Beginning Note: Does anybody have a particular way they want a character portrayed here? I love suggestions. I might even use them! (Hear that biting sarcasm.) No, truthfully, I might, if I like it enough. Depends on how well it fits in. Completely random stuff like saying that Neji should be a dragon tamer will not be considered for even a second, so think a minute before writing!
I really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really want to say how sorry I am for making all of you who may have been waiting for this to, well...wait so gosh darn long. I really am sorry. To make up for it, Chapter Five should be posted sometime around Monday , December 17th, 2007 between the hours of 1 AM and 11PM. I haven't been completely lazy...
I disclaim: -holding voodoo doll- That's right, Masashi, sign the contract...Give Hyde the rights...
Thank you for 9 reviews, 7 favorites, 12 alerts, and 820 hits! Every bit is appreciated!
But now, my lovelies, I present to you:
1.4 (Medianoches)
"I am staring at my clock.
"It flashes. It says 3:52.
"3:52.
"3:52.
"That is no time to be awake. It is the rawest hour of the earthly day. There is no one to help you at 3:52. Many people don't exist at 3:52." –Thirsty, by M.T. Anderson.
---
Gasping for air, he awoke. The light was dark and the thin sheets seemed to be miles thick. There were no traces of the invisible mist that was choking him in his sleep.
Naruto sat up slowly, trying his hardest to keep his eyes from springing open. He tried taking a few deep breaths, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and yanked the snaps on his shirt open to get more oxygen to his heaving chest.He couldn't breathe. He couldn't get any air in his lungs. It was awful.
He lunged out of bed to the overhead light, not even looking to make sure the floor was clear. He stumbled, tripped, and hit the wall, then scrambled up to flick on the light switch. There was something there, he knew it. There was. His eyes, in their crazed vibrations, sped around the room. Empty bed, empty walls,not a person nor a monster in sight.
Freud was sleeping on a chair, every last ash-gray hair licked neatly into place. Naruto watched the small rises and falls of the cat's body with each breath. They seemed so short. So temporary. Slowly, slowly, Naruto's breathing went back to normal, but he still felt as if there were something sitting on his breastbone keeping him from taking air in properly.
He moved his surprisingly heavy feet over to the chair on which Freud slept. Naruto knelt down on the wooden floor next to the cat and held the position for some minutes, just watching his pet sleep.
"You are so lucky, Freud. So, so lucky cats can't dream. Lucky that cats can't have nightmares."
He picked up his journal and began to write down what he could remember. Most of what he could recall at all was fear-- immensefear-- and a sense of helplessness. These two feelings, he reasoned must have been so strong in his sleep that they carried over into his waking hours.
When he ran out of words, he moved on to pictures. He flipped the lights on in the living room on his way to the office just to feel like he was safe. The door to his office was open just a crack, something not exactly normal. On a normal day, Naruto would've closed it. Maybe he'd just been busy cleaning, he told himself. So busy he forgot to close the door.
Once inside, Naruto closed the door and turned on the lamp. His folders were all laid out in color-order– the folders themselves, not their contents. He pushed several of them aside, but kept a few of them close at hand. The pictures inside spilled out when Naruto opened up the folders, and Naruto set to work. He grabbed different colored papers, paints, glues, magazines, cutting knives, and all sorts of other sealants, binders, and colorful things. Then he set to work, and it was as if he was possessed. The table in front of him was soon covered in bits and scraps of paper. There were photos torn to pieces all over the table. Naruto'd gotten some acrylic paint (the kind that doesn'twash out) on his shirt. But in the end, he had something amazing. Something he didn't really want to look at, because somehow it made him sick.
There were so many colors, so many images pushed together and layered. From one angle one story could be told; from another a different tale was apparent. There were colors: green and black and red and blue; there was texture: lines and circles and thickly-spread paint half-hid pictures or bits of newsprint. There was horror and happiness, felicity and fear. It was his nightmare and his fantasy.
It was awful and beautiful simultaneously.
Naruto gaped.
And then he pushed the stiff paper away from him to dry– because however much it made him sick, it was still something he made and which had value– and let his head fall to the table.
There were pieces of paper floating around him, stirred up by the wind generated by his head when it hit the table. The gust of air had blown many of the larger pieces out of the way, but smaller scraps were still there to be moved when the hard breaths similar to someone trying not to cry blew out of Naruto's nose. He felt physically ill, because of what the aggregation had reminded him of– of his dreams. They were always scary, always awful, and always confusing. He rubbed his face with his hands, scratching at the junction between his collarbone and his neck– the place where he'd had those bruises. It itched.
While scratching, he accidentally pressed too hard on the bruise itself. However, something very abnormal happened: he didn't feel just a dull pain, like other bruises usually causedInstead, his vision swam for just a second.
