The Curse of Immortality
The man crouches down and his fingers lovingly stroke the dirt beneath him. His face is filled with softness and affection of the kind you would see a father give his child. His facial expression isn't entirely content. No, his eyes are brimming with tears and the hand that isn't touching the ground is clenched into a tight fist. Dark drops of blood hit the ground, in time with an unheard clock. The man imagines that the sound of the drops hitting the ground is synchronized with the smaller hand of an ancient clock.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
He can hear it now like never before. No one but him knows it's there, and even he doubts himself. Someone the sounds it makes seem both unreal and real, as if they come from a dream or another reality. In a strange way, he is certain that what he hears is real, to him if no one else. Does time even exist in the manner humans believe it does, or is it simply that their bodies have a guaranteed expiration date? His doesn't, but then again, why would it?
He keeps time by watching the birth and deaths, the ends and beginnings and the turn of the seasons. He counts years in autumns, thinking that when the leaves turn red another year has passed. He never keeps tracks of exactly which year is passing. It has no meaning to him, anymore.
The dirt beneath him is soft and slightly wet to touch. It is early autumn here and it rained the day before. Lingering traces of the water that fell from the skies are still to be found in the earth. Besides that there's also the faint scent of rain in the air that only an experienced nose can pick out. Rain has always been a hidden pleasure of his. No one watches when he's out in the rain. Rain is security, happiness and freedom. That was a long time ago. He still enjoys it for what it symbolizes.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
The beginning of his life is hidden by a veil of forgetfulness. What he can remember is happy and sad, exhilarating and terrifying, full of pleasures and pain. He'd give anything to forget it and give everything to be able to live it again. Remembering is painful because what he has now is nothing to what he had once upon a time. There can be decades between a good friend and another, and even a good talk is far and few between. This isn't the life he wanted. Can it even be called life?
Life is creating memories with other people, taking chances in the hopes of a better future and little details such as eating ice cream on a sunny day. Life is both pain and pleasure and the feeling of a certain meaning to what you do. Life is living despite knowing that you will and can die.
There's a clock out there, ticking and tocking his life away(though it can't really be life without death). Every sound that it lets out takes him farther and farther away from where he wants to be, back in his village with his teammates, mentors and friends. It's a life he will never regain but will always long for. Whoever said that immortality, such as he has it, was a gift must have been mad. Living like this makes him feel that he is cursed. There is truth in that.
Tick-tock. Tick-Tock. Tick-Tock.
Uzumaki Naruto sits on the dirt and dust. On his face, as he looks up at the scorching sun, there are tear tracks coming from his red eyes. They are dry now. In the palm of his hand, where his nails(claws) dug into his skin till it bled, there are no marks. There are never any marks; no scars or blemishes are allowed to remain. He tears his eyes away from the shining sun and looks down upon the traces of walls, roads and towers around him. The remains of Konohagakure no Sato; now just ruins.