Fast Asleep
"And here we are at the home of the well known Fugaku Uchiha, who's youngest son, Sasuke Uchiha, apparently burned to death late last night. Questions are still being issued as to whether this was an accident or a suicide. Understandably the Uchiha family, including an older brother and a mother - the Senate hopeful's wife - have declined to comment about the seemingly odd method of death. The room, as was commented by police, had been torched, completely blackened by fire, but not a mark of soot reached much further than the victim's doorway. We will, of course, be updating more as this story unfolds..."
'Click.'
000
Kakashi sat down to his desk with a blank expression on his face, as if the shock was still burning holes through his brain. Thoughts moved like quicksilver, meshing, entangling, squirming away before he even got a good bead on them.
All he could do really, was pull out his old cassette player from one of the filing cabinets, a bent coat hanger dangling from the snapped off antenna, and run the tape Sasuke had given him.
"Something different happened this time. Something off, yet something incredible. My waking dream talked to me - talked to me like a person and smiled like one too...Waking dream, pah, it seems like such a weak name to give to what these are...because they aren't actually dreams. The problem is I don't know if they're more or less. Heh, one of the maid's said I should just 'bite the bullet and get an exorcism.' I had no idea such archaic stupidity still existed. I'm not possessed, I'm merely haunted."
Kakashi smiled, slowly rubbing his eyes of the sting and moisture that had slowly, but surely, begun to develop.
"I can't stay here. I've said it so many times, I'm not sure my person will survive me saying it again. I just can't stay here. Everything's so damn hard and unforgiving. Bars on my window, because there either scared I'll get out, or someone else will get in. I'm not sure which one, and I've never really asked... I'm beginning to think it doesn't matter anymore, and that's what keeps me up so late into the night, with only the sound of water trickling down my bedroom walls to keep me sane...except everyone says there isn't a drop on my floor - nothing. I fear this overwhelming numbness. Sometimes I can't even feel the comfort Kakashi provides."
He rested his face in his hands, simply unable to stop the wet from dripping between his fingers.
"I threw up my medication this morning. It's so much easier to see."
"I was there again...That place so peaceful I can hardly stand it. Can't stand it. It's fake... Because there's a darkness creeping at the corners of the photo, haunting me. Teasing me with glimpses of it."
"How can it just be a dream...? When my eyes are open and I'm awake...?"
Kakashi desperately wished he still had that container of whiskey hidden in his locked bottom drawer. Groping weakly for the stop switch, he figured the silence signaled the end of the tape, and only jumped a little when the next voice filled his office.
His eyebrows formed a V of bewilderment. It wasn't Sasuke.
"Hey you!...wrong with you!...man is a creature accustomed to the normalcy of his life...Anything else frightens and disgusts them...You can't stop it..."
The words were garbled and just a little indiscernible, but they were there.
"It melts eventually."
Kakashi blinked at the sound of Sasuke again.
"Tonight."
"Kakashi, whatever happens, I just wanted you to know I'd be alright. Whatever is - whatever reality reins there - I'm fine. Bars, Kakashi. Bars."
Sasuke sounded so oddly out of sync, so - content - that Kakashi felt his sadness, fears drift away on a heavy exhaling of breath. As his friend, he'd said he believed him. He said he would believe in him.
And nothing more needed to be said.