After awhile, you get used to the needles.
The noise the gun makes, anyway. And what I'm doing right now is stupid. Foolish. Arrogant beyond all belief, according to my brother, but if I listened to him, who knows where I would be?
Because I'm finishing a tattoo on my right arm. With my left hand.
Free-hand.
Itachi would kill me if he knew.
But he's out touring with his band right now. Akatsuki's doing really well, and how could they not, with my blessed, all-talented older brother headlining for them? (I'm not bitter, I swear.)
Just a little disillusioned, I guess.
There's always pain with tattoos. Anyone who says it doesn't hurt them is lying. Of course it fucking hurts, but that's not the point. The point is sticking it out till the end, through a process that takes hours and hours, a high threshold for pain, and all the fucking guts in the world. Because if you fuck it up, there's no way of hiding it, not when you wear the brand.
Doing it to yourself is even worse. You can't move. You can't adjust yourself. And it hurts like hell, but you're doing it to yourself, so you only have yourself to blame in the first place. Sort of this controlled kind of masochism, all for the sake of art.
And what I do? That ain't art.
I dip the needle in the ink again, turn the gun on. The outline of lightning bolts on my right arm is black and harsh and severe, the way I like my tattoos. Nothing frilly, nothing feminine, just fucking lightning. The harsh grinding vanishes into the background as I concentrate, filling in the outline all the way to my wrist.
I glance at my reflection in the mirror, examine the outline from a different angle, and I'm arrogantly pleased with my work. As an apprentice, I'm not technically allowed to work on anyone without my mentor present, but Kakashi's pretty lenient when I want to draw all over myself. This, though, he might be pissed about; I'm using a lot of ink.
I'm Sasuke Uchiha. I go to Konoha Performing Arts Academy, studying guitar and musicianship, and I moonlight as a tattoo artist.
Go figure.
"That looks painful as shit," Naruto remarks on the way back to our dorms. He's pointing to my newly finished outline; the skin is inflamed and aggravated, bleeding a bit in some places where I drove the needle too hard, but all of it is practice, to help me get better. And it's painful, but I can deal with pain.
"Hn. Pussy," I tell him to start a needless argument.
Predictably, he rises to the bait.
"Who you callin a pussy, asshole? I let you tattoo my fucking stomach, didn't I?"
Naruto was my first client, so to speak. As in, we snuck into Kakashi's tattoo shop after hours last year when he wasn't there, and I tattooed a sick ass spiral on his stomach for practice. It looks badass as shit, though looking back on it, maybe I should've fucked it up on purpose. Just to give him something real to complain about.
Naruto's my best friend.
KPAA is positioned on a sprawling green campus, overgrown with trees and flowers. World famous for the talent it produces, notorious for the rigorous training schedules it assigns. The kids here live and breathe art and music and shit; for a guitarist, there's nowhere better to be.
At least, that's what they tell me.
It's late now, and I just closed the shop with Kakashi, and Naruto and I meet on campus to head back to our dorm rooms together. Nights in Konoha are warm without being stiflingly hot, and there's a decent breeze blowing. It feels good on my new ink. Cools off the overheated skin.
"There goes Sakura," Naruto says suddenly, this slavish, adoring tone to his voice. I roll my eyes but glance over to where he's pointing anyway.
The girl he's pointing to, Sakura, is a girl everyone on campus knows or at least has heard of. She's supposed to be the best ballet dancer in the school, and her work ethic is famous, second only to this witchy spell she has over most of the guys at Konoha. I can't tell you how many times I've been in the locker room at the gym, or in the studio recording a new track, or just walking around the quad and her name pops up. Always with this kind of reverence, like she eclipses the whole of her gender, or a dirty, sexual lasciviousness, with the speaker going into great detail as to where he'd like to bend her over.
She doesn't have that power over me. She's a looker, I'll give her that, but I've never so much as spoken to her, nor has she ever given any sign she wanted to speak to me. Probably thinks herself too good to talk to the troubled younger brother of Itachi Uchiha, international recording star.
I glare at her, and resent her for this perceived indignity.
"Come on, man, even you have to admit she's the hottest thing in the entire universe!" Naruto elbows me in the side, narrowly missing my freshly-tattooed arm, and narrowly escaping a very painful, violent death at my hands. "She's so mysterious, too! She's always in the studio practicing. No one ever sees her at parties or anything."
