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In The Eyes
By RC Mason
3.
~ Godless ~
'I am leaving,' Sasuke says.
It has been a month, a month since Hinata and Naru – Narutard as Sasuke now thinks of him – have officially shown the world of their no-longer-platonic feelings towards each other.
A month of Hinata and Naruto holding hands and laughing softly into the breeze; a month of Hinata and Naruto sharing secret smiles and stolen looks as they pass each other in the training halls; a month of Naruto appearing unannounced, and thoroughly unwelcome in Sasuke's unvoiced opinion, as he bursts, grinning, into the Hyuuga household; a month where making sudden turns around a corner or walking into a seemingly empty room would find Sasuke staring at the shadows of two figures locked in embrace and attached at the lips –
All in all, a month too long.
Wait another month and he'd be fifteen. Fifteen and still pathetically weak. Fifteen and Itachi still gloating.
Where is that promise now, with all its swagger and confidence? Even the burst of the spring wind, heady with pollen and smelling like spices from flora most exotic, begins to feel like a slap in the face. The wind whips his black hair about and tosses it, mockingly, into his eyes.
'You'd be dead,' Sasuke had said. 'Dead before I'm thirteen.'
Sasuke remembers the choking feeling, the ice cold fingers wrapped around his throat and crushing down on his oesophagus, bringing up blood in his mouth, bad memories in his mind, and ... cruel déjà vu.
Again, the feeling of weakness – vile, thick, and cold – sweeping over and drenching him, more suffocating than what the hands on his throat could ever do, until the world around him hazes, as though he is peering through the eyes of a drowning man, and fades to peculiar shade of black. Rusty. Like dried blood.
In his last feeble grasps at consciousness, Sasuke remembers thinking – dimly, almost detachedly as if he was an overhead bystander watching a little, insignificant boy being crushed by his older brother – that Itachi had a point.
(You are weak Sasuke)
He would have left by the time his stitches had been removed, all traces of his injuries gone except for the freshly pink skin peeking out of faint white scars.
(The hellish visions, the harrowing glimpses into a demonic world stained in blood and splattered with grotesque dark shadows, stayed with him however; it would not be for another year before he could close his eyes at night and not see the grinning mutilated faces that seemed to whisper: Welcome … Brother).
He already had his boots laced up, his shinobi gear sitting on the seat next to him, and one leg swung over the edge of the bed, ready to spring up, when Hinata, white-faced and wide-eyed, burst into his room and his vision was suddenly blockaded by a sea of black. But this was a good, familiar black that surrounded him, falling across the tip of his nose and onto his chest, smelling faintly of lavender and morning dew, and as soft as the finest spun silk. A more than welcome reprise from the bleached white walls that had made sleeping so exhausting and so near impossible in the hospital.
And when Sasuke found his hand patting – albeit awkwardly – Hinata's back as she buried her face into the crook of Sasuke's neck, her ruffled hair turning the most exquisite shades of black as she trembled and apologised over and over again in words that Sasuke could not quite understand (I should have seen, I should have seen), the forehead protector resting on top of his combat shorts, with kunais poking out eagerly of the pockets, seemed less and less of a beckoning friend, and more and more of a malevolent intruder striving to part him from all that he loved under the old ruse of honour and shame.
Sasuke felt his hand tighten over Hinata's back and he pressed her fiercely against his chest, his pale cheek brushing against the top of her hair.
Not yet. Not now.
The metallic plate of his forehead protector glinted in the fading afternoon light – a knowing wink that he had merely delayed the inevitable. The malevolent intruder was never to go away.
The cursed seal on his neck continued to burn.
Later, there would be justifications. It was logical that he had to get stronger before he could challenge Itachi again. He was just biding his time and making his hatred strong, growing it like a patient farmer tending to his crops – though it was poison that Sasuke wanted to reap, not fruit.
But it would always end in the same thing, the same damning thought. Like a sunflower turning its head towards the sun, so innocently and naturally, Sasuke would think of Hinata, her soft smiles, her gentle looks – and suddenly all that hatred, the eden of toxic fury and smouldering rage, was gone, replaced instead by a light, tingling feeling that only later, much later, a wiser and more mature Sasuke would identify as
(hope)
Yet, hope – and its counterpart: love, as this older Sasuke would later reflect – was such an insubstantial and fleeting thing, shining brightly one minute and gone in a flash the next. A bit like the piercing rays of light after a thunderstorm, glinting gold and bold when the rain cleared but quick to disappear behind the grey clouds as they tumbled across the sky.
