Dear Comrade V/V
Where's Itachi, Sasuke asked. The unprecedented question has prompted Kakashi to locate the older Uchiha brother.
He hadn't expected Sasuke to already be here.
The stained glass windows of the family chapel reflect off Itachi's long hair. Hardly anybody used to frequent this chapel – it came with the house, for a time it served as a garden shed, certainly Mikoto and Fugaku have never been interested in it – but Itachi lately has taken to coming here.
He's facing the altar, his back to Sasuke.
"You know," Sasuke says lightly, "Genesis establishes breath as the beginning of life. If she didn't want me, she could've just aborted me."
"That would've been the pragmatic solution," Itachi agrees, turning to offer Sasuke his profile.
They look astonishingly alike, both wearing subtly altered versions of Mikoto's face. Whatever people whisper about Sasuke's paternity, nobody could ever question that he's Itachi's brother.
"Mmh," Sasuke says lightly, his fingers trailing along the back of a pew. It's an unnatural movement, not something Sasuke would normally do. Itachi's eyes follow it with something almost like resignation. "But in the end you're the one who raised me. Ne, Itachi-niisan."
Itachi turns to face him at last, and a change comes over him. His face was set to dismiss, rather with scorn, with this sad disgust that he's been trying to direct at Sasuke for years, but the expression falls away. Time seems to fall away, because Sasuke's smiling at him. It's an impossible smile: a small, shy but perfectly comfortable smile, his eyes above it huge and full of this complete trust.
It's the smile that was Sasuke's and Itachi's, before Orochimaru.
Kakashi wouldn't have thought it was still hiding under Sasuke's older, harsher features, would have thought Sasuke had killed it years ago. He does know that Sasuke's never given it to Orochimaru, for all Orochimaru's wanted very badly to have it.
And so Itachi meant to turn to Sasuke with scepticism, but is caught in the smile like in a memory.
"What brings you here?" Itachi asks.
"You."
"And what is it that you want with me, Sasuke?"
Sasuke shrugs, still smiling. "Shinjitai."
"Usotsuki. Kami-sama o?" Itachi seems only peripherally to notice that he's been drawn back into the language of childhood. Sasuke isn't sentimental about Japan, but Japanese is still the language he dreams in. How Itachi feels about it, Kakashi's never been certain: he spoke Japanese with Sasuke before Orochimaru, when Sasuke balked at having to learn yet another language, but never with anyone else.
"Iie." Sasuke tils his head, bird-like and so impossibly young. "Itachi-niisan dake o shinjitai."
"I had assumed," Itachi says dryly – too dryly, self-consciously dryly – never quite looking away from Sasuke, "that you wished to be free of me."
Sasuke takes a few steps closer. "How could I be? I'm what you've made me."
"The way one hears it, it's Orochimaru who's made you."
"The way one hears it, God is dead."
Itachi tilts his head, in just the same way Sasuke did earlier. "Aren't you callously disregarding that shifter beast of yours?"
The smile returns to Sasuke, warmer and brighter. His eyes crinkle a bit, slanting deeper than usual. He exudes a brittle, ethereal beauty, like a fairy caught in the hands of a child prepared to tear its wings. "Long before I met Naruto, you were already so deep inside me."
"That's one way of looking at it."
"Mmh." He takes that last step closer, into Itachi's space. Close enough to share body heat, for all they're both cold, the sort of people who wear jackets in summer.
He puts a hand on Itachi's arm, fingers closing around Itachi's wrist in the exact grip they had when Sasuke was eight. Kakashi, still hidden in the shadows just inside the doorway, finds himself oddly breathless. Sasuke hasn't touched Itachi in eight years.
In fact, Kakashi's fairly certain nobody's touched Itachi in eight years.
Sasuke does it now as though it's easy, as though he never stopped.
For some reason, Kakashi remembers the evening when he first slept with Sasuke. Standing in the sleet outside the hotel, Sasuke huddled close under Kakashi's coat. How Sasuke looked up at him with that shining belief, the warmth that came when Sasuke put his hand on Kakashi's chest and then didn't dissipate – the sudden return of hope, as if the world had been made new, an impossible night-time dawn.
