Dream 002
Another white room.
The ceiling is white. There is a buzzing noise. The walls are also white. It is probably coming from the lamp. There are windows. The curtains are white. It is bright outside. There is a hint of blue sky and green leaves but the sun is in the window and everything burns out white. The lamp on the ceiling is flickering. The room dims and then is white again. The shadows are sharp in this room, as though they are carved into the walls. Painted there. The edges, where light and shadow blurs, seem to vibrate. Buzzing. As though the wall and the shadow are locked in a subtle battle, neither budging, only shaking with the effort. Black against white.
When Sasuke was a child he used to think things about white. That it was the color of new things. Of good things. The color of sunlight. Rice in onigiri. And snow.
White is the color of things erased. The walls and floors (ceilings, sometimes) of the Uchiha district are all this white. All evidence of death has been cleaned away. All evidence of life has been cleaned away. Once the evidence was collected by the crime unit, men and women wearing white (white boots and white masks and white gloves) came and scrubbed everything until it shone. Spotless. Bleached clean.
While they did this, Sasuke lay in a white room, like this one. Doctors in their white coats and nurses in their white skirts.
Bleached by the sun, burned into a sear of white. Like bones left on the battlefield. Skin sloughs off like an old glove and flesh is picked away and scattered in the stomachs of scavengers. Tendons are floss for rats and muscle slides down the gullets of vultures. Even a corpse is alive so long as there are things to eat. It crawls with the living, swarming around it. It is a feast for crows. A nest for maggots and a birthplace for flies. They are born blind and they consume blindly and grow up a thousand thousand flies with eyes with a thousand thousand facets. They depart from their birthplace. They die after brief lives. Meanwhile, hollowed-out bones turn dry and brittle under the white-hot sun.
Until nothing is left but white bone. When all else has been scoured, leaving only pale shells, sucked dry of marrow. When there is no more color.
The white is blinding, and so Sasuke closes his eyes.
And opens them.
There is motion in the room. It is subtle. It is - fast. There is just the barest flicker of it. Flashes of color. Pink and red and pinpricks of green. Washing across his field of vision, flitting in and out. When he was a child he would close his eyes and press his fingers into his eyelids, gently. And bursts of light would dance across the blackness, before fading, drifting. It is the same. But this time the color splashes across the blur of white. He cannot focus. In the corner of his eye he sees yellow and orange and bits of blue. They move like phantoms in his vision. He tries to look but his eyes are too slow to catch them. They are not even there.
Has time sped up?
Or has he slowed down?
The colors remind him of being outside. Warm colors. Yellow and orange like fire - standing on the docks and trying to bring it out, the fire. Warmth when it came. Father's nod of approval. As expected of my son. There is a spark in his eyes that is not usually there. His eyes are usually so tired, the lines on his face deep and shadows with exhaustion. There is a spark now. Like fire. It is warm. That warm feeling - that was pride. It stretched out infinitely, expanded inside him as big as the sky. Blue and cloudless. Sitting under the sky with mother, looking up as petals fell. Her voice. Her words. Her hands were small and delicate and graceful, and so gentle when they touched him. They would press down on his hair, trying to flatten out the crest in the back. Her voice, saying he looked like an angry bird. Her laughter, like the sound of bells. Petals fallen in her hair, black hair like expensive ink. Petals in her lap, the warm tan of her dress. The pink of cherry blossoms in spring and the green of grass. Grass-stains on his bare knees as he ran across training fields and tripped. Sprained ankles and being pressed against warm solid backs, being carried back home. But if they went home just yet he would leave again, for missions or training or I'm busy, maybe next time, so Sasuke begs him to wait a little while. To rest in the field beside the lake. To sit on the bank and watch koi wander in and out of sight. He tilits his head back to look into soft black eyes that he loves. They are so warm.
And so red.
Sasuke blinks.
His eyes open again, and the room is dark. Black. It is night, he thinks. The curtains are closed. He cannot see the stars. He is not sure why he wants to so badly. But he does. He does. He wants to see them. Even the smallest bit of light. Even those tiny pinpricks. Anything at all but this blackness. Submerged in it, he sees things. Things that he does not mean to see. Colors swim into his vision. Blue skies and green grass. Pink blossoms and orange flame. They had comforted him, but in the dark, he remembers. He cannot have them. He cannot have these things. He does not want to see them anymore because they aren't his.
