I dropped out of the academy. Not because I didn't like it-no, no, I was fine with the murder-lessons they taught there-but because I wanted to have more time to sleep. Now that I'd had a taste of what it felt like: blissful darkness and addicting stretches of mindlessness-better than any drug I'd tried on Earth-I couldn't get enough of it. I slept from dawn till dusk, and then in the timeless tranquility of the night I scribbled down transcription after transcription from earth.

Soli

I wrote them down because I didn't want to forget them. Music had been my only refuge during my decade-long stint of insomnia and many other mental pathologies. Don't get me wrong-the process was agonizing, not to mention relentlessly monotonous. Writing tonal music made my eyes glaze over from boredom and my scalp crawl in impatience; nonetheless I dutifully scribed pieces each night until my vision doubled and I crawled back into bed with migraines. My fingers bristled with an unending sense of urgency-a feeling akin to the itch you got when a knuckle failed to crack. My mind was full of knuckles and bones. I had to write them down. Before I forgot. Before I broke all my fingers in my carnal impetus. I worked from favourites-down: first-Dvorak's Requiem, and then the Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich. La Campanella, Chopin's Ocean Etude, Holst's Planets. Crack-crack-crack-crack-crack.

The Hokage knocked on my door eight weeks after I'd decided to stop going to the academy. I answered it, shamelessly rubbing sleep out of my eyes at four in the afternoon, and invited him in for a pot full of my favourite oolong tea. He looked at me with undisguised concern over the top of his teacup.

I knew I looked bad. Deranged. Neurotic, even. My hands were stained ink-black and I'd developed a habit of massaging my neck during panic attacks. Dark claw marks scratched up and down my throat as a result. I'd fallen asleep over my work last night, and a mirrored version of the 62-note gliss in the 201st bar of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz contoured the bottom of my left cheekbone. We talked for a bit about the upcoming October Festival and my music before the Hokage switched to more serious topics.

"Iruka has told me that you've dropped out of the Academy," the Hokage said, "I'd initially wanted you to heal and decide to return on your own, but I don't think that's happening."

I nodded my head and pretended like I was considering his words.

The Hokage came around the table and knelt down next to me. I turned to face him.

"Sasuke, please go back to school," he said, taking both of my black hands in his.

I nodded again, "Okay."

The Hokage looked like he'd expect much more resistance, but quickly changed his expression to that of a proud smile. "Good boy," his grip tightened on my hands. He left very shortly after that-I supposed he'd had places to be.

I didn't go back to school. The Hokage showed up at my house again a week later, with the jonin commander in tow, and he was a lot less nice that time.

"The Sharingan is the most powerful bloodline limit Konoha has ever had,"

He hadn't even bothered to seat himself, and instead stared me down from across the living room. Shikaku looked very grim at his right-hand side.

"It is your duty to the village to learn how to use it. You are solely responsible for keeping Konohagakure safe from threats like Itachi. Don't you want to kill Itachi?"

I stared at my black, grimy hands as I considered my answer. I thought about the years I'd spent plagued with visions of open necks and red blood. I thought about my father's severed head and my mama's stomach ulcers. I thought about my death.

"Yes," I decided, "I want to skin him alive." But I could learn how to do that later-maybe in a couple of years, after I'd finished all of my transcriptions.

The third time they came back I didn't even answer the door.

There was a week of blessed silence after that. In celebration, I took a break from tonicity and worked on creating a memory-perfect version of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto. Ah, twelve-tone. You are the bread to my butter.

A man broke into my house in the middle of the night, seven days after the Hokage's last (attempted) visit. I jerked up from the throes of screeching oboe noises as he stepped quietly through my front door, its lock demolished. He introduced himself as Shimura Danzo, and told me to pack a bag, as I'd be going on a very long training trip with him. I immediately dug my heels into the floor, scowling deeply.

"No," I insisted. I threw a kitchen knife at him when he started walking towards me. There was a flash of dull pain-and nothing more.

In ROOT you trained fourteen hours a day, and every other night was spent in a four-hour class on torture and interrogation. You lived deep underground in a complex where the temperature was constantly at an ambivalent 30 degrees Celsius. You were forced to go by a new name.

