There was blood on the sheets. It all happened so fast he was hardly able to keep up. One thing lead to another and his girlfriend was dead, as was everything about her. Her deafening, nagging screech, the way she fought, the sharpness of her nails and the adoration in her eyes. What was left of Karin's face stared mutely up at him, half of it marred by the bullet hole that shattered her cheek. There were smatterings of red on the wall and headboard above her. In a sickening display of affection, Sasuke propped her head up on the pillow, gore spilling derisively from the wound and onto his hands. He tucked her beneath the sheets stained all hues of pink and red and brown, since it had been at least two hours since the blood was first let. The colors danced in front of his tired eyes and Karin seemed to be smiling at him, even in death. The gun felt cold in his hands - he wasn't sure why, but since he had picked it up it's temperature had not changed. No heat had been transferred from his warm, sweaty palm to the cool metal that held the iron-like taste of judgment. Karin had taken the brunt of his insanity, and now he was to be judged. Placing the mouth of the gun to his temple in the universal symbol for suicide, he pulled the trigger. Sasuke was dead.

--

In front of him lay a gray, stark hall that didn't seem to end. The entrance to the passage ahead kept drifting listlessly in front of him, sometimes close, sometimes far, but either way always just out of reach. He wasn't sure that he wanted to cross the threshold, not knowing for certain what was inside, but his body moved continuously forward, unable to resist the magnetic pull of whatever happened to lie in wait.

Just when the passage seemed to extend far beyond any point he could ever traverse on foot, he lost his balance, slamming through the nondescript archway and landing flat on his face. His nose started to bleed profusely, and he clutched at it with his hand, pain still coursing through him as he struggled to his feet. What he saw in front of him wasn't what he had expected. It was a waiting room.

The small room was similar to a waiting room in a pediatrics ward, except the seats were filled with positively gruesome beings. He felt his insides crawl as a man stumbled through the gateway behind him, holding a nail gun with four or five nails protruding from his skull. The only seat left in the room was next to this man, and he instinctively sat down, holding his nose to stop the flow of blood. It had been reduced to a steady trickle.

"That doesn't look too good..." Sasuke hadn't noticed the girl about his age on his other side. He had been gaping at the nail-headed man for too long to pay attention to anything else.

Surprised by her milky voice, he turned to face her, distracted by the thin curtain of long, black hair that covered the visible side of her face. Then he noticed the needle and the thin elastic band tied around her upper arm. Heroin?

She saw him staring. "I liked needles. A little bit too much. But I think you're worse off than I am."

/Liked? Why is she talking in past tense?/

The raven answered curtly, holding his swollen nose. "It's just a nosebleed."

"I wasn't talking about that. I mean, your head."

Sasuke let the disgusting reality wash over him, slowly reaching up and touching his temple, feeling the congealed blood and the perfect hole judgment had created that had blown out the back of his skull. His hands were shaking.

/This is what death is like./

"I'm Haku. I've been waiting here for a long while now. Who are you?"

"S-Sasuke..." He swallowed. He could feel himself sweating. "Isn't Haku a boy's name?" His tone was nervous, solely trying to distract himself from the blood leaking from his head and devoting his attention to the drug addict beside him.

"Silly, I /am/ a boy."

It possibly the strangest thing he had ever experienced, but he guessed that all humans did, one way or another. Something felt odd, though. As he looked at the sixteen-or-so men and women that resided in the room, illuminated by a single, flickering bulb in the center of it, he was able to come to the conclusion that these weren't normal deaths. From Haku, the nail-gun man, and the chronic smoker with a cigarette dangling from her lips, to the small boy with bleeding wrists and a sprinkling of gunshot-to-the-head patrons like Sasuke, there was a similarity.

Have you guessed what it was?

"How long have you been waiting here?" Sasuke inquired, wrenching his gaze away from a woman who's eye was hanging listlessly from the socket. She smiled at Sasuke, obviously intrigued by how pretty he was, even with a slovenly wound on the side of his face. Feeling his stomach pulsate wretchedly, he kept his eyes on the effeminate boy. He wasn't something as ugly to look at.

"I don't know. A very long time. Years and years, it feels like. But you're lucky. You came at the last minute. Something is happening to us soon."

From this small sentence, Sasuke deduced that the group of people in here were a select few. Obviously suicide victims, but there was something else about each of them that must have placed them in this room. Perhaps it was the fact that they were all cold-blooded like Sasuke, killing their wives or strangling their children. Sasuke didn't know. He was intelligent, but this shit was out of his realm. How could he reason logically about something he had never believed in?