He wants to go back to sleep. He wants to close his eyes again and for the whole world to shut down. A deep sleep in which there are no dreams. He was there, before. But they woke him up and now he is awake in the blackness and there is nothing there but him and his head.
The light is not on anymore. There is no more buzzing. Just the sound of someone breathing.
Is it him?
Is he still breathing?
Has time sped up?
There are sounds. Broken flecks of it scattered. They sound like voices, like the sound of a radio losing signal. He could almost hear words. He could almost hear someone calling his name.
Or has he slowed down?
He could almost think there is someone out there.
Thoughts drift in and out of Sasuke's mind. Memories. Associations. He begins to be aware of things like - there are other people in the room. Some of them Sasuke does not recognize - nurses, doctors, a woman with blonde hair who speaks with authority in her voice - but others. Others, he knows.
There is a girl. Pink and red and green, green eyes - spring colors, and her name is Haruno Sakura, a kunoichi of Konohagakure. He knows things about her like: she is the same age as him. In the same year in the Academy. Got high test scores. Higher than Sasuke, on written exams. They would sit in class and sometimes he would glance up and when his eyes swept over his classmates (he was suspicious of them, for reasons he couldn't quite explain) he would see that she had been looking at him. She flinched when he glared. Sometimes he would say things to her, cutting things. Sometimes there would be tears in the corner of her eyes. It made him uncomfortable to see her cry. He would say to himself that it was her fault for being annoying. It did not make him feel much better. Even after she was hurt she would stare at him. When they did work that required a partner, she would want to pair with him. She would fight with other girls for this reason. Eventually they graduated in the same class. They were, in fact, placed in the same genin cell.
She was a member of Team 7, like him. She disliked Naruto. Was often annoyed by Kakashi. Still was strangely inclined to follow him around. She had better chakra control than he did as well. On a mission, once, they had been put through a training exercise, and she had done better than him. He had wondered about her secret but never asked, never worked up the nerve to speak to her on the subject.
There are other things, a flood of them - Haruno Sakura who stood alongside you on a mission you weren't ready for, who cried for once with relief when you opened your eyes after what you thought was your death and that made you uncomfortable too but differently, who cut her hair and tried to defend him against an enemy that was far beyond her, who fought her hardest and didn't win but didn't lose and didn't give up, who was pinned to a tree by a monster that not even Sasuke could beat, who thanked him for saving her but he wasn't the one to do it, he wasn't strong enough, and he tried to tell her but he wasn't sure if she understood - he wasn't strong enough to save her.
These are the things that Sasuke knows about her.
They have been acquainted for years.
But Sasuke cannot shake the feeling - no, the knowledge - that he does not know this girl at all.
As she sits next to him and slices apples for him to eat (though he never does eat them - he rarely eats now), he thinks perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she does not know him. Because she has never met him, has she. Not him. She has met a boy - one Uchiha Sasuke, who went to the Academy with her, who was on her genin team, who made her cry. Who saved her life. But Sasuke isn't any of those things. He had forgotten somehow - somehow, that person had taken over. That person who relied upon his peers, who worried about stupid things like passing exams and succeeding in missions (even the most pointless missions imaginable, delivering packages and catching cats, the sort they gave to genin), who would die in order to save a person he considered his friend. That is the person that Sakura knew.
But that wasn't Sasuke. Sasuke doesn't trust anyone - Sasuke knows that people can't be trusted. That no matter how much a person smiles to your face, there is no guarantee they aren't holding a knife behind their back. That no matter how much you care about somehow, no matter how determined you are to protect them - they will die, eventually. And Sasuke has a goal. A person whom he must kill. And nothing else matters.
He had gotten distracted. Buried, under the weight of a peaceful life. He would close his eyes and night and sleep peacefully, sometimes. More and more often, recently, the light of the sun would wake him up and he would feel well-rested and content. He would go out into the world and bicker with Naruto and glare at Sakura and glare harder at Kakashi and sometimes - sometimes he would go whole days without thinking about it.
