Chapter 6: Seppuku
In that moment, time stood still for Naruto, and he was able to see every horrific detail of Sasuke's self-mutilation with absolute clarity. He watched, helplessly frozen behind his wooden barrier, as the lightning incased blade tore through Sasuke's stomach. Sasuke grimaced in pain, his face so contorted that it was almost unrecognizable, but did not cry out. When the hilt of his katana touched his skin, he took a ragged breath, and then sent a second violent shock through the blade. His body convulsed and his legs gave way beneath him, sending him crashing to his knees. Blood seeped from the wound at his stomach and from previous wounds from his battle with his brother. It seemed as if the electrical shock had forcefully ripped them open.
His hands shook—rivulets of blood ran over his knuckles—and his upper body swayed from side to side as if debating how best to fall. And just when Naruto thought it was over, Sasuke choked and wretched violently, nearly doubling over from the intensity. Even in the dim light, the pool looked to be a sticky, murky red. Naruto knew it was blood. The lightning and screeching that surrounded Sasuke sputtered and died, concentrating into a dull hum around his sword.
Panting from the physical exertion of emptying his pierced stomach, Sasuke slowly lifted his head to stare bleary-eyed at Naruto's mask. Liquid ice ran through Naruto's veins. He stared transfixed at Sasuke's dull eyes, once so full of life and passion. He was oblivious to everything else. The blood that trickled down Sasuke's chin to hit the wet floor—drip, drip, drip—and the wood that splintered into his fingers didn't even register in his mind. Then suddenly, Sasuke's eyes fluttered and rolled to the back of his head, and time sped up as his body fell forward to collide with the ground.
A beat passed before Naruto regained control of his limbs. "Sasuke!" he screamed and barreled forward into the room, nearly slipping on the blood and bodily fluids that mixed on the floor. Sasuke lay motionless at his feet, which only increased his panic.
Think, think, think! He could still be alive, yes, he could still be alive. But the sword needed to go. He needed to stop the blood and clean the wound. Rolling Sasuke on his side, Naruto took a firm grasp of the sword handle. A powerful electrical volt ran through his arm.
"Shit!" he yelled and somehow managed to release his grip. But wait. This was a good thing. Electricity meant chakra and chakra meant life. Sasuke was still alive! Naruto just needed a different approach.
His eyes danced wildly around the room until they landed on the bed. Crossing the room in one stride, Naruto ripped the sheets off with a harsh tug—various items fell to the floor with dull thuds—and wrapped them around his hand. Returning to his original position by Sasuke, Naruto gripped the sword handle again and slid it out as quickly as he dared. A soft hum of electricity still ran through his arm, but the pain was much more manageable. The sword clanged against the floor as he slid it to a far corner of the room. With shaking hands, Naruto hurriedly wrapped the sheets around Sasuke's torso and was horrified to find how quickly the white was marred by red.
As he secured the last piece, Naruto heard a soft groan escape Sasuke's lips. Snapping his head up at the sound, Naruto ripped off his mask and gently turned Sasuke onto his back. "Sasuke . . . Sasuke!"
Sasuke coughed a few times and slowly opened his eyes. A small spark of recognition lit their dim surfaces as he gazed up at Naruto's face, but it quickly faded. "I told you . . . to come back tomorrow . . . idiot," he wheezed. Though they had not had a real conversation in years, Naruto knew Sasuke well enough to interpret his message as, 'I didn't want you to see this.' It could have been another cough, but Naruto swore what followed his statement sounded like a chuckle. In Sasuke's weakest moment, his walls had finally appeared to have fallen.
He lay there, coughing up blood, ugly. He was not meant to die like this. It went against his very nature. In his final moments, his beauty had fled in hopes to escape such treachery, leaving his bloody face contorted in grotesque expressions of pain.
Tears welled up behind Naruto's eyes, but he didn't have time to cry. There was too much at stake now. "You have to stop talking, you stupid bastard," he chastised him, his voice shaking as much as his hands. "I've got to get you to a hospital. Konoha's the closest thing . . ." Naruto mumbled mostly to himself and started to slip his arms under Sasuke so he could carry him to salvation.