Sasuke looks at Itachi now with the love of a child who still has all his first teeth and all his chances, who's never really lost anything and so doesn't truly believe that he could, and touches him accordingly, as if it's his birthright.
For a long time, in the rainbow light under the stained glass windows, he touches Itachi innocently and ardently, just the way he did when he was little. And then – the way his hands move over Itachi doesn't change, the way Sasuke leans into him and looks up at him doesn't change, but Sasuke's face twists, just subtly, and the scene is blatantly, overwhelmingly sexual.
Itachi, who never touches people, who barely deigns to touch the ground he walks on, floating through life refusing to make contact with it, shudders away. He pushes at Sasuke with the staccato violence of someone not used to falling back on physical force.
Sasuke's hip hits the altar, he falls to his knees, clinging to the hem of Itachi's shirt, Itachi's belt. Breathless, open-mouthed, he stares up at Itachi with the hungry eyes of a ghost child.
"What do you imagine you're doing?" Itachi demands.
"I'm kneeling in a church," Sasuke points out.
"You're depraved."
"That's what you wanted, isn't it?" Sasuke smiles that wholesome, innocent smile of a lost childhood, even as his hand ghosts over Itachi's crotch. "You loved me. You couldn't stop yourself. So you set out to make me into something cracked and dirty, something nobody could love, so you'd be cured of your sin."
Itachi doesn't answer. As so often, that is an answer.
"But it didn't work," Sasuke says, almost kindly. "I've fallen so low, I'm as filthy as you could've ever dreamt, and yet you still want me. So you just made it worse, it just made you sinful too, that you should love me even now."
"You're dirt."
"Yes," Sasuke says. "And you want to roll in me."
Itachi reaches down and grabs Sasuke's chin, pulling him to his feet by the grip. Still Sasuke smiles that awful, lost smile.
"You were always a coward," Sasuke says. "You always needed someone else to take action, so you could go along but blame them in your heart. It wasn't even your own idea to get rid of me." He winds his arms around Itachi's neck. "And you couldn't have reached for what you wanted, you couldn't have born it." The corner of his mouth quirks, he looks more like himself. "You're so afraid of being weak, it's made you weak." He touches Itachi's forehead, chin, cheek, cheek, making the sign of the cross. "But here we are. It's time we put all our sins on my head, and I'll carry them into the desert."
He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites – all their sins – and put them on the goat's head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place; and the man shall release it in the wilderness.
Itachi puts an admonishing hand on Sasuke's head, angled to push him away. But Sasuke's done being pushed around.
"Very soon, it'll be time for you to release me into the wilderness."
He leans up and kisses Itachi on the mouth.
xxxxx
That night Sasuke calls Kakashi, tells him, Be late tomorrow, and then hangs up. His voice is sleepy, breathy: childish. It leaves no room for argument.
Next morning Kakashi gets a call about a massive exorcism. It was duly predicted, but seems to have grown bigger.
"Itachi's gone," Mikoto tells him. "He disappeared yesterday. Hanabi and Neji haven't returned yet, and Kimimarou appears to have gone nova."
"Really," Kakashi says.
"Indeed. Orochimaru had to go himself."
"Really," Kakashi says again. "He went with Sasuke alone, then?"
"Yes. And looking at the latest numbers, this is very much a team effort. You should hurry."
"Maa, maa. I'll get there eventually."
About an hour late, he arrives at the scene. The sky's still storm-coloured, darkness like clouds and afterimages of angel blades striking through them like lightning. It must've been one of the bigger exorcisms of the decade.
It's about to get bigger: just before the seal closes entirely, Sasuke reaches out and rips the sky open.
Gabriel tears out to Kakashi so sharply, it feels like a flaying. Around him the world has gone dark.
He thinks idly, misquoting, that today is the day when Orochimaru will finally learn why storms are named after people.
Exhaustion has cracked open Orochimaru's face, and emotions play quickly across it: despairing fury, pride, resignation. Something you might call love.
