Blue
Disclaimer: Naruto and all its characters are Kishimoto's legal property. I'm not making any money off this story; however, all the Original Characters, Original Plot-lines, and Original Themes are my own.
Rating: Written for mature readers due to content that involves Violence, Sex, and Language.
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AN: The story is going through a quick editing process; hence, I'm re-posting the chapters one by one. It helps me keep track of them as, due to the story's peculiar length and my busy days, it's difficult to ascertain as to which chapter I edited last.
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Amongst the ghosts, The Great Fourth War came to an end: a joyous affair, she heard them say. Men bowed to victors, joining hands in front, robust breasts bursting with love; then they clapped frantically, chanted, cried; sounds travelled upon wind, dancing. Their spring had come, at last!
In wars, men perished; shrivelling red dots on earth, they softened and diminished in rains—many left shivering ashes behind under the skies that were all but unchanging in their mechanisms: sun started, slept, returned, radiance splitting down the middle to form promising lights. It always did make bloom a sense of hope, of things to come.
A well-meant guidance should be borne in mind, her mother had said; and she was a resilient one. Things came to pass; yet, like unbending mountains, her spirits stood tall, endured storms' fall. Shinobi must be the same: a man who withstood time, halted the stalling of his spirit. It was too much . . .
A greater silence—her gaze crossed the immense stretch of the lake, which was blue by day, black by night, which was dotted over with fireflies bright and restless. She wore white tonight—like most nights. She liked the colour. She did not know why. The breeze caught the material and made it flap and billow like a great sail.
Stars lay down, eyes which closed one by one beyond season's drape. What was left here to see now but insects burning upon a fabric bleak in fury? She turned away and walked back into the forest that was less quiet behind War's celebrations: they were un-ending . . .
Quietly, she walked along a stone-path, broken up by Nature's invasions. The path entered a clearing where countless tents stood in groups, placed in the midst of the strongly sloping hillsides, upon which sat a mist so thick that flora could scarcely be seen.
In streets, they all stood closely packed together like toys, covered in vivid colours for celebrations. In lights, little was noticeable but forgettable outlines of faces, bodies, limbs, over which lanterns shed colours most sharp and ugly. She did not stop, eastbound to her new home.
Voices came at great speeds and slowed down and came . . . to a final halt by the sacred rocks that stood before shadows and ghosts released by night. This forest's quiet, disturbed by noise which lay latent in its limbs, was not calming. Here and there, one gaunt limb thrust forth from dark and went back whence it had come, a dusting of spring's dots adorning its bumps, to reach out into lanterns' shy reaches, its crookedness hidden by no foliage.
Few lights, of lanterns old, originated from closed doors. On their surface, neglect hung like ceremonial flowers, undisturbed like the dead which slept. Twisting and winding down, wind flowed soundlessly along these pathways, these veins, which threatened to fall away under her feet. She did not stop, sensing a spectre at her heels—she always did.
At night, houses turned quietest: they were no less quiet in the morning. Graves—yes, she likened them all to graves. Men prayed by their kin's graves, yet they harboured no intention to go into the dirt's deep and lay down beside them, perish with them, rise along them in another life, without living this one. She was not sure how he felt . . .
She did not stop to gaze upon them, to send a prayer to them. Their hearts and eyes, like doors and windows, lay closed off, eternally—signs in a village that stained no heart, but his. Night's ink had emptied out, but his came fresh and flowing, every night, every moment . . . he sung the unsung without singing.
The house that was unlit, blackest, beckoned; she stepped in and looked, not finding any light save one which came from the other room's extremities, in broken trails to teasing blacks which existed in abundance. She thought she could see stains, shadows burning like men alive along the floors that refused to eat them up to their fill, to let them find peace in life after. The house had set nothing free: it took new prisoners . . .
She opened the door, hesitant. What would he say that she had come home late, that this was not how a wife was to behave? The house betrayed her before she could speak; it was not a creaky old machinery of fears that could be adapted to new uses. Her foot trembled and she stopped, awaited a scolding; but it did not come. What was she to feel? Pleased? Relieved? Over-joyed?