The room had grown very cold. Sasuke was still confused as to how he could feel anything at all. It seemed that his emotions, thoughts, and physical feelings were still in tact. Well, every feeling except for the one that probably mattered the most:

Pain.

The flickering light in the center of the room was struggling, desperately, to stay on, as if it could feel the ominous fear of the patrons that resided within. If the room went dark, what would happen then? What were they all waiting for? Sasuke could feel Haku shivering next to him. His great, big eyes shone in the inevitable darkness. The light was gone. A voice, smooth and visceral like water, rose above the stagnant air in the room in a soft hiss.

"I'm sure you all know why you're here...It's just a matter of time before you find out what you're going to do. I'm giving you a choice you never would have had, had you been a good, God fearing Christian like your dear old grandmother, or the man you always thought was psychotic when he screeched from atop a soap box and distributed Jesus flip books. The choice is this. You can either join me for an eternity, and continue to leave your mark on this world. But it will be a scorch mark. A burn. Your life will be painful, hard, and miserable. You will do only what evil calls for you to do. You will continue to murder and maim as you have done in the past, but with no outlet. There will be no death or forgiveness waiting for you."

There was a long silence. The room's occupants waited with bated breath for the blood-curdling voice to continue.

"And then, the other option. You can rest. I will lay you down forever, and you will become the earth that suffocates your graves. The choice is easy enough. Redemption for those who wish they hadn't died, or peace for those who knew they chose right. You have fifteen minutes."

The light flickered back on, and the cold faded.

Sasuke looked desperately at Haku for some sort of answer to a question he hadn't even asked. The boy was smiling softly.

"Well," Haku asked quietly. "What are you going to do?"

Sasuke swallowed, shocked, appalled that Haku would even ask him so blunt of a question. Of course, he would take the softer route, curl up in a ball six feet underground and sleep forever. But that thought sent shivers up his spine. Had he done the right thing in killing himself? There was so much unfinished business he had to attend to. His brother. His dead family. They would be so disappointed in him. How could he expect to join them in eternal happiness disguised by nothingness? He didn't deserve it.

The seconds ticked by much too fast for his liking. He could tell, just by looking at Haku, that he had already had his mind made up.

"I-I don't know. What are you going to do?"

"There's nothing left for me here. My savior is dead. He's waiting for me. By the look on your face, it seems that you weren't exactly ready to leave the world behind, were you?"

How could someone so much younger than him be so certain? How could Haku know so much about the world that he was ready to give it up?

Ten minutes had already passed. Two doors he hadn't noticed before stood to his left, behind a ratty looking reception desk. There was a girl there, almost perfectly normal looking. It startled him that he hadn't noticed any of this before. It was as if it had all appeared out of thin air. A few shocked expressions around him suggested that it just had. The girl had pink hair, and she was chewing on a piece of bubble gum. There was a thick layer of eyeliner around her green eyes. Her fingernails were black, and filed down to sharp points that mimicked claws. Sasuke swallowed. She winked.

Four minutes.

What would he do? Which would he choose? Live a life of pain as a result of his disgrace? Or take advantage of something he didn't deserve?

Three minutes.

Haku had already stood. He waved meekly to Sasuke as he moved to the desk, where the lines were beginning to form. The girl spoke briefly in whispers to Haku and directed him to the right.

Two minutes.

Sasuke stood. His destiny had already been decided. Sasuke had always been a prideful being, and it was this factor that was ordering that he make the right choice...Or, the only choice that Uchiha pride would let him make. Sweating profusely, he resolutely decided that he must obey the teachings of the Uchiha name. Self-discipline. He found his body jerking him towards the door on the left, while his heart ached longingly for pretty little Haku and his right door. Even the pink haired girl looked surprised.

One minute.

She leaned forward and grabbed his arm firmly in her clawed hands. Smiling shyly, she said, "We're going to be spending a lot of time together."

The doors creaked open. Sasuke felt like screaming. The passage was endless. It was as if he was being shoved forcefully through the doorway, and he suspected he was, by the girl's deft, sharp hand. It was too late to turn back now. He was falling into a darkness so thick it felt like his body was being strangled. He felt parts of him being torn away, and new parts being added. The tips of his fingers and toes felt like they were splitting. His tail bone ripped though the skin at his back, and his shoulder blades felt like they were stretching as new bones grew in their place. He felt the hole in his head sealing. Then emptiness.