a/n: four months later and you'd think i've learned to edit in the daylight and stop posting in the middle of the night…(c'mon we all know the drill, i'll edit this godforsaken mess come morning)
…i'm so not ready for this. so i hope at least you guys are.
first of all.
✮ EVERYONE SAY THANK YOU TO FALL OUT BOY FOR THEIR EXQUISITE KILLER (pun not intended) WORD PLAY (which i've used as the title because HOW COULD I NOT?)
✮ if this chappie feels "incomplete" it's because it is folks, it absolutely is. there's more of this– whatever this is–coming your way.
...had to unfortunately change the rating 'cause i suppose the gore spikes up every 10 chapters or so :/
i'm sorry :(
✮ also the (second to) last line is crucial to the excuse of a "plot" of this whole mayhem.
✮ (if any of you guys feel like overanalyzing the shit out of this chapter {i mean why would u even waste ur time doin that?} lemme know, i'm sure all your theories will be so much better than what i've come up with lmao)
Soundtracks to the chapter:
✮ Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers
✮ Stay Frosty Royal Milk Tea - Fall Out Boy
. . .
YOU ONLY GET WHAT YOU G{R}I{E}VE
Summary of the chapter:
"I saved the best seat in the house just for you."
. . .
…i've never put this many warnings in anything ever :/
|TRIGGER WARNINGS|:
• mention of alcohol abuse
• PTSD
• vomit
• elements of Gore / Horror
• Death
A sealed scroll and a closed book rest opposing and lonely onto veined branches.
The beehive nested into its crook swings positively precarious, it hangs on by a thread.
Ivy germinates, wound tight across the feet of the laurel tree.
A lit, snowy candle melts before its broad trunk.
Fresh twin cherries to be found on the ground, dyeing the green lush grass a growing red.
Feathers dance to the wind's shiny wills.
A flock of black crows swallows the sphere, flying idle spirals over the leafed spires cutting through the deeper sky.
Moon rises crescent, whimsical as it plays hide and seek beneath a fleecy layer of sun clouds.
.
Jiraiya has turned around, his weary back facing him once more.
His shadow burns through the gap in Naruto's memories, wreckage left from the moment he left him.
But he disregards everything but him, disengages from his frame of mind and background to cross the unnerving distance that's come between them. He's leaden-footed and deliberate, a fishing line reeling him in.
Naruto is past being in over his head at this point. "...I don't know what else to say."
"That's a first."
A surprised, genuine laugh, thumbing the edge of a sob, ripples out of him. "...And you're still allowed to laugh at my expense."
"Expected I'd argue with each time you returned the favor." Jiraiya returns, mirth pigmenting his tone. "But that's just semantics."
Naruto is unquestionably reeling, faltering to an indecisive standstill to the man's right.
"Waiting for a heartfelt invitation?" Threads of amusement lace his question.
Naruto can't help the shrug, the hesitation spilling out of him. "...just making sure I'm not intruding."
Jiraiya's shoulders shake with a hearty chuckle. "You kiddin'," He says, the same way he used to do. "I saved the best seat in the house just for you."
Cascade ocean blue waves of nostalgia wrench his heart, spread sincerity all over his face in the mold of a smile.
His feet gradually unstick from the earth, he crosses what remains of the cavernous distance.
Only to take notice of his mentor stoking an empty fire with an inky coal rod.
A frisson of fear chills him beneath his bloodstream for some indecipherable reason.
At the marrow of the unlit bonfire lies what appears to be tattered fabric—kimono cloth?—refusing to catch fire.
"It won't work." Naruto mutters out of the blue, slightly nonplussed at himself. "There's too much water."
—what...is he talking about? He doesn't even know what prompts him to say it. It's too murky to even tell.
"The fire's dead."
Jiraiya's head is cast low, shadowing a knowing smile.
Hatred drowns the pit of his gut, Naruto frowns at himself. He never wants to utter that cursed word. So why did he just—?
