Wind-Up Dolls
Summary: A fairy boy and a nothing girl find each other. AU Homeless SasuSaku
Songs listened to: "Who Wants to Live Forever" by Breaking Benjamin and "Drones" by Jed Whedon and The Willing.
Sasuke was supposed to be born a bird or a fairy or an angel, he thinks. But he can't get off the ground. He picks the wings off butterflies and rubs their magic dust on his arms.
Then later he cries because the butterflies are dead but he isn't any closer to heaven.
I don't expect you to understand.
Sasuke
When Sasuke wakes up, it's because Itachi's stupid fish-obsessed friend, Kisame is pounding on the door before it's even sunrise. He doesn't have the consideration to keep a beat, when that Sasuke could sleep through. Instead it's an inconsistent bamph-buh-bam-bamph! And even a deflating feather pillow isn't enough to drown out the noise.
"Shut up!" Sasuke calls, pressing his fists to his eyeballs, "I'll be out in a minute, god damn it!"
After the banging comes to a rest, he lies in the dim mustiness of his pull-out bed for just a moment, blinking up at the dust specks swarming in the light of the bedside lamp he forgot to turn off in his exhaustion the night before. He still has his costume on, and at this point the leotard is riding up in all the wrong places.
He groans quietly to himself and claws at his sheets until he's in a sitting position, and then he just listens to the sound of his own breathing for awhile.
Bamph-bamph-buh-bam!
"Hey! Sasuke!" Kisame calls through the door, rapping on it with his knuckles in a rhythmic fashion, "Your loving uncle requests an audience!"
Sasuke rolls his eyes under his uncomfortably lengthy black fringe. When was the last time he got his hair cut? Karin used to do that for him. Ugh, Karin. He fingers the slightly oily ends as if contemplating what to do with them before just violently pushing it all away from his face so he can at least see.
He rips the door open and it bangs against the foot of the Murphy bed with a worrisome shudder, a habit he knows he should get rid of, judging by the large crack in the wooden frame. Kisame, looking bizarre and annoying as usual checks him over with a smirk.
"Have you started private performances in your trailer, Sasuke? Or just advertising them to lure innocent virgins into your- AGH!"
Sasuke slams the door in Kisame's face, tugs at the leotard in disgust, and gets to work on putting on something that doesn't pinch so awfully in the groin-area.
Madara is a foolish old man. The type who has tales to tell and secrets to share but can barely contain himself in his own wicked enthusiasm. Sasuke knows his uncle has enough baggage to hold over his head that he could plant his career six feet into the earth, but he also knows that as long as he does whatever the old man says, he won't have to suffer it.
So the usually impassive and unaffectionate Sasuke plants a kiss on his uncle's papery white cheek in greeting, lowers himself into a rickety, sagging chair, and settles his gaze on the blissfully puffing stick of incense resting on the cherry wood desk. It smells of ginger and tingles in his nostrils.
"Is Karin's replacement functioning well enough for you?" Madara asks, tapping his long-veined nails on the wood in an absentminded rhythm. He flicks through a pile of documents that say a lot without saying anything and pulls out a black and white headshot of the girl that grabs his hands long enough to flip him into the air. Her name is scribbled across the back of the picture in blue permanent marker. Ino Yamanaka.
"She is perfectly adequate," Sasuke confirms, eyes roaming the photograph for faults. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl could be a model or an actress, her skin flawless and her personality loud-mouthed and sassy enough for show business. She'd like to be an acrobat, but for a reason he can't fathom, she immediately jumped at the chance to be Sasuke's barely noticed assistant. She stands and smiles in her sparkling leotard until Sasuke reaches for her hands, and then she sends him flying. This is not her calling.
"And Itachi...he is well?" asks Madara with a grin of twisted lips. Sasuke is the old man's favorite and he knows this. Madara did not have to bargain for Itachi. He simply received.
Sakura
In this town, the grass is white. Bristly. But still grass. It's still winter and the air is still cold, but it doesn't snow here in Suna. In this city, she can sleep on the subway train during the daytime and wander aimlessly at night. It suits her fine.
She's still not sure if she's made a mistake, leaving behind the familiarity of Oto. Sometimes something inside her likes to whisper over and over that Naruto is gonegonegone and it's her fault. She gets scared and can't sleep for awhile and then she walks dreamily through the park for days at a time until she passes out from exhaustion. When the patrolmen find her, they leave her battered and bruised. Sometimes this gives her the motivation she needs to keep on going.
She's in Suna three weeks before she decides to move on to greener pastures. She's about to descend into the bowels of the city, get on that tram one final time and vanish when she sees him. She's walking past a newsstand and she thinks maybepossibly it's Sai she sees vending today's paper. (It's a Sunday, the headline states, and she notes it absent mindedly.) He doesn't even really look like him, but he has the same slanted eyes and loveless expression that feels a little bit like home.
There's a pile of flyers that no one is bothering to spare a glance at, just lying there on the table. They look just like the one she keeps in her back pocket, the sheet of water-warped paper that weighs greater than lead. But the dates and location are different. She traces the curve of the flying stranger's spine with her little finger and whispers a Thank you.
She knows her destination now. The circus has followed her here, maybe for some reason like destiny or fate, and this may be a pipe-dream but does she have anything left to lose?
MISS MARY MACK, MACK, MACK
ALL DRESSED IN BLACK, BLACK, BLACK
It smells like popcorn and musty hay. Like elephant droppings and smoke and bubbling grease traps that spawn the fried food that fathers try to juggle over their children's screaming heads. The white bristled grass crunches beneath Sakura's shoes and her stomach moans and bubbles with every hotdog on a stick she passes while the people around her gawk and glare at her, unsure if she's part of the attraction or if they should be wary.