'I am leaving,' Sasuke says to the empty room.
No-one to hear it of course, but who is to say that is his intention? Dramatic and staged departures are only for self-loving tards who have one eye at the door and the other at their audience (preferably shocked and aghast by their announcement of leaving this very second), with ears cocked and waiting in glee for the enthralling protests and entreaties that would follow.
Rather, Sasuke's words are overflow, the brimming from his pool of thoughts unable to contain themselves within the boundaries of his mind any longer.
The walls begin to chant. Leaving … leaving … leave … LEAVE!
Outside, the sky is overcast and overrun with grey, rumbling clouds. It leaks a bleak, dreary hue into the interior of the parlour, staining the walls with sombre shadows.
From the window, Sasuke can see the slanted outlines of a little, steepled hut on the gentle apex of a hill.
Unlike the Uchiha, the Hyuuga are a religious people and attend to their devotions with austere piety. Sundays are especially reserved for this purpose, though try as she might, Hinata could never entreat Sasuke to visit the house of a god that he does not believe in.
('My whole family was killed in a single night,' he said. 'Where is Justice in that?')
At the thought of Hinata, something in Sasuke's chest unhinges, but his feet are already on the doorsteps and the wind is already there, slapping cold and laughing airily into his face.
The roses blooming crimson by the gates appear like Itachi's eyes, Mangekyo Sharigan ablaze and rising.
So as Hinata seeks her god, Sasuke seeks his vengeance. Eve had wanted the forbidden fruit, willing to give up an eternity of paradise for a single bite, but Sasuke wants the snake behind it, the snake that had whispered
(Ye shall be as gods)
And when one is a god, what is of the promise that came before it?
(Thou shalt surely die)
The cursed seal blisters, but Sasuke feels a different kind of prickle on the back of his neck when he leaves the house.
As if he is being watched.
He spins around, eyes turning from black to red in an instant, and catches sight of a tall, long-haired youth behind the wall, his own eyes white and alight with thick veins blasting at the sides.
The muscles in Sasuke's shoulders relax in the smallest of fractions and he slips the kunai back into his pocket.
'Not at church, Neji?' Sasuke raises an eyebrow.
'My father' is all the Hyuuga says. The same flat tone that Sasuke uses when he discusses his family and his non-belief.
Sasuke looks into Neji's eyes and knows that he knows. If anything, the backpack hitched over his shoulder, bulging with more items than required for any feasible genin mission, keeps no secrets.
'Spying on me all this time?' Sasuke says, not particularly concerned but needing answers.
The Hyuuga prodigy, a year above Sasuke and possibly Sasuke's match, nods. A simple tilt of the head that says: I've never trusted you and I don't intend on starting anytime soon.
Sasuke can read this not because he and Neji are close (the very thought makes Sasuke want to smirk), but because he is all too aware of the constancy of Neji's hawk stares. The barest frowns, the crinkle around his eyes, when he sees Hinata and Sasuke together. The tightening of his fists when Sasuke makes a motion too sudden or too close to Hinata for Neji's liking. Embraces – though more often than not initiated on Hinata's part rather than Sasuke's – turn Neji scarlet.
But the glares, the deep-set disapproving glares that bare an uncanny resemblance to those of Hinata's father, are reserved only for Hinata at the morning table when she walks in, takes one look at Neji, and can only blush furiously into her hands because she knows that Neji knows that she had visited Sasuke's bedroom in the evening.
Neji never mentions this to her father because he sees that she is too innocent and kind to get up to any … shenanigans … behind the closed doors, and there is his rule of letting sleeping dogs lie, but he cannot help but feel an unnaturalness in the bond that she shares with Sasuke
(something tempting fate and destiny)
and this is what sends him shooting piercing silver glares at her in the following morning.
The bond, however, is strong – as if Sasuke and Hinata are tied by their heartstrings – and this is what sends Neji shouting after Sasuke now, when the raven-haired ass turns his back and starts to head down the Hyuuga gates.
'So you're just going to leave?'
The upturned spikes of hair – much like the upwards-turned ass of a duck, Neji muses and, in a moment of metrosexuality that he would never admit to (and gawd forbid Ten-Ten gets word of), considers this hairdo very much inferior to his own long and sleek hair – stop just inches from the gate but do not turn around.
Yes, the tightly held and determined posture of the Uchiha's back seems to say. Yes, and what the hell is it to you?