"Say," Jiraiya starts, switching subjects. "When was the last time you had a good cry?"
"...I can't." Naruto blinks himself out of the stupor, head swimming under the spell of unmitigated unpredictability—despite any number of topics he could have picked, why did he choose to inquire about this. "Cry anymore, I mean." He explicates, and laughs some more, because—"Whatever the hell that means."
For some strange reason, this seems the perfect time to occupy the spot beside him.
So Naruto does just that.
The woods loom over them, watching impassive and expectant.
Reminding him of how he's always romanticized this quality of a quiet life, in direct antithesis to the life he yearned to have—his ambition outweighed him in the end.
"Excuse the non-sequitur," Jiraiya begins once more—because of course he would, he's a writer. "But I've been meaning to ask."
"About?"
"The company that you've been keeping lately."
This time Naruto can't help the tug of a smile as he unforeseeably pictures the innocuous glint to mischievous eyes, the smooth softness of his grin solely aimed at him.
He shakes his head, wipes at his cheek with the back of his hand in nervous mannerism, attempting to nick the mystifying thinking line, the tinge of inexplicable shyness as he thinks of him. "He doesn't deserve the honorary mention, don't waste your breath." Naruto utters. And instantly loathes himself for it.
(News Flash: he doesn't have breath left to waste.)
"Don't suppose he's here for a reason?"
"Don't care enough to find out."
"Ah, so that explains it."
"Meaning?"
"Your uncharacteristic lack of interest."
Naruto buys time. Builds up to the excuse of a noncommittal exhale. "Well. You know what they say."
His mentor stops stoking the pretend fire for two, three even-tempered breaths.
At close quarters, Naruto can faintly discern the rod in his hold to be imbibed with residue chakra.
"I do." Jiraiya answers. And then catches his eye. "Curiosity killed the cat."
He blenches at the volitional word choice, the way it rolls so easily off Jiraiya while Naruto is left grappling with his synthetic composure.
"But." His mentor persists, just as purposive. "Satisfaction brought it back."
Hurt thins his lips, it dries his eyes. "...why do I get the feeling this isn't the open shut case you paint it to be." Naruto poses in a nonquestion.
"You've always been too shrewd for your own good. Haven't you, kid." It isn't a question, either.
Naruto gazes intently at the inexistent flame with a slow, jaundiced curve some might mistake for a smirk. "My esteemed teachers at the Academy would respectfully disagree with you there."
It earns him a harsh chortle from Jiraiya. "Bet they turned over a new leaf."
He can't really tell if it's wordplay on the leaf village, or if he actually cares enough to want to know.
"Gotta say, the whiplash is my favorite part." Naruto answers either way. "Hypocrisy's just so rare to find nowadays."
Jiraiya concurs with a noisy sigh. "They singin' you praises yet?"
"...You kidding," Naruto's jaw quickly clicks shut, throwing off weighty considerations his beam broadens, blustering and acidic, and he's free to quip:
"They beat me to them."
He probably shouldn't wisecrack about the abusive folk, but come on, how could he discard this golden opportunity when it's so on the nose, such a clever little twist—when the twist really is the bare-faced truth here!
How many kids can really brag about it, having most of their lifetime spent plagued by their peers and educators alike?
Life is just a cakewalk, that's universal knowledge.
But Naruto has enough compunction to allow. "Too far?"
"Hey, brat." Jiraiya remarks with uninhibited percipience, the way he used to once upon a ghostly scene during blood speckled nights. "Who do you think you've taken after?"
Despite the dark connotations, the ingenuous undertone of humor breaches past the gravity so effortlessly, has him breaking another smile at the end of the line.
But time is ticking.
Tick, tick, tick; relentless the way it did before his very own implosion.
"Naruto."
It's the very first time he uses his name since...well, since.
Awh, dammit, his eyes are itching again.
...Naruto can't be expected to know just how to handle this.
"Slow down." Jiraiya utters with a sombreness that he hates, hates, hates.
