Ends Meet (2/5)
Of course I had to make a Gintama reference in this. And yes, I have to reiterate Itachi was channelling Seishirou--again, thank you, CLAMP.
Alas, it's the turning point, and we're finally getting somewhere. Yosh. It's still slow, but being such a contained story, I don't want to rush things, which I probably will anyway because it's supposed to take place over the course of a maybe a little under two months. Considering Kishimoto is vague look who's talking with his sense of time, I want to make that long enough for Sasuke to heal physically while once again failing to cope with emotional stuff. I guess I am making him more complicated than he should be, but it's more interesting to think of his relationships with Itachi and Naruto like this. I'm just sorry I ended up cutting so much out of this part.
Oh, the and flower thing. Um, okay, so yeah, I'm back on that, and I've almost half a mind to change the title to Blue Dahlia, but let's just ignore my tendency to write my ooc Naruto giving Sasuke flowers. It actually serves a purpose here.
***
Characters: Naruto/Sasuke, Itachi
Rating: R
Words: 6305
Summary: It’s not Tobi who finds Sasuke.
***
Providence II
He plops himself on the floor, shudders and huddles closer to the low-seated table between you.
“No wonder it’s been so cold in here,” he says. “I offered to fix it, but old lady Inoue-I already told you about the old lady who owns this inn, right?”
You make a fist with your right hand, flex your fingers you watch slowly begin to unfurl above the heavy blue blanket outspread from beneath the top of the table Naruto hauled from downstairs. The aches in your body haven’t quite settled, but the pain isn’t unbearable. It’s more tolerable after taking the medicine, a dull throbbing almost numb that hinders long periods of constant motion.
“Right,” he says again, stretches the word into three syllables. “Yeah, like I was saying, she said there’s a guy who takes care of all the repairs. Her husband used to do it-they built this inn, you know. It was their dream, to have a place where people would want to come and stay. She called it the best memory they made together, but she’s a widow now, so...”
He clears his throat. “Anyway, the repair guy is a relative of hers. He’s supposed to be coming from the next town over, which I guess isn’t going to happen anytime soon since we’re kind of snowed in right now. Pretty far out, too.”
How far, he doesn’t say, maybe wouldn’t if you did ask. You won’t. Whatever the incentive for bringing you here, on some level he has to realise you have no intention of staying any longer than necessary, but you can’t afford to draw attention to the inevitability of you leaving. Not when you aren’t even fit to travel on your own.
It’s reasonable to assume you’re still in Fire Country. You can’t be too far from Konoha, yet having actively sought this kind of seclusion begs to question why he would take you to this seemingly remote town in lieu of returning with you to Konoha, which should have been his first priority.
Plain curiosity suggests an ulterior motive, but as to what Naruto thinks he’ll accomplish, it’s an uncertainty you’re not particularly inclined to acknowledge.
You follow his gaze towards the window almost completely doused white, hear his murmured slip of far enough that still reveals too little.
It’ll have to do for now.
His mouth quirks at one corner when he turns to face you. He rubs his hands together beneath the thick blanket, hisses and shudders. “I didn’t even know there was a next town over, but I don’t think I can wait that long. Not that I’m saying I know how to fix a leak in a roof. At least I can still try to do something, though.”
He laughs a little. “Maybe I can be like that guy in those comics, you know. Start a business doing odd jobs here and there. What do you think?”
You reach for the ceramic mug on the table top, crossing your legs beneath the blanket. The arrangement is cumbersome, with a table that nearly takes up the narrow width of the room pitting your back against the side of the bed.
His snort breaks the silence. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”
With a sigh, he scoots closer to the table, to the kerosene heater beneath it. “I have to do something while we’re here. Until you get better at least. And then we can...I mean-well, we’ll still have to wait until the weather’s not so bad. But if the snow doesn’t start to let up soon, it looks like we might be here for a while.”
In your hands the mug feels cool. The tea you sip bitter and warm soothes the dryness in your throat.
“Good thing we have one of these, though, right,” he says, gesturing beneath the blanket with one hand towards the table. “I almost wish it was an electric one, but I think that would seem out of place in this sort of atmosphere.”
Slowly, you place the mug still almost full back on the table top.
He watches you, sees the slight twitch of your right arm you weren’t careful enough to hide. He opens his mouth, pauses, stares at you with his lips pursed.
You lean against the side of the bed, allow your head to fall back, clutch at the thick blanket with shaky fingers as you close your eyes.
...
You wake up on the floor in same position you fell asleep between the bed and the table. It’s cooler now but not cold. Warm air takes the place of the heat once trapped beneath the blanket.
Beside you, he lies too close, curled on the floor right next to you with his hair almost brushing against the blanket over your knee.
You make sure to keep your distance as you shift towards your left, away from him shifting on top of the blanket even closer to you. The cramped feeling in your thighs begins to lessen when you elongate your legs. It becomes a series of prickles, travelling to your calves, lingers at the bottom of your feet when you stand.
It still takes too long to manoeuvre your weight. You don’t tire as easily as you did before, but the effort made to keep yourself steady long enough to walk almost threatens to pull your legs from beneath you.
You’ve only fallen once, yesterday, while Naruto was downstairs. On the way to the bathroom, your knees smacked against the floor, made a loud clap in the room you weren’t sure Naruto hadn’t heard.
He didn’t say anything when he returned to the room with the heated table in tow, but you were back in the bed by then.
The sound of your name murmured by his voice thick with sleep almost makes you pause. Fists clenched at your sides, you take one step forward. Try to find purchase with your fingers slipping against damp palms.
It’s already been a little over a week. The injuries obtained during the fight with Itachi shouldn’t affect you like this. Neither should recovering from a fever. Although it’s too soon for the muscle atrophy you push yourself to keep at bay to set in, your limbs still feel heavy when the medicine begins to wear off, as you breathe and grit your teeth, place the left foot in front of the right, swallow low gasps of air too much at one time.
There’s no reason to feel this way when you’ve survived much worse.
Yet to be reduced to this kind of state, knowingly dependent upon someone who stole from you the last assertion of a single ambition-you don’t want to remember another time when you ever allowed yourself to become so weak.
...
“Fixed the leak.” He closes the door behind him, spinning the small ring holding three keys around his finger. “Looks like I might be doing some odd jobs after all.” He catches the keys in his palm with a clink and stuffs them in the side pocket of the pants hidden beneath his cloak.
You bring the small bowl in your hands to your lips. The amount of miso almost causes the soup to be too salty, but the thin pieces of sweet potato and carrots are tender, and the taste of ginger makes it go down easily enough.