In the light that cast a happy shadow on the wall, he sat by the low table, his back to her. She moved and sat opposite him, watching. He was writing—he wrote often—on a scroll whiter than camellia. He dipped a brush into a pot of black ink and to the hanging line added a curling loop of another letter. A missive? To whom? He had no one . . . no one left . . .
She wanted to speak, but she did not know if he would like her intruding upon his task; so she beheld him, his sharper than snow skin, his careless beauty, his un-leaving silence, which like a deathless utterance hung in-between their tongues, demanding a word to connect the chasm.
Quiet—he was dressed in traditional Uchiha clothing, and his rough hair tumbled loosely along his neck. Just behind his ears, sweat gathered visibly, each strand entwined with delicate droplets that sparkled silver. Strange, she thought. Had he re-turned after his triumphs to Leaf's playground of provocation from which he fled?
Yet upon his return, he chose exile from Leaf's joy. He wrote and re-wrote lines, making each as pretty and clear as he could. Whatever was in his mind, he wrestled it down into the words, re-collected his furious emotions onto the scroll, which took upon itself his sleeping wrath in lines less chaotic than he. Outside, wind pounded the windows with the heels of its hands numerous; but, inside, he remained singular in his task: she was mostly forgotten . . .
He rejected the women who sought him, turned away the one who wanted him the most. She did not think he hated the person of Sakura; he never adored her the way she wanted. Day after day—night after night—she to him came with pleas to free the woman he had taken in marriage; he was un-moving. She wept by his door: he would not let her in. His answer was the same, delivered in a tone not affected by emotion's trappings: a slow refusal . . . why me? she would ask herself, often, yet she knew he would not answer . . .
Often, he said to the weeping woman that she was no more to be trusted with love than a child with Kin-Jutsu, that she was naïve, that she was to move forward for he was to do the same. Lies, she knew, for he existed betwixt the past of ghosts and spectres of future, never moving; his body, a liminal space, crushed between worlds un-changing.
Memories could not keep up with her: bodies ran after lust, impulse, promise; reality alternated with reveries, yet she remained trapped in his world, felt the effects of his drowsy frenzy, which stayed in a state of uncertainty without certitude.
Uchiha Sasuke: He was young, strong, very beautiful, very brilliant—haunted, hope-less. He was most things Naruto, her beloved, was not. He did not fear enemies or fear collecting enemies. He stayed with himself, quiet whilst rain, like music, broke and mourned over the closing lines from storm's joy—daily, nightly.
On their wedding night, she did not expect him to disfigure her neck by bites; but she never thought he would not come near her, at all. He chose the empty room's company and spent the whole night alone, writing. She had wept, remembering Naruto's words by the lake, each one of which she felt as a dart in her flesh. He had moved past her, too, married the woman Sasuke did not embrace.
Often nights, he would keep to himself inside his room, which reflected moon's lights; and he stayed entombed in its tricks, unwilling to crawl beyond its artifices, a babe on all-fours bewitched by toys which shone. Naruto told her that he modelled himself after his older brother, but she did not know him to say anything for sure, though his impassioned nightmares of him frightened her. He was a killer of kin: why did he love him?
Then there were the nights he did lay on her, slip between her open thighs. He was robust, lasted long that he tired her out; she could not say she hated the act, the feel of his thickness inside her channel—no, this was the only thing she looked forward to on most nights, only thing she found joy in. If he did not come, she turned sad and went pillow-less to bed.
At first, it hurt: soon, his thrusts turned hypnotic for her flesh. She could tell he had not been with many women before—or any woman before. It was hard to tell with him. It was as though he kept a fast for days and broke it after a revelation came to him from beyond the veil that he was free to join together with her, enjoy her.
When dawn was deep, not blue, he would leave the house and go—somewhere. He never told her where: she never asked. Days went on . . .
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