This was already a major exorcism, Sasuke's seal vibrating and over-stimulated – and Sasuke now has torn open every ward, clearly aiming to overload the seal. It's a very sophisticated lock, able to last through the power necessary for exorcising even a devil. But two devils, three… it will break now, or Sasuke will be eaten alive by the evil.
Kakashi could step in. Unlike Orochimaru and Sasuke, he's still fresh, and could seal the torn wards.
He does nothing. All his life, he's failed Sasuke by not taking action – he's not going to fail him now by suddenly interfering.
The world goes black and white, angelic lights in a sudden night.
Uriel roars out of Sasuke: a final and glorious show of power from the angel to whom has been entrusted the vengeance of the Lord.
As long as there's a demonic threat, the seal cannot close. And no seal in the world could withstand this magnitude of power. Very, very few exorcists could: this is nova level power, a suicidal grasp at magic beyond what a human being can wield.
When the darkness clears, Sasuke's outlines are hazy. He seems to flicker in and out of existence every time Kakashi blinks, teetering on the very edge of existence.
The seal has ripped open, and has probably ripped Sasuke's soul along with it – Kakashi's surprised to meet Sasuke's eyes and see recognition, any sort of human intelligence or personhood.
Of course, he thinks. Of course Sasuke's personal thirst for vengeance would trump Uriel's destiny as divine avenger.
There's a humming in his ears, even though Gabriel has receded.
Sasuke turns on Orochimaru, and can speak after all. His voice cracks into almost song, echoed by the heavenly choir, but he's still tone-deaf, still doesn't have much of a singing voice.
Orochimaru raises a hand, brushes Sasuke's face, and Sasuke catches it. Holds it to his cheek, and at the contact Orochimaru's fingers start to char.
They smile at each other, the perfectly mirrored smiles of close family, of people who've lived with each other and in each other.
Orochimaru says something Kakashi doesn't catch, and Sasuke nods. "Of course I understood. Like you must understand why I had to unseal myself, no matter the cost."
"To rather die standing than live on your knees – I confess, I never grasped that sentiment."
"That's where you went wrong."
"Yes," Orochimaru says slowly, lifting his free hand to Sasuke's other cheek. "That's where I failed with you. I could've made you so perfect, Shinigami-chan, if only you'd been willing to bend a little."
"If I bent, I'd have broken."
"Ah, perhaps. Well, I suppose we shall never know, now." He bends forward, kisses Sasuke's forehead, and his lips come away ashy. "You were my best, Shinigami-chan. I always knew that you were for me."
Sasuke bares his teeth. "Did you want to die by my hand, then?"
"Truthfully, I never wanted to die at all. But I suppose if I have to, you're my perfect end."
Sasuke says something in Japanese, sayonara and then something Kakashi can't follow.
Orochimaru burns so bright, Kakashi thinks he's been struck blind. When he can see again, there's nothing left.
"Right then," Sasuke says tonelessly.
It's clearly a struggle for him to rein in the power raging through him, and light keeps breaking through his skin, cutting through his humanity.
He looks sad, as if Orochimaru's death had to happen the same way cutting of a gangrened limb has to happen. You live, it's the only way you can live, but it hurts and it makes you smaller.
It's not something you get over.
"Let's go, chibi-chan," Kakashi says. He couldn't say why he reverts to the ridiculous nickname, something he hasn't called Sasuke in ten years, and rarely even then.
But Sasuke's mouth twitches into some approximation of a smile. "Let's."
xxxxx
"You can let me off here," Sasuke says.
For two hours of driving, he hasn't said a word. Has kept his eyes closed, mostly, and when they've blinked open they've been red and looking at nothing Kakashi can see. But Sasuke seems steadier now, more normal. He's got a little bit of a nosebleed, which he keeps wiping on his sleeve.
Mikoto never did manage to train him out of that filthy habit, he's always wiped his nose on his sleeves, sometimes even with his fingers.
Orochimaru, of course, liked to lick it. So did Itachi, once – in some demented childhood game Kakashi didn't understand, wrestling Sasuke down on the sofa cushions and licking the snot from his cheek while Sasuke gasped and squealed with laughter and protest.