I don't care. I don't care about Naruto's bizarre devotion to a girl he's never actually met in person, or the legend surrounding a girl I don't pretend to be curious about. I have my own shit to worry about, and with that, I walk faster towards our dormitory, to discourage any further hero worship.
He gets the hint and keeps pace with me up the walkway to the musicians' dorm. I stay on the second floor, Naruto on the third, and we part ways on the staircase. I have work to do on this new song that'll take me most of the night, and my arm's sore as shit. Maybe I should've waited till the weekend to experiment on myself.
Whatever. I look my newest tattoo over in the mirror hanging on my door, and I find very few things to dislike. A winding array of lightning bolts streaking from the shoulder all the way to my wrist, a perfect complement to the sleeve on my other arm of licks of flame. Not my only tattoos, but certainly my most prominent ones.
But that's only half of my so-called passion. The other half is what got me into KPAA in the first place. What will make me famous, if my teachers are to be believed.
I'm a guitarist, see. Self-taught until I got into KPAA, and now I take classes.
I prefer playing electric, with an amp, but everything's locked away in the studio across campus. They don't want any asshole coming in from work at eleven at night playing hard rock chords with the bass turned up so the walls shake, since everyone's studying all the time. So late at night in my room, I'm restricted to acoustic, but that gives me time to lay down some new rhythms and polish up my playing.
I sit on my bed and my fingers find the frets on their own, without me needing to think about it. It's second nature now. I could play in my sleep. Ignoring the painful twinge in my arm (which is bound to hurt worse tomorrow) I strum a few chords, tune it up a little, and lay back down on my pillows, the bulky old six-string on my stomach as I play a few chord arrangements I thought up earlier, at the shop.
I'm almost out of this dump.
The phone rings, and I know there's only one person to call me this late. I sigh and answer.
"Hn."
"Little brother, so pleasant to hear your dulcet tones!"
Itachi's drunk, I can hear it in his voice. He's drunk almost all the time lately, always calls from some club or bar or concert hall, some random chick's house, wherever. Out on the road, he's got nothing but time to waste between performances, and handlers who get him hammered from morning till dusk. I wonder if he's spiraling out, but he's an adult, ain't he?
"What do you want. It's late."
"Is it a crime to want to speak to my beloved younger brother of whom I think so highly?"
"At midnight it is. I have class in the morning."
"I think you'll agree with me that you have no class." Then he laughs at himself, and against my will, I smirk a bit, too. Because I go to this rigorous, elite, prestigious performing arts school a la Juilliard, but I'm draped in tattoos and a bad attitude. No class is right.
"Where are you now?" I ask, just for something to do. Because even if I resent my brother for his success, and even if I'm bitter and heated and everything that I just can't seem to stack up, he's my brother, and I love him.
"Uh…Kusa, last I checked."
"You have no idea, do you."
"Nope. Does it matter?"
And he means the question innocuously, but it hits me really close to home and shit. Does it matter?
Does it matter?
Does anything matter? Music, tattooing, art for the sake of art, competition, being the best, beating the best, trying, working, sweating, bleeding…at this fucking academy, what is any of this for? What's the pay-off? Is it Itachi? An international recording star in the eyes of the public, a degenerating alcoholic in the eyes of those who know him best?
Is that what's waiting for me out there?
"I'm going to bed," I mumble into the receiver.
"Good night, little brother. Sweet dreams." More giggling; he's really fucking hammered.
And I hang up on him, on this heroic big brother of mine, who's disillusioned to the point of drunkenness every single night, who doesn't know where he's at or even cares anymore, who's sold his soul to his art without being really cognizant of the price he'd have to pay:
Self-control is the first thing to go when you're out on the road.
And I lay back down and try to sleep, but there's a burning pain in my arm that tells me I need Aquaphor and a decent meal, and maybe to take caution from my brother's example, and ease up every once in awhile.
There's no need to go balls out on every single aspect of your life, but with a full self-drawn fresh sleeve on my arm that stings like a motherfucker, I'm the last person to preach about temperance.
Naruto's annoying. Ever since he brought her up the other night, I've been seeing more and more of that Sakura girl without meaning to. You know how you never really notice if something's there or not, until somebody brings it up, and then you start seeing it everywhere?
It's not that I go out of my way to look for her, either. But she kind of sticks out everywhere she goes. Which, as it turns out, ain't so many places: the rumors about her are true, and if she ain't in class, she's holed up in that dance studio across campus.
