Lead
Disclaimer: Naruto is Kishimoto's property. I'm not making any money from this story.
AN: The story has been re-posted due to reviews that contained slurs. As I can't delete the reviews (or delete the stories with good reception), I thought it prudent to repost it.
# # # # # #
Below the moon that brightened here, full and disruptive, he was a thrall to night. This place existed in suspension, plunged into hell's bowls where blood pools gurgled, simmered with death that was still fresh. Boughs came up, twisted about, a frenzy in their veins; and between their conjoinings, bodies hung, pierced in the hearts, bleeding out, good as dead. Was that the fate of all Shinobi? He wished that death had made them humble, demure, but their arrogance was stark against the ivory towers. Even in that state, their violence was a noise in his vision, betrayal.
Swelling his eyes with grief, out came loves, a shimmer along the mien that foretold little of the life he had lived. The spiral clung on, watching, seeing what he could see, death by his feet . . . his Rin, gone. Half her body lay submerged in their passion; and akin to a martyr, she carried signs of farewell about the mouth that was two petals, spring bifurcated, nearly coming together to blossom; moon, a liquid all about, a strain. What melody haunted this husk, a sunken spring?
O-bi-to—O-bi-to—O-bi-to! Hush now, let the eyes sing! he almost heard the old man, Madara, speak, murmuring in the air, heavy, a temptation trapped in-between, one he could not miss.
And bear it he could not. This was not how he had hoped life to be, a defeat at hope's door, a future in Leaf's shade. He wished to be its fire, its brightest May! Yet now, she was buried—buried under leaves, gone, forgotten. Soon, they would come, take her from here, conceal sin in the earth. When you are gone, life marched on; it was her fate to be defeated at memory's first threshold.
No—no! he nearly screamed, slumped down, looked up at the moon that only stared and was less keen, God's pupil into which all his hopes had poured forth, turned it white, pure. It only looked, did not see how his heart existed . . . so broken.
The spirals, new limbs for a new world, grew more and more; their apexes galloping, seeking like veins. Blood—blood everywhere, raining down, sluicing them all—and her; yet she was asleep; yes, just asleep in fevered bowers of his making.
And he reached down to touch: his eye would not allow, still terrified that, lest he touched, she would feel like a gelid artery, too distant to be born of joys; but he gathered what valour he had left, and his hand materialised, a magic trick, and with it, he fondled her streaked cheek that was unsympathetic against his warmth.
How easy life could be; death, easier; and sitting there amidst the flowing ardor, he wept hysterically with the dead girl clasped to his breast. Kakashi, his friend and foe in equal measure, swooning in dreams; and dream he should, for another war was to begin, a war to end all wars, a motion to set everything adrift in vaporous wishes. How tricky, this grief, permanent? Yet in moon's hallows lay her being, inviting; and to there he must go, find, turn the heart to lead . . . live!
# # # # # #
The End