But before his left arm could slip under his back, Sasuke's hand gripped Naruto's wrist surprisingly hard for someone that had already lost half a pint of blood. "No," Sasuke said firmly. His speech was broken by three more coughs; blood trailed down the corners of his mouth. "No, I want to die."
This hurt Naruto more than any chidori through the chest possibly could. His lip trembled, and he looked down at Sasuke's broken body with a growing sickness in his gut. "God, what have you done to yourself, Sasuke? You have so much to live for," he murmured hopelessly, shaking his head and blinking his eyes so that his tears would not fall. Even now, he couldn't lose whatever respect Sasuke had left for him.
This time, the sad chuckle that left Sasuke's throat was unmistakable. "No, Naruto . . . I have nothing left . . ." Sasuke trailed off. His eyes stared at the ceiling, seeing and understanding things that Naruto only wished he could comprehend. He hadn't been sarcastic. He hadn't been condescending. He had used a tone of complete and hollow honesty that chilled Naruto to the bone.
Naruto's already troubled emotions skyrocketed. The painted fox could not contain him now. His instinct had fled to make way for something even more deep rooted: complete, absolute anguish. He didn't have enough time to explain the depth of the wound Sasuke had dealt him. All of his hard work, all of his training, all of his blood, sweat, tears—his very soul!—had been centered on this one task of saving his friend. It had been for Sakura, for himself, for the village, for Sasuke! It was for everything and everyone he had ever cared about . . . and now it was all dying before his very eyes. Naruto was unable to express this through words, but he tried anyway.
"You had me! You had Sakura, and Kakashi-sensei . . . all of us!" his heart screamed, begging Sasuke to understand, if only for a second, the extent of his devotion to his conviction. In the back of Naruto's mind, he knew that he needed to stop this conversation and get Sasuke immediate medical attention. But Konoha was so unbelievably far . . . and Sasuke's hand was still gripping his wrist.
Shaking his head ever so slightly, Sasuke continued to stare at the ceiling, his voice growing softer and softer as he continued his explanation. "No . . . I understand everything. It's so clear," he murmured and stopped to choke and spit up more blood. "He did it all for me . . . everything for me . . . and I killed him. I don't deserve his sacrifice." Sasuke went on to mumble incoherent phrases about misplaced hate and misguided goals, but that was all Naruto could manage to make out. But even the words that he could understand perplexed him. Itachi was the enemy. He had always been the enemy. Things like that didn't just change.
However much he wanted to uncover all of his unanswered questions, Naruto knew that now was not the time. Any anger that Naruto had felt melted away as he continued to stare at the pathetic sight beneath him. Sasuke was dying. His mind knew this, but his irrational heart kept telling him that he would survive. Sasuke had come out of worse, right? Of course he had. This was just a scratch for him. A long, deep, gushing scratch that would—oh God, oh God!
"You have to stop talking," Naruto begged him and pressed his hand against the sheet to try and stop the bleeding. All he managed to do was stain his hand. "I'm taking you to the hospital. You're going to be fine," he repeated shakily and desperately tried to retie the sheets so that they would prove to be more useful.
Sasuke fixed him with an empty gaze that would haunt Naruto for years. "It's too late, Naruto . . ." he whispered. "It's always been . . . too late for me." When he could not handle the weight of his eyelids, they fluttered shut, and didn't open again.
The hand that gripped Naruto's wrist became lax and slipped to the floor with a muffled thud.
"Sasuke . . ." Naruto called. Sasuke didn't move.
"Sasuke!" he cried more desperately and grabbed his face between his hands. It felt as if he were lifting the head of some large, lifeless doll.
Naruto's hands began to shake quite terribly, and he gently lowered Sasuke's head back to the floor so it could rest in a pool of his own blood and vomit. This wasn't real. This wasn't real. Sasuke had caught him in the Mangekyō sharingan, and he was experiencing some sort of hell. Yes, that was it.
