Capsize


Summary of the chapter:

"Are you"

"Yeah. I'm fine."

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Stage II: Anger

'It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving.

Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss.'

- Elizabeth-Kubler Ross and David Kessler From 'On Grief and Grieving'

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5 years back

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Naruto runs up to the rest of his newfound team, breathing heavily, grinning big at them.

"Sorry, sorry, I'm here!" He apologizes for his lateness, bending over, hands on the jutting bones of his knees to catch his breath.

The wide and toothy smile he shows them pulls on the newly formed reddish mark adorning his cheek.

Kakashi throws him a glance over the book's hard cover grasped in his palm. "Mah, youngsters these days, don't you know that being chronically late means being chronically rude?"

"You're the last person who can berate him for that, Kakashi-sensei...you literally just arrived!" Sakura exclaims pointedly and slightly exasperated, before regarding him with a disapproving stare, brows furrowed with a hint of concern. "And you're always so clumsy."

Naruto apologizes, rubbing the back of his head with a sheepish chuckle under Sakura and Kakashi's superficial chastising, which doesn't last more than usual as it turns into Sakura starting to scold their teacher for one thing or another, seamlessly falling back into a brand and quickly establishing routine as they walk toward the loadwork of the day.

But once their attention is elsewhere, after having their backs turned to him, Naruto drops his hand down to his side. Fingers twitching from the way they want to curl into fists.

The easygoing grin drops frighteningly quick from his face.

His eyes narrow minutely and he scrutinizes the only other person in his team, who didn't utter a single vowel, with circumspect. Expression muting into something too sharp, too out of place spreading across the soft features of an eleven year old.

Kakashi and Sakura brushed it off, as they tend to do. But Sasuke doesn't break the stare off just yet, reciprocating the treatment, dissecting every shade of his behavior from the corner of his eyes.

This is not supposed to happen. Naruto stifles the beginnings of a frown.

Sasuke is starting to notice the bruises.

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present day

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Naruto had taken to pacing the sleeplessness off, this franticness scaling between the threaded fibers of his muscles and suffusing into his bloodstream, doing so for long enough he feels he might decimate the floor with every fitful footmark he's crossing over.

He is in overload, surcharged and about to crash. Every angle of his room he has ploughed, every slant of his mind he has dismantled, it's all the same. A maze of remembrance he doesn't want to step in, doesn't want to be beguiled into.

But his brain won't shut offhe doesn't want to think anymore.

Cornered, it's this minacious restlessness that has him suddenly springing the door to his room open, stepping out into the hallway, fumbling towards the entrance of his apartment, rushing, rushing.

Sakura and Kiba, who had been hushedly conversing by the kitchen, promptly stand at the clutter of noise he is leaving behind himself.

"Naruto–"

"I'm going to the hospital." Naruto asserts, blunt and uncaring of any subsequent response.

As soon as he finds himself outside, he is stepping right beneath a blistering midday sun that could split rocks open. Naruto doesn't remember the last time he was out in the daylight. He shields his eyes from the fierceness of it, dizzy, as blurry dots across his vision fuel a throbbing headache.

He doesn't let it deter him from his self-appointed mission, however, blinking wetly and squinting into the day as he marches forward.

Exceedingly and acutely aware of the presence of others, he tries to stay out of anyone's way and expects the same treatment in turn—except for two specific people, who have taken to following him without reserve.

"Are you–"

"Yeah. I'm fine." Naruto cuts through their fretfulness a little too forcefully, accelerating his step. His whole demeanor begs to differ.

Kiba and Sakura shadow him to the hospital, refusing to let him be on his own. And while he could have appreciated the sentiment behind it months ago, now all Naruto wants to do is shout his contempt. To scream at them that he wants to be left alone, to waste up his lungs doing so—but he bites his tongue and holds on to the scathing words instead.