The man used to chase after fault lines, treating women as if they were nothing more than a dirty habit he would ditch come morning, gambling with his demons and dancing along the lip of a precipice. They've fought a number of times over it, Naruto left angry, hopeless and crying because the supposed adult was too drunk out of his mind to care.
But now he finds the audacity to lecture him on his coping mechanisms? Naruto despises him for it.
How could he not?
"Slow down." Jiraiya restates with a staggering amount of candor. "This isn't a race to the end."
His vision swarms with regrettable memory; a flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.
"You say that, but..."
Naruto smushes his cheeks into his hand, and wonders if it's a front to hide now.
"You're mad." Comes coolly beside him.
"You're observant." Naruto's rejoinder comes fierce.
He's just so...(mad.)
Naruto drags the shaky hand down his forehead, eyes shut to a pulsing, pitch-black darkness.
He can't believe any of this is happening.
"...you seem to move on easy."
...no no no. This he wasn't supposed to vocalize. But there's so much anger directed at Jiraiya himself that he doesn't know how to bury.
"Ask." Jiraiya prompts him, as if he can tell. "Anything." He grants in a windless murmur. "Anything you want."
Naruto shakes his head again in hard, childish motions, teeth clamping down on his tongue to spare himself the regret.
'Where the hell were you when I needed you the most?'
"I told you already." Naruto mutters, chin dipping into his chest.
He realizes he's still denying it. Still in hiding.
"...I don't know what else to say."
Because if he opens the floodgates and shouts the war of heart-stopping words burrowed into his vocal folds, he will run the risk of stepping on the wrong stone, of ruining this.
Because even if he could, even if he scraped off what's congealed into the sore walls of his larynx, coiled around the tip of his tongue, burning to be let out, he...
Wouldn't know where to start.
...wouldn't know when to stop.
The wind whistles. A sharp ring in the stony woodlands engulfing them.
"I usually try to avoid platitudes, but..."
And then, the silence thrives poisonous in the void of sound, the shallowness laid bare clinging to the air.
Jiraiya stands still; silent as a held breath.
Until an unnatural grin painstakingly carves into his features, splitting his stained cheeks wide, the gleam of his teeth a menacing vision in the lull of darkness.
"We have company."
Battling the panic paralysis, Naruto cranes his neck so quickly it cracks, bones shifting and assimilating the painful maneuver.
Wide, dilated eyes scan the dark woods swallowing them, leaping wildly from trunk to trunk, a sweeping attempt to palliate the tidal wave, the unavailing race of the pumping organ inside of him.
Naruto swivels back, slow, senses assaulting his prefrontal cortex, screaming at him to run as far as he dares.
His mentor's full profile awaits to meet him beneath streams of a wan moonlight sieved through the brittle foliage.
Lifeblood cascades from the gaping cavity meant to hold Jiraiya's left arm.
Naruto recoils from the unadulterated shock.
Scrambling, flailing, falling. Landing palms first into the parched earth. Blood pooling so swiftly on the ground it brushes against the tips of his toes.
The empty fire Jiraiya had been stoking blazes to life. Naruto's attention dwindles toward it, finding at its core the missing appendage, now wreathed in flames inside its own dug fossa.
"...whu–?" His spine quivers with the creeping frost, a golf ball of heat sears through the tender tissue of his tummy. "–what–"
Reacting on sheer instinct, Naruto crawls, clumsy and reckless on all fours, like a blind cub looking for its mother before it starves.
Seething with terror, he reaches for him.
Wanting to fix it, to heal him, to make it better, so it will be okay again; build the bridge, restore the gaps, cover the scars.
"...w-who did...t-this...to y-you?"
Jiraiya's grin cracks listlessly, strung to a strain, glassy irises gleaming with a midnight, pained haze.
Naruto keeps crawling toward him. Salt in the darkness, a sting to his eyes.
His quivering fingers finally latch onto a fistful of fabric—
Naruto gets rammed full-force into the thicket of trees behind, the mass of his body breaking barks to pieces that embed beneath his clothes, splintering his skin.