"Woah." Naruto stood up, leaning on one hand on the table. "What just..." He pressed the spot again. Black spots danced in the corners of his vision. "That's weird." He walked down the hall to the bathroom. The mirror reflected a ragged-looking man with tired eyes, looking very curious indeed about his image. Naruto leaned towards the mirror, his head angled up so he could see his neck, so close his breath fogged up a small spot with every breath. His fingers rested lightly on the brownish-green bruise.
He pushed on the bruise and his knees turned to liquid; his vision went dark for a second, and he toppled to the floor.
He took a moment to get his bearings back. This is where I started two days ago, he thought. This is where life changed. The floor between the sink and the toilet. The tiles were cold and hard, and Naruto had a headache. He didn't remember hitting his head, but he was sure there would be a lump when he checked. He slowly closed his eyes, feeling his breaths. For the moment, everything was surreal, as is life in the middle of the night.
He didn't know how long he was there, though he was sure it was longer than the planned single moment. There was no clock in the bathroom, for there was never a need to know the time when in the shower. But he measured time in the air that left his lungs and came back again, steady breath after steady breath. Several times he contemplated standing up and going back to bed, but he'd been on the cold tiles for so long that they had turned warm beneath his skin. He was becoming comfortable– too comfortable: every now and then, he noticed his eyelids flicking open again as if fending off sleep.
Time passed slowly. Sleep tried to reclaim him, but a small part of him– the prideful part– refused to fall asleep on the floor. However, he didn't have that strong an urge to get up, either. In the end it was Freud who saved him, wandering into the bathroom and batting at his nose. The cat meowed and butted him with its head. Naruto slowly sat up; then, gripping the edge of the tub for support, he hoisted himself to his feet.
As he rose, his face appeared once again in the mirror. His eyes were drooping and his head was hanging from his shoulders. He barely recognized himself. He lifted his head up, exposing his neck. Sure enough, there were the bruises. The largest of the two was a deep brownish blue, still painful. He prodded gently at it; nothing much happened except for the dull, slightly itchy pain that rose up beneath his fingers. Nothing like the blindness that had claimed him before.
Naruto was...tired. He dragged his legs down the hall once again to the open door of his bedroom, all the while leaning on the wall for support. His eyes were closing of their own accord. The bed seemed so far away, the windows with their lamp glare so menacing.
Carefully, he dragged the heavy blankets back onto the bed into their places. He fluffed the pillows, adjusted the sheets, and moved the various pens that had strayed into the bed out of the way. He reached over, clicked off the lights, and closed his eyes.
---
Terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible. The word kept repeating itself in his head as he ran. There were roots beneath his feet: he kept stumbling on them. There were thick pricking vines and bushes clawing at his arms and legs: he was bleeding in so many places, shallow cuts, small cuts, but so many.
A voice, horrible in its lilting baritones, sang out through the darkness in which he ran. Mud sloshed under his bare feet while the words spoke loudly, clearly:
"I hear your beating heart, your racing thoughts, the fear coursing through your veins. I smell the terror coming from your very pores: the tears on your face show all the signs of agony." Naruto reached up to touch his face. Something sticky came off his hand; he could only guess what it was. As he drew in a sharp breath when a hooked spike tore through his skin, lines of salt on his face cracked.
"Your life is open to me; there is nowhere to run. Your feet may move, but the endless track goes naught but in place." He sped up his pace. The roots beneath the thick mud caught his feet, grabbed them, dragged him down. His knees, and then his hands, and finally the very front of his face hit the mud. He quickly scrambled up, tugging his feet out from under the root. Suddenly, it seemed like the mud was thicker. It was harder to run.
Naruto swiped at his face. The mud on his hands was spread over his forehead, but he managed to get the majority of it away from his eyes. A warm, thick liquid dripped onto the skin just beneath his eye, and Naruto used a single finger to wipe that away, too. There were tears and mud and what he could only assume was blood running down his face in a dirty mask.
"Words will get you nowhere. Light will show nothing. Sound will only serve to distract. The only real truth is pain. Only pain is real. Life is only pain." Terrible, terrible, terrible, the chant went on. Terrible horrifying gruesome awful grotesque. He tripped again. The mud was thick like drying cement. He was running through cement! The realization scared him even more. His hands plunged into the hardening floor and he yanked them out, covered in solid muck. He scraped at each hand, trying his best to get rid of it all. And the whole time, his heart beat faster and faster.