I went by the name Mneme and was beaten each time I referred to myself as 'Sasuke'. Mealtimes were a strict fifteen minutes long each and the food was protein-rich and tasteless. After a week my muscles stopped aching with every movement, and the scrapes on my hands gave away to calluses. The bruises on my limbs grew less frightening in intensity as soft flesh hardened into wiry strength.

"How was your day, little brother?" A kid, around my age, with delicate, girlish features sat down across from me at dinnertime. He flashed a dimpled smile, nothing but patience insinuated in the motion.

I took my time chewing and swallowing my steamed fish-I was positively starving-before crossing my ankles defensively. "Go away," I muttered, not meeting his eyes.

Sai's expression crumpled into genuine sadness. I felt mildly guilty for bullying an eight-year-old kid, so I glared holes into my brown rice until he left. He did that with a clutter of dishware, and when I exited the cafeteria to get to T&I class early, his blond friend gave me a dirty look.

Once a day, before dawn, I was ushered into a sterile, white-walled room with a hospital bed in the center and an army green machine stood sentinel next to it. I was strapped down, anaesthetized, and electric currents were run through my body until my jaw locked and lights flashed alarmingly in my vision. When the seizures ended, the doctor's assistant, Kabuto, carried me back to my room and hand-fed me apple slices. I'm sure the gesture was meant to comfort me, but those were the same hands that had taught me how to pry off someone's fingernails with maximum pain. I ate obediently and with great unease.

I only saw Danzo-sama once during my stay at ROOT. He waved me into his on-site office as Kabuto and I stepped out of the white room together. Kabuto settled me down comfortably in the chair across from Danzo's desk, bowed deeply, and slipped out through the door.

One of Vivaldi's allegros was clutched between Danzo's gnarled fingers. He tilted the page to show me the notes, as if I didn't have all of them already ingrained into my memory.

"You write beautiful music," he complimented.

"Thank you."

Danzo continued reading over the music with an approving look in his eye. "Have you ever considered specializing in auditory genjutsu? One of your brothers, Sai, has recently developed his paintings into his own ninjutsu." His lighthearted tone conveyed an order rather than a suggestion. "With your natural talent you'd be formidable."

"Formidable…?" my Japanese vocabulary had deteriorated over the years.

"Unstoppable. Terrifying. The best of the best."

"Uh," No thanks. "No thank you."

When I came back to my room that night, all my pens were gone and my precious sheet music lay in a pile of ashes on the middle of the floor. They discovered me before the stool I'd used to kick off of even had time to finish its fall, and there was barely a bruise around my neck when Kabuto cut down the noose. As a punishment, I was no longer given anaesthesia before my rounds of electroshock therapy.

Kabuto clucked his tongue in disappointment as I curled into a ball and tried to calm down my racing heartbeat. He peeled the electrodes from my temples. Reflexively, I caught the apple he threw at my head, and never attempted hang myself again.

Some months later, Kabuto fished me out from the cave-systems of ROOT and I was brought to the Hokage's office. The Hokage gave me a box of apple juice and made it very clear that my future was either ROOT or the Academy.

I went back to the fucking Academy. Not happily, mind you-I rarely came to class and my enthusiasm was sub-zero-zilch. I showed up only for tests and to hand in assignments. Out of spite, I ensured that I was always at the top of the class regardless of my atrocious attendance. On the intermittent days I actually turned up for lectures-mostly to meet minimum attendance requirements-I passed time working through all of Johann Pachelbel's languid chamber music, eyes half-mast and hands half speed. Shikamaru, who sat next to me, liked to shift his head and press his ear against the table so that he could listen to the soft scritch-scritch of my pen when I wrote.

One day I finished Canon in D and placed it next to his semi-asleep head. "This makes me think of you," I explained, "You should have it." Shikamaru thanked me and stared at it for a very long time.

I didn't show up at school again until end-of-the-year exams. Shikamaru finished his exam early, like me, and stopped me before I left with a hand on my forearm. "My mother really liked your Canon," he told me.

I wrinkled my nose. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Did you like it, too?"

