"Why are we doing this again?" Naruto disturbed the silence once more. Sitting still was not her forte, especially for hours at a time and they hadn't even reached the thirty-minute mark yet. "I feel like I'm wasting my time. Again." She finished with a pout.
Not to mention she was still sleepy and the old man had not provided breakfast before dragging her to the clearing outside their camp. Granted, he'd warned her of this and told her to be up and ready before the break of dawn, but well...she'd been up all night studying the small fuinjutsu scroll he'd introduced her to a few weeks ago. She was eager to absorb any and everything regarding the dying art once she learned her parents had been masters at it, especially her anonymous mother. She'd never taken to anything so easily in her life. To say the least, she was excited to tackle something she was actually good at, something her parents were good at. In those moments, whenever she grasped a concept and memorized patterns in sealing, it felt like she was closer to them somehow.
"You need to work on your emotions kid, and the best way to go about that is meditation. Finding some semblance of peace with yourself and your circumstances can go a long way in controlling your feelings and by extension the Kyuubi. The last thing we need is a repeat of last time." Jiraiya explained, growing more pointed in tone toward the end.
Naruto flushed with embarrassment. Yeah, last time she'd tried to claw his eyes out and it was a very, very, near thing. She performed the tale-tell nic of scratching the back of her head with a sheepish grin. "Right, right. I'll try again."
She straightened her posture, ironing her back out from the prior disinterested slouch she was in. She fell into the full lotus pose like he'd taught her before closing her eyes.
The meadow was beautiful, filled with tall grass spotted with yellow daisies. In the distance, sakura trees loomed largely, their petals rustling in the autumn wind. The hilltops were coated in pink. There was birdsong and buzzing insects rising in crescendo for morning's symphony as the sun steadily touched the horizon. Nature's song. These things were supposed to ease her into it but they were more distracting than they were grounding.
"Don't focus on the external factors, Naruto," Jiraiya guides, and she listens. "Just yourself. Only yourself." His voice then becomes a distant echo.
For once, she focused on herself. It was terrifying. She was afraid of what she might find, the dark emotions lurking just beneath the surface, beneath her sunny disposition. Emotions that have always been there, a festering wound that she refused to prod at. Whenever she tried, something ugly would form in her chest and spread like mold before she hastily patched it away. Built walls upon walls on top of it to hide that sickening rot. And whenever she grew angry, really angry, it consumed her.
That's what Pervy Sage wanted her to focus on. Naruto's never been one to run away from a challenge but...this was different. This wasn't some complex jutsu or training regime, this was something intimate, something personal. She wasn't ready. She's ignored it for so long that it's taken on a life of its own.
But she knows that eventually, she'll need to learn control.
She'd nearly hurt Jiraiya, what's to say she wouldn't do it again? She'd done it to Sasuke. Had let rage consume her, abandoning the reason she'd possessed when she first confronted him. She was ready to hurt him in a real way, bring him back broken instead of letting him leave whole, her best friend . She'd allowed the Kyuubi no Kitsune to get the best of her because she couldn't control her emotions.
Oh, fine. Fine .
This would be a work in progress but, she'd tackle this eventually. Find peace with herself, learn to let things go, leave things in the past. She could do it, she could do it . She'd counter all the feelings of sadness and anger with happiness and love, she'd remember the good things, the precious things that even hatred couldn't taint.
It would be a cold day in hell before she gave the Kyuubi no Kitsune reign over her body to hurt those close to her.
She allowed herself to fall into her subconscious. It felt like floating, no- like sinking further and further into the eye of a maelstrom. But despite how tumultuous the waves and the currents, the constant pull, and tug of the eddies, she had a tenacious grasp on control. She was falling and she wanted to.
Naruto opened her eyes and came face to face with the demon fox. He bared his teeth at her. A single tooth was as tall as a grown man. A morbid thought crossed her mind then. She wondered if his teeth were strong enough to crush a grown man's skull until the brains spilled out like juice from a busted fruit. Then with no pause, she wondered what she would look like between his teeth.
"A bloody meat bag," he promised. The thought seemed to please him.
"Yeah right," she challenged, just to see that smug smile twist into a snarl.
"I've cracked the skulls of giants between my jaws," he boasted, and he was pleased again. He loved boasting of his past exploits, loved intruding in on her dreams so that she may bear witness to them. "You'd burst open like a fig, you'd be fruit skin on my teeth,
"And your existence is little more than a blink in the eye of eternity. That morbid curiosity will be made real someday, and someday I'll pick you from between my teeth and molars,"
His voice was as hard as granite and a deafening chorus of madness. When he spoke a thousand voices spoke with him. It was unholy, made her feel like her eardrums were going to burst and bleed when she listened too hard and too long, a far cry from the dark rumblings he whispered into her conscious thought. It dawned on her then that this truly was a demon, only a demon could have that kind of effect.
"Yeah, yeah whatever just stop messing with my dreams," she demanded, but the demand went unheard.
"Every day I feed off of your life. The more you use me the more I eat. In return, I give you the power to protect the world that your body was used to keep me from. A deal with the devil that you didn't even make. And one day your soul will be mine. A true sacrifice. The only one who's losing is you. How does that make you feel whelp, pathetic?"