But it's no good thinking about Itachi and Sasuke.
Sasuke never mentioned seeing Itachi in the family chapel, and Kakashi's not going to bring it up.
He stops the car outside the train station. "Are you going north?"
Sasuke nods.
If I'm not with you Sunday, Sasuke told Naruto, it'll be because I'm dead.
Naruto will be good for him, Kakashi thinks. Sasuke could use some of that boundless, relentless joie de vivre – and Naruto, by all reports, could use someone to rein him in and make him take a long hard look at himself.
"He'll be happy," Kakashi says. "Just don't kill Gaara."
Sasuke sniffs at him.
Kakashi makes a disarming gesture, not quite ruffling Sasuke's hair. "I know it'll seem like a good idea at the time, but you might quickly find yourself regretting it."
"Hn."
"Well, then."
"You can come if you like, you know."
Kakashi blinks, wordless with how touched he is. "I'd like to." He kisses the side of Sasuke's face, feels the skin crackling with heat and light under his lips. "But I don't think it'd be a good idea."
"Mmh." Sasuke steps out of the car, and Kakashi goes with him to the ticket machines. Probably, as usual, Sasuke doesn't have any money. He could live in opulence if he wanted – there's very little Orochimaru would deny him in the way of worldly luxuries, not that Sasuke's ever been interested in that – but he hardly ever has any cash. Like a spoilt child, he's given things but never given the opportunity to buy things for himself.
They're turning towards the platforms, Sasuke stuffing the ticket into the pocket of his hoodie, when they run into Mikoto.
That relentless savoir faire seems finally to have left her. "Sasuke," she says, without greeting.
Sasuke tilts his head, looking at her. He doesn't reply, and Kakashi isn't sure whether it's because he can't hear her or can't speak, or just chooses to ignore her. His skin is slowly growing translucent again, lit up as a lamp shade.
"Am I to understand that you've murdered Orochimaru?"
Sasuke's nosebleed grows heavier. He wipes at it with his hand, the blood so hot it smells like boiling copper. The dirt under his nails stand out in astonishing contrast against the star-white light permeating his fingers.
"You shouldn't talk to me," he says.
"I would've liked to be spared the need," Mikoto agrees. "However as things stand, I find myself compelled to –"
Her words are cut off sharply. Sasuke flicks his fingers, and she burns. So quickly, so hotly, there's no time to scream before she's erased from existence.
Sasuke's fingers are burning, a little. He puts them in his mouth and sucks on them, putting the fires out.
Kakashi hands him a handkerchief. "You killed your mother," he observes.
Sasuke shrugs. "She made me feel worse."
"Do you feel better now?"
Sasuke's mouth quirks, twists. "I don't feel worse anymore."
xxxxx
A snowflake catches on the tip of Gaara's nose, burns against it for a moment, then melts down the side of his nostril.
Something's happened, something to do with Sasuke: Naruto's happy. Naruto's been doing much better ever since Sasuke promised him, Sunday. Gaara hasn't commented.
He's got nothing to say, and anyway it's not what he says that matters to Naruto.
Gaara never used to understand Kushina. He's always liked her, but it frustrated him so much that she'd let Minato get away with shit – with Yui in particular.
But he understands it now. Naruto's love for Sasuke is stronger than anything Gaara himself has ever felt or expects he ever will feel, and so is Naruto's misery at Sasuke's absence, and by extension Gaara's misery.
Naruto wants better for Gaara, Gaara knows that. But it's only for happy people that generosity comes easily, it's only happy people who have anything left to give away for free. Without Sasuke, Naruto barely manages to survive. He puts on an all right front, but Gaara sees through that now, clearer than he probably ever wanted to, and knows that Naruto's barely making it through. There's no room for taking care of Gaara, who anyway has always preferred to take care of himself.
He knows that if Naruto had to choose between on the one hand having a perfect life, filled with love and accomplishments and meaningful work, but not having Sasuke, and on the other hand losing literally everyone he ever has or ever could care for, all his ambitions going to waste, but having Sasuke present in his life in any capacity at all – he'd choose Sasuke, because without Sasuke all the rest is meaningless.