"It made me fall asleep."

That was good enough for me. "Cool," I said, and then asked him if he wanted to come over for tea and judge my piano pieces.

I graduated from the Killing Academy a semester later. The exam had been depressingly slow-going, so I bought myself a grand piano in celebration. Now I had two pianos in my house, and I thought they looked quite happy together.

I didn't recognize any of my teammates. I actually didn't recognize most of my classmates-Shikamaru was the only person whose name I knew.

My sensei arrived three hours late and then demanded of us to share our lifelong dreams with one another. "My name is Mnem-" I flinched, hard, at the memories of ROOT, "My name is Uchiha Sasuke," I corrected, "I like… I like visiting the Konohagakure Temple and listening to the monks sing. I dislike brown rice. My hobby is writing. My dream for the future is to be happy."

My teammates were… real pieces of art. Sakura was loquacious, passionate, and warlike. Naruto was daring, honorable, and tenacious. Kakashi was eccentric and plainly starved of love. I saw it in the way he was always on edge, always positioning himself to avoid accidental contact with other humans, how he, in his stoic confidence, opted to shift his body language away from every person he was addressing. The first thing he did with our team was give us a psychological test on our loyalty. I had no intention of passing it, but then I thought of how annoying the Hokage would be if I decided to throw my career and spend a lifetime as a genin. Team 7 became officially registered.

It took Sakura an alarmingly short time to develop a crush on me. I caught her several times staring at me in the breaks between spars and during our mindless D-rank missions. She waited two weeks, as if to assure herself of the commitment, and then threw her attentions on me full-force. My other teammates treated this with anger and sadistic amusement, respectively. You can guess what applied to whom.

Once, after three rounds of one-on-one sparring (which was dubiously supervised by Kakashi-sensei), Sakura offered to sharpen my weapons for me. I agreed, because, free labor, and I hated sharpening knives-my hands could always be doing something so much better; more creative; more valuable. She managed across one of Liszt's Etudes-the one with three lines of notes that I'd won my college tuition with-balled up and discarded at the bottom of my weapons pouch. Her green eyes widened in amazement at the impressive slew of notes spilling across the paper, and she turned to look at me with a flush.

"You write music, Sasuke-kun?" she asked breathlessly, fluttering her eyelashes in excitement, or anticipation, or avariciousness.

"Mainly symphonic, sometimes piano," I answered.

"Can you write me a song?"

Her dead-set expression revealed the volumes she'd go to for me to do exactly that. I knew that if I said no, she'd undoubtedly continue bothering me for a very, very long time.

"Alright." I scribbled out the Aria from The Magic Flute on the back of one of my dummy explosive notes. As Sakura peered eagerly over my shoulder, I tapped my pen on my chin, and then added some bastardized lyrics underneath.

"This was inspired by the sound of your voice," I explained, "It's a pretty difficult soprano vocal piece, so see if you can find someone trained to perform it for you."

Sakura accepted the sheet music, gave me the most eye-wateringly pleased smile I'd ever seen in my life, and said something about her aunt being a prima donna soprano for the Konoha Opera House. She walked home with a skip in her step, and then didn't show up to practice the next morning.

"Sakura was very hurt by what you did," Kakashi-sensei scolded me. "It's not very nice to make fun of things that people cannot change, especially their voices." She eventually did end up coming to practice, in the afternoon. When we sparred that day, her punches left bruises on my cheekbones and abdomen that didn't go away for weeks.

If D-ranks were painstaking and cruel, then C-ranks were painstaking and cruel wrapped up in pretty paper. I was beyond thankful when Kakashi-sensei entered us into the Chunin Exams and saved us from the monotony of genin imprisonment. Upon re-examination, deciding to pass Kakashi's crackpot teamwork test had been probably one of the best decisions I'd made in my life. A lifetime in the genin corps, pulling nothing but C's and D's… No, thank you.

During the second phase of the exam, a woman who called herself 'Orochimaru' knocked out my two teammates and then approached me. In response, I threw my team's heaven scroll at her feet and told her to fuck off.

"Uchiha Sasuke, right? I assume you're not at all interested in gaining power?"