He had forgotten about them. He told himself he would remember but he had forgotten. But now he remembered, and he wouldn't forget again. Not ever. He wouldn't let himself - no matter how tempting it was. That other Sasuke is barely even real to him anymore. He'd never been real at all, had he. He was just an idle fantasy, a Sasuke who might have been if things hadn't gone all wrong, but they did go wrong and that Sasuke couldn't exist. And the real Sasuke is awake and he won't close his eyes again. Not even for a second. Because if he lets his guard down again, he might fall back into that pattern, might become that person again and that's unacceptable. Unacceptable, to be the sort of person who would forget his duty to his family so that he could live happily. Someone who would accept weakness as long as it gave him peace. Sasuke won't be that way, can't comprehend how anyone could be that way, doesn't have anything to do with that person.
But the problem is: Sakura thinks he is that person.
She has finished slicing apples, and she offers them to him. She says, "They're a little uneven, I know," self-consciously. She anticipates this will be a problem for him, because she believes that he is concerned about how even his apple slices are.
He is frustrated. No, no he is not. No, he is infuriated. He doesn't understand how she can't see it when it's so fucking clear. She's acting like nothing has changed, like he hasn't changed, but he has. He isn't the same. He isn't even the same person. He isn't even changed - he's replaced. Sasuke-kun, she says, and he wants to say, don't you fucking get it. Don't you fucking understand. He's gone. He's been gone. He isn't coming back. I'm living in his body and I have his memories but I am not him. He was weak and so he died. That's all there is to it. You can peel as many apples as you want, you can do it immaculately and you can cut them into perfectly symmetrical slices and who knows, one of these days I might actually fucking eat them, I might talk and stand up and walk on these feet, I might go on with life as though nothing is wrong, go on a thousand missions and be a great shinobi and get married and have a dozen screaming kids and the fact will not change that I am not that person. I can never be that person.
He does not say this to her.
He says nothing at all.
but before all of that
the world is red and black and white
Sasuke listens, obedient. He is quiet because Itachi is speaking to him and he has been waiting for this moment for such a long, long time. Craving it. Itachi left him alone with the dead and it has been years, so many years since Sasuke has heard his voice. You are not even worth killing. Alone at night and unable to sleep, he thinks about Itachi's voice. Wonders, if they were to meet tomorrow, what Itachi might say. After small successes, mission that go well or training sessions that end with a new lesson learned, he lies in bed staring at the ceiling and wonders, shamefully, if Itachi would recognize his growth. When he plays, over and over, scenarios in his head, of him killing Itachi (and he does this often), he wonders if Itachi might give some indication that he is satisfied with what Sasuke has become before he dies. Sasuke gets up the next morning and hates himself, for thinking such things, for wanting it so badly, but he returns to these thoughts again and again. He needs to think these things, to imagine, because the reality of what he was left with is so unsatisfying that he finds he cannot bear it.
You are not even worth killing. Those were the words Sasuke was left with, and they sank their teeth in and ate him alive. Not even worth killing. Not worth anything, to Itachi, and Itachi was the only one left (Itachi was everything) so he wasn't worth anything to anyone, was he. So what the fuck was he.
If he is worth nothing then he is nothing.
Sasuke listens, obedient, as Itachi educates him. He is not worth killing, but he is apparently worthy of Itachi's contempt, and of his instruction. And so as Sasuke listens, Itachi speaks, and tells Sasuke what he is: and he is weak.
And the world is red and black and white, and Itachi breaks everything. Breaks the world that Sasuke thought he knew, a world which was made of sensible things. A world where there are people and the way they act and the way they feel are correlated. A place where feelings are reasonable expressions of human nature - people love the things that are good to them, people hate things which hurt them. Friendships are formed based upon common interest and understanding. Family bonds are built upon duty and honor and intrinsic, instinctive love. Trust grows from action, from mutual kindness, from cooperation. Distrust is earned through deception and selfishness. There is right, and there is wrong. And what is right will prevail, somehow. Because that is what right is. It is goodness and it is strength, and they are the same thing. And evil is cruelty and cowardice and deception and darkness, darkness that is driven out by the light. Black corruption erased by white purity. The bad guys lose and everyone goes home happy at the end of the day, back home where Mother has already prepared dinner and it's your favorite, and you all sit down together and are happy because you deserve to be, because you are good and good things last, they endure, they stay with you.