Suddenly, Naruto was acutely aware of every drop of blood in the room. Blood stained his shin guards and soaked through his pants from the knees down, leaving them feeling warm and heavy. It dried around his left wrist where Sasuke had grabbed him. It filled his nose with its overpowering stench of metal and shame. But what he noticed first was the rosy stain it had left on his finger tips and gloves. It marked him with the blame of such a macabre scene and mocked him for his uselessness to Sasuke when he had needed him most.
In a moment of clarity, he lifted his trembling hands to his face and listened as the many facets of his life began to splinter and break. So this was what it meant to be ANBU. A murderer, covered in the blood of his best friend.
And then the world exploded into a blurred visage of anguish and woe. A deep roaring, like the bellow of a wounded animal, filled the room. It took Naruto a moment to realize the sound was his own screaming, but he could not stop. The screams turned into sobs, and tears blurred his vision. He pulled at his hair and face, further spreading the stain of Sasuke's blood. At one moment he found himself hunched over Sasuke's body, his head almost touching his soiled torso. The next, Naruto was shaking his shoulders, pleading for him to wake up, wake up Sasuke, wake up! They had to hurry, didn't he realize that? This was no time to be sleeping!
Naruto wasn't sure how long he spent in this state of despondency, but he was sure it would have been much longer if he hadn't heard frantic footsteps racing towards them.
Fuck. The door and window were both open. The whole inn must have heard.
In a desperate haste, Naruto fit his mask back over his face. The world came back into focus, and his emotions suddenly became a subdued ache in his chest. His eyes quickly darted around the room. Oh God. This had murder written all over it. As his eyes scanned the room, they landed on the bottle of clear liquor perched on Sasuke's bedside table, still with only an inch of alcohol missing. A single strangled laugh made it out of Naruto's throat. Even in the face of death, Sasuke had been too proud to try and dull the pain.
As he heard the door of the stairwell slam shut, Naruto positioned himself to lift Sasuke, but something else caught his eye. Sasuke's katana still lay across the room. Naruto immediately reached for it. Sasuke had been carrying it all these years. He would want it when he woke up. The pounding footsteps were coming closer and closer, and Naruto heaved Sasuke's body over his shoulders, draping his broken and bloody form across his back. He had managed to lift himself into a squatting position when someone skidded to a stop outside the door. There, bathed in the harsh florescent light, stood the boy from the front desk.
The boy's eyes grew wide as saucers, but just as he opened his mouth, Naruto embedded a shuriken into the door frame and inch away from his head. His mouth froze in a silent scream.
Naruto laid a single finger over the fox's grinning teeth. "Forget what you saw," he instructed calmly, as if he hadn't just suffered his most intense emotional breakdown since Jiraiya's death. The boy's eyes—just a boy, just three years younger than Naruto—filled with so much fear that Naruto wondered just what kind of monster he had become. But the mask kept his emotions in check, and in the next second, he was gone.
As soon as Naruto teleported to the Hiraishin seal that he had placed at the edge of the woods, he hit the ground at a flat out sprint. His mind was racing as he weaved in between the trees. One hand gripped onto Sasuke's kimono to hold him in place while the other clutched the handle of his bloody katana. No more than five seconds after he had teleported, he realized that he had left his traveling cloak in his room. Shit. Too late now. He resolved to have one of his clones sneak in to retrieve it and dispatched all the others. A flood of memories invaded his already troubled mind as they all dissipated, but he did his best to think clearly.
Already he could feel the weight of using the Hiraishin twice press down on him. It was an imperfect jutsu that he hardly ever escaped without some minor internal damage. However, the Kyuubi usually took care of it before it became too serious, and the benefits of the jutsu highly outweighed the costs. At least . . . most of the time. Though he had mastered the basic concept of his father's jutsu, Naruto had been unable to perfect the delicate science of regulating his chakra output. Consequently, all of his body didn't always stop at the same time, which could sometimes give his organs a good shake. And he had never traveled with such a large burden, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
The dark forest was difficult to maneuver in, even with his keen eyesight, and more than once he found his blood-covered soles slipping on the waxy pine needles that covered the forest floor. He always caught himself, but the sudden lurches did nothing to calm his nerves.
