Part III
Somebody
By. Misery's-Toll
Chapter Seventeen: Sasuke's Interlude
It doesn't pay to make predictions
Sleeping on an unmade bed
Finding out wherever there is comfort there is pain
Only one step away
Like four seasons in one day
- "Four Seasons in One Day" by New Buffalo
[You're an angel boy, Sasuke.]
He was born with wings. Or something like them.
He had grown up a mystery, spending the first few years of his life periodically in science labs and hospitals for different tests. A boy with wings was the world's greatest enigma –something that should have been impossible.
He recieved attention. And plenty of it. But love was something he lacked from the day he was pushed from his mother's womb. He was nothing more than a science experiment, following his birth.
How does a boy with wings find love?
One.
Sasuke is five years old.
He doesn't get to go to kindergarten like the other kids in his neighborhood, and he can't go outside without his mommy or Itachi by his side. He's not allowed to go swimming or go to the hot springs even when the rest of the family goes. The neighborhood children stare at him when he leaves the house, his hand in mommy's, and they call him the devil's-child, but he just smiles at them until he gets home when he crawls into bed and cries.
His daddy doesn't love him, and he knows it. He hears daddy arguing with mommy sometimes about giving him to the scientists permanently. And when they start to yell, Itachi takes Sasuke into his room where he tells him stories about little boys with wings, and they always have happy endings.
And twice a week he'd spend the night with the doctors who would monitor his blood pressure and take finger-pricks and spinal fluid samples. And then he'd sleep in his little cot, curled in on himself, wondering why he should be punished for being born the way he was.
"You're an angel boy, Sasuke," his mother would coo at him, smoothing back his untamable hair, "You are my beautiful little angel."
Two.
Sasuke is six.
He gets to go to school now, but his mommy winds gauze around his torso and makes him wear baggy shirts and thick sweatshirts to conceal his wings.
"It's because I want to keep you all to myself, silly. And maybe other people won't understand you the way I do," she says, thinking of her life and how everyone she knows is fading from it all because of this little boy she couldn't give birth to correctly.
Sasuke meets a boy named Naruto who has whisker-like scars that are darkdarkdark and he tells Sasuke that he is an orphan.
Sasuke and Naruto become best friends. Sasuke protects the boy from the other kids who throw rocks at him and call him a fox-demon, because he knows what it's like to be called a demon, himself. And when Naruto sees his wings, he just says, "Cool."
But when Sasuke goes home every day, daddy gives him disapproving looks, and mommy checks to make sure the gauze is still intact. And each week he goes back to the doctors who perform their painful tests on him that make him want to die.
Three.
Sasuke is eight years old.
Daddy pushes Itachi too hard and the boy falls into an angry depression. He spends most of his days with Sasuke, teaching him about their business. Because Sasuke wants Uchiha Fugaku's love and Itachi doesn't.
Sasuke's mommy strokes his hair and gives him encouragement, but the words wings and angels are completely banned from her presence.
And Sasuke wonders if maybe it wasn't that she wanted to keep him all to herself, but that she was ashamed of giving birth to a child with wings. And he wishes, not for the first time, that they'd go away so that maybe his mommy and daddy would love him.
Four.
Sasuke is nine.
Daddy finally looks at him like a person, now that the words wings and angels haven't been mentioned in years, and the neighbors have forgotten, and there's no visible proof left that his child had been born with hideous irremovable deformities, and he thinks that maybe this child has some potential. So even though the boy still goes to the doctor twice a week, daddy spends three days a week tutoring him, because maybe now that Itachi is hopelessly involved in the world of cigarettes and playing-hookie, he needs a different heir.
Later on in the year, the Uchiha Co. fails, and the family loses everything. And one day while Sasuke is at the doctor's, he hears news that mommy and daddy have both been killed, both stabbed to death.
And so he and Itachi learn to live alone together. And he no longer goes to doctor appointments, and is no longer required to bind his wings, so he walks around the house enjoying the way it feels to let them expand to their full-length, though he's afraid of losing the love of anyone else, and he still binds them when he goes to school. And sometimes he still crawls into bed and cries in their little shit-hole of an apartment, but Naruto comes over and tells him stories of boys with wings while Itachi smokes and watches MTV, and the stories never ever have endings.
Five.
Sasuke is eleven.
He lives in a world of hellish-lives and war and sin, and when he goes to school there are children younger than he is making out against lockers or taking a drag from a cigarette. He spends most days at Naruto's house, because now Itachi's gang-friends come over and deal out different drugs, and sometimes when they're all high, they ask Sasuke to show them his wings and they laugh and spit at him, and he sometimes wonders whatever happened to the caring big brother he used to have.
And he begins to believe that maybe the neighborhood children had been right. Maybe he was a demon, not an angel, if everyone whose life he touched collapsed around them.
Six.
Sasuke is fourteen years old. Itachi has cleaned up for the most part and finally decided to get a job, though he continues to smoke. They move into a small, cookie-cutter home, identical to every other one on the block, if not just a little bit more damaged. He picks up his little brother from school each day instead of making the boy walk for an hour as he had before, and every day when they walk through the front door he ruffles Sasuke's hair with his fingers, as if it were enough of an apology.
And Sasuke's given up on hope of finding someone who could prove to him that maybe he wasn't a demon instead of an angel boy, though he tries to make up for the sin of his existence in every way possible.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, 'Four Seasons in One Day' or anything related. Fan-made fic, guys.
A/N: I'm cringing right now. I figure you guys will either love this or hate this. I'm guessing most people's response to this will be sputtering in confusion. Hoho. Um. I'm hoping that those of you who do hate this will at least give it a chance to keep going and explain some stuff in upcoming chapters... ;D Well, it would appear that my number of readers has signifigantly dropped. I've gone from getting around 24 reviews per chapter to around 7 or 8. But hopefully with a chapter like this, you guys will make your opinions known.
Please review, dearies!
And thanks to Ira Feye for beta-ing!
-MT