I stay in the musicians' dorms, and I practice in the music room. I have no reason to stray onto the dance quad, and I'd never even bother cutting through there in the first place, but the tattoo shop I work at is close by. So because Naruto pointed her out to me, and because I've always had an eye for freaky shit that looks totally out of place, I start seeing her more often.
And it's so fucking cliché, how we officially meet.
I'm on my way back to my room from the tattoo shop; Kakashi normally doesn't care if I experiment on myself as long as I ain't working on clients without his supervision, but he saw my sleeve and really chewed my ass out.
"How long did that take you?" he'd asked me.
"Hn. Six hours."
"And let me guess: you did it in one session."
"Aa."
So I had to sit tight and listen to a lecture on taking my time with shit, and not rushing, and whatever. But in the end, he told me my line work was solid and my shading was on point.
So with that in mind, I'm in a decent mood as I head back to my room.
I cut through the dance quad, since it's faster, but I'm not really in any hurry to get back. I'm not tired yet, and I have some new ideas for new tattoo designs that I'm working out in my head as I walk. And it's a warm night with a decent wind, so my footsteps drag.
The buildings here are older than the ones on the music quad, where I stay. Konoha renovated the music rooms a couple of years ago, installed new equipment, updated the acoustics, added a whole bunch of shit to keep us as modern with the times as possible. But the dance quad looks largely untouched, big stone buildings from years and years and years before I was born, wearing down but standing strong, imposing, permanent.
And completely by accident, I happen to be looking over at Dance Studio A, when the door is thrown open and that Sakura girl comes floating out.
I don't mean to notice things about her, but I'm an artist (an amateur, pathetic, shallow imitation of one anyway) and I look at everything with an artist's eye, so there's things about her I can't help but pick out. There's her pink hair, of course, which I'm stunned she's allowed to keep in a field like ballet, where uniformity is key or whatever, but more than that, it's the way she moves.
She's not dancing right now, of course, but she carries herself like she doesn't know any other way. There's this weird kind of grace that you don't see in the average girl, like she's…like she's floating, rather than walking. Her posture is perfectly straight, and she moves quickly, her footfalls in the tiny slippers she's wearing light as air on the grass. Her ponytail flips back and forth like a pendulum, and she's reading something with a backpack slung over her shoulder. She doesn't notice me.
But I notice the guy following her.
It's not my business. Maybe it's one of her friends. Sakura's pretty popular around here, even if she never has any spare time to spend with the people who worship her so much. Maybe it's a boyfriend. Maybe he knows her. It's not my business. None of my concern.
And I can't explain it, I really can't, but something doesn't feel right. And so even though it's completely out of my way, I follow both of them. Sakura, who's absorbed in her reading and not paying any fucking attention, and the tall guy hurrying behind her.
It's almost eleven, I think to myself, irritated with a girl I've never even spoken to, for her naivete. What kind of girl is she, to walk around this late by herself?
I'm getting closer to the guy, and he's getting closer to her. And I realize grimly that I was right to follow them, because the closer I get, the more I realize this asshole's intention, and it ain't friendly. He looks side to side and sees that there's nobody else around, before he calls out, "Oi, Sakura!"
She whirls around, surprised, sees who it is, and her eyes narrow.
"I told you to leave me alone, Zaku," she snaps. And this is odd, for me, anyway. Because for as many times as I've seen Sakura Haruno, in passing or by accident or whenever Naruto points her out with that slavish affection, I've never seen any expression on her face but serenity. Friendliness. Always smiling, even if it's fake.
Now, though, I see what she looks like pissed. Confrontational.
And it's more of an honest emotion, more honest than the saccharine sweetness she effects for all of her admirers. Begrudgingly, I admit to myself that the look is attractive, before I remember why I'm here. They don't seem to have noticed me yet, since it's dark and there's shadows and this kid, Zaku, is an idiot, which suits me fine.
"No need to be such a tight ass," he snaps back. "Jesus, what's with you ballet girls?"
"I can't speak for the others," she hisses, like a viper, "but I've got standards. Stop calling me. Stop texting me. Stop showing up at my rehearsals. Stop asking my friends about me. I'm not. Fucking. Interested."
And she spins around again.
Big mistake. I can tell by the way Zaku coils like a spring; you never turn your back on an enemy. And maybe this girl's been sniffing rosin for too long, holed up in that ivory tower of a ballet studio, thinking she's untouchable, because the second her back's turned, the kid makes his move. Reaches out, his hand on her shoulder, goes to pull her back around, but I speak up.