To Gaara's left, Asuma looks at his phone and then looks up at Gaara with some trepidation.
"Speak."
Asuma touches his cap in a sloppy salute. "Uchiha's early. He'll be at Lilytown about seven thirty."
"I see." Gaara makes a sharp gesture, fingers twitching involuntarily into a fist, cutting Asuma off before he can speak again. "I'll get him myself."
Asuma obviously wants to question him, but Asuma's no fool: Asuma doesn't dare.
So for the second time this endless winter, Gaara smells exorcist and spots Sasuke Uchiha. All the same the scene is very different: Sasuke walks out of the train station, clearly regretting having forgotten his down jacket, his skin crackling and alight with out of control power that makes Gaara want to sneeze, tickling Shukaku's jaw and making his pelt stand on end.
There are no demons here, no threat to Sasuke, and yet his eyes are red.
But all of these considerations disappear. Sasuke's smell hits him – starfire and tea and underwashed hair – and Gaara's instinct is to…to… he can hardly even think it: to take Sasuke in his arms, or something equally horrific and absurd.
Shukaku trashes around inside him, pulled this way and that, pulled almost apart, between his own urge to kill Sasuke and Kyuubi's overwhelming desire to keep Sasuke for his own.
Gratifyingly, Sasuke doesn't seem very happy to see him.
It's silly, because the only reason he should be unhappy is jealousy, and the idea of Sasuke being jealous of him is completely absurd: Gaara never wanted to know that Kyuubi wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice every human being on earth, shifter or not, for Sasuke, and consider it a cheap trade. He never wanted to know that Naruto would let him.
All the same Gaara finds himself unwinding his enormous woollen scarf and holding it out towards Sasuke, Naruto's unbearable tenderness clenching his heart like the talons of a predator bird.
Sasuke gives him an odd look, as well he might, but gets in the car.
With the doors closed around them, the air confined to the jeep, Gaara almost chokes on the smell of him. Angelfire glitters on Sasuke's skin, slipping through and then sinking back through his pores. That stench of holiness and purgatory fire: the smell of Sasuke's soul. Beyond that there's the smell of Sasuke's body, a dizzy smell of flesh and skin and hair. Dried blood crusts his nostrils, he's sweated a bit on the train, and Gaara has the vomit-inducing urge to lick him clean.
"What the hell are you doing?" Sasuke demands, and Gaara comes back to himself. To the realisation that he's staring, open-lipped, and straining towards Sasuke as far as the seatbelt will let him.
"Let's drive," he says, sitting back and looking sharply away from Sasuke.
Changing gears, his little finger brushes fleetingly against Sasuke's leg. It feels like moving your finger through a candle flame, like children do, just quickly, quickly so it doesn't quite have time to burn you, and somewhere deep in your stomach there's an urge, maybe you want it to burn.
Sasuke can hardly have felt the touch through his layers of clothing, but frowns at Gaara all the same. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"I wish I was," Gaara says through gritted teeth.
"Keep your paws off me."
And Gaara's just – had enough. He sees red and backhands Sasuke.
Then he crumbles forward over the steering wheel, Kyuubi howling at a deafening level inside his head. Sasuke's spitting teeth, his mouth a red ruin and his cheekbone cracked so badly, broken bone peaks through his skin.
Gaara's fist is gone. It incinerated on contact, his wrist ends in sooth and nothing.
He waits for Shukaku to heal it and it doesn't heal and it keeps not healing.
A true angel wound, he thinks, over the ringing in his ears and his sight whitening out. It'll never grow back, then.
He'd like to strangle Sasuke but that'd mean losing his other hand.
"Fucker," Sasuke says.
"Whore."
Sasuke's collected six or seven teeth in his palm, and now throws them out the window. He lifts an eyebrow. "What, do you need two hands to drive? Let's go."
"Che." But Sasuke has a point. Gaara shakes off the nausea, regains control of the car. After a while he says, feels himself oddly and reluctantly compelled to say, "It's Naruto. I don't feel this way. I don't want to feel this way."
