Author Notes: Quite a bit darker than my previous stories, Dead Man Swinging is shaping up to be a multi-chaptered fic. (Translation: Shanghaii will attempt to keep this new story going for as long as possible) The premise of this story came out of pretty much no where. The prologue kinda reminds of the Salem Witch Trials/Hanging of Pirates sort of dealio, but really has nothing to do with either.
Warnings: Blatant Yaoi (eventually). Gruesomeness. Gory Imagery. Content for Mature Audiences.
Pairings: NaruSasu. SakuLee. InoShikaChou. Mostly NaruSasu, though in the beginning there is a tiny bit of NaruHina.
Summary: Semi-canon but not really. Yaoi. NaruSasu. On a bright copper clad day in October, the traitor is put to death. He is hung from the gallows, and all of the neighborhood children are brought to watch his pale, athletic body swing.
Dead Man Swinging
By Shanghaii
On a bright, copper-clad day in October, the traitor is put to death. He is hung from the gallows, and all of the neighborhood children are brought to watch his pale, athletic body swing. There is murder in the crowd's eyes as they gaze at the limp, still corpse that was once a shinobi, once a comrade, once a boy without family. There is a lesson to be taken from this, they tell their children, whose wide eyes have brittled, shards of glass broken in their unseeing stares.
In the throng, there is man who cannot tear his eyes away from the morbid scene. The body sways gently in the breeze, a gruesome face mottled purple, a swollen tongue, and a broken neck. It is an ignoble way to die. The man thinks that this cadaver was once a person, someone who was once the closest thing he had to a family.
Hours pass, and crows wing their way across the bloody sky. They settle on the slumped shoulders of the traitor, yellow beaks clacking as they rip out the eyes, tear apart the flesh. Carrion, that's what the body is. From earth it came and to earth it will return. The man gives the carcass a final, significant look before disappearing.
The crows linger for days afterward, until all that is left is bleached bone.
-- Not man; Man once I was --
Sasuke looks at his dead body with a faint sense of disgust. He stands only a few feet from his corpse, feet planted firmly and arms clasped behind his back. His spine is ramrod straight. There is something utterly fascinating about facing your own decaying flesh, he thinks to himself, watching as a particularly audacious crow leans over to rip at his useless eye sockets.
He slips a kunai from its holster and slices through the coarse rope, thus interrupting the bird's impromptu meal. His physical body drops into his arms, scarcely more than bones and yellowed ligaments, and he bears it gently away.
Finis
End Notes: Chapter One is partly finished, so if you want to read it, Review!
Quote from Dante's Inferno, Canto I, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.