Considering your continuing lack of appetite, it’s the most agreeable thing you’ve been able to stomach so far.
He takes off his cloak he throws on top of the bed, shivers with his arms crossed and hands rubbing his shoulders. “At least it’ll be warmer in here now.”
“Good thing, too,” he says. “Old lady Inoue isn’t charging me that much as it is, but I still figured I’d have to come up with something sooner or later. I was going to run out of money eventually. I was kind of hoping I’d have enough until-I guess I didn’t plan that far ahead,” he says, scratching the back of his neck with his hand.
Across from you, on the other side of the table, he settles on top of the blanket, folding his legs beneath him. “But this works out great. She said she’d recommend me to go around to help with some of the side jobs that still need to be done. Nothing really big, but just a few things here and there. Doing this and that.
“It’s almost unexpected. For a place with this kind of weather and to be so cut off, there’s a lot of old people living here. Civilians, I mean. It’s not so bad, I guess, if they’re already used to it, but considering how cold it gets, I wonder...
“When I was talking to Hayashi the other day, he said that most of the younger people moved on years ago. As soon as they could leave a town this small. Some of them still visit, he said, every once in a while. But most of them don’t come back. Really, he said it doesn’t make a difference after a while, but to be in this kind of isolated place, and staying here knowing people leave without wanting to come back. Being left behind like seems kind of lone-”
You set the bowl on the table top. The spoon clanks against it a little too hard for your liking.
Blinking, he leans over, peers into the bowl then looks to you. On his face, there’s a sort of half smile stilted from a frown. “Don’t tell me that’s all you’re going to eat.”
You lick your lips. Whenever you do eat, however much it is, he always says it’s not enough. The more you eat, the more he complains. He did it yesterday, too, and the day before, every time he feels obligated to sit with you and watch. Eventually, he’ll leave the matter alone when he realises you’re ignoring him, at least until he tries to push it again, but you’re more than well aware of your own limitations. It’s not for his sake you need to get better.
He bites his lower lip, still frowning. “You’re not going to finish the rest?”
Picking up the cup sitting beside the bowl, you take a sip of water and place the cup back down.
“Sasuke, you...” He scoffs, shaking his head and reaching his arm across the table for the food you didn’t finish.
...
Finally, it stops snowing. Another day passes. One more turns into two and then three. Most of the time goes by in relative silence, despite his attempts to pull you into conversation with even emptier words about the odd jobs he’s done around town and the few times he’s had tea with Inoue.
“She said she likes having the company of a nice boy like me-you believe that?” he says, smiling around a mouthful of noodles and placing his hand level with his shoulder. “This tiny little old lady who barely comes up to my shoulder. And it’s cute because she still sounds really young, and then she has the softest voice-almost softer than Hinata’s.”
The hand over you knee tightens its grip under the blanket splayed over your lap. You tell him he talks too much, but he just laughs, continues to smile and picks up his bowl to gather more noodles around his chopsticks.
The next day brings you closer still to another week, almost two since you’ve been here. If Naruto went against orders and ran off to find you like he’d claimed, a search party probably wouldn’t be too far behind-Sakura and Kakashi, your mind unwittingly supplies-but if anyone was looking for the two of you, most likely, unless Naruto did cover his tracks that well, however doubtful it seems, you would have been found by now.
Although he hasn’t mentioned anything about it since admitting to deliberately leaving behind Itachi’s body, you aren’t too bothered to ask.
Too quickly, traces of a routine begin to emerge. It threatens to become a dangerous means to pass time while you heal. Routines suggest stability, make people soft and unsuspecting, and it becomes even more dangerous when it’s clear Naruto’s actively trying to build one with you.
Yet the sun continues to rise and set, and the snow finally looks like it’s on the verge of melting when you realise a routine has already been established.
More often than not, he’s gone in the morning before you wake, leaving you to yourself until the afternoon when he returns.
You don’t know where he goes, but neither do you particularly care. You do know, however, that he’ll come back. It’s the kind of person he is. Has always been. It doesn’t mean anything more than that.
The most you can do in the meantime is bide your time and focus on preparing to leave. While your current situation is less than ideal, there’s leeway in the simple fact that, for once, he doesn’t seem hell-bent on bringing you back to Konoha.
In the quiet of the room, you exercise muscles still too easily overworked, well beyond the point when the pain in your side beginning to subside decides to flare up again. You distract yourself from thoughts dwelling too long on the staunch ambiguity of where the aftermath of Itachi’s death leaves you.
Today, Naruto returns a little later than usual. It’s already dark, but you anticipated his arrival long before he comes through the door. He shuffles inside the room with a white paper bag held in his arm, carrying a large blue container by the handle in his free hand.
“Picked up some more kerosene,” he says, turning to his left to open a door revealing a diminutive closet. “This should last us for a while.”
He places the blue container inside and holds the paper bag in both arms. Normally, he heads towards the desk to unpack whatever he bought, but he sits next to you instead, maintaining only enough distance to place the bag between you.
“So,” he says, shifting on the blanket with both his hands covering the top of bag rolled down, “I was thinking earlier, about when I first found this place, and I remembered this river I passed on the way. It’s not that far away or anything like that, and you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I thought, maybe, uh, maybe you’d want to do something, since you...”
The rustle of the bag is too loud when he removes his hands he then drops into his lap. He pauses and looks down, for a few seconds rubbing both palms against the material of dark grey pants before he decides to open the bag.
Without looking inside, he grabs the first thing he touches and pulls out a small object packaged in multiple layers of paper. He’s quick to unwrap it, throwing the paper aside to hold out a short ivory vase.
It’s stout at the bottom, curving outward and then tapering into a narrow mouth chipped in several places around the rim. Decorating the surface is a simple mosaic. Starting at the widest point curls a thin branch growing small flowers and bulbs retaining hints of once bright hues of reds and oranges now heavily faded.
As a whole, the vase is nothing special, nothing you’d give a second glance, yet Naruto tilts his head and grins just a little, obviously proud of the find.
“Doesn’t look like much, I know, but I was helping Hayashi clean out his storage, and he had a bunch of stuff he was just going to throw away. When he saw me looking at it, he said I could have it. He didn’t even charge me, you know. At first I wanted it because I was kind of hoping it could have passed for an urn, to use for a service or something like that, since I thought-”
“You thought wrong.”
“It’s not that I’m trying to say what Itachi did was okay-that’s the last thing I’m trying to do-but it doesn’t change the fact he was still your-”
“Shut up.” You curl your fingers into your palm, press down hard enough to feel the indents your nails leave on your skin.
