Awakening, Chapter 4
Story Title:Awakening
Rating: R
Warnings/Pairings: None yet. Um, realism?
Summary: Sasuke wakes up in the worst possible circumstances. In a world he doesn't recognize, can he make his name once more?
Sasuke slowly became aware of warmth - a warm patch on his arm. Too warm, actually; uncomfortable. He shifted it slightly to the right. It dropped off of the edge, and his whole body nearly went with it.
Eyes snapping open, Sasuke automatically rearranged his body on the-chair? His first instinct was to whip his head around, but the pain that had mercifully escaped him while he was unconscious came back full force. He spent a few minutes with his eyes screwed closed, sitting very, very still.
Once he was certain he could do it without retching, he opened them again. Slowly - slowly - a ceiling came into focus. It was made of slatted wood with what might have been aluminum siding braced on top, easily visible through the half-hearted structure. Out of the corner of his eye, Sasuke could tell there was a window, covered with blinds that had seen better days. There were a few cracks in them. One of them must have been letting sunlight through, onto his arm.
For a long moment, Sasuke lay there, confused. He could hear a few ambient sounds outside the window - men shouting, lifting things. He recognized the slightly salty smell in the air as that of the sea. As he began to try to tense a few muscles experimentally, to perhaps attempt sitting up, he noticed a foreign... thing in his other arm. He turned his head slowly this time - very slowly.
The thing was a needle. It was buried deep into his left arm, attached to a clear IV drip.
If he hadn't been very certain that sudden movements were a bad idea, Sasuke would have reached over and ripped it out. IVs reminded him far too well of Orochimaru's laboratory. As he was debating whether he should do it anyway, voices outside the door came into clearer focus.
“--needs to take it slowly. You are lucky we had a shipment of refugee supplies delivered last month.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
“Don't you thank you doctor me. Take better care of your own next time. We have our own issues to worry about.” There was a creaking sound as a door swung open across the room. Sasuke tensed his muscles in spite of himself.
“Yes, doctor,” said the voice he now recognized as Chouno's. “I-oh!”
“Awake already?” A gray-whiskered face suddenly appeared directly over Sasuke's; he grimaced. The man had clearly eaten fish for breakfast. “Why, how resilient! I suppose that's to be expected with your kind.” Sasuke found his arm suddenly lifted against his will; he tried not to wince.
“Son, how long has it been since you ate solid food?” The man's voice was gruff if not unkind as he checked Sasuke's pulse. Sasuke opened his mouth but could not think a reply. “You can't keep running around on those hyped-up ninja energy pills for this long and think you can just revert to solid meals, that's for sure. I see new-fledged soldiers do it all the time, young fools. You ought to know better - what'd they teach you in that ninja fort?”
“Sir,” said Chouno from slightly behind the man, voice terse, “we can't explain our circumstances to you any further. I hope you understand.”
“Top secret and all that? Right, right,” sighed the doctor, laying Sasuke's arm back down on what Sasuke now figured to be a re-purposed dentist's chair. “Look, it'll be a flat 55 for the rehydration and nutrition. I need it in cash, no IOU, you hear me?”
“Understood,” said Chouno after the briefest of pauses, and Sasuke heard the scrape of money being placed on a table.
“He'll be ready to be moved in an hour or so,” said the doctor in reply, jingling the cash as he put it in his pocket. “Sooner, perhaps. But if you take him out before 45 minutes, you're really pushing it.”
“Thank you, doctor.”
“For heaven's sake!” grumbled the man, though he was already moving towards the door. “And tell your companion that the dockworkers work plenty efficiently already, we don't have plans to change a damn thing. Preferably before one of them punches him in the face.” The door swung shut.
Chouno was silent for a moment, then let out a truly exasperated sigh. “Stupid brat!” He clomped over towards a different wall, which must have had a window Sasuke couldn't see. “SHIKAJIRO!!”
Wincing at the sounds echoing in his still-throbbing head, as Chouno yelled orders out the window, Sasuke lifted his head just far enough to evaluate his current condition. He had been laid out on this makeshift chair very neatly, and dressed in clothes clearly too large for him; the baggy pants were tied with rope. Aside from the pain glancing through his body, and the needle stuck in his arm, he didn't seem to have any other external wounds. Not that this matters, of course, when I am stuck in a genjutsu, he remembered abruptly. Old habits died hard.
He had also noticed that the sunspot, back on his flesh, highlighted perfectly the single mole.
Sasuke closed his eyes and hoped sleep would follow quickly.
…
“So you didn't die. We thought you might, you know.”
There were precious few people (or entities) in the world whom Sasuke wouldn't have rather had sitting next to his sickbed than Shikajiro.
“You threw up on my leg in the rowboat. It was really gross.”
Assigned to “watch” an immobile Sasuke while Chouno went to take care of something, he didn't seem to know when to shut the hell up, and Sasuke was getting tired of glaring.
“Say, what's your name? Wait - do you even have one?”
He weighed another glare and the answer; finally, he decided he didn't care who heard.
“I...” His voice cracked, sounding just as pathetic as he felt. He took a deep breath, steeled it with sheer will. “My name is Uchiha Sasuke.”
Shikajiro snorted. With laughter.
Rage narrowed Sasuke's field of vision to a seething red line. If his needle-stuck arm could have moved with just a tad bit more finesse--
“Is there something funny?”
