(all my blood; what have you done, what have you done…)
Summary of the chapter:
Because that would add depth and layers to a tragedy meant to stay fathomless but immeasurable.
. . .
.
.
3 years back
.
...there's blood in the water.
Naruto is conscious when he watches Sasuke leave.
Barely so.
With blood stains smearing his face and clothes sopping wet, immobilized. Distantly and gapingly, his body feels maimed, bones fragmented and rearranged to fit a new, broken mold, torso ripped apart and sewn back shut. Everything aches with a yawning capacity, as if the threads of his skin have been separated and regurgitated. What aches the worst, however, it's his heart, as if it's been swallowed down and spit out torn, and still, he is unable to pinpoint the pinprick originating the swirl of pain.
But he was conscious and he watched Sasuke leave.
Naruto watched. Naruto remembers it happening... but cannot ultimately visualize it in the forefront of his mind. It's an obliterated chronology, paralyzed the way he was hours, days after. He can almost graze the ash gray of it with his touch, but why can't he see it at all. In a matter of days the shadowy details that had first stuck to him like glue stretching malleable between his fingertips went entirely omitted, leaving him emptied out, with a heart folded in half.
Leaving him to think, overthink, if watching the sole person he had deemed his closest friend leave was fundamentally more traumatizing than suffering the verge of death at his hand.
...he can still see the ill intent in the depth of his irises lying obscure, can see the raging flame bursting alive inside of them as Sasuke tries to kill him. Can still feel his limb caving his chest as if it were his own, like it belonged to him. But can't recall the ensuing, unanticipated moments driving up to Sasuke walking away… from him.
...perhaps that's where the knot of the trauma lies, since Naruto never thought Sasuke would leave him behind- not in such a literal facet. Never like this.
...what have you done? what have you done...
But it happened. And now he cannot forget it.
But he cannot remember it, either.
It's a paradox, a conundrum, a contradiction, a limbo stretching timeless, and Naruto is frozen inside that placeless draw between living and grieving.
...there's blood in the water.
.
.
present day
.
Naruto did not see Jiraiya die.
It's unthinkable that he watched the murderer of his mentor dissolve before his very eyes, but not Jiraiya.
Water trickles down the baseless glass surface of a one-way mirror, thick, and thinning at the edges, until cutting clean off. Resembling blood.
A misshapen shadow crops out, into the edgeless corner.
It doesn't take him long to identify it.
Pain.
(It's not Pain. It's Nagato.
In his head, Naruto does not refer to him as such. He won't.
Because that would add depth and layers to a tragedy meant to stay fathomless but immeasurable.)
"A heart is only as strong as the hand it draws its might from." Pain gravely recites like a god with no disciples to mold into the indent of his footsteps. "...Uzumaki Naruto."
It's dour, the judge to a sepulchral trial, trails of fire burn beneath their weight, above them the expansion of a sky on fire, and they're all drowning, drowning in it.
"That strength you preached about so foolishly, so obliviously," The slow turn of his neck clangs like a blade plunging to the ground, nebulous eyes meeting his own with a vacant stare. "Your self-appointed strength in the end proved insufficient to keep your preceptor rooted into this life."
It eradicates the roots from within him, breaks the mold out of his feet, throwing blaze into the abysmal obscurity.
"What have you done…"
...there's blood in the water.
Pain levels his scrutiny at the viscosity circling at Naruto's feet, blood anticipatorily pooling into the gaping wound left behind, but dripping, dripping, dripping into depths below he cannot reach.
(He knows who it belongs to.)
"…what have you done?"
As the rest of them do, the next solemn inquiry is meant to go unanswered.
"...however will you live with it?"
.
.
.
Naruto realizes he has awakened only a minute into hyperventilating.
"Did the nightmares start again?" He jerks in place, cutting off on a smothering gasp and scrambling back, until he discerns Sasuke sat in the pitch blackness of his room. With hands loosely clasped between the jut of his knees, head hung, until he's tipping his chin enough to detain him in his field of vision, continuing sombre and resigned. "It was only a matter of time, don't you think?"
Naruto feverishly puzzles about how Sasuke would even know, but his stomach churns into the awareness that he'll be physically sick next.
Unceremoniously, he stumbles into the unlit bathroom, landing on his knees with a pounding impact, pitching toward the toilet as acidic water forcibly clambers out of him.
He throws up until he thinks he might be suffocating.
Blood is thicker than water, but what in the world is left to do when that blood pools into the water and sullies the unadulterated pureness of it.
The acrid taste of it sears his esophagus once he's shaking from the effort of breathing, struggling for air.
"...I d-don't... need... you." He heaves out, spit and acid trickling from the swell of his lower lip, tiny droplets hanging to his lashes and stinging the inside of his eyelids, matching the puncture of a million little needles sinking into him.
Sasuke doesn't say anything to this, the antithetical muteness trenchant enough to debunk Naruto's paramount belief.
And Naruto wants to consume every last tendril of his shrinking lungs screaming, raging at the unhitched unfairness of it all.
...there's blood in water, rotting what once used to live so purely inside of him.