I shook my head.

Orochimaru hummed in thought, "I run a village in the Land of the Rice Paddies," she continued, "It's called Otogakure-The Sound Village. I'm sure you've heard of it before."

Yes, I had heard of Otogakure before. The ninja there wore cute headbands with music notes on them and were famous for their auditory-based jutsu. This I told Orochimaru.

"Otogakure-as you already know-has the finest musicians the Elemental Nations can offer. Our philharmonic and opera troupes go on world tours and are widely regarded as the best at their craft. I'm extending to you a formal invitation to join Oto and become our City Composer."

I blinked, taken aback. That hadn't been what I was expecting, at all. Slowly, I rubbed the side of my neck, considering my options. I'd have to defect from Konoha and become a missing-nin-ninja weren't permitted to emigrate out of the country. That was fine, I was more than willing to do that. Freelancing would keep me in Konoha, but it sounded too stressful to pursue, what with my current career. My hands were clean, save from a sparse scattering of forest grime, so they left no marks on my throat when I removed them. I stared at them, inexplicably surprised by their appearance, thinking about electroshock therapy and the sch-sch-sch chewing apple slices.

"Great!" I decided, "When do I start?"

Orochimaru grinned down at me, and returned the heaven scroll. "I'll come get you in two months or so," she winked, patting me on the cheek.

The Hokage summoned me into his office again once he heard that I'd made it to the Tournament phase of the exams. He gave me a cup of bitter jasmine tea and my first professional commission.

"I want you to write a march for Konohagakure. A nationalistic fanfare-something big, flashy, and grand. Something to show off to our foreign guests before the tournament," he said.

I smiled a toothy smile, immediately and genuine. "I'm gonna need cannons, and I want to speak with the high lama of the Konoha Temple. I want a choir, too, a full one-and I want to hand-pick all the singers." If I was going to leave this village, then I was going to do so with a bang.

Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture was a killer performance-not literally, unfortunately-but it certainly gave some people lifelong blood pressure problems. The crowd's reaction when the cannons started firing (high arcs into the surrounding forests) at the climax of the piece had been priceless and exhilarating. Konoha Temple had then, madly and artlessly, rung all of her bells-something that made the entire village shake in its foundation-the trumpets sang their absolving note-cannons fired one last time, in unison-and the stadium exploded into hysterical applause.

Shikamaru gave me a funny look when I returned to the competitor's box. "Reminds me of my mom," he told me, the same time Naruto yelled "Kick-ass!" into my ear.

My opponent liked to wear heavy eyeliner and had the kanji for 'love' tattooed above his left brow bone. He had red hair, small slanted eyes, and was absolutely nuts. Before our fight he raved on and on about his hobby as a serial killer and then started telling me about his dead mother. I half-expected him to thumb his ears and stick his tongue out at me by the time he'd finished his loopy tirade. Unsurprisingly, he didn't do that. Instead his body exploded outwards in a wave of broiling sand, and he turned into the Demon Tanuki.

There wasn't much for a genin to do in terms of fighting during the subsequent invasion, so I hung back for a bit and then left for the civvie sector to help with evacuation. The Tanuki crushed the stadium. A giant, three-headed snake pretty much demolished the entire financial center, completely changing the city skyline. Konoha Crush, indeed.

The Hokage's funeral was a welcoming break from hair-raising humdrum of post-invasion cleanup. Picking human bodies out of rubble (and one on memorable occasion, just the scattered fingers of an unfortunate soul) made my hands tremble and my heart beat con incalzando. Oftentimes I would sit down, off to the side, and watch my teammates bag and seal dead after dead with unshaken calm. I wondered what was wrong with me, and the Queen of the Night laughed her shrill laugh inside my head. Everyone I saw at the funeral wore black: black legs, black torsos, black collared necks. I wore white. On that day, in that sea of mourning, I was a speck of undyed silk, standing out through the crowd. I was a cabbage butterfly drowning in my own inkpot, and I found that quite fitting.