Itachi rips this veneer of a world away and shows him what is underneath, what is living in that husk. And this is the truth - that if you love someone, they will die. And death is not noble, not a sacrifice that all shinobi must be prepared to make to protect what is important to them. Death is confusion and flight, alarm, fear, struggle. Death is disbelief, betrayal. Death is pleading for mercy. Death is cursing with a final breath. Death is trying to do one of these things, but being able to manage neither. Death is running away barefoot, leaving everything else behind in flames. Death is hiding in a closet, trying not to breathe too loudly. Death is trying to make your baby quiet, because if she keeps crying he'll find you, but it's too late. Death is questions half-asked, accusations half-made, before the end. Death is limbs at strange angles. Death is eyes glazed over. Death is when you open a door and it is the last time you see Mother and Father, and Death is standing over them with a sword in his hand and he killed them. He killed them.
Death is: they will never open their eyes again.
This is what happens.
And Sasuke takes it all in, takes it all and it is true, because Itachi says it. Because Itachi knows everything. Because Itachi sees the world as it is - and what Itachi sees, what Itachi thinks, what Itachi knows - that is reality. It is an age old riddle: when you look into the sky and see a bright light, does that light come from the sun, or from your own eye? Does sunlight project into your eyes, or do your eyes project light onto the sky? Reality comes from Itachi's eyes - seeing for Itachi is becoming for what he sees. Itachi looks into the sun and it lights up white. Itachi closes his eyes and the world goes black. Itachi's eyes bleed red and Sasuke bleeds right with them.
And Itachi brushes him aside like a bit of dirt, sweeps him away and this is it, this is what Sasuke has been waiting for - the moment when Itachi finishes it. Itachi disappointed him before, left him alive and clinging to his unsightly life, but of course he wouldn't really leave a job half-done for long. So now Sasuke, Sasuke who was the last splotch of color marring the perfect white slate that is the Uchiha Clan - now he has been cleaned away and everything is perfect. He is gone. Really and truly he is gone. He thinks to himself that he must have been worth killing after all -
and then he thinks nothing at all.
- - -
[Sasuke sits up. He is barely visible in the darkness of his bedroom. He runs a hand through his hand, exhales loudly, and then lies back down.
He is still for a few moments.
And then he sits back up, quickly. Grabs the Hitomi and scowls at it. There is a shot of his eyes, which are still tired but angry and spinning red, and then the picture cuts out.]
The ceiling is white. There is a buzzing noise. The walls are also white. It is probably coming from the lamp. There are windows. The curtains are white. It is bright outside. There is a hint of blue sky and green leaves but the sun is in the window and everything burns out white. The lamp on the ceiling is flickering. The room dims and then is white again. The shadows are sharp in this room, as though they are carved into the walls. Painted there. The edges, where light and shadow blurs, seem to vibrate. Buzzing. As though the wall and the shadow are locked in a subtle battle, neither budging, only shaking with the effort. Black against white.
When Sasuke was a child he used to think things about white. That it was the color of new things. Of good things. The color of sunlight. Rice in onigiri. And snow.
White is the color of things erased. The walls and floors (ceilings, sometimes) of the Uchiha district are all this white. All evidence of death has been cleaned away. All evidence of life has been cleaned away. Once the evidence was collected by the crime unit, men and women wearing white (white boots and white masks and white gloves) came and scrubbed everything until it shone. Spotless. Bleached clean.
While they did this, Sasuke lay in a white room, like this one. Doctors in their white coats and nurses in their white skirts.
Bleached by the sun, burned into a sear of white. Like bones left on the battlefield. Skin sloughs off like an old glove and flesh is picked away and scattered in the stomachs of scavengers. Tendons are floss for rats and muscle slides down the gullets of vultures. Even a corpse is alive so long as there are things to eat. It crawls with the living, swarming around it. It is a feast for crows. A nest for maggots and a birthplace for flies. They are born blind and they consume blindly and grow up a thousand thousand flies with eyes with a thousand thousand facets. They depart from their birthplace. They die after brief lives. Meanwhile, hollowed-out bones turn dry and brittle under the white-hot sun.
Until nothing is left but white bone. When all else has been scoured, leaving only pale shells, sucked dry of marrow. When there is no more color.
The white is blinding, and so Sasuke closes his eyes.
And opens them.