She misses her pink wig. She wishes she could just pull it on and slink in through the back door with the help and not be looked at. She'd be like an undercover agent, wading through pools of strangers in disguise until she found her prize waiting for her, gleaming with welcome.
WITH SILVER BUTTONS, BUTTONS, BUTTONS
ALL DOWN HER BACK, BACK, BACK
She waits in line with the mothers hugging babies and the lovers linking little fingers, who wrinkle their noses and cover their faces with their hands and scarves because maybe she smells bad or maybe people are just strange. When she gets the front of the line, she drops on the counter three nickels and a penny and the crumpled, ruined flyer she recovered from the alleyway when she decided she didn't want to be dead.
The person working the ticket booth seems tired and bored and reluctant. He has pineapple hair and it makes her smile just a little bit. Both his ears are pierced too, and she finds that to be a little bit relieving because she can't remember which ear is supposed to be the gay one. He looks over her items in a daze of incomprehension before he blinks himself awake.
SHE ASKED HER MOTHER, MOTHER, MOTHER
FOR FIFTY CENTS, CENTS, CENTS
"Tickets are eleven dollars. Not...sixteen cents," he says pushing the penny back toward her with his index finger. He looks up at her grubby, wind-blistered face and doesn't even flinch. He just sort of contemplates her a little bit.
"I want to see the fairy boy fly," she rasps out through reluctant vocal chords. She can't remember the last time she spoke. Sometimes she whispers to herself, but that's only when it gets so quiet that she's not sure if she's real person or a solitary dot of light floating in solid darkness. Then patrolmen come around and...
The pineapple-headed boy smirks a little bit and rests his chin in his palms, "So does everybody else here. And they can pay."
TO SEE THE ELEPHANT, ELEPHANT, ELEPHANT
JUMP OVER THE FENCE, FENCE, FENCE
She fishes through her pockets, hoping that maybe she's had a ten dollar bill floating around for the past three weeks and hasn't noticed it yet. She only comes up with a little bit of lint that catches on her bitten hangnails.
"Please?" she asks. Not pleading or begging. Just asking because she can't do anything else. And the ticket-taking man just sighs and rolls his eyes. And maybe because this is something like destiny or fate or maybe because this man can't think of a reason not to, he hands her a ticket with something like a smile. She doesn't thank him because her brain is whirring and she's confused because these underworld creatures that run this circus think she's a human being.
She shows her ticket to a round-faced boy with swirls tattooed on his cheeks and enters the giant, looming tent. The temperature change causes an involuntary shiver to run down her spine, and it continues to reverberate through her fingers and toes as she finds her seat somewhere near the back.
IT JUMPED SO HIGH, HIGH, HIGH
IT TOUCHED THE SKY, SKY, SKY
Soon a redheaded man, studded with gleaming metal piercings and shrouded in a voluminous, billowing cloak of black is stepping out of the shadows and into the spotlight. He smiles something sinister and the tingles continue.
"Ladies and gentlemen!"
A white-blonde man who looks somehow familiar even from this distance swallows swords like magic. A flock of acrobats glides like swans bathed in glitter, lacing fingers and parting lips to grin with blinding pearlescent teeth, the balls of their feet brushing and soothing the spines and ribs of their partners.
The elephants bow and scrape and behave like gentlemen, while the tigers prowl and roar and threaten like only professionals can.
Her heart catches in her throat when she the thinks she sees him. But no. He's so close, but he's not him. This man is a fire dancer. The way he twists his limbs around and through the flaming hoops, kicking and spinning and tangling...she feels as though she's in the presence of gods. Her fingertips twitch and itch to touch and stroke and learn through feeling, so she sits on her hands and grins like a child.
The lights dim and the crowd's single bodied undulating mass quiets its roar and settles into a whisper that sounds like the fire dancer's floor-brushing steps. The spotlight flickers to life and suddenly she's seeing him. Her fairy boy.
AND DIDN'T COME BACK, BACK, BACK
'TIL THE FOURTH OF JULY, JULY, JULY!
Sasuke
When he strolls back to his trailer at the end of a long day, he is not alone. He opens his trailer door and there is a girl curled up on the floor in front of the cabinet that holds his hide-a-bed. She is long and frail and stringy-haired and she reminds him of his mother in the times when he wouldn't look at her.
"Hello," Sasuke greets her, standing in the doorway, waiting for something to happen. Her knees are pulled up to her chest and her clothes-pin arms seem to be the only thing holding her body from falling into tiny little pieces. He feels like maybe if he moves, her limbs will collapse.
She sticks her thumb to her mouth and gnaws on the end of the nail in the next few unsure moments. Then she murmurs into the bitten flesh at the quick, "Hello. Sorry. Hello."
"Hello," he says again. And then she stands up and her bones don't crumble into a pile at his feet, so then he feels like it's safe to add, "I'm Sasuke."
She takes a step and a half forward, and the fluorescent light bulbs of the street lamps outside illuminate her face the slightest little bit. He isn't sure if she has eyes. "Sakura."
His older brother picks him up by his underarms. He's big and strong and almost everything Sasuke wishes he could be. But Itachi is no bird.
"How's the view, little brother?"
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto
A/N: Hey, guys. I'm really sorry about the huge delay! I've been so freaking busy these past few weeks it's like there's not even breathing room. I stayed up after midnight the past two nights so that I could write this up since I had a lot of ideas saved up from daydreaming sessions during my English Comp lectures.
I'm not going to tell you guys what you should expect from me, because like a few of you might have figured out by now, I'm a mother trucking liar. (:
Please review! I really really appreciate it!
-MT