Itachi appeared back into my life with the stubborn ching-ching of an onbeat tambourine: memorably, unnoticed at first, but constantly driving the music forward. The first sly beat was Kakashi-sensei, lying comatose in the critical ward. I stood at the foot of his bedside, my mind racing in the newfound knowledge of Itachi hunting the teammate who'd just left the village. Then, there was no thinking-suddenly the world went a tempo and I was racing after him, desperate to see him.

Itachi's back was to me when I saw him at the motel. He was wearing a black and red cloak. There was another man stood at his shoulder, taller and brute-faced. Naruto gaped his mouth and threw his gaze between Itachi and I, back and forth, back and forth; I paid no mind to this.

"It's been awhile, Sasuke."

I didn't respond, instead choosing to marvel at the fantastic fury coursing through my veins. How was it possible that one person could cause so much pain in my life? To leave me wrecked, damned, and dead? I approached Itachi as one might approach a new instrument: voraciously, with hands begging for a feel, clumsy and amateurishly.

"Itachi-" A flurry of movement.

He hit me in the chest. My breath went out in a violent huff. Elbow to the stomach, knee under the jaw-I reached out to touch his face-and Itachi broke my wrist. The pain was familiar and meant that I was awake and not dreaming. At the end of it all, I was pinned by my neck against the wall.

I kept my gaze lowered, staring at Itachi's Adam's apple. His breathing was harsh against my face, hot with anger more than physical exertion.

"Why won't you fight back!?" he demanded. "Why do just stand there and let me hit you-why don't you want to kill me?"

Itachi was wrong. I wanted to kill him more than anything in the world-if it meant destroying my own world to have him dead, I'd do it with a leap of faith.

"I could never kill you," I said, "You're my muse."

Itachi made a shaky, frustrated sound. "Look me in the eyes," he ordered, "I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me that."

No Tsukuyomi. No Tsukuyomi. No Tsukuyomi. "No Tsukuyomi," I begged. Itachi hesitated, and then nodded once, short and final.

I dragged my eyes up to meet his, and Itachi, because he was a fickle bastard, sent me plunging into a world of black and red. "Welcome to the world of Tsukuyomi," his voice whispered in my ears. "For the next seventy-two hours, your reality will be completely under my control."

Dal segno al coda

I awoke in a hospital. My throat burned like acid, and when I ran my hands up and down it, I was met with a painful, swollen ring of purple. I staggered my way towards the window, desperate for the comforting image of the Hokage Mountain-snapped open the blinds-and was met with a view of the New York skyscrapers.

I was still standing in front of the windows when my mother came into the room. I only noticed her being there because she screamed, and then dropped the vase of flowers she'd been holding. Crash.

A week. I'd been in a coma for a week. My roommate had come home early and found me dangling from the ceiling. A week. Four years awake, one week asleep. I was alive, again, and everytime I closed my eyes I saw open necks and black blood. Again.

Insomnia came back to me like an old friend, but this time I greeted her with a lover's embrace. Mama's stomach ulcers returned from the stress of my attempted suicide, and then a year later those stomach ulcers turned into cancer. I missed my own graduation-Bachelor of Music with Honors-because I was at my mother's deathbed.

"Go," she urged me, I holding one hand and father holding the other, "Go back to your other mother. She'll be there for you now." Mama swallowed-my eyes were instinctively drawn to the motion-and when I looked at her face next she was dead.

Papa fell to the bottle, and then felled himself off of a bridge. Now I had no one.

Solo

I wrote my thesis, An analysis on the evolution of Romantic and 20th Century era notions of variational atonality, and got a Ph.D. in music at the age of twenty-three. Then, because my fingers still itched for more, I wrote The psychoacoustic and psychophysical mechanisms applied in religious music across cultures, and tucked away another Doctorate in Psychology of music. After that I stopped actively pursuing doctorates because universities started giving them to me for free. A . from Cambridge; another one from Oxford. T.U.M., Humboldt-academia was weird, not that I was protesting their generosity.

I don't remember exactly when I developed my own style of composition. All my life had been a slew of half-assed original writings and then mindless transcriptions without foreseeable end. There'd been a gradual grey area where I'd transgressed from transcribing, to listening to other people's music and writing countermelodies to it, and then eventually building those countermelodies into their own distinct pieces. Atonality had always been my Siren's Song, so it was inevitable when my concerts started attracting old men in Hermes Paris jackets and young rich hipsters with metal studding entire constellations across their faces.