He can’t possibly think you’d want to seek any kind of closure for the man responsible for the deaths brought upon your family and the shame brought upon your clan-that you could ever mourn someone like Itachi for the hell he’s put you through. In all the time you’ve known him, you never thought Naruto could be that incredibly stupid.
But he must be. For even thinking about something like this, much less suggesting it to you, because somehow, he’s still not deterred.
He breathes in and out, the rise and fall of his chest a little too forced, but he places the vase on the table top then reaches for the bag again, carries on as if you said nothing at all.
“I ended up getting this, too,” he says, “instead of using the vase to hold incense. I think this’ll turn out better.”
He takes out a small bronze pot, embellished with autumn grass leaves beginning to tarnish. It’s set beside the vase, standing with a slight tilt on three little pointed feet. In front on the pot he lays a small bundle of ten or twelve thin, black sticks held together by a strip of paper.
“It’s cloves and cinnamon,” he says, when he catches you eying the incense. “I don’t know how you feel about those, but it’s all I could find.”
He sits forward and picks up the bag to dump whatever’s left inside.
It’s a waste of money and a useless gesture. You don’t say any more about it, though. More so than usual, he seems adamant enough to continue with this charade, whether you’re agreeable to it or not.
“...there aren’t a lot of places here to offer the sort of thing like this anymore, but-”
Toppling onto the blanket are four tea candles, a marginally sized roll of thick blue paper, and a plastic cylindrical container the width of his forearm obscured from within by newspaper.
“About the river, why I brought it up, I was thinking you might want to send something down there-even though it’s not summer and all. I mean, if that’s the kind of thing you want to do. I couldn’t find any paper lanterns or anything, but I can make paper boats.
“I actually used to make them all the time,” he says, picking up the rolled paper he begins to unravel and pulling from it a square sheet. He begins to fold it at the corner. “Since they were easier for me to make than the cranes and other stuff everybody else knew how to do. It was too expensive to buy a lot of the good paper, but it’s enough to make a few. And then we can light the candles to put inside and send the boats down the river.”
The boat he made is placed on the table top, closer towards you, and he grabs two candles. He sets one inside the boat and keeps the other candle in his palm. “Like this, see?”
He chuckles, tossing the candle from his right hand to his left. “The lady who checked me out at the convenience store, she thought-”
There’s a slight flush to his face as he looks down. It fades when he gives you a small smile as he looks up, placing the candle next to the paper boat. “Doesn’t matter because it’s not that important-anyway, these,” he says, reaching for the plastic canister, “they don’t last long after they’re cut, but I found them starting to grow from some of the trees out back, and the old lady said I could have some, so I just-well, I thought they’d be nice.”
He removes the flimsy lid then tips the open end of the canister towards his lap, where the newspaper slides out. Carefully, he unwraps the paper to reveal four flowers with translucent petals a gradient of pale yellow and white.
Instantly, you’re assaulted by the smell. It’s too fragrant, almost sickeningly sweet.
“They’re wintersweet,” he says. “It’s not much considering it being this time of year, but at least it’s still something-here.”
You look at the flowers but don’t move to take the one he picks up and holds towards you.
The last time someone gave you a flower was the last time you remember watching the cherry blossoms with Itachi. It used to be the two of you on those days during the short viewing seasons you spent together, long before you deemed yourself too old to be treated like the child Itachi ceased to be when he passed the Chuunin Exam.
Sometimes, sitting beneath the canopy of the garden, you made the ungainly habit of falling asleep. He was immovable sat against the trunk of the tree, became a solid presence while you slept, but it was a dangerous habit he indulged that you grew too comfortable sharing with him.
He’d wait until late in the afternoon to take you home, wake you with the soft call of your name. Opening your eyes, you’d see him kneeling beside you, allowing you to climb on his back, and you’d always clutch his shirt a little tighter as he lifted you high above the cherry blossoms fallen around you.
“It’s said that all cherry blossoms are initially a pure white,” he said that day, carrying you while he made the long trek across the compound.
Surprised coloured your face. “All of them. Really?”
“Do you know what makes the cherry blossoms so beautiful?”
He paused underneath a particular tree, where only a handful of flowers remained. As one of them began to fall, he held out his hand to catch it, trapped inside his palm a flower he would later give to you.
You shook your head, muffling a yawn against his shoulder.
With the crooks of his elbows supporting your legs, gently, he adjusted your weight on his back. “It’s told that dead bodies are buried beneath the trees, and it’s the blood tinting the white that gives the cherry blossoms their beauty.”
Your arms pulled closer around his neck. “...is it true?”
“Only if you believe it’s true.”
“What about you then?” you whispered, glancing at the ground littered with pale, pink petals already beginning to shrivel. “Do you think it’s real?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, instead continuing on the path leading you home. When he spoke, though, there was a slight rise to the corners of his mouth, and the lines around his eyes crinkled. “The only way it matters is if you believe it to be real.”
“I’ll believe it’s real if you do,” you said, already decided to change your mind if Itachi said he didn’t believe it, because then was a time when you were a child foolish enough to be so impressionable.
“Whether I believe it or not, the question you should really ask, little brother, is how much do your own beliefs influence what you perceive reality to be?”
“So,” Naruto says, still holding the flower towards you, and you almost frown at the sound of his voice overlaying with that of a younger Itachi, “that means you like it, right?”
You don’t. For him to go through so much trouble, it’s demeaning to pay any kind of respect to a man who should have died far too long ago.
Yet his careless sense of determination lends itself to opportunity. Under the guise of his ridiculous proposal, you’ll be able to scout as much as you can of the area surrounding the town without having to raise any suspicion.
The flower for a moment twirls when you catch the short stem between your finger and thumb. Flat petals glossy, almost waxy in appearance droop over your hand, almost concealing the reddish, almost maroon centre.
It’s pretty. Maybe. If you ever cared for that kind of empty, poetic sentiment.
Closing your eyes, you breathe, face him with your head raised. Only just do you refrain from crushing the flower in your palm. You ignore his hopeful sort of smile, turn your gaze from the way he’s looking at you when you tell him to take you to the river, because going there will only be a means to an end.
Nothing more and nothing less.
...
You don’t leave tomorrow but he says he’ll take you the following day, right after he says he needs to remove your bandages because they need to be changed.
He offers to do it at first, then continues to insist when you start to undo the bandages yourself.
Slowly, you begin to lean over, reaching for the roll of gauze lying on top of the desk. A firm hand on your left shoulder keeps you sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Let me do this,” he says. “It’ll put less strain on your side this way.”