There is motion in the room. It is subtle. It is - fast. There is just the barest flicker of it. Flashes of color. Pink and red and pinpricks of green. Washing across his field of vision, flitting in and out. When he was a child he would close his eyes and press his fingers into his eyelids, gently. And bursts of light would dance across the blackness, before fading, drifting. It is the same. But this time the color splashes across the blur of white. He cannot focus. In the corner of his eye he sees yellow and orange and bits of blue. They move like phantoms in his vision. He tries to look but his eyes are too slow to catch them. They are not even there.
Has time sped up?
Or has he slowed down?
The colors remind him of being outside. Warm colors. Yellow and orange like fire - standing on the docks and trying to bring it out, the fire. Warmth when it came. Father's nod of approval. As expected of my son. There is a spark in his eyes that is not usually there. His eyes are usually so tired, the lines on his face deep and shadows with exhaustion. There is a spark now. Like fire. It is warm. That warm feeling - that was pride. It stretched out infinitely, expanded inside him as big as the sky. Blue and cloudless. Sitting under the sky with mother, looking up as petals fell. Her voice. Her words. Her hands were small and delicate and graceful, and so gentle when they touched him. They would press down on his hair, trying to flatten out the crest in the back. Her voice, saying he looked like an angry bird. Her laughter, like the sound of bells. Petals fallen in her hair, black hair like expensive ink. Petals in her lap, the warm tan of her dress. The pink of cherry blossoms in spring and the green of grass. Grass-stains on his bare knees as he ran across training fields and tripped. Sprained ankles and being pressed against warm solid backs, being carried back home. But if they went home just yet he would leave again, for missions or training or I'm busy, maybe next time, so Sasuke begs him to wait a little while. To rest in the field beside the lake. To sit on the bank and watch koi wander in and out of sight. He tilits his head back to look into soft black eyes that he loves. They are so warm.
And so red.
Sasuke blinks.
His eyes open again, and the room is dark. Black. It is night, he thinks. The curtains are closed. He cannot see the stars. He is not sure why he wants to so badly. But he does. He does. He wants to see them. Even the smallest bit of light. Even those tiny pinpricks. Anything at all but this blackness. Submerged in it, he sees things. Things that he does not mean to see. Colors swim into his vision. Blue skies and green grass. Pink blossoms and orange flame. They had comforted him, but in the dark, he remembers. He cannot have them. He cannot have these things. He does not want to see them anymore because they aren't his.
He wants to go back to sleep. He wants to close his eyes again and for the whole world to shut down. A deep sleep in which there are no dreams. He was there, before. But they woke him up and now he is awake in the blackness and there is nothing there but him and his head.
The light is not on anymore. There is no more buzzing. Just the sound of someone breathing.
Is it him?
Is he still breathing?
Has time sped up?
There are sounds. Broken flecks of it scattered. They sound like voices, like the sound of a radio losing signal. He could almost hear words. He could almost hear someone calling his name.
Or has he slowed down?
He could almost think there is someone out there.
Thoughts drift in and out of Sasuke's mind. Memories. Associations. He begins to be aware of things like - there are other people in the room. Some of them Sasuke does not recognize - nurses, doctors, a woman with blonde hair who speaks with authority in her voice - but others. Others, he knows.
There is a girl. Pink and red and green, green eyes - spring colors, and her name is Haruno Sakura, a kunoichi of Konohagakure. He knows things about her like: she is the same age as him. In the same year in the Academy. Got high test scores. Higher than Sasuke, on written exams. They would sit in class and sometimes he would glance up and when his eyes swept over his classmates (he was suspicious of them, for reasons he couldn't quite explain) he would see that she had been looking at him. She flinched when he glared. Sometimes he would say things to her, cutting things. Sometimes there would be tears in the corner of her eyes. It made him uncomfortable to see her cry. He would say to himself that it was her fault for being annoying. It did not make him feel much better. Even after she was hurt she would stare at him. When they did work that required a partner, she would want to pair with him. She would fight with other girls for this reason. Eventually they graduated in the same class. They were, in fact, placed in the same genin cell.
She was a member of Team 7, like him. She disliked Naruto. Was often annoyed by Kakashi. Still was strangely inclined to follow him around. She had better chakra control than he did as well. On a mission, once, they had been put through a training exercise, and she had done better than him. He had wondered about her secret but never asked, never worked up the nerve to speak to her on the subject.