The single reason Naruto is choosing to sear his respiratory system by breathing in antiseptic and reliving tragedy is one person only, his sole outside to this reality. But he finds out Jii-Jii's condition has worsened in his absence, and is now taking the pitfall of it like he did with Jiraiya—the first sucker punch of shock, a surface level hurt that barely began, claws slowly sinking in.

He had stayed in the bleak room with him, sat beside him, staying after visiting hours. Watching the fragile rise and fall of his sternum dragging over slow beats and asking himself if it might stop with him in the room, eyes fixed on the wearisome pulse hidden in layers of withering skin and wrinkled sheets. Until he couldn't take much more of the spiraling thoughts.

He had taken to pacing, again, only a much larger stretch of hallway. Which had taken him to walk off an unfamiliar path. Naruto is not supposed to be in this wing of the hospital, he realizes, after glimpsing around the corner a dead end, and people wearing melancholy like an old favorite sweater faded by the hands of time.

There is a family at the hospital. They're huddled together, they're awaiting news of a loved one.

Sakura had explained it to him, once. Instead of open waiting rooms or patients' rooms, people are ushered into a more private space where they are given the news. Naruto could guess which kind.

"–there is nothing else we can do." The medic on call ends with an even tone. Flat. Professional.

And then, then comes the biggest, worst fabrication of them all.

"I'm sorry."

And that's it.

The stranger gets to walk away. To move on to the next patient. Their history and life sequence a string of numbers and diagnosis. Gets to move on and still have a life. Gets to move on without repercussions.

While the people he walked out on are stuck with their lives coming apart in shambles, plunged into the paralyzing clutches of an all consuming grief.

There is a family at the hospital. They're huddled together, they're crying a loved one.

And Naruto is there, too. Stuck outside the clutches of their grief, but paralyzed inside his own all the same.

He wonders, asks himself, if his mentor had been torn away from him due to a fatal illness, or if he had lost him any other way than the one he did...would that have changed anything at all?

The desperate taste of horror constricting his throat, the cavernous pit inside his chest swallowing around him, the hollow remains of his world burnt to shreds and fractured to glass shards. This neverending helplessness.

Death is a tragedy in its own right; but it can be made especially bitter by circumstance.

Naruto thinks about this as he realizes he is getting crushed underneath the weight.

Naruto thinks about this as he realizes he never stopped.

All the conundrums he has carried, as if they were his own to battle, as if they were his to solve. And they amassed, growing exponentially and oppressively, the ills of the world spread into an illness he has shouldered throughout the years.

He can't help.

He can't do anything.

This detrimental realization he is forced, shocked into facing now, is a dead end all on its own.

...He can't save anyone.

Naruto gradually sinks down the solid weight pressed to his back, a numbing wall permeated in tragedy. Cold tears brim the rim of his vision, both trembling hands held against his mouth, stifling himself of even the faintest or anguished noise that could escape him. Mourning the loss of a stranger's irreplaceable life coming to an unfair ending alongside the family that will be left behind, unable to do anything to prevent the death of their loved one from taking place.


And then...

...and then the atypical calm, ugly in the way it sits so unpredictably inside of him, so silently in the way he feels it clotting under his skin like a disease; now it beats like a heart with a pulse.

The broken remains of his world are shifting again—and here it comes. The next, abrupt shift.


The first vitreous spark of unalloyed rage bites into the last tendrils of denial.


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a/n:

Capsize, by Emily Warren & Frenship where the title comes for this and the last chapter. Believe it or not it's also where the summary comes from. (this song is an actual, extraordinary masterpiece and everyone needs and deserves to hear it at least once in their life, you can't go on without it)

So. Here's the sitch. My computer crashed and it can't be fixed. This story is all saved up (literally was my biggest concern oh my God), but until the new one arrives I can't write much of anything because I can't access the file (this one chapter was typed from my phone, all from my memory- which, I won't lie, is pretty sucky). So, I'm sorry, it's why it took me so long to update this one and it's why updates will be kind of slow for a while.

Okay, I'm done.
Stay safe and healthy!