The hand you push away is replaced with a light hold on your arm.
“Let me do it, Sasuke.”
Your condition hasn’t noticeably improved. This, you both know, and the grip he tightens around your arm is a stark reminder of where you currently stand.
You shrug off his hold, swallow the sudden dryness in your mouth instead of holding back a grimace when he lays his hand across your right side.
“Does it still hurt?”
You grit your teeth when he removes his hand. “If you’re going to do it, then do it.”
Frowning, he reaches from behind him to grab the gauze and pulls himself on the chair even closer to the bed.
The bandages are wrapped around you in silence. His hands fumble along your side, clutching and grasping with the pads of his fingers needlessly cautious over the light bruising exposed on your skin.
You stare at the makeshift altar on the desk. He arranged it yesterday, placing a single flower in the vase he set in the middle of the desk and close to the wall. The four tea candles are stacked into two short columns to the right of the vase, behind the three paper boats he made.
To the left of the vase is the bronze pot still emitting smoke from the incense burning inside. The almost nauseating odour of cinnamon and clove permeates the room, further antagonising the headache that made its reappearance the day before.
You grunt when he finishes, reaching for the shirt he laid on the bed earlier.
He watches while you slip the shirt over your head, pulling it down with your left hand. Mouth slightly ajar, the words it seems he’s going to say don’t come out, and suddenly, he looks away.
The empty roll in his hand is all but slammed on the desk.
...
It’s late in the afternoon when you arrive at the river, almost dusk. He showed you the trail he found behind the inn, took you uphill and closer towards the large mounds still covered in a large expanse of white despite the distinct lack of snow near the river.
You have a good vantage point of the town from here. It’s much smaller than his vague depictions led you to believe and far less developed than you imagined. The town is built around a wide dirt road, empty save for the various pieces of junk among scrapped wood scattered along the sides. Not including the comparatively large inn, there can’t be more than a dozen buildings or so, yet even from this distance, you can tell most of them are in deplorable shape. They’ve probably been vacant for more than a few good years.
The bottom of the thick cloak he gave you flutters, and the wind whips across your face, blowing your hair over your eyes. A sharp pain to the left of your chest contends with the headache that still hasn’t gone away. You take a breath that fills your nostrils with cold air too quickly.
The dead grass rustles beneath his feet when Naruto steps away from the bank. He stops to stand beside you, almost brushes his shoulder against yours. An occasional glance is thrown your way, but you only pull back the hood of your cloak and continue to stare straight ahead.
Floating ahead of the three flowers he set adrift the river is the lit candle in the paper boat you placed down first. You watch them follow the gentle stream heading west, where the river curves and disappears into a small forest made bleak by the bare branches of trees.
With no body, there’s no need for a proper funeral, but notions of what’s proper ingrained during childhood have no place for this kind of occasion.
The irony almost astounds you. It’s a ghost of a tradition, and the intrinsic simplicity almost mocks the elaborate rituals you remember surrounding the death of your mother’s uncle when you were younger.
He died a couple of weeks into March, when the last of the snow had finally melted and you no longer had to wear a coat in order to go outside.
The funeral itself lasted six days, yet your mother ensured that you spent most of that time preoccupied with Itachi, including the first time he took you on the other side of the compound to see the cherry blossoms bloom.
You weren’t familiar with your uncle, and his name you can’t recall even now, but you do know he was an important figure in your mother’s childhood, taking the place of the father who was killed when she was too young to remember. He had no children, and since his only niece was older than his only nephew, the arrangement for his funeral fell to your mother.
You’d been curious about the day-long preparations that seemingly lasted for weeks on end. However, no one would answer your questions, all too ready with a placating pat on the head and pointing you away from matters children didn’t need to worry about despite your numerous rebuttals that Itachi was a child, too.
There isn’t much you can actually discern from that time, though, not apart from the few glimpses into the preparations you stole without your mother knowing and the more frequent arguments between your parents you were still able to hear behind closed doors.
“It isn’t something he needs to be a part of,” your mother said the night after your uncle died. She didn’t disagree with your father too often, but the sound of their hushed whispers would start to escalate after Itachi was promoted to chuunin.
In some aspects, she was even more resolute than your father. She was strong in a more unassuming manner that threatened to uproot the image of your father standing tall, and sometimes you admired her more than you did Itachi and your father you wanted to be.
The soft face she shared with Itachi became marred by the dark circles beneath her eyes that made her appear older than she really was. As Itachi became more estranged, your mother began to direct more of her attention toward you, but when the veneer of your family already wrought with cracks created jagged lines on the pieces not yet broken, you found yourself still holding on trying to seal the ruptures by putting yourself in Itachi’s place.
What you can interpret now, you couldn’t have known at the beginning. You were five then, when it started with the death of your mother’s uncle, and it would be far too late when you realised how distorted the image you held of your family truly was.
“He isn’t so young a child that he should be shielded from the idea of death,” your father said to your mother, voice terse but not yet raised. “With Itachi, you didn’t-”
“Sasuke’s different from Itachi,” she said, “Because Sasuke’s not...”
You didn’t care to hear the rest as you continued further down the hallway. You snuck into Itachi’s room instead of your own, tried to slip beside him in his bed even though you already knew he was pretending you didn’t wake him up.
On the day after her uncle’s cremation, your mother agreed to allow you to attend the final ceremony being held by the Naka river, where his ashes would be thrown.
She led the small procession alone, wearing in a white kimono made of newly woven silk and adorned with delicate ivory trim. Dark hair reaching past her shoulders laid fallen down her back. Large sleeves billowed behind her like the wings of the butterfly you’d seen Itachi easily crush the week before.
“Remember this, little brother,” he’d said the day after returning home from his first mission alone. To you, he held out the butterfly then caught and killed by a deft hand. “Never take for granted the fragile nature of our existence.”
You watched him turn over his palm to abandon the remains on the forest floor, but they’d been no sooner blown away by the breeze.
“Otherwise, you’ll suffer to live bound by ambitions that can easily be made obsolete by something even as fickle as the wind.”
The daunting words didn’t register much in your mind then, although for whatever reason they resonated at the ceremony that night. You clutched Itachi’s hand, following the procession ahead of you with timorous eyes that made you wary to stray from the fingers curled within your own.
Yet as the crowd slowly began to part, slowly revealed the marvel of white paper lanterns drifting along the river, you let go of Itachi’s hand.