“Yeah!” Shikajiro didn't seem to pick up on the implied threat to his life in Sasuke's voice. “But Chouno told me not to talk to you about that.”
“Did he.”
“Yeah.” Sasuke saw him nodding to himself out of the corner of his eye.
If this moron he was forced to converse with was a manifestation of Madara's fucked up mind, like that bizarre Tobi character had been, Sasuke vowed to kill the bastard extra painfully when he got around to it.
In the meanwhile, he returned to the silent treatment with a vengeance.
The wind made a soft whispering sound as it wound around the small building like a softer ocean wave. A seagull's cry echoed distantly, almost forlorn. One of the dock workers outside shouted “Hey-ho” loud enough to carry into the small room, and was answered by farther-out voices, perhaps on a ship pulling into port.
“They really are doing it all wrong. You shouldn't have boats coming in without a time schedule.”
The silence continued after that statement for a while.
“The small ones should dock down at the end, not in the middle.”
Silence ticked on, broken only by the cries of the gulls and grunts of the men.
“They'd have better work efficiency if they took smoke breaks in shifts.”
Good gods, thought Sasuke on the very edge of sanity, was Madara or anybody ever going to make him stop talking--
“You really looked dead. I saw my brother when he was dead, too.”
Sasuke's eyes focused suddenly on the ceiling. Every board came into sharp relief.
Sorry, little brother. This is the last time.
“I wasn't supposed to. Dad got angry at me. They burned him all up,” Shikajiro continued matter-of-factly. “But before they did his face was all white and flat. Yours was like that too. So I thought you were going to die.”
His voice was calm, even casual. No change of tone from complaining about port organization. He could have been talking about the weather.
Sasuke wondered if something had lodged in his own throat.
Did you hate your brother? he wondered despite himself. Then, Did you love your brother?
“Why didn't you die?” asked Shikajiro, then continued before Sasuke could even start to consider an answer. “You didn't have any programming to break out of the tank on your own. I don't think, anyway.” He clucked his tongue a few times, something he seemed to do when he was thinking. “Did you have a will to live? Is that what they mean by that? Why didn't my brother have that, I wonder?”
Nothing lurked under that question, that loaded, wrenching question, other than... curiosity.
Sorry, little brother...
Sasuke felt his blood run cold. He could sense his shoulders trembling and he hated, hated himself for this.
The one thing he had never been about Itachi was indifferent.
“Dad said it was bad luck. But I don't understand bad luck either. Isn't it just that you didn't plan for every contingency?” Shikajiro sighed, truly aggrieved now. “People talk about stuff and do stuff and they don't make any sense.”
“Your claim to be a ninja doesn't make any sense,” hissed Sasuke, coiling up his shoulders like a snake about to strike. Anything to make him stop talking---“You aren't even competent. Don't talk to me about sense!”
“I'm a Special Jounin!” Shikajiro piped up with obvious pride, as if Sasuke had just asked a simple question. “I only do some sorts of things and not others. I collect data. I do it really well. Chouno is a regular Jounin. He said once that he doesn't think he should be, though. He said my brother was better. He was real drunk.”
“Shut up!” Sasuke snarled, losing the battle over his emotions suddenly, head spinning, sitting up in the chair to slap a hand over his face if that would only shut him up---
“Chouno says that a lot too. Hey, you're going to fall and rip the needle out and I don't know how to put it back in.”
Sasuke stopped struggling, panting for breath, legs now partially hanging off the chair. His body trembled after even that miniscule exertion. A horrible realization struck him in the aftermath of his sudden rage.
Physically, and now emotionally...
He was weak.
Shit, thought Sasuke. At this rate, Madara will...
A door banged on the other side of the room.
“Shika! I have the coach lined up.” Chouno sounded more tired than triumphant. “We're leaving now, or we won't get back to the village for another two days.” His footsteps clomped towards the two of them. “How is he--” A pause. “Shika. I told you not to piss him off. He's ill, for the gods' sake!”
“I just said--”
“Never mind. No more talking! I need you to go hold a space open on the transport coach!” The chair squeaked again as Shikajiro stood up and trotted out.
Chouno stood over Sasuke. He looked as tired as he sounded. “Don't mind him.” The voice was almost mumbled. “He's a little odd, always has been. Look, we have to go and I'm going to have to carry you because I don't think you can walk yet. Don't fight me. Understood?”
Sasuke turned his head away and stared fixedly at the nearby wall.
“I'm just going to tape the needle in for now--” There was a sound of ripping tape. Sasuke let his arm be lifted, felt the tape adhere to his skin in brisk, professional movements.
He noticed that the movement hurt less this time.
“You look better,” affirmed Chouno in a dull voice. “Here, hold your IV bag.” It was stuffed into Sasuke's hands. “I'm going to lift you now.”
An arm snaked under Sasuke's back, and another under his knees. Before he could react, he was lifted up helpless-damsel style in the Akimichi's arms.
“Don't fight me,” warned Chouno as if he could read Sasuke's mind. “You won't like it if I have to drop you.”
Sasuke thought about glaring. He thought about struggling.
Instead, he closed his eyes.
“Thank you.” Chouno's brittle voice carried the hints of true exhaustion on more than one level. “We'll... we'll be back home soon.”
Home? thought Sasuke. I vowed I would never go home.
Sorry, little brother...
Chouno kicked the door open with his foot, and the warm sunlight from the dying day hit Sasuke full in the face.