Warnings: gore, death, slight shonen-ai.
When The World Loses Its Center
a futurefic that doesn't show much of a future
The air reeks of death.
There is a heavy weight along the bottom half of my body, and I push it off. There's a thick liquid spread all over my face, so much that I cannot even see. I'm standing by the time I can wipe enough away to glance around.
And when I do, I wish I were blind.
Along the field in which I had played time and time again with my friends, lie the corpses of my family. My mother rests eagle spread, and I had been lying below her bloody cadaver. I stare down at my hands.
They're red and slick with the blood of my mother. My sister's body is a few feet away, hanging by her feet from a tree. Her head is impaled on a stick next to my mother, like a grim tombstone. One eye was grimly opened, and it stares out blankly at nothing.
I remember it now, and it comes back to me in violent flashes. It was dinnertime, and we were sitting together at the table as we always did. My mother, my father, my sister and I.
It was so sudden. The screams were suddenly coming through our windows, and my parents readied themselves. At first I thought it was a game, a joke. That the blood spill on the street below us was a prank. Or maybe I just wished it were.
Run, my father told us. My mother argued she did not wish to; that she, too was a shinobi.
Me, too! I cried. I wanted to help. I'm a Chuunin, now. I thought I could fight.
I was stupid. Run, Moegi, he cried, and he pushed us through the back door.
I am walking through the street in front of my house, and my footsteps make wet noises because of the blood. I look at the faces, full of pain and stillness, and I can't tell for the life of me which of them are enemies and which of them are allies. My father is lying there with them all, his face slashed open. I saw glimpses of grey and white from under the red, which I knew to be his brain and skull. I recognize only his coat, which had once been a beautiful rich green color, and which was now stained with red. My mother made it for him.
I start running, and my supper is all over the front of my shirt, but I don't care. I stop when I can run no longer.
The ramen stand.
I approach it warily, trying so hard to ignore the bodies around me, the faces of people I knew, of people I loved. I don't want to put names with the faces, but I can't help it. I wipe the tears away, having forgotten my hands are still covered in blood.
I peek past the curtain, and I am greeted by a sight less than uplifting. The man who had smiled at Konohamaru, Udon and I while giving us ramen, was now sprawled over his own counter, his head bashed in. I didn't see the girl, and I pushed the curtain back into place before I could.
How was it that we were massacred like this? Perhaps there were still people living, though I hadn't seen anyone yet. But, in the end, did it really matter how it had happened?
I headed towards the school.
Iruka-sensei always told us about the war, and we all knew that people had died in battles. But experiencing something like this was completely different. It was different from the time when Orochimaru interrupted the Chuunin exam, even. That time, we beat them off, and though people died, our spirit held strong.
There was no one left now to be strong.
There's no one in the school, and no matter how much I scream for someone to wake up, no one does. Maybe there's someone at the training grounds, I think numbly, my feet moving without much thought from my brain.
By now the tears have stopped flowing, and I stop to take off my blue sandals, which are now almost completely red with blood. This is a dream, I tell myself, and this allows me to keep moving. As long as this is a dream, I just need to hold on until my mother comes to wake me up for breakfast.
And I'll meet up with Konohamaru and Udon, and the three of us will wait for Kakashi-sensei, who's always late.
Konohamaru and Udon will train with me until evening, and maybe I'll steal a few kissed from both before my mother calls me inside to study my lessons before supper. Then we'll eat, my mother, my father, my sister and I.
Maybe we'll argue, and maybe we'll laugh. Father will tell us of his day in the bookstore, and Mother will tell us of her day as mail carrier. Noi-nee-sama will bore us with her long explanations of her pointless games, and my mother will shush me when I begin humming.
There's just no way that my mother is laying dead on a field, and that Noi-nee-san is beheaded and that my father can't be identified by his face any longer.
It's just worse at the training ground than anywhere. There are twice as many dead, because the shinobi that were training managed to kill some before they were massacred. I fall on my knees, and I know then it's not a dream. There's a girl, kneeling there, her arms around a bloodied corpse, her mouth open in a silent scream, as if there's no sound loud enough to express what she feels.