Naruto felt her throat go dry, felt her muscles stiffen tightly. She hadn't thought that was possible in her mindscape.
The girl let out a dry chuckle, "Shut the hell up, you stupid fox. I'm tired of your yapping. You keep it up and I'll have the old man put a seal on me that'll lock you up tighter,"
The creature growled something terrible. The bars trembling and water boiling, it burned her. She sat down in it, lotus pose, and closed her eyes. She wanted to go further than this, to the place she'd been that night (which feels so long ago now) before the Kyuubi forcibly dragged her away from it. That would spite him.
She tuned out the sound of cursing and growling, chanting focus focus focus in her mind's eye. Deeper , she told herself, reaching for that maelstrom and beyond that something more, I want to go deeper. The sound of leaking pipes and turbulent water faded away, and so did the smell of sewage and iron.
When Naruto opened her eyes again she was met with a blinding white landscape without form.
She tried not to immediately panic, reminding herself that this was what she wanted. Something airy and cool tickled the back of her neck. She strained her eyes to find some form of shape in the unseeable vista surrounding her. She doesn't remember it being like this, though she'll admit she'd been in a bit of daze, so wrapped up in Sasuke was she.
And then what was once a blank limbo became streaks of dark ink bleeding into the canvas.
A red string began to materialize, translucent in nature but solid to the touch, and it ebbed and flowed and flowed until there was a distinguished beginning and end. And at the end (or beginning?) was him. On the edge of a foreboding precipice. A thick cloud-like darkness that hung behind him, little more than a menacing shroud. The smell of iron and ozone infiltrated the air, and a deep chill settled into the atmosphere.
The shock and tension were palpable. For a moment, she couldn't breathe, couldn't think. Here he was, before her once again, either real or imagined, staring at her with almost unseeing eyes.
The shock on his face melted into one of impassivity and she knew- she knew - it was really him.
Sasuke had been meditating. He'd found out it was a good way to gain control over his curse mark and Orochimaru had reluctantly insisted upon it. Better a behaved dog than a mad dog and that mark could make anyone go insane. The emotions directly affected the curse mark and the flow of chakra that entered his own so it only stood to reason that to consciously regulate it at will he'd need to gain more control over his emotions. This way, he could manipulate how much or how little of the sannins chakra entered his body. It was all about control, agency, some semblance of fucking autonomy.
He hadn't expected to fall so deep into his subconscious, didn't even believe it was possible to be so aware while in his subconscious. But he was, and while that'd be a note of pride any other time, it wasn't now. This was his own fault. For thinking about her or the dark crescent-shaped thing that marks his left palm, even for a sliver of a second while meditating. Now he was in some sort of limbo with her, desperately thinking of a way to get out. He duly noted the tether between them, connecting them.
A spiritual manifestation of our bond, his mind labeled it, almost instinctively. Unbroken and as strong as ever. Even after everything he'd done to severe it. It was still there.
Sasuke clenched his jaw, the sound of his teeth grinding together cutting through the silence.
The black webs began to spread, inching closer, and closer to her side of the shared space. Sasuke took hold of the bond and yanked at it, trying to dislodge its hold in his heart. But it wouldn't budge. Not even a little. Only split into a thousand threads that wrapped around his fingers.
He turned his pointed glare toward her. Still sitting there with that stupid dumbfounded look on her face. In her eyes, he could see clearly all the things that had brought them together, that made their bond so, and his heart ached a bit. Her heart aches too, he thought unbidden and knew it to be true.
Sasuke hadn't thought of her in weeks since their last encounter, had punished himself with intense training whenever he tried and now she was here in front of him. Their bond was in front of him. Mocking him and his iron resolve.
Within seconds she was gone (as though he'd willed her away), the light dissolving right before his eyes, and he was alone again. In the darkness of his mind, memories of the past lurking in the thick black smog behind him. Memories of his family, of Itachi and Shisui, and the ultimate betrayal that ended it all. It was difficult to be unconscious of them when they were so terribly loud .
He steadied himself. He hadn't seen hers but maybe her memories had been hidden by that thick and suffocating smog of light.
Nothing worth remembering or holding onto, he bet, except for perhaps those of him and the team he abandoned. He wonders if she even noticed. It doesn't matter. She doesn't matter. He's better off forgetting about her again. He closes his eyes and when he opens them again he's back at the hideout. He'd never been so grateful to see those cold clammy walls.
When Naruto comes too, she's shaken to her core, overcome with wave after wave of vertigo. She abruptly stands up, eager to move about to process her riled thoughts but Jiraiya stops her when she begins to sway on her feet.
"You shouldn't have stood up so fast, kid. You've been out of it for a while." He gently reprimands, guiding her back to their camp.
She smells cinnamon-flavored oatmeal before she sees it and she mumbles gratefully, fixing herself a bowl and sitting down on a worn log.
It's silent for a while before her master questions her. "Something you wanna tell me? You seemed kind of distressed back there. Was it the Kyuubi?"
She shakes her head in the negative. A part of her wants to tell the truth but something inside of her, something primal and protective of her bond with Sasuke, won't allow her.
She smiles groggily at his disbelieving face, "Heh, it's not that. It's just, I guess I got a lot of stuff to work on if I want to reach that inner peace."