"You're his mate," Sasuke says tonelessly. "Shouldn't you have fucked him out of it?"
Gaara hears himself make a strangled, hoarse sound not quite a laugh. "It doesn't work like that."
"From what I hear, that's exactly how a bond works."
Well, that's what Gaara heard too. He shrugs. "Naruto's Naruto. He's never been predictable."
He can see it in the glitter of Sasuke's eyes, smell it in the power coursing just under Sasuke's skin: Sasuke would like to kill him. The temptation must be tangible, a piece of meat held between the jaws of a starving man.
He supposes pyrrhic victories are still victories, at least to someone who's lost so much. Someone much like Gaara himself, in other words.
Sasuke has to know that very recently, before the seal broke, Gaara could've done whatever he liked with him. Not killed him, probably, Naruto would never have allowed that, but he could've hurt him, badly – Naruto's too far away to prevent it in time. Fucked him, too, if he decided it was worth it.
So they'd both like to go for each other's throats, but of course there's Naruto in between them. "We need a balance of terror," he says. Sasuke lifts an eyebrow, and Gaara would like very much to say something nasty about how Sasuke should be used to sharing, he's been shared so much. But it's time he set himself above that. For the first time in his life, he wishes Kakashi was here: someone who can make Sasuke see sense without getting completely caught in his gravity. "Regardless of who's the wife and who's the mistress, we're both in this, and we're not getting out."
With a shudder, he thinks how it'll be when they get back, when Naruto can finally get to Sasuke. There will be no shielding from that, no more than you can shield yourself from a nuclear explosion. It's going to be wrenching, fox claws shredding Gaara's soul, ripping through his intestines. They're going to fight and they're going to fuck, and Gaara's twitching with the sick anxiety of knowing he'll have to second-hand experience it all.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps he won't experience anything at all, because the sky above them darkens so abruptly, Gaara thinks for a second he's been struck blind.
Sasuke mutters something in Japanese, presumably a curse.
Gradually, with a vertiginous, sinking feeling filling him, Gaara lets the car slow down and then stop. He can't see to drive through this. Never once has he been nightblind, Shukaku seeing through any darkness, but now suddenly he's muddled, lost and helpless as a human.
"How many devils, Sasuke?"
"Too many."
"It's time for you to go," Gaara tells him. "We can't run from this."
Sasuke looks like someone who's been falling for so long, he'd forgotten he's going to hit the ground. But he remembers now.
"It's time for you to go," Gaara says again, building wall after wall through his mind. "He can't live without me, and if you wait – if we try to run, if you wait for him to get here – it'll be too late. He can live without you."
"Maybe," Sasuke says, and then stops for a while before he manages to continue. "No – but maybe he can."
He digs through his pockets for his phone, and for a black moment Gaara thinks he's going to call Naruto. That'll be the end of it, then, the end of them all.
Sasuke speaks abruptly, interrupting Kakashi's drawled greeting, "I loved you. It was never going to be enough, but I did. Just so you know."
He ends the call and breaks the phone in his hand.
Gaara understands. He never wanted to understand Sasuke, but he understands this. If Sasuke had heard Naruto's voice, he wouldn't have been able to walk away from it, and he has to.
"Sasuke."
For the first time in years and years, Sasuke smiles. "It's time for me to go."
He climbs out of the car, shedding the dirty parka, and walks up into Heaven, a pinprick of blinding light in the unnatural darkness.
Gaara has to blink, peer through his lashes, and so catches sight of the watch next to the steering wheel. That's
how he knows: 9.23 pm, Sasuke goes nova.
Kilometres down from him, Gaara feels his skin burn off, feels the edges of his soul curdle at the light.
Then there's no trace of Sasuke left in this world. He's gone where he was always going, to his grave in the sky.
9.25, Kyuubi eats Naruto's soul.
"And in the end," Gaara mutters aloud, clinging to the words as he builds his walls higher and higher against Kyuubi's beastmad rage, the only form of suicide Naruto could indulge in without taking Gaara with him, "in the end we were all just human, drunk on the idea that love, only love, could heal or brokenness."
xxxxx
