Tenketsu: Day 21
Naruto stepped back, tripping on an gnarled root protruding from the soil and stumbling until her back hit a tree. The bark pressed uncomfortably into her spine, and she fumbled to hold the trunk with awkwardly bent arms. Her breathing was heavy.
"Orochimaru," she whispered, her breathing quickening with realisation and pressing urgency, and her fingers clenched their grip about the bark. The outer ridges cracked.
"Orochimaru!"
The snake-infested hawk before her simply blinked, dark eyes surprised and watching her like a specimen. Naruto gritted her teeth, and lunged forward, spinning a kunai from the pouch on her leg and launching it towards his head with no hesitation at all.
He side-stepped the kunai, and Naruto fired herself forward, senses perhaps somewhat dulled by the end of the war but still sharper than most she knew. When he jumped backwards on his hands, she stilled for a moment, allowing natural energy to perforate her chakra as she watched him like he was watching her; like prey.
Because that was all he was doing. The man before her, with a single dark eye and a single yellow eye, was watching carefully, with an expression neither calculating nor malicious. He was observing, and Naruto felt turmoil. Her fists clenched.
"Why?" she said, tone rife with distress and everything Naruto could not portray in her words. "Why would you choose to take Sasuke after everything?! You're the reason Sasuke never came home...!"
Fury welled inside of her gut, flushing her senses, cheeks reddening, and her eyes filled with angry tears. She could feel the natural energy edging away from her self, and she stilled, on the verge of Sage Mode.
The man's expression was not empty. It was observant, estranged from her emotion almost, with eyes that were deep and hungry and odd, if nothing else. Naruto could relate it to neither Orochimaru nor Sasuke. He closed his eyes and sighed, smiling – an expression that wasn't as odd and peculiar on Sasuke's face as she would have imagined it to be, because it held no joy.
"Sasuke, huh?"
Naruto's heart thrummed strongly against her ribcage at the low tide of his voice.
He reached up for his hair, running his hand through it as he allowed the large rucksack he was carrying to slip off his shoulder, putting it at the base of the tree. Naruto yearned to speak words, but found the silence so thick she couldn't bear to even move her lips. He turned from the tree, the distance between them tempering her heart, because she simply couldn't bear to regard a man so evil in clothes so beloved.
"Who?"
The question shook Naruto out of Sage Mode entirely, the tint of orange flickering upon her eyelids and she slipped on her words, mouth very abruptly dry as she stuttered out of sheer-
"What?" she said, incredulous.
"Sasuke," he said again. "Who was he?"
Naruto stopped, and a small flock of birds flew from the trees beside them as though startled. Their cries reverberated through the empty dark sky, and Naruto's delayed anger burst up like a sunflower in daylight.
"Don't fuck with me, you prick!" she roared, running forward and withdrawing a flurry of shuriken that she launched out one by one. The man dodged each one, running and ducking and jumping until the final star grazed his cheek, slicing off a strand of hair and leaving a bleeding scrape on his cheekbone. "I'm not a stupid thirteen year old any more, Orochimaru! Do you really think you can fool me with bullshit like that?!"
The man trailed the wound, pulling away to leave blood on his finger. He looked at it unconcernedly.
And oh, how Naruto resented hearing someone so like Sasuke speaking in Sasuke's voice; how it grated upon her, how it made her heart and will and mind wane with longing for a man that was as dead as he was absent.
The man stood up, hand on his hip and dangerously close to the blade strapped to his back as he looked Naruto up and down. His hair was longer than Naruto remembered, and he was dressed in all black, with pants, boots and a vest of black, bandages about his forearms, calves and midriff. The look was rougher than Naruto ever remembering Sasuke looking, but did nothing to dissociate the image of her best friend from the man before her.
"Orochimaru? Sasuke?" he asked again. "Which one of them am I?"
Naruto's eyebrows instantly knotted into a furious expression, and she launched through the clearing off of her right foot.
"That's my question!"
The blade was met quickly by his instantaneous withdrawal of a chokuto, and the scraping of metal filled the clearing as Naruto found her face closer to his than she could ever remember. She was close enough to stare into the yellow eye; the colour turned her stomach, cold and sickly and serpentine.
The clash ended with Naruto scraping up enough force to push the chokuto out of his grip as she landed a punch into his gut, and the man was sent flying across the clearing until his back met bark. He fell to his knees after the contact, blood leaking from the side of his mouth.
He didn't move to attack her, and Naruto took the opening and launched forwards, pressing the cold edge of her blade to his neck. He didn't shift, one eye black and the other eye yellow but both cold and unshifting in their stare.
"Am I not worthy of the Sharingan?" Naruto hissed, steaming with anger as she pushed the blade further; the tip scraped thin white flesh, red seeping over the edge of metal and slipping quickly down the strained muscle of his white neck. White camellias, Naruto thought; like white camellias infested with blood red disease, wilting and dying silently.
His eyes flashed angrily, a brief glint of emotion in a night of midnight cean, and then he pushed her aside roughly, kunai slipping from his neck limply as he rolled through the underbrush and grabbed his chokuto.
"I thought you'd give me all the answers," he said, picking up his backpack and straying from her gaze. He was shaking slightly.
"What the fuck are you on about?" Naruto said, voice cold with anger. "You're the one who isn't answering any of my goddamn questions!"
The boy turned to her with a familiar ruthlessness, and spoke with a voice that began low and ominous and finished with a tone that spoke of unbridled anger. His gaze did not break from hers, honest black the only colour for miles.
"I don't know who Sasuke or Orochimaru are," he said, moving towards her purposefully with hands that trembled from anger. "I don't know my name, I don't know yours, I don't know my goddamn mother's! I don't remember anything!"
Naruto tried to move her lips, but nothing came; and she could hear little at all besides the pushing of blood against the walls of her veins, and as though underwater, the distant muffled intake of breath, in-out, and then the hysterical pumping of her heart-
'Why can't I move...?'
Muffled, distant, barely there, the timbre of his voice-
"-oi!"
And for a moment, Naruto pretended it was him, and that things that were things were simply not. Lies became truths and truths became lies, and abruptly, Sasuke was here, concerned, worried, and alive. His voice was warm to her ears, his eyes looking straight into hers as he shook her shoulders. His hands were calloused and cold on her flesh.
The lie passed, and Naruto blacked out.
A/N: Sorry for the wait. Plot is well mapped now. More coming soon. Thanks for support!