It was an hour's run to Konoha. Even under the best conditions, Sasuke had fifteen minutes. Sending an extra burst of chakra to his feet, Naruto scowled and frantically tried to devise some sort of plan. He had a seal placed on the border of Konoha . . . but the distance was so far. What if he didn't make it? What if he didn't end up so lucky this time and accidentally pinched off Sasuke's leg during the teleportation? Or worse. What if he pinched off his own leg and wasn't able to get Sasuke to Tsunade in time? He thought he might be sick.
Naruto tried not to notice how the sheet wrapped around Sasuke's torso was completely soaked through or the warm drops of blood that started flowing from Sasuke's body and down his back. He tried not to notice how Sasuke was growing stiffer and colder by the second. But most of all, he tried not the notice the horrible, twisted irony that he would indeed be carrying Sasuke's broken and bloody body back to Konoha, despite his earlier doubts.
Damn it, they needed to be home now! But the distance . . . no! He could handle it. If he tapped into the Kyuubi's chakra, it would give him the boost he needed to pull the extra weight a second time. Right? Right. Naruto slowed his pace only slightly to concentrate both his and the Kyuubi's chakra evenly throughout his body. After securing his hold on Sasuke, he took a deep breath and was pulled into the surrounding darkness. He knew that not even a second passed between each destination, but sometimes Naruto felt as if he hung in that tight middle ground of existence for an eternity. The feeling passed, and he was plopped back into reality like a yolk falling from the protective shell of an egg. He landed in a crouch on a thick tree limb, and he stabbed the wood with Sasuke's blade so that the force of the jutsu didn't propel them forward. Naruto allowed himself to take one second to breathe a sigh of relief.
And then pain burst through his ribs. Fuck. But he couldn't stop now. They were so close.
On a good day, Naruto took five minutes to run from this area of the woods to Konoha's gates. That day, he made it in two.
But it was not an easy trip. Sasuke's weight on his back was starting to become more noticeable. He held the blade awkwardly as he ran, finding no other good place to store it. The right side of his torso was throbbing and he started to taste blood and Sasuke's blood was still running down his back and fuck fuck fuck!
The gates finally came into view, slowly swinging outward as the first sliver of sunlight became visible over the horizon. The timing couldn't have been more perfect. Pounding his feet against the ground, Naruto dove through the narrow entrance and continued on toward the Konoha hospital, disregarding the angry shouts from the gate keepers. Under normal conditions, Naruto would have taken to the rooftops, but the streets were empty and they made for much more even footing. After an eternity that lasted thirty seconds, Naruto arrived at hospital, skidding to a stop only after he had barreled through the double doors.
"I need Tsunade!" he demanded over the alarmed shrieks of several nurses.
A stretcher suddenly appeared at his side, and two nurses attempted to coax him into dropping Sasuke's mangled body onto the mobile bed. Only after he was assured that a messenger had been sent to retrieve Tsunade from her private quarters in the Hokage tower did he allow the two women to touch Sasuke. With his help, they lowered him onto the bed, placed his sword at his side, and then carted him off down the hall. When he tried to follow, a male nurse gripped his arm to try and hold him in place.
"You're covered in blood. You need medical attention," he tried to explain, but Naruto just shrugged him off. When the medic tried to stop Naruto a second time, he punched him hard in the chest, sending him backwards several feet.
As two nurses rushed to help the man back onto his feet, Naruto turned his head to see Sasuke's stretcher rounding a corner. He sprinted after him, but was met by more interference. "Let me through! He needs me!" His pleas were met by frantic explanations—"There's nothing you can do for him," "The Hokage will take care of him," "Please, sir, let us help you"—but every time someone tried to stop him, he pushed them aside. His body was tired, and his ribs were screaming for him to stop, but he had to keep going. He had left Sasuke's side. Sasuke needed him. What if the nurses didn't give him his sword? He'd be angry with Naruto if he thought that he had lost it.