"Hey."
They both jump, and they finally see me. Sakura looks confused; she's never spoken to me in her life, so why would I be interfering in something like this? And Zaku, to my eternal gratification, looks horrified.
"U-Uchiha?"
I'm fucking famous around this school, even if I don't want to be, and sometimes, like now, just my name is enough of a threat to weaklings like this shithead, to the point where I don't even need to show him why I've never lost a fistfight in seventeen years.
"This don't concern you, man," he barks out, looking intimidated, but still trying to act like tough shit. His hand, I notice, slides off Sakura's shoulder, though.
"You heard her," I say quietly, and I keep my face neutral, but I concentrate enough Uchiha venom into my voice to give this kid a heart attack. "Clear out."
Sakura's eyes are wide, and I've never been this close to her before, to see that they're this bright, dizzying green. Unconsciously, I think about how I could mix that precise color with ink, and then I note her pale, luminiscent skin, and think to myself how well light skin like that would pick up ink. Nice pale skin that would show off bright color really well.
Zaku opens his mouth to argue, then clearly thinks better of it. He shoots a filthy glare at Sakura before muttering, "Whatever, bitch," and stalking off.
I debate if I want to follow him, if I want to smack him around for using that word to describe a girl, even one as notoriously uptight as Sakura Haruno, but I don't think it's worth it. Instead, my gaze shoots to her instead.
Realizing what a close call this must have been for her, I'm expecting tears, maybe shudders. But I'm surprised, because she looks perfectly composed. Like this is nothing new for her, like she's used to this kind of treatment, which I recognize as sexual harassment, but she might see as something else entirely: status quo.
It pisses me off.
"You all right?" I ask, just to see if she'll crack. She should; I read the intent in Zaku as clear as anyone. If I hadn't been there, who knows what would've happened?
"I'm fine, thank you," she replies, her voice lower and raspier than I've been expecting from someone with cotton candy hair and ballet slippers. She adjusts the strap of her backpack, which slipped when Zaku grabbed her. "You didn't have to do that. Usually he just gives up."
"'Usually?'" I repeat, even angrier. "So this has happened before."
"It's nothing," she shrugs it off. "But thank you, seriously. I'm Sakura, by the way. You're Sasuke Uchiha, right?"
So she has heard of me, then.
"Aa."
"Nice to meet you, Sasuke," she says, and there's a smile on her face that looks as honest as the snarl she'd worn two seconds ago. She sticks out her hand like we're strangers meeting at a party, instead of on the street in the middle of the night.
I'm a bit taken aback, honestly. Sakura's regarded as so untouchable here that I never thought she might actually be just down-to-earth. In my head, I always pictured her as an aloof little snob the way most of the dancers here at KPAA are. I might need to reevaluate.
But I take her hand anyway. It's colder than I thought it would be.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I'm holding you up... Sorry, I'm fucking exhausted…it's nice meeting you, Sasuke. Thanks for your help. I'm sure I'll see you around sometime."
With a final smile, she bounces away from me with a spring in her step, returning to her reading.
"Pay attention next time," I scold her, but I don't think she hears me.
Tch. Stupid girl.
By coincidence, later in the week, Zaku shows up in Kakashi's shop for a shin tattoo. Wants the words "No Regrets". One of the other apprentices, Kiba, is a friend of mine, and when I briefly explain the situation, he smirks in understanding and takes Zaku for his client.
And it's a total fucking accident, I swear it, when Zaku leaves the shop pissed as shit, his jacked-up tattoo reading, "No Egrets" and all of us laughing behind him.
And it's all in the name of art. I swear.
I just hope one day, this all pays off. Whatever's waiting out there for me outside KPAA, I hope it's worth all this uncertainty.
note.. I'm trying something new with incorporating Itachi into this story. I like the idea of having him as this scary kind of foil to Sasuke; how they're really close and they love each other, but Sasuke recognizes how Itachi's spiraling out of control and that he represents the darker side to fame and art and music. I'll elaborate more on that later on.
And I realize Zaku's a fairly generic villain in my stories, but as I don't like using original characters and he's just really remorselessly evil, it works out well for me.
I'm taking this story in a different direction than my other ones, so I hope you stick around to read more. Thank you very much for reading and reviewing :)
xoxo daisy :)
