his own. Sasuke doesn't need to see the blonde head of hair to know how what it felt like between his fingers, to know the taste of the other boy's mouth. The last few days before Madara takes him out to try again he's seen shades of him everywhere.
There's smoke in the air, like a grass fire a long way off. He closes his eyes...
...chapped lips and bruised knuckles. Sandals a little too small. The cheap detergent all the kids in the apartment building used to do their laundry. The deep ache in his own body where Haku's acupuncture needles had hit, and Naruto's voice cracking when he asked "Why?" He saw the ANBU who where standing in for the Uchiha police, watched their hand as they finished drawing the chalk outline of his parent's bodies connecting the circumnavigation, but the shape this time is different.
"Good" he hears Madara say from a long way off, heavy breath on his neck.
He pulls harder, feels the thread behind his breastbone draw up taunt and painful. Bitten fingernails, how small his chest looked without the orange jacket. His own hand punching through the sinews and muscle of Naruto's shoulder. Tomatoes eaten in the company of someone else. How the Miso Ramen always tasted better when he went with Naruto. Freckles. The sad reckless mess of his apartment. The uneven nape of his neck from his six yen barber. And more, he felt it all rise up in him like a flood and he couldn't contain it. Like a long inhale kept inside, the thread twanged and broke and then whatever it was inside him gave. He felt it, his heart pounding in his ears and then his knees gave out.
"You again! What did you do?" He felt his body being shifted, substantial hands touching his shoulder, wiping the blood off his face with an orange sleeve.
"It's—uh, it's gonna be alright Sasuke. I don't know how I got here, but—I'm going to kick this Tobi guy's ass and then we'll uh, we'll go home."
Naruto is grinning, looking down at him.
"You—" he grasps Naruto's hand. Solid. And only then does he realize the implications. He can almost feel the eyes of the summoning statue turn. Stare. The last jinchuuriki.
Naruto squeezes his hand and gets up, the Kyuubi's chakra already erupting out of him. His skin turning black, then red, bones assembling, then muscle. He knows this scene, he's seen it before. The hero going forth to his final battle. The field is burning. He sees Izanami's face in the movie theater again, her mouth open wide, a black maw filled with the bitterness of realization.
Madara's eye through the mask winks at him, "Didn't I tell you Sasuke-kun, something familiar."
It is postulated that forbidden techniques based around the theory of genjutsu (See Izanagi) are able to bring forth illusions into physical realities for a short period of time based solely on the strength of the practitioner's own belief. However this is only possible with significant physical and psychological sacrifice on the part of the user. The consequences of the subsequent dissolution of their reality in the face of the 'real' is the reason anything beyond distraction and discomposure techniques should be strongly discouraged even for masters of genjutsu. Should a situation like this arise it is likely a practitioner will not be able to resist the seduction of their own illusion.
-Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai (ANBU) Introductory Tactical Manual
AN: Special thanks bellicosus and myrafur for last minute help and general hand-holding. Originally written for the sasunaru exchange on lj.