He's plummeting knees first into the gritty dirt, held captive there. The steel drum weight of pain beats down his battered form.
A strange weightlessness piques his harrowing curiosity.
His wavering vision pivots down low.
On the coarse ground, he finds the rigid contour of a shadow lying a few inches from him.
...Oh.
Oh no.
It's his hand.
Palm open. Fingers clutched inwards, frozen.
From his sheared wrist, the spray of his own blood cuts a vivid arc through the stillness, the glitter of shaved bone peeking chalky from maimed skin.
Naruto doubles over. Drowns in a wave of sickness within that stems far beyond any physical retching.
Tar shoves past his lips, darkness slinks down his chest, gooey tendrils thinning over the jagged line of his throat.
He bites down on billows of bile. With the hand that's left, Naruto squeezes his sheared off wrist until his blunt nails slice through the first two films of skin.
Blood spurts out in a vicious outpouring of scarlet. Splattering down his thighs and the grit below, soiling past his petrified frame, soaking into the dirt below, clotting like an open wound waiting to fester. Thick, viscous, flowing through his fingertips as they clasp around the agonizing patch of hurt.
The chunk of flesh squelches wetly in his palm, pervading his senses with it; mouth drowning with the heat of copper, nostrils imbued with the stench of death, eardrums pulsing with every ripple of his mangled skin.
Death coats his lungs as a rancid tar, reminiscent of terrors in the night he has found himself oppressed within countless of times. He tries to wrestle his fright into words, but his voice peters out into the pathetic effort at a scream nobody would ever bother to hear.
Gloom descends with the timeliness of a clock, cloaking them in yet another layer of dread.
A crisp silhouette shrouded in the fall of night bleeds to life.
In the dead of light his face is haggard, his eyes, however, remain feverishly clear, glowing alight inside his featureless cranium.
Naruto plunges into the venom of unnamed emotions welling up inside of him, facets he can't discern, sapped of lifeforce and physical strength.
Pain scrutinizes him without scruples. The glimmer of his carmine smeared blade is clasped snugly between his phalanges, an edge that would rend human flesh to shreds.
And it did.
(Ventured out in the name of peace, they ended up with a pair of missing limbs.)
Inky wisps frame his gaunt skull as he halves the distance severing him from his—their—mentor.
Naruto would describe the lack of expression as unerring and pitiless, as he comes to rest beside the firelit profile.
And with deliberate cruelty, Pain sinks the weapon into Jirayia's torso.
Until it bursts out of the seams of his fleshy cage. His bones shatter on impact. His organs rupture. His taut spine snaps. His once unbending back, his unyielding ambition; sullied forever.
Naruto's jaw unhinges without sound, powerless to vocalize his horror, all the same debilitated to the viscidity of it as it claws out from the depths of his trachea and spews down on him.
Flames lick the maimed limb sitting at its core, melting the humanity left to it, eating away at the strings of ligaments, tearing through the snapping tendons, consuming the dissipating cartilage, roasting raw muscle, through to the soft chew of bone.
Jiraiya tumbles, dismembered and limp, a lonely thud amid the h{a}unted woods.
The timeworn question: If a [tree] body falls in a forest, and there's no one {else} around to [hear] witness it, does it [make a sound] die?
Does it, Naruto?
Do you?
Naruto sobs without tears, cries without heat, terrified, like a child without a shield, shaking without a shred of hope into the limitless frame of his fear.
He can't speak, can't resist, can't intervene—can't do anything—but wait for the world to drop out from under him.
His mentor's eyes remain trained on him, crinkled at the corners from a blood warm smile. He croaks out a full couple of sentences, syllables sticking to each other through the outpouring of warmth escaping from within him.
"You've been stuck in your lungs since–"
The day you slipped away, his murky thoughts interject for him.
"–sooner or later you'll have to exhale."
Not a crumb of fear grains Jiraiya's stony face—facade.
