Prompt: Be somebody, by Thousand foot krutch.
m.
The blinds keep most of the bright sunlight from glaring at his bed ridden form and frying his brain like a laser beam, but some of it penitrates through and falls to the ground like reflections from plexiglass. Motes of air and dust dance in those dull bars, atomic sized particles cartwheeling like circus animals in space, trapped in the motion.
Sasuke folds his arm over his eyes like as if the action itself would separate him from the world and its complications. Keeping his eyes shut, he counts backwards till the numbers blur in a whirl smoke in his numb mind and he feels alienated from his own body, like an extraterrestrial residing in a foreign host. His prosthetic arm throbs with the pulse of his heart, arteries humming in a constant peristaltic hum, nerve endings tied in a jumble knot of high-wired stress and the strange urge to move. To do something, anything, to busy his hands and mind.
He ponders at the peculiarity of human nature, of his own selfishness, and how he has always somehow seen her empathy as a superiority over his self, how even when he saw her too bright and too eager to burn her light in his clouded world, he could not let her go. Selfishly, he admits his weakness, and wonder if this weakness comes from a deficit of character. But Sasuke is an Uchiha, and he has memories of his clan strumming deep inside his heart, of the silent love that had spiraled the streets of the Uchiha district like a soft wafting breeze on a quiet, summer night and he thinks that maybe it's okay to be a little selfish sometimes. He admits to the desolation he has felt, admits to never quite feeling worthy of a life where blood doesn't bleed on pavements and splatter of side walks and where the rooms aren't cramped and oxygen deprived and the ceiling isn't too low to impose on his senses, and the windows open to a constant back yard and not dusty streets of a new city every day; he is an Uchiha, his spine is as stiff as a rod and his pride is the only thing he think he has left, but he is human, breakable so. And there's so much he can do or say or believe till he curls up inside his mind and decides to remain there forever.
The cold shower he takes washes away the sand from his hair, but the ruminations cling to him like a second skin and he thinks he can still feel some of them stuck in his cuticles. Black shirt over white skin, he feels like a bullseye for a tornado to come crashing down, a stranger in stranger land. Suna is warm, too warm for his rain - trained senses and heart and he thinks he can hear his soul rattling inside him with nothing to hold on to. It takes effort to gulps down the urge to lurch.
The kage tower stands like a black pillar in the glare of the sun that sparks behind it. Sasuke bends his neck against the solar flare and travels in the silence that engulfs him like a cloak. Inside, Gaara stands in an empty office, green eyes rimmed with coal, his red robes and hat lying face down like a puddle on the mahogany desk. Sasuke's lips pull down to a grimace.
"I never took Kakashi-san for someone who would take pleasure in his student's misery," the crack at humor makes Sasuke groan.
"He's turning sadistic."
One side of Gaara's lips lift up for a split of a second before flattening out. Sasuke nearly rubs his eyes.
"I received a letter from him last night." Sea-foam eyes prob at him. "It's for you."
Twenty minutes later, the guards notice a streak of blue lightning flashing across the desert horizon at top speed, like a comet flickering in the night sky through the galaxy.
Sasuke pauses by the border of Wind country and let's the rain - laden breeze infiltrate his lungs till the smell of home comes back to him and renews him with purpose. Across the continent and the great Naruto bridge, Sakura feels someone calling her name.
Story's coming back on track again. Well, kind of.
RREVIEW=ONE SLAP TO MY FACE TO SNAP ME BACK INO WRITING THIS BOOK TILL THE END
and I burned out my capcaps - lock. But seriously, I love all those who drop a word down.
And I'm not going to stop till this is finished But I like reviews. So make me happy.