You chased after the stars spilled from the sky that suddenly seemed within reach. Itachi’s soft calls were ignored as you lost yourself in the sea of white obstructing your view. On the other side of the crowd refusing to part, you tried to be careful, tried not to trip while navigating through dense patches of tall grass interceding the narrow path leading to the wide mouth of the river.
The already heavy fabric of the white kimono that enveloped you became heavier when you stepped into the water that was too cold. Large sleeves falling past your hands became harder to keep above the surface the further you waded into the river. Higher the water rose. Up to your chest, almost above your neck, but you were almost there, almost close enough to touch the paper lanterns that reminded you of the stars.
With a desperate cry, your mother snatched you from the stars that were suddenly out of your reach. Her prayer beads broke away from the string loose around her neck as she fell to her knees into the water with you in her arms.
You shivered and squirmed against her, tried to escape the feel of your wet clothes clinging to your skin. She continued to hold you close, though, squeezing too tightly with the threat of never letting go when you told her you were only trying to get close enough to touch the paper lanterns. The words she murmured into your hair you’ve long since forgotten, but it was the sight of Itachi that held you still against her chest.
Too clearly, you remember the palpable fear in dark eyes. The ashen quality of his skin was almost matched by the white of your kimono. You watched him breathless with your mouth trembling at the tremor of his hand pushing away the hair stuck to your face, from his lips heard the silent whisper of your name amidst the commotion around you, and in that one moment you were almost afraid to think he would have taken you out of your mother’s arms had your father not been standing beside him.
“...Sasuke,” you hear, again and once more, but you realise it’s not Itachi calling you.
“You feel cold,” Naruto says, and you turn your face from the hand resting against your cheek.
Wobbly legs almost cause you to lose your balance, but you manage to stagger from his hand that reaches to steady you. “Don’t touch me.”
“Really cold,” he says with a frown. “Too cold, Sasuke.”
There’s a strange prickling sensation that almost makes your fingers feel numb, but you don’t feel cold. Aside from your headache and the growing pain in your chest, you don’t feel much of anything.
Hard, you press the heel of your palm against your temple. You tell yourself to breathe out. Almost forget to breathe in when your eyes begin to burn beneath the waning glare of the sun.
Vaguely, you hear him call your name as the horizon west begins to waver and blur. Trickles of yellow and reds bleed into the whites overlapping in the distance. Gravity shifts your vision down. Your knees hit the ground, start to sting at the snow seeping through your pants and into your skin.
You try to stand but sway trying not to fall. Your hands push against the arm around your waist holding you upright.
“Sasuke, you-”
The arm tightens when you continue to struggle, but you need to leave. You can’t stay here. You can’t pretend to seek solace you don’t-can’t-want for the death of a man who never existed.
In this place with just the two of you, where there can no longer be such a thing as Itachi because he’s no longer out there waiting for you, won’t ever be again, and this time when you close your eyes, in the dark all you see is blue.
Blue Dahlia I
Alas, it's the turning point, and we're finally getting somewhere. Yosh. It's still slow, but being such a contained story, I don't want to rush things, which I probably will anyway because it's supposed to take place over the course of a maybe a little under two months. Considering Kishimoto is vague look who's talking with his sense of time, I want to make that long enough for Sasuke to heal physically while once again failing to cope with emotional stuff. I guess I am making him more complicated than he should be, but it's more interesting to think of his relationships with Itachi and Naruto like this. I'm just sorry I ended up cutting so much out of this part.
Oh, the and flower thing. Um, okay, so yeah, I'm back on that, and I've almost half a mind to change the title to Blue Dahlia, but let's just ignore my tendency to write my ooc Naruto giving Sasuke flowers. It actually serves a purpose here.
***
Characters: Naruto/Sasuke, Itachi
Rating: R
Words: 6305
Summary: It’s not Tobi who finds Sasuke.
***
Providence II
He plops himself on the floor, shudders and huddles closer to the low-seated table between you.
“No wonder it’s been so cold in here,” he says. “I offered to fix it, but old lady Inoue-I already told you about the old lady who owns this inn, right?”
You make a fist with your right hand, flex your fingers you watch slowly begin to unfurl above the heavy blue blanket outspread from beneath the top of the table Naruto hauled from downstairs. The aches in your body haven’t quite settled, but the pain isn’t unbearable. It’s more tolerable after taking the medicine, a dull throbbing almost numb that hinders long periods of constant motion.
“Right,” he says again, stretches the word into three syllables. “Yeah, like I was saying, she said there’s a guy who takes care of all the repairs. Her husband used to do it-they built this inn, you know. It was their dream, to have a place where people would want to come and stay. She called it the best memory they made together, but she’s a widow now, so...”
He clears his throat. “Anyway, the repair guy is a relative of hers. He’s supposed to be coming from the next town over, which I guess isn’t going to happen anytime soon since we’re kind of snowed in right now. Pretty far out, too.”
How far, he doesn’t say, maybe wouldn’t if you did ask. You won’t. Whatever the incentive for bringing you here, on some level he has to realise you have no intention of staying any longer than necessary, but you can’t afford to draw attention to the inevitability of you leaving. Not when you aren’t even fit to travel on your own.
It’s reasonable to assume you’re still in Fire Country. You can’t be too far from Konoha, yet having actively sought this kind of seclusion begs to question why he would take you to this seemingly remote town in lieu of returning with you to Konoha, which should have been his first priority.
Plain curiosity suggests an ulterior motive, but as to what Naruto thinks he’ll accomplish, it’s an uncertainty you’re not particularly inclined to acknowledge.
You follow his gaze towards the window almost completely doused white, hear his murmured slip of far enough that still reveals too little.
It’ll have to do for now.
His mouth quirks at one corner when he turns to face you. He rubs his hands together beneath the thick blanket, hisses and shudders. “I didn’t even know there was a next town over, but I don’t think I can wait that long. Not that I’m saying I know how to fix a leak in a roof. At least I can still try to do something, though.”
He laughs a little. “Maybe I can be like that guy in those comics, you know. Start a business doing odd jobs here and there. What do you think?”
You reach for the ceramic mug on the table top, crossing your legs beneath the blanket. The arrangement is cumbersome, with a table that nearly takes up the narrow width of the room pitting your back against the side of the bed.
His snort breaks the silence. “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.”
With a sigh, he scoots closer to the table, to the kerosene heater beneath it. “I have to do something while we’re here. Until you get better at least. And then we can...I mean-well, we’ll still have to wait until the weather’s not so bad. But if the snow doesn’t start to let up soon, it looks like we might be here for a while.”
In your hands the mug feels cool. The tea you sip bitter and warm soothes the dryness in your throat.