Naruto's eyes bulge from their sockets, coerced into the robes of a title role spectator, witness to his demise, absorbing the clear cut sight of his father figure being wrenched from him.
He would gouge his own irises out if it could spare him the torturing sight.
The villain in question turns to seize him, the cracks of his cadaverous lips parting perfunctorily, shaping words into existence.
But all Naruto sees is the heat death of his universe and the foreboding end of his existence.
Jiraiya's disfigured corpse watches him watch him back with a painted, still-life smile.
.
Moon dips, gibbous and waxing, peeling beneath a spectral layer of storm clouds.
A perishing flock of black crows swallows the sphere, falling slack into the wooden spires piercing deeper through the sky and their carcasses.
Feathers shred from the wind's rusted wills.
Rotten twin cherries splattered to the ground, dyeing the grainy gravel a pooling blood red.
An extinguished candle chars before a barren trunk.
Ivy wilts, dipping in a heap at the feet of the withering laurel tree.
The beehive smashed into its crook is decaying, hanging by a noose.
An unrolled scroll and an open book rest opposing and lonely, impaled onto veined branches, the silhouetted crimson hue of the tree burns a stark cross into the dead of night.
.
.
.
"But how long do you think it will last?"
.
.
.
The excruciation washes him conscious, back into the land of living.
Naruto remains immutably stuck in his lungs, screaming underwater where nothingness reaches back, bubbles of air burst to the surface but no sound breaks free.
Fire, earth and blood clog the spate of his senses to a debilitating stage, he feels everything, the thin skin of his eyelids screwed shut, his spine arcuating, the consuming quail crushing his windpipe, the shape of his teeth blood bitten into the dried cracks of his lips.
A deluge of footsteps thunders nearer, the door thrown wide, and they're rushing inside his room. The line of his body incurves, contorting to the side. Nails ripping sheets, hair, he tastes panic, the swell of mercurial pain.
Warm fingers card through his hair, steady hands cover the backs of his own, peeling his shaking fingertips from his scalp, running down his hunched back, his palpitating chest, forcing him to sit up, but his physique refuses to comply.
The stab of horror coats his palate clean.
His best friends are a lonely tether to a crippling, waking reality that doesn't differentiate from his nightly terrors, only they're talking to him from atop a well, the rising tides of their voices rippling through his consciousness in waves, distant, detached, distorted.
He's abusing his vocal cords, what's left of them, still nothing makes it past the chafing dread.
"Did the nightmares start again?"
...no.
No no no . It never was a question of when, don't you get it? Because, the thing is—
They never ceased in the first place.
He folds in on himself, trying to reject with every vestige of strength left the addition penetrating through the sensory fog immuring him, just barely managing to stifle out.
"...shut...up..."
For the very first time since his mentor's merciless murder, Naruto addresses aloud the baleful hiss that stems from the inward, atrophying abyss of his mind.
Every murder is the end of a story; yet so many tales take it as their beginning.
. . .
a/n:
i'm: SPIRALING
explanation:
Naruto quipping 'they beat me to them' has 2 meanings. since he's answering Jiraiya's question 'they singin' you praises yet?', basically Naruto would be saying that the villagers beat him to the punch – as in, they're idolizing him even before Naruto has the chance to put himself on a pedestal. but because Naruto has obviously never been the shallow type who'd regard himself as the 'hero' of the situation, he's really referencing the abuse during the years. basically this is Naruto using dark humor. (thus, i seriously hope someone comments on the "They beat me to them." because when i tell you i'm actually proud of that line—i was SO close to using it as the chapter summary. but i needed the foreshadowing to take the spotlight in this particular chapter :( )
P.S.
to any psychology student out there, or anyone who has a good enough grasp of this, or anyone who's passionate at all about this stuff: i'm curious what would be the actual meaning behind being limbless/mute/paralyzed/tortured in a nightmare within a grief-stricken context on a subconscious and conscious level? asking for a friend
(rip to the pure souls who were anticipating a heartwarming reunion between Naruto and Jiraiya)