"Pain and torment are the only way to live. Happiness is a false emotion. Comfort is an illusion. Love is fake, hate is real, pain is pleasure, fear is the self coming alive, sleep is merely a way to elude your emotions," the voice went on and on. His feet wouldn't move! He pulled, tugged at them with all his strength, but they could not be removed from the ground. His hands had crusts on them, cuffs from which a thick chain dangled, leading from the crumbling hard gloves on his hands to oblivion, away into the dark in which Naruto could see and not see. He stood, pulled, fell when he could move forward. As he fell, something, someone, grabbed at the collar of this shirt he did not know he wore.
The voice was suddenly right beside his ear, whispering in harsh tones.
"Pain and torment are the only way to live. Light shows nothing. Sound gives up no secrets. Pain is truth. Fear is life. Sleep is merely a way to evade your emotions. Sleep is merely a way to run. Sleep will not aid you. Dreams are never real. No tools found in the dark hours will be solid in the light. Sleep is merely an illusion. Sleep is merely a way to run." Hard, cold hands gripped his shoulders, pushing them as if the figure was trying to fold him up.
Ice-hands forced his arms to his sides, forced him down to the ground.
He felt ice-breath on his neck, in his ear.
"Do not run."
Pain. Blood and dirt. Immobility.
"Do not run."
Breath falling out of his body, not returning. Lungs crushed in the folded ribcage he now possessed. Head about to burst from the pressure on it.
Shoulders folded in like broken wings to his bloody sides.
"Do not run."
---
He woke once again feeling like there was a gigantic vice around his body: He couldn't breathe. His arms were sore. He couldn't think. His head was pounding. He couldn't move. His legs felt so heavy. He felt his face. No blood, no mud. Only tears.
Light outside the window.
---
Friday (lalala, time skip -heart-)
"Ino, I don't know what to do."
It was early Friday morning. Ino, Naruto, Gaara and the other few employees that had arrived already were taking down chairs and getting ready to open. The heat wasn't on yet, so the air was still frightfully cold.
"Don't know what to do about what, Sunshine?" Ino glanced at him. She wasn't at her full excitement levels yet, considering it was still early. Ino was more energetic once the sun was up.
"Sleep– or, more specifically, the non-sleep I've been getting." He took another chair down from its upside-down position on the table and put it on the floor.
"Non-sleep? What do you do at night?" She got a twisted look on her face. Ino was probably the only one who had any guesses as to which way Naruto was bent. "Er, never mind."
Naruto blushed. "What?! What are you thinking? Nothing like that. I just can't sleep. I'm too afraid."
"Of what?"
"...Let's just call them inner demons. One inner demon."
"You can't sleep 'cause some umbrella with eyeballs is dancing in your head?" She raised an eyebrow.
Naruto laughed. "What? No. It's a bit more complicated than that. Nightmares. Horrible stuff."
Gaara appeared behind them. "Nightmares?"
Naruto jumped. Gaara had scared him: the sudden appearance had reminded him of his dream two nights ago. "Yes. Nightmares. Vampires. Blood. Pain. Voices."
"So now you hear voices?" Ino stopped taking down chairs.
"No! It's not like that! It's like there's something haunting me in my sleep. Or hunting me. Or both or something! Except that that was the only time I've heard it speak. I mean honestly, I've been having these dreams every single freaking time I close my eyes and doze off, and I think I'm going to go insane!"
"Join the club," he heard Gaara mutter. Then he spoke in a louder voice directly to Naruto. "Listen. I didn't used to sleep much for what seems to be the same reasons. Every time I fell asleep, something horrible would happen to me in my head. I went to see a therapist and he prescribed some pills. Now I sleep fine."
Naruto got uncomfortable whenever pills were mentioned, simply because he didn't like swallowing food or anything whole. The idea of a tablet dissolving in his stomach or some sort of liquid going all around his body creeped him out.
"Um...I don't exactly like pills."
Gaara shrugged. "Whatever. They worked for me. I'm a regular functioning adult now that I get my eight hours every night." He went back to taking down chairs, leaving Naruto and Ino alone on their side of the restaurant.
Ino sat on a table, her feet on a chair. She leaned on her hands and looked pointedly at Naruto.
"So. What're you going to do?"
Naruto let out a heaving sigh.
"Take up drinking, I suppose."
---
Business was slow at the Title Page that evening. Naruto had arrived early after stopping in quickly at his house to feed Freud simply because he hadn't had a chance yet to call anybody to re-upholster the couch and then rushed off to the back corners of the employee quarters, which basically belonged to him and some other mysterious person that Naruto'd never met. He/she wasn't there when Naruto got there two hours early that Friday, either. When asked, Shikamaru simply said that Naruto's co-worker was only a part-timer who worker a mere twenty-eight hours a week as opposed to the raging forty-two Naruto worked.
"That's so lame. I'm the only major employee?"
"I get paid, too."