I was the warmonger who governed a country of conforming peasants. I was the gunslinger that lead a travelling bandit camp in the wild west. Tsukuyomi ruled my life, and my heart orbited in a tight, dangerous circle around it. I wrote entire symphonies in undertone serii, my audience squirming in their seats at the wrongness of the sound, never once noticing that the fundamental notes leading the melodies were missing the entire time. That was the thing about human psychology-the explicit is never need. Given enough exposure to the implicit-like introducing melodies sub-harmonically-the brain would always, without fail, interpolate your missing note, your subliminal desire, and fill your empty lungs with water.

I took this idea of psycho-auditory hallucination and wrote my first and only silent symphony. Consisting of twenty-odd subcontra- and hyper-bass instruments, I commanded them to play solely at pitches too low to be decipherable to the human ear. We played mostly at fort-issi-issi-issimo, and our music made the air tremble and quake. I experimented with shepard tones, decided I fucking loved them, and then squeezed them into the silence. On the debut of my Tichá Sinfonietta, people arrived at the concert hall curious-and left in an ugly miscellany of emotion. The shepard tones created an illusion of a constantly rising bassline-a sound desperately clawing its way into human perception-but the expectation never succeeded itself. It left my following of old men and hipsters rooted to their seats; their chests vibrating in tune to my music. The entire concert hall had been hallucinating notes in distress by the end of it all-I was sure of it-for I'd engineered my machine perfectly.

Sometimes I combined the two-my hell-blessed undertones with hyperbass mixed in-and people left my concerts furious. Reviews after those nights were always fun to read-the critics could never seem to agree on whether or not my central melodies ascended or descended in pitch (jokes on them; they were all tritone paradoxes.) Some called me the Christ-killer, and my musical masterpieces were often compared to sub-human suffering.

I thought it meant something good if my music inspired such imagery in others. I'd lived an entire life with songs on my sleeves and notes knotted around my neck-good, evil, younger brother, older brother-those things meant nothing but enlightenment to me. I was writing the best music of my life, and I had no one to tell it to.

What was living, if not a lurching, unpracticed solo stretching into infinity? My infinity-my future-looked to be decades of consciousness, Tsukuyomi under my eyelids, and then dissatisfying death. I walked briskly towards the epicenter of the suspension bridge. Briskly was how I did everything nowadays: confident, with rationale, and never regretting.

Five or so kilometers downriver I could clearly make out the seafoam huddled against the adjacent beachfront. The expanse was blinding, and stretched north and south as far as the eye could see. My body would undoubtedly wash up there, waterlogged and foam-covered, and certainly very dead. I threw off my leather jacket in one smooth motion-and then I leapt from the bridge without breaking stride. My hands trailed through the air beside me as I fell: free, jubilant, and pale. In this pose I stayed, my arms orthogonal to my torso, until I went under the water. My spine snapped in a scatter of sixteenths and I opened my eyes to see-

Coda

-Itachi's Mangekyou Sharingan. His hands-pale like mine-were still around my neck, but I was tall enough that my feet touched the floor, so it didn't really hurt. He was blinking very fast, in short, wild bursts, and for a second he looked so much like my mama it hurt.

"Tell me," Itachi begged, but I only heard the sound of a violin being practised in a living room. "Look me in the eyes and tell me!"

I raised my right hand and finally touched the side of Itachi's face. His skin was surprisingly soft and even, save for a rumble of forgotten stubble gracing his jawline. My hands were the instrument of instruments, and Itachi was my transcendental etude. I traced a thumb over the purple crescents under his eyes; I'd had those too, once upon a time. Belatedly, I registered his crying: two lines of tears, scarring his cheeks with grief. His face suddenly became very prominent. I saw nothing but his face. It was as if his head was separate from the rest of his body.

And so I said: "You're the only family I have left. I will never be able to kill you,"

Poco a poco morendo

"None of us will ever be Abel."

Fine.