"Temari-sama?" I ask gingerly, approaching her. She turns to look at me, her makeup smudged and her eyes bloodshot with tears.
It's the boy with the big hair and the bored expression, which doesn't look so much bored now as kind of peaceful. "He . . . he wanted a normal life. A wife and two children. One boy. One girl." Huge, racking sobs shake her body, and lets the cadaver drop to the ground.
"Look around us, Moegi. Why did this happen? How could this happen? Lives ended in seconds, for no reason! For revenge because a man did not get what he wanted. One man was able to do this. One man was able to almost completely wipe out the—" She can't talk any longer, because she's coughing. When she lifts her hand to her mouth I see the wound on her stomach.
"Temari-sama, we've got to get you to the hospital—" She cuts me off before I can get further.
"What does it matter? They're all dead, and there was no point to it at all. Look at their blood! I never thought there was so much blood in this village." I can that she going crazy with this; that her mind can't wrap around the death.
I lift her chin with one hand, and I slap her in the face hard with the other. "Snap out of it! You're alive, goddamn it! Do you think your boyfriend would have wanted you to sit there crying? You're a proud, strong Sand kunoichi! Act like it!"
I don't know what does it, maybe the look of desperation in my eyes, or the slap, or the mention of her lost loved one, but I shake her out of it. She stands up slowly and carefully, like a foal on new legs. "You're right, Moegi-sama. I'm being ridiculous."
We reach the hospital to find it almost brimming with life, or at least compared to what I had seen of the rest of the village so far. "You're not too badly injured," the nurse that we called over told us. "I'm sorry, but there are people dying. We can't spare any beds." She rushes off, and we end up sitting surrounded by others in much the same state.
I don't talk to anyone. I think someone probably does try, but I don't want to talk. I just want to sit here, and maybe my heart will just stop.
I look up, like everyone else, when a loud cry is heard outside. Many people jump their feet, ready to fight and know that they will die if they do.
It's only Naruto.
"Don't fucking grab me, I'm fine, I tell you! LET ME SEE HIM!" He's fighting with the nurses who are trying to control him, and I note that several people are still tensed, as if he's just as much of an enemy as the ones who massacred our people. "Let me see Sasuke!"
Eventually, they all give up, and he runs passed us, out the door.
I find I don't even care. I fall asleep on Temari's arm, and I call out for my mother in dream.
But life goes on. The Hyuga clan was all but exterminated. The only survivors from the Main House were Hinata and Hanabi, who their father had announced should be protected at whatever cost. Several survived from the Branch House, including their prodigy, Neji.
Most of the other clans were eradicated, perhaps because the Hyuga clan had more survivors than any others, in some warped sense of karma. The Akimichi and Inuzuka are the only ones that come to mind.
As for Sasuke, since nearly four years had passed since Orochimaru had taken the Uchiha as his host body, when Gaara and Tsunade had fatally injured Sasuke, Orochimaru was somehow able to escape. No one knows what body he took, and for several weeks afterwards, no one really cared. There were too many dead to bury and too much weight to sling over our shoulders. Sasuke, abandoned by Orochimaru, and nearly dead, had only one person come to his rescue.
Naruto, of course. The blindly loyal idiot with far too much power in his hands. But all the power in the world can't stop death, and dead Sasuke was now. Many share the opinion that Sasuke's head should be mounted on a pole as a message to enemies to beware of people who have nothing left to lose. Naruto protected the body with his life, and took it on his own to bury by himself.
I don't think anyone else wanted to go to Uchiha Sasuke's funeral anyway. The only other person who might have gone was Haruno Sakura, but Kabuto had killed her.
Konohamaru and Udon were killed, too. It hurts too much to think about it much. I never got to tell the two of them that I loved them. I beat myself up for being stupid, and thinking about myself when it is really about all those dead people.
Like my mother, like my father, like my sister. I'm the only one left now, it seems.
Temari returned to Sunagakure, along with Gaara, who suffered major injuries, but managed to live through them.
I'm the only one left.
The world looks gray now. There's nothing hopeful or uplifting to say, not after a massacre, not when centuries of rich history are erased in a day.
There's nothing to say when the world loses its center.