and if it was an open-shut case… (I)
Around seven, Naruto starts learning about the world encompassing him, more than he would ever want to.
He's learning to cut out a corner and carve himself inside it until he fits the cramped mold. Because others have so much space to spread themselves over, but it's an abundance they are just not willing to share.
He has learnt some kids talk with their fists. And learnt their language too, exhibiting the writing of it upon his skin, arrayed in bruises, like the gauzy shirts hanging from his bone frame.
And he learnt that the adults towering over him don't have the time nor the patience for the clobber of injuries he sports so obtrusively, even by being so small he is stifled inside the length of their imposing shade.
So he's learning to seal his mouth shut. It stings, like gluing together the torn seams of an open wound, blood still oozes out, scarlet droplets still frame the fresh, raw cut.
He's still learning.
His weary feet drag him towards infinite stretches of road, past unfamiliar shadows of faces and places he doesn't know.
He feels so, so tired now. But he just doesn't want to be at Home.
Home being four walls imbued in emptiness. He doesn't want to listen to the silence of ghosts, to watch the monsters underneath his bed unfold in the gnarly darkness. Nobody is there to chase them away, and the paralyzing fear of them is an asymmetrical two-way mirror, it's exhausting to endure.
He eventually comes to a halt once his feet lift clouds of dust, taking notice of his surroundings. Of the walkway standing lonesome, the glare of the sun bleeding out into the water enfolding it, coloring it copper and dazzling. With the striking rays in his eyes, Naruto squints to catch the ends of the brilliant sight, draw the complete picture of it inside his mind with the fading shine.
There's this boy, standing there, the view of him sinking into a deeper layer of loneliness. With cognizance dragging sluggish, Naruto realizes he has seen him around, already. Even if having the back of his silhouette displayed to him, he can recognize him just enough to brush his picture across the canvas of his mind around hazy detailing.
Standing on the precipice of the wooden plank, the boy tips forward into his body weight, propelled as if screaming. The slower realization sets in motion, this is not a vocalized inclination, but rather, the act of giving voice to the dynamic incandescence of flames.
The lack of sound, Naruto notices, is so unlike the ringing silence fitting his mold alongside him, so unlike the deafening smother he has come to know inside this hollow world made of four extending walls and its inimical inhabitants.
Naruto watches bewitched as ripples break over the grand sapphire bed like cracks of dappling light, watches the way flames lick at the endless, gemlike surface, as if to devour the windkissed waters in their golden heat.
And still, the boy is the burning focus, snapping the pull of his attention. The tension in his frame, stitched into the minute line of his worn shoulders as they lift then fall, like the fast-paced beat to a storm-tossed heart. The boy spends himself out, drained of so much effort he is losing his footing on a tightrope balance that wasn't there from the start- as if he is drowning beneath his stifling, wordless screams. And still, he remains on his feet, almost as if rooted, standing still.
And Naruto learns for the first time, with overzealous and abrupt yearning, this is what undiluted anger looks like. Naruto freezes the aseptic burn of it into the highest shelf of his memory, displaying it like an earned and suffered trophy.
It's intense, scalding enough to be igniting radiant embers into him despite how far he is standing from him, the way he is manifesting anger, wielding it like a treacherous weapon. If to hurt deepening shadows breaching past the safety of daylight or to defend himself from them, is too unclear to determine. But that taste, desperate cut of anger, a devastation to it, billowing boundless from this stretch of distance, like the wisps of smoke refusing to dissolve.
He wonders how searing it must be, how badly that kind of anger burns- is it a furious scorch, ablaze and staining, curling wet and thick at the core like the weight of blood.
Or perhaps a low burn singeing the outer layers first, consuming through dry tissues and threaded fibers, like crumpled paper smoldering to ashes.
Naruto punctures himself on the sight; a prick of envy, trickling admiration and gushing out awe.
He wonders if he could ever dress himself inside that veracious, that authentic anger, be unyielding enough to wear it. He can't delve into it, nor could he explicate it, but can sense, almost corporeally, an anger so fiercely, so deeply rooted inside the dregs of himself, maybe one day it will finally crack through the barren ground. Bloom vivid and crimson.
One day, perhaps.