There are other things, a flood of them - Haruno Sakura who stood alongside you on a mission you weren't ready for, who cried for once with relief when you opened your eyes after what you thought was your death and that made you uncomfortable too but differently, who cut her hair and tried to defend him against an enemy that was far beyond her, who fought her hardest and didn't win but didn't lose and didn't give up, who was pinned to a tree by a monster that not even Sasuke could beat, who thanked him for saving her but he wasn't the one to do it, he wasn't strong enough, and he tried to tell her but he wasn't sure if she understood - he wasn't strong enough to save her.
These are the things that Sasuke knows about her.
They have been acquainted for years.
But Sasuke cannot shake the feeling - no, the knowledge - that he does not know this girl at all.
As she sits next to him and slices apples for him to eat (though he never does eat them - he rarely eats now), he thinks perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she does not know him. Because she has never met him, has she. Not him. She has met a boy - one Uchiha Sasuke, who went to the Academy with her, who was on her genin team, who made her cry. Who saved her life. But Sasuke isn't any of those things. He had forgotten somehow - somehow, that person had taken over. That person who relied upon his peers, who worried about stupid things like passing exams and succeeding in missions (even the most pointless missions imaginable, delivering packages and catching cats, the sort they gave to genin), who would die in order to save a person he considered his friend. That is the person that Sakura knew.
But that wasn't Sasuke. Sasuke doesn't trust anyone - Sasuke knows that people can't be trusted. That no matter how much a person smiles to your face, there is no guarantee they aren't holding a knife behind their back. That no matter how much you care about somehow, no matter how determined you are to protect them - they will die, eventually. And Sasuke has a goal. A person whom he must kill. And nothing else matters.
He had gotten distracted. Buried, under the weight of a peaceful life. He would close his eyes and night and sleep peacefully, sometimes. More and more often, recently, the light of the sun would wake him up and he would feel well-rested and content. He would go out into the world and bicker with Naruto and glare at Sakura and glare harder at Kakashi and sometimes - sometimes he would go whole days without thinking about it.
He had forgotten about them. He told himself he would remember but he had forgotten. But now he remembered, and he wouldn't forget again. Not ever. He wouldn't let himself - no matter how tempting it was. That other Sasuke is barely even real to him anymore. He'd never been real at all, had he. He was just an idle fantasy, a Sasuke who might have been if things hadn't gone all wrong, but they did go wrong and that Sasuke couldn't exist. And the real Sasuke is awake and he won't close his eyes again. Not even for a second. Because if he lets his guard down again, he might fall back into that pattern, might become that person again and that's unacceptable. Unacceptable, to be the sort of person who would forget his duty to his family so that he could live happily. Someone who would accept weakness as long as it gave him peace. Sasuke won't be that way, can't comprehend how anyone could be that way, doesn't have anything to do with that person.
But the problem is: Sakura thinks he is that person.
She has finished slicing apples, and she offers them to him. She says, "They're a little uneven, I know," self-consciously. She anticipates this will be a problem for him, because she believes that he is concerned about how even his apple slices are.
He is frustrated. No, no he is not. No, he is infuriated. He doesn't understand how she can't see it when it's so fucking clear. She's acting like nothing has changed, like he hasn't changed, but he has. He isn't the same. He isn't even the same person. He isn't even changed - he's replaced. Sasuke-kun, she says, and he wants to say, don't you fucking get it. Don't you fucking understand. He's gone. He's been gone. He isn't coming back. I'm living in his body and I have his memories but I am not him. He was weak and so he died. That's all there is to it. You can peel as many apples as you want, you can do it immaculately and you can cut them into perfectly symmetrical slices and who knows, one of these days I might actually fucking eat them, I might talk and stand up and walk on these feet, I might go on with life as though nothing is wrong, go on a thousand missions and be a great shinobi and get married and have a dozen screaming kids and the fact will not change that I am not that person. I can never be that person.
He does not say this to her.
He says nothing at all.
but before all of that
the world is red and black and white
Sasuke listens, obedient. He is quiet because Itachi is speaking to him and he has been waiting for this moment for such a long, long time. Craving it. Itachi left him alone with the dead and it has been years, so many years since Sasuke has heard his voice. You are not even worth killing. Alone at night and unable to sleep, he thinks about Itachi's voice. Wonders, if they were to meet tomorrow, what Itachi might say. After small successes, mission that go well or training sessions that end with a new lesson learned, he lies in bed staring at the ceiling and wonders, shamefully, if Itachi would recognize his growth. When he plays, over and over, scenarios in his head, of him killing Itachi (and he does this often), he wonders if Itachi might give some indication that he is satisfied with what Sasuke has become before he dies. Sasuke gets up the next morning and hates himself, for thinking such things, for wanting it so badly, but he returns to these thoughts again and again. He needs to think these things, to imagine, because the reality of what he was left with is so unsatisfying that he finds he cannot bear it.
