.
3.
hell most personal
.
He comes home and tries not to wake them up.
In that, he fails.
Because as soon as he is shoved - hard, angry, traitor we hate you - through the door, as soon as the voices behind him dim to a hum he can't focus on and the manacles fall from his chapped wrists, they awaken. Invisible to everyone, even him, the ghosts of his past rise and live, whisper in voices that echo through his mind. In every surface, every dust-covered inch of floor and every time-mottled photograph, they breathe and scream.
Sasuke wants out.
He wants to go back to the prison, with its dark walls and safe confinement. To the empty solitude that only gave him opportunity to be angry and livid and hateful. In a cell, he is safe from his past, safe from himself, able to hide and pretend behind the fury of being imprisoned.
Here, in his own damn house, he is vulnerable. Here, he is afraid and hurt, jumping at the shadows of anbu as they set up a guard around his house. In a sort of blind, desperate panic, he wonders if attacking them will get him thrown back to shackles and bars and thick stone walls he doesn't recognize. Logic tells him it will get his head cut off. Maybe that would be better. Less painful and horrifying, he is sure.
Someone - a voice that whispers in his ear now, but it is a voice he can't place - had once told him he must not believe in love, what with all his apparent emptiness. At the time, he had stared, blank and silent, un-acknowledging. Now he remembers and thinks that wherever that faceless someone is, they should know how wrong they are.
Because Sasuke does believe in love. He believes in looking at a person and seeing a god; in the silent vow of I'd die for you; the warmth of a familiar laugh and the joy a proud smile can bring. He believes in all those things, remembers them with a biting clarity. Once upon a time, back when the days were bright and this now desolate house teeming with voices and family, he was a child and he was happy and he didn't fear his heart. Oh, he believes in love. And he doesn't want it.
These scars that twists his soul, rip open his chest and shove burning hot pokers to sizzle in his throat and eyes are a part of love as well. This inability to move for fear of seeing phantom blood and hearing long-lost screams is a child's devotion mutated. Weakness and despair and vengeance and irony and death and death and more death: That's what love means to Sasuke.
Hours later, equipped with rags found in the kitchen (right where he thought they would be, something he is unreasonably proud of) and a bucket full of water, Sasuke begins to clean. Every surface is wiped down, every picture cleaned with gentle hands and ever crest shined. It hurts Sasuke - hurts him so badly that he wants nothing more than to throw his things to the ground and rage until hate once again finds him - but he continues. Slowly, methodically, perfectly - just like everything else he does. At his shoulders, the ghosts whose hands he swears he can feel running through his hair whisper their approval.
And because he loves them all, he continues. No matter how badly it hurts.