A sharp, twisting pain exploded through Naruto's ribs, like someone slowly twisting a knife into his vital tissues. For a moment, after he had just escaped an onslaught of nurses, he stopped running and doubled over from the pain. With one hand clutching his side, Naruto coughed and then spit up a mouthful of blood. The repugnant liquid was caught in his mask and splashed back against his face. Disgusted and distressed, Naruto ripped off his mask and threw it at the wall. Wood clinked against wood as the mask clashed against the wall and then rattled to the floor.
Panting heavily, Naruto looked up to see Sasuke's stretcher enter the emergency room. By sheer act of will, he wiped his mouth and pushed himself forward. He was half-way down the hall when he felt a strong hand grip his right arm. The hold was strong enough to be a man's, so as Naruto spun around, he lifted his left hand in preparation to strike his assailant. Both his hand and heart stopped when he saw who it actually was.
"Sakura . . ."
She gazed up at him with a broken, knowing expression, and Naruto's world slowly came to a halt. He lowered his arm and she loosened her grip, but they remained there, staring at each other, relaying what they never could through words through their eyes. Naruto tried to speak. He tried to explain how something had gone wrong, how Sasuke had ripped a second hole through his chest as he stabbed himself in the stomach. He tried to say that he had done everything he could. He tried to smile and say that even though things looked bad now, everything would be fine. Sasuke was home and soon Tsunade would be there to heal him. He had fulfilled his promise to her, wasn't that nice? Now she could stop being sad and move on with her life, just like he could.
But even Naruto, with all his optimism, could not continue the charade any longer. His vision blurred and his throat constricted. He had so much to tell her, but all he could say was, "I'm sorry."
The next thing he knew, Sakura had pulled him into a tight hug and his body went limp against hers. He sobbed into her neck and clutched onto the back of her medical jacket. Securing him in her strong hold, Sakura lowered them to the floor and leaned against the wall. She cradled him against her, saying nothing, staining herself with his tears and blood. One of her hands hovered over his torso until she found the source of his internal injury. Focusing her chakra to her hand, she immediately began to heal it, all while comforting him. Her fingers ran through his blond hair, and she held his head close as she gently shushed him. She was being the stronghold that he had never managed to be for her.
Oh, how the world had been reversed.
Delirious in his heartache, Naruto buried himself deeper into her neck and murmured miserably, "I didn't kill him . . . I didn't kill him . . ."
Sakura kissed the top of his head—still matted with Sasuke's blood—and held him tighter. "I know you didn't," she answered in a shaky whisper.
After an undeterminable amount of time, Naruto came to his senses enough to feel Sakura shaking against him. Snuffling and taking in air in large gulps, he opened his eyes and lifted his head just enough to see her face. Sakura's eyes were shut tightly, tears streaming from their corners, and she had pressed her lips together to stop herself from sobbing aloud. Naruto's heart sank at the sight. She was trying so hard to be strong for him when it should have been the other way around.
Lifting his head, Naruto caressed Sakura's cheek in his hand and waited for her to slowly blink open her eyes. Even swollen and puffy with tears, they were the most beautiful shade of green that he had ever encountered. He wanted to comfort her to the best of his abilities. He wanted to kiss her and hold her close and tell her that he would never let anything else break her heart because he would take care of her as long as he still had breath in his lungs. But he was already so broken . . . the thought of one more rejection was unbearable.
So instead, he leaned his forehead against hers and apologized one more time. He wasn't sure why. Sakura just shook her head sadly and clung to him as a fresh wave of tears came, pressing her face into his shoulder and sobbing openly. Wrapping his arms around her, Naruto tried to shield her from all the pain and the hurt . . . but he knew it was too late. The damage had been done.
Suddenly, the hall was alive with movement as a nurse guided a disheveled looking Tsunade down the hall and pointed to the emergency room. Her heels clicked violently against the tile as she sprinted to the room and burst through the doors. Despite how much he wanted to believe that he had saved his friend, that he had been fast enough, or even that a shard of hope still remained . . . Naruto knew it was too late.
It had always been too late.
To be continued . . .
Author's Note: Well, it's that time of year again, so I'm going to be considerably busier. Consequently, there might be some more time between chapters, but the story will go on! Thanks for reading, and keep checking back!