“Good thing we have one of these, though, right,” he says, gesturing beneath the blanket with one hand towards the table. “I almost wish it was an electric one, but I think that would seem out of place in this sort of atmosphere.”
Slowly, you place the mug still almost full back on the table top.
He watches you, sees the slight twitch of your right arm you weren’t careful enough to hide. He opens his mouth, pauses, stares at you with his lips pursed.
You lean against the side of the bed, allow your head to fall back, clutch at the thick blanket with shaky fingers as you close your eyes.
...
You wake up on the floor in same position you fell asleep between the bed and the table. It’s cooler now but not cold. Warm air takes the place of the heat once trapped beneath the blanket.
Beside you, he lies too close, curled on the floor right next to you with his hair almost brushing against the blanket over your knee.
You make sure to keep your distance as you shift towards your left, away from him shifting on top of the blanket even closer to you. The cramped feeling in your thighs begins to lessen when you elongate your legs. It becomes a series of prickles, travelling to your calves, lingers at the bottom of your feet when you stand.
It still takes too long to manoeuvre your weight. You don’t tire as easily as you did before, but the effort made to keep yourself steady long enough to walk almost threatens to pull your legs from beneath you.
You’ve only fallen once, yesterday, while Naruto was downstairs. On the way to the bathroom, your knees smacked against the floor, made a loud clap in the room you weren’t sure Naruto hadn’t heard.
He didn’t say anything when he returned to the room with the heated table in tow, but you were back in the bed by then.
The sound of your name murmured by his voice thick with sleep almost makes you pause. Fists clenched at your sides, you take one step forward. Try to find purchase with your fingers slipping against damp palms.
It’s already been a little over a week. The injuries obtained during the fight with Itachi shouldn’t affect you like this. Neither should recovering from a fever. Although it’s too soon for the muscle atrophy you push yourself to keep at bay to set in, your limbs still feel heavy when the medicine begins to wear off, as you breathe and grit your teeth, place the left foot in front of the right, swallow low gasps of air too much at one time.
There’s no reason to feel this way when you’ve survived much worse.
Yet to be reduced to this kind of state, knowingly dependent upon someone who stole from you the last assertion of a single ambition-you don’t want to remember another time when you ever allowed yourself to become so weak.
...
“Fixed the leak.” He closes the door behind him, spinning the small ring holding three keys around his finger. “Looks like I might be doing some odd jobs after all.” He catches the keys in his palm with a clink and stuffs them in the side pocket of the pants hidden beneath his cloak.
You bring the small bowl in your hands to your lips. The amount of miso almost causes the soup to be too salty, but the thin pieces of sweet potato and carrots are tender, and the taste of ginger makes it go down easily enough.
Considering your continuing lack of appetite, it’s the most agreeable thing you’ve been able to stomach so far.
He takes off his cloak he throws on top of the bed, shivers with his arms crossed and hands rubbing his shoulders. “At least it’ll be warmer in here now.”
“Good thing, too,” he says. “Old lady Inoue isn’t charging me that much as it is, but I still figured I’d have to come up with something sooner or later. I was going to run out of money eventually. I was kind of hoping I’d have enough until-I guess I didn’t plan that far ahead,” he says, scratching the back of his neck with his hand.
Across from you, on the other side of the table, he settles on top of the blanket, folding his legs beneath him. “But this works out great. She said she’d recommend me to go around to help with some of the side jobs that still need to be done. Nothing really big, but just a few things here and there. Doing this and that.
“It’s almost unexpected. For a place with this kind of weather and to be so cut off, there’s a lot of old people living here. Civilians, I mean. It’s not so bad, I guess, if they’re already used to it, but considering how cold it gets, I wonder...
“When I was talking to Hayashi the other day, he said that most of the younger people moved on years ago. As soon as they could leave a town this small. Some of them still visit, he said, every once in a while. But most of them don’t come back. Really, he said it doesn’t make a difference after a while, but to be in this kind of isolated place, and staying here knowing people leave without wanting to come back. Being left behind like seems kind of lone-”
You set the bowl on the table top. The spoon clanks against it a little too hard for your liking.
Blinking, he leans over, peers into the bowl then looks to you. On his face, there’s a sort of half smile stilted from a frown. “Don’t tell me that’s all you’re going to eat.”
You lick your lips. Whenever you do eat, however much it is, he always says it’s not enough. The more you eat, the more he complains. He did it yesterday, too, and the day before, every time he feels obligated to sit with you and watch. Eventually, he’ll leave the matter alone when he realises you’re ignoring him, at least until he tries to push it again, but you’re more than well aware of your own limitations. It’s not for his sake you need to get better.
He bites his lower lip, still frowning. “You’re not going to finish the rest?”
Picking up the cup sitting beside the bowl, you take a sip of water and place the cup back down.
“Sasuke, you...” He scoffs, shaking his head and reaching his arm across the table for the food you didn’t finish.
...
Finally, it stops snowing. Another day passes. One more turns into two and then three. Most of the time goes by in relative silence, despite his attempts to pull you into conversation with even emptier words about the odd jobs he’s done around town and the few times he’s had tea with Inoue.
“She said she likes having the company of a nice boy like me-you believe that?” he says, smiling around a mouthful of noodles and placing his hand level with his shoulder. “This tiny little old lady who barely comes up to my shoulder. And it’s cute because she still sounds really young, and then she has the softest voice-almost softer than Hinata’s.”
The hand over you knee tightens its grip under the blanket splayed over your lap. You tell him he talks too much, but he just laughs, continues to smile and picks up his bowl to gather more noodles around his chopsticks.
The next day brings you closer still to another week, almost two since you’ve been here. If Naruto went against orders and ran off to find you like he’d claimed, a search party probably wouldn’t be too far behind-Sakura and Kakashi, your mind unwittingly supplies-but if anyone was looking for the two of you, most likely, unless Naruto did cover his tracks that well, however doubtful it seems, you would have been found by now.
Although he hasn’t mentioned anything about it since admitting to deliberately leaving behind Itachi’s body, you aren’t too bothered to ask.
Too quickly, traces of a routine begin to emerge. It threatens to become a dangerous means to pass time while you heal. Routines suggest stability, make people soft and unsuspecting, and it becomes even more dangerous when it’s clear Naruto’s actively trying to build one with you.
Yet the sun continues to rise and set, and the snow finally looks like it’s on the verge of melting when you realise a routine has already been established.
More often than not, he’s gone in the morning before you wake, leaving you to yourself until the afternoon when he returns.