You are not even worth killing. Those were the words Sasuke was left with, and they sank their teeth in and ate him alive. Not even worth killing. Not worth anything, to Itachi, and Itachi was the only one left (Itachi was everything) so he wasn't worth anything to anyone, was he. So what the fuck was he.
If he is worth nothing then he is nothing.
Sasuke listens, obedient, as Itachi educates him. He is not worth killing, but he is apparently worthy of Itachi's contempt, and of his instruction. And so as Sasuke listens, Itachi speaks, and tells Sasuke what he is: and he is weak.
And the world is red and black and white, and Itachi breaks everything. Breaks the world that Sasuke thought he knew, a world which was made of sensible things. A world where there are people and the way they act and the way they feel are correlated. A place where feelings are reasonable expressions of human nature - people love the things that are good to them, people hate things which hurt them. Friendships are formed based upon common interest and understanding. Family bonds are built upon duty and honor and intrinsic, instinctive love. Trust grows from action, from mutual kindness, from cooperation. Distrust is earned through deception and selfishness. There is right, and there is wrong. And what is right will prevail, somehow. Because that is what right is. It is goodness and it is strength, and they are the same thing. And evil is cruelty and cowardice and deception and darkness, darkness that is driven out by the light. Black corruption erased by white purity. The bad guys lose and everyone goes home happy at the end of the day, back home where Mother has already prepared dinner and it's your favorite, and you all sit down together and are happy because you deserve to be, because you are good and good things last, they endure, they stay with you.
Itachi rips this veneer of a world away and shows him what is underneath, what is living in that husk. And this is the truth - that if you love someone, they will die. And death is not noble, not a sacrifice that all shinobi must be prepared to make to protect what is important to them. Death is confusion and flight, alarm, fear, struggle. Death is disbelief, betrayal. Death is pleading for mercy. Death is cursing with a final breath. Death is trying to do one of these things, but being able to manage neither. Death is running away barefoot, leaving everything else behind in flames. Death is hiding in a closet, trying not to breathe too loudly. Death is trying to make your baby quiet, because if she keeps crying he'll find you, but it's too late. Death is questions half-asked, accusations half-made, before the end. Death is limbs at strange angles. Death is eyes glazed over. Death is when you open a door and it is the last time you see Mother and Father, and Death is standing over them with a sword in his hand and he killed them. He killed them.
Death is: they will never open their eyes again.
This is what happens.
And Sasuke takes it all in, takes it all and it is true, because Itachi says it. Because Itachi knows everything. Because Itachi sees the world as it is - and what Itachi sees, what Itachi thinks, what Itachi knows - that is reality. It is an age old riddle: when you look into the sky and see a bright light, does that light come from the sun, or from your own eye? Does sunlight project into your eyes, or do your eyes project light onto the sky? Reality comes from Itachi's eyes - seeing for Itachi is becoming for what he sees. Itachi looks into the sun and it lights up white. Itachi closes his eyes and the world goes black. Itachi's eyes bleed red and Sasuke bleeds right with them.
And Itachi brushes him aside like a bit of dirt, sweeps him away and this is it, this is what Sasuke has been waiting for - the moment when Itachi finishes it. Itachi disappointed him before, left him alive and clinging to his unsightly life, but of course he wouldn't really leave a job half-done for long. So now Sasuke, Sasuke who was the last splotch of color marring the perfect white slate that is the Uchiha Clan - now he has been cleaned away and everything is perfect. He is gone. Really and truly he is gone. He thinks to himself that he must have been worth killing after all -
and then he thinks nothing at all.
- - -
[Sasuke sits up. He is barely visible in the darkness of his bedroom. He runs a hand through his hand, exhales loudly, and then lies back down.
He is still for a few moments.
And then he sits back up, quickly. Grabs the Hitomi and scowls at it. There is a shot of his eyes, which are still tired but angry and spinning red, and then the picture cuts out.]