'Damn you,' Neji says and strides to the Uchiha, his Byakugan lighting up all the different chakra points like a perverse map. One touch to those points and Sasuke is rendered a crumpled, agonised heap on the floor.
'I mean that much to you?'
Sasuke has the audacity to smirk. Neji's vision bursts into a blaze of green and he could Eight Triagrams Sixty-Four Palm Sasuke right there and then.
'Not to me,' Neji hisses and grabs the front of Sasuke's shirt. Sasuke gives him a cool look and, though he is younger, they stand eye-for-eye. 'To her! To Hinata! She doesn't know, does she? And you're not going to leave any explanations for her, are you?'
Something stirs in the obsidian depths. Neji feels almost a flinch under the bundle of cloth in his fist before a cold hand abruptly closes down on his wrist and jerks his hand away.
'She probably wouldn't even notice,' Sasuke says. There is the picture again: Hinata and Naruto sitting side-by-side, the swing rocks gently underneath them, and the sunset washes them in a warm, beautiful glow.
'Damn straight she will!' Neji says. There is his promise: Father, I will protect her, as is my branch member's honour and as I shall protect your honour.
Sasuke's eyes are cold now and Neji can see the tear-drop shape of the black tomoe spiralling in the Sharigan, very much like the blood circling into his Byakugan right now.
'Time will change it,' Sasuke says. 'It has the inclination to erase.'
'You're ungrateful!' Neji shouts. 'After all these years, living with us, you just run off without so much as a word of thanks –'
'I was a charity case!' Sasuke snarls and Neji is no longer the only one with homicidal thoughts. 'I was never made to feel home – considered lower than the basest servant because apparently I did not "earn my keep",' Sasuke mimicks the pompous tone of the Hyuuga elder who told him this when he was a child. 'Do you know what it feels like, Hyuuga, to have looks of condescending pity following you around, everywhere you go?'
Yes, Neji thinks and with slight amazement. When my Father was sacrificed. Because he was a branch member. Those vacuous looks that had trailed him, bespeaking pity, not from the heart but from all the wrong places. Because I was a branch member.
'And do you know what it's like, Hyuuga, to have vengeance hanging over you like a lingering ghost, knowing that your honour is at stake and that only blood can wipe the slate clean?'
Yes …
Sasuke's chest is heaving; he has his fists clenched and ready to strike Neji if it comes down to it. He expects Neji's furious eyes to flash silver – the tell-tale sign of his incoming attack and way too obvious, scoffs Sasuke inwardly – and for a moment, it is almost there. But the glint of the morning sun fades away and leaves Neji's eyes strangely blank. Even the veins of his Byakugan recede a little.
Perhaps blank is the wrong word for it. Neji's eyes are not blank; instead, it is as though the fury, which had brewing so dangerously close to the surface, had been siphoned out and the space filled instead with a begrudging sort of acquiescence and understanding …
White. Like an uneasy truce forged between two rivals.
Sasuke suddenly understands Neji's allegiance, and he relaxes slightly. At least a part of his worries can be placed at ease.
'You'll stop her, won't you, if she tries to go looking for me?'
A pause.
Then a curt nod downwards.
Of course.
A single strand of light breaks from the grey, gargantuan clouds and it streaks in a fleeting flash of gold across the diagonal of Sasuke's face, illuminating, for the briefest of seconds, a smile that had been tucked away into the corners of Sasuke's mouth.
o
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Merry Christmas, fellow readers! Thought I might pop this (longer-than-usual) chapter out as a special Chrissie present for all of you ;)
Of course, given the festive season, the religious references could not be helped. In my mind, with the Hyuuga tendencies towards sacrifice and duty, it struck me as following more of the Judeo-Christian tradition than Buddhism, hence the reason behind any perceived anachronisms.
Also, there is the question of the characters' ages. I agree, Cherrilicious Phenomena and others, that at 14, the characters seem a bit young for the relatively mature activities they are engaging in, but this was a result of the constraints in the canon. I mean, we have Itachi at age 13 massacring his entire family. If that's not screwed up, I don't know what is. So, I just imagine that everyone in Naruto-land are very mature for their ages, which, by the way, I had to compress in this fanfic in order to stick fairly close to the canon and the timeskip's ages.
Anyway, would you be kind enough to leave a Christmas present for me in the form of a review ;) ? As always, let me know what you think (story, development, characters, writing) and any questions that you may have/ clarifications that you may need. It certainly makes writing this more interesting and helps me update faster.
Enjoy Christmas everyone!
~ RC Mason.