You don’t know where he goes, but neither do you particularly care. You do know, however, that he’ll come back. It’s the kind of person he is. Has always been. It doesn’t mean anything more than that.
The most you can do in the meantime is bide your time and focus on preparing to leave. While your current situation is less than ideal, there’s leeway in the simple fact that, for once, he doesn’t seem hell-bent on bringing you back to Konoha.
In the quiet of the room, you exercise muscles still too easily overworked, well beyond the point when the pain in your side beginning to subside decides to flare up again. You distract yourself from thoughts dwelling too long on the staunch ambiguity of where the aftermath of Itachi’s death leaves you.
Today, Naruto returns a little later than usual. It’s already dark, but you anticipated his arrival long before he comes through the door. He shuffles inside the room with a white paper bag held in his arm, carrying a large blue container by the handle in his free hand.
“Picked up some more kerosene,” he says, turning to his left to open a door revealing a diminutive closet. “This should last us for a while.”
He places the blue container inside and holds the paper bag in both arms. Normally, he heads towards the desk to unpack whatever he bought, but he sits next to you instead, maintaining only enough distance to place the bag between you.
“So,” he says, shifting on the blanket with both his hands covering the top of bag rolled down, “I was thinking earlier, about when I first found this place, and I remembered this river I passed on the way. It’s not that far away or anything like that, and you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I thought, maybe, uh, maybe you’d want to do something, since you...”
The rustle of the bag is too loud when he removes his hands he then drops into his lap. He pauses and looks down, for a few seconds rubbing both palms against the material of dark grey pants before he decides to open the bag.
Without looking inside, he grabs the first thing he touches and pulls out a small object packaged in multiple layers of paper. He’s quick to unwrap it, throwing the paper aside to hold out a short ivory vase.
It’s stout at the bottom, curving outward and then tapering into a narrow mouth chipped in several places around the rim. Decorating the surface is a simple mosaic. Starting at the widest point curls a thin branch growing small flowers and bulbs retaining hints of once bright hues of reds and oranges now heavily faded.
As a whole, the vase is nothing special, nothing you’d give a second glance, yet Naruto tilts his head and grins just a little, obviously proud of the find.
“Doesn’t look like much, I know, but I was helping Hayashi clean out his storage, and he had a bunch of stuff he was just going to throw away. When he saw me looking at it, he said I could have it. He didn’t even charge me, you know. At first I wanted it because I was kind of hoping it could have passed for an urn, to use for a service or something like that, since I thought-”
“You thought wrong.”
“It’s not that I’m trying to say what Itachi did was okay-that’s the last thing I’m trying to do-but it doesn’t change the fact he was still your-”
“Shut up.” You curl your fingers into your palm, press down hard enough to feel the indents your nails leave on your skin.
He can’t possibly think you’d want to seek any kind of closure for the man responsible for the deaths brought upon your family and the shame brought upon your clan-that you could ever mourn someone like Itachi for the hell he’s put you through. In all the time you’ve known him, you never thought Naruto could be that incredibly stupid.
But he must be. For even thinking about something like this, much less suggesting it to you, because somehow, he’s still not deterred.
He breathes in and out, the rise and fall of his chest a little too forced, but he places the vase on the table top then reaches for the bag again, carries on as if you said nothing at all.
“I ended up getting this, too,” he says, “instead of using the vase to hold incense. I think this’ll turn out better.”
He takes out a small bronze pot, embellished with autumn grass leaves beginning to tarnish. It’s set beside the vase, standing with a slight tilt on three little pointed feet. In front on the pot he lays a small bundle of ten or twelve thin, black sticks held together by a strip of paper.
“It’s cloves and cinnamon,” he says, when he catches you eying the incense. “I don’t know how you feel about those, but it’s all I could find.”
He sits forward and picks up the bag to dump whatever’s left inside.
It’s a waste of money and a useless gesture. You don’t say any more about it, though. More so than usual, he seems adamant enough to continue with this charade, whether you’re agreeable to it or not.
“...there aren’t a lot of places here to offer the sort of thing like this anymore, but-”
Toppling onto the blanket are four tea candles, a marginally sized roll of thick blue paper, and a plastic cylindrical container the width of his forearm obscured from within by newspaper.
“About the river, why I brought it up, I was thinking you might want to send something down there-even though it’s not summer and all. I mean, if that’s the kind of thing you want to do. I couldn’t find any paper lanterns or anything, but I can make paper boats.
“I actually used to make them all the time,” he says, picking up the rolled paper he begins to unravel and pulling from it a square sheet. He begins to fold it at the corner. “Since they were easier for me to make than the cranes and other stuff everybody else knew how to do. It was too expensive to buy a lot of the good paper, but it’s enough to make a few. And then we can light the candles to put inside and send the boats down the river.”
The boat he made is placed on the table top, closer towards you, and he grabs two candles. He sets one inside the boat and keeps the other candle in his palm. “Like this, see?”
He chuckles, tossing the candle from his right hand to his left. “The lady who checked me out at the convenience store, she thought-”
There’s a slight flush to his face as he looks down. It fades when he gives you a small smile as he looks up, placing the candle next to the paper boat. “Doesn’t matter because it’s not that important-anyway, these,” he says, reaching for the plastic canister, “they don’t last long after they’re cut, but I found them starting to grow from some of the trees out back, and the old lady said I could have some, so I just-well, I thought they’d be nice.”
He removes the flimsy lid then tips the open end of the canister towards his lap, where the newspaper slides out. Carefully, he unwraps the paper to reveal four flowers with translucent petals a gradient of pale yellow and white.
Instantly, you’re assaulted by the smell. It’s too fragrant, almost sickeningly sweet.
“They’re wintersweet,” he says. “It’s not much considering it being this time of year, but at least it’s still something-here.”
You look at the flowers but don’t move to take the one he picks up and holds towards you.
The last time someone gave you a flower was the last time you remember watching the cherry blossoms with Itachi. It used to be the two of you on those days during the short viewing seasons you spent together, long before you deemed yourself too old to be treated like the child Itachi ceased to be when he passed the Chuunin Exam.
Sometimes, sitting beneath the canopy of the garden, you made the ungainly habit of falling asleep. He was immovable sat against the trunk of the tree, became a solid presence while you slept, but it was a dangerous habit he indulged that you grew too comfortable sharing with him.
He’d wait until late in the afternoon to take you home, wake you with the soft call of your name. Opening your eyes, you’d see him kneeling beside you, allowing you to climb on his back, and you’d always clutch his shirt a little tighter as he lifted you high above the cherry blossoms fallen around you.