Naruto leaned over the counter, gesturing wildly with his hand. "Yeah, but you own the place. Of course you're gonna get money. I get, like, fifteen dollars an hour. That's seventy-five dollars a day, four-hundred and fifty dollars a week, nine-hundred a pay period. After rent, I have about half of one pay period's cash left. I pay rent once a month and have two pay periods in that month. I usually deposit around a quarter to a half of the second pay period into my bank account, because, as part of the starving artist stereotype, I might at any minute undergo some life-threatening danger and need cash to fall back on."
"You think too much about this."
"No, I don't. Anyways, all in all, I have about half the pay I'd get if I didn't spend a dime. About two hundred of the remaining thousand for that month is spent on groceries, another hundred-fifty on art materials, another hundred on essentials like toothpaste and shampoo and clothing, another hundred-fifty on electricity and plumbing, fifty a month for music, and maybe fifty a month on transportation, and that's only because I use public transport. That means that after all reductions, I have about three-hundred dollars left for other things. That gets used on books and library fines and cat food and notebooks and magazines and lightbulbs and a million other little things I buy on a whim. That is why I deposit half of one paycheck. And that is why I'm–"
"No."
"No what?"
"I know what you're going to say. And despite how heart-breaking your story may sound, as much as you might sound like the strapped-for-cash guy on the street corner, I'm not raising your pay. You sound like you're doing just fine with what you've got: savings, a lot from what it sounds like."
"But–"
"NO."
"Not even an extra dollar an hour? An extra five dollars a day?"
"That's thirty dollars a week and sixty a pay period. Seventy dollars I could use on renovations and bills."
"Ugh. I go and do math in my head and think and think and think of how to present this to you and none of it's appreciated!" He threw his arms up in exasperation. "Why do I even bother?"
"No idea, Naruto."
"It was a rhetorical question, Shika."
"I know."
"Gah, what am I going to do with you?"
---
It had started raining by the time Naruto left the store. Shikamaru, for once, had been conscious enough to lock up, so Naruto had no extra work. He didn't have an umbrella though, so he sprinted to the cover of the bus terminal.
Unfortunately, wind can be a bitch when it feels like it. Naruto was pelted with raindrops that appeared to attack him in large groups and which were spurred on by the howling wind.
"Stop encouraging them, you stupid air waves," Naruto ranted at the sky. "It's not like they're doing me any good. I don't even have window boxes!" He pulled his jacket tight. The wind was whipping at his nose and ears, which were slowly going numb. Occasionally, Naruto would reach up, rub his nose vigorously to get some feeling back in it, and then let his hands retreat back into his pockets. A few minutes later he would repeat the process, going for his ears.
His hair was soaked by the time the bus arrived, and he garnered a few sympathetic looks from fellow passengers with his soggy head.
His reflection in the dark glass surprised him. I look like a freaking sheepdog, he thought bitterly. No wonder people were shooting me those glances. You can't even tell if I have eyes!
He almost fell asleep on the bus, but his hair kept sticking to his face and getting up his nose when he started to snore. The effect was most disgruntling.
It was nearing midnight when he reached home, and only then did he get the ingenious idea to ask Sasuke to pick up the book he'd never gotten for him and bring it the following day. It was late, he supposed, but hadn't Sasuke called him pretty late at night before? The phone rang exactly three times before the disconcerting answering machine message played. Naruto left a short message with his request, promising to reimburse him, and then dragged his sorry self off to bed. However, sleep was very hard to come by. Naruto was afraid to close his eyes, so he opened a book instead.
He failed, though, in his endeavors to elude sleep. His eyes refused to keep open, and Naruto debated several times whether or not pinning them open with clothes pins was a good idea. By two o'clock he was forced to close the book and turn off the light.
The cycle began again.
File continued in 1.5 (Chat Noir)
---
Notes:
That dream with all the bolded parts of speech is part of a true dream I have had before, and I woke up almost not breathing from it I was so terrified. I've been having a...um, well, a hard time sleeping lately, so, as you can see, I go and write when my eyes should be closed. AND: "Medianoches" means "midnight" in Spanish. AND: The poem in chapters one and two is Der Schwan– The Swan– by the famous German author Rainer Maria Rilke. (Just don't wanna get sued, you see.) AND: forty-two hours really isn't that much...seven hours a day-- less than the average eight-hour day. And no over-time. AND: the "umbrella with eyeballs" comment made by Ino refers to the legend that after either 100 or 1000 years (I forget which) an object gains it's own soul or becomes haunted or something... AND: Am I the only one who thinks this focuses too much on sleep??
Plus: As stated at the beginning, I'm accepting character profiles (of the Naruto cast) that may or may not appear! Give me your crazy, your elderly, and I will build a nation! Er, that's not how it goes, but...