“It’s said that all cherry blossoms are initially a pure white,” he said that day, carrying you while he made the long trek across the compound.
Surprised coloured your face. “All of them. Really?”
“Do you know what makes the cherry blossoms so beautiful?”
He paused underneath a particular tree, where only a handful of flowers remained. As one of them began to fall, he held out his hand to catch it, trapped inside his palm a flower he would later give to you.
You shook your head, muffling a yawn against his shoulder.
With the crooks of his elbows supporting your legs, gently, he adjusted your weight on his back. “It’s told that dead bodies are buried beneath the trees, and it’s the blood tinting the white that gives the cherry blossoms their beauty.”
Your arms pulled closer around his neck. “...is it true?”
“Only if you believe it’s true.”
“What about you then?” you whispered, glancing at the ground littered with pale, pink petals already beginning to shrivel. “Do you think it’s real?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, instead continuing on the path leading you home. When he spoke, though, there was a slight rise to the corners of his mouth, and the lines around his eyes crinkled. “The only way it matters is if you believe it to be real.”
“I’ll believe it’s real if you do,” you said, already decided to change your mind if Itachi said he didn’t believe it, because then was a time when you were a child foolish enough to be so impressionable.
“Whether I believe it or not, the question you should really ask, little brother, is how much do your own beliefs influence what you perceive reality to be?”
“So,” Naruto says, still holding the flower towards you, and you almost frown at the sound of his voice overlaying with that of a younger Itachi, “that means you like it, right?”
You don’t. For him to go through so much trouble, it’s demeaning to pay any kind of respect to a man who should have died far too long ago.
Yet his careless sense of determination lends itself to opportunity. Under the guise of his ridiculous proposal, you’ll be able to scout as much as you can of the area surrounding the town without having to raise any suspicion.
The flower for a moment twirls when you catch the short stem between your finger and thumb. Flat petals glossy, almost waxy in appearance droop over your hand, almost concealing the reddish, almost maroon centre.
It’s pretty. Maybe. If you ever cared for that kind of empty, poetic sentiment.
Closing your eyes, you breathe, face him with your head raised. Only just do you refrain from crushing the flower in your palm. You ignore his hopeful sort of smile, turn your gaze from the way he’s looking at you when you tell him to take you to the river, because going there will only be a means to an end.
Nothing more and nothing less.
...
You don’t leave tomorrow but he says he’ll take you the following day, right after he says he needs to remove your bandages because they need to be changed.
He offers to do it at first, then continues to insist when you start to undo the bandages yourself.
Slowly, you begin to lean over, reaching for the roll of gauze lying on top of the desk. A firm hand on your left shoulder keeps you sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Let me do this,” he says. “It’ll put less strain on your side this way.”
The hand you push away is replaced with a light hold on your arm.
“Let me do it, Sasuke.”
Your condition hasn’t noticeably improved. This, you both know, and the grip he tightens around your arm is a stark reminder of where you currently stand.
You shrug off his hold, swallow the sudden dryness in your mouth instead of holding back a grimace when he lays his hand across your right side.
“Does it still hurt?”
You grit your teeth when he removes his hand. “If you’re going to do it, then do it.”
Frowning, he reaches from behind him to grab the gauze and pulls himself on the chair even closer to the bed.
The bandages are wrapped around you in silence. His hands fumble along your side, clutching and grasping with the pads of his fingers needlessly cautious over the light bruising exposed on your skin.
You stare at the makeshift altar on the desk. He arranged it yesterday, placing a single flower in the vase he set in the middle of the desk and close to the wall. The four tea candles are stacked into two short columns to the right of the vase, behind the three paper boats he made.
To the left of the vase is the bronze pot still emitting smoke from the incense burning inside. The almost nauseating odour of cinnamon and clove permeates the room, further antagonising the headache that made its reappearance the day before.
You grunt when he finishes, reaching for the shirt he laid on the bed earlier.
He watches while you slip the shirt over your head, pulling it down with your left hand. Mouth slightly ajar, the words it seems he’s going to say don’t come out, and suddenly, he looks away.
The empty roll in his hand is all but slammed on the desk.
...
It’s late in the afternoon when you arrive at the river, almost dusk. He showed you the trail he found behind the inn, took you uphill and closer towards the large mounds still covered in a large expanse of white despite the distinct lack of snow near the river.
You have a good vantage point of the town from here. It’s much smaller than his vague depictions led you to believe and far less developed than you imagined. The town is built around a wide dirt road, empty save for the various pieces of junk among scrapped wood scattered along the sides. Not including the comparatively large inn, there can’t be more than a dozen buildings or so, yet even from this distance, you can tell most of them are in deplorable shape. They’ve probably been vacant for more than a few good years.
The bottom of the thick cloak he gave you flutters, and the wind whips across your face, blowing your hair over your eyes. A sharp pain to the left of your chest contends with the headache that still hasn’t gone away. You take a breath that fills your nostrils with cold air too quickly.
The dead grass rustles beneath his feet when Naruto steps away from the bank. He stops to stand beside you, almost brushes his shoulder against yours. An occasional glance is thrown your way, but you only pull back the hood of your cloak and continue to stare straight ahead.
Floating ahead of the three flowers he set adrift the river is the lit candle in the paper boat you placed down first. You watch them follow the gentle stream heading west, where the river curves and disappears into a small forest made bleak by the bare branches of trees.
With no body, there’s no need for a proper funeral, but notions of what’s proper ingrained during childhood have no place for this kind of occasion.
The irony almost astounds you. It’s a ghost of a tradition, and the intrinsic simplicity almost mocks the elaborate rituals you remember surrounding the death of your mother’s uncle when you were younger.
He died a couple of weeks into March, when the last of the snow had finally melted and you no longer had to wear a coat in order to go outside.
The funeral itself lasted six days, yet your mother ensured that you spent most of that time preoccupied with Itachi, including the first time he took you on the other side of the compound to see the cherry blossoms bloom.
You weren’t familiar with your uncle, and his name you can’t recall even now, but you do know he was an important figure in your mother’s childhood, taking the place of the father who was killed when she was too young to remember. He had no children, and since his only niece was older than his only nephew, the arrangement for his funeral fell to your mother.
You’d been curious about the day-long preparations that seemingly lasted for weeks on end. However, no one would answer your questions, all too ready with a placating pat on the head and pointing you away from matters children didn’t need to worry about despite your numerous rebuttals that Itachi was a child, too.
There isn’t much you can actually discern from that time, though, not apart from the few glimpses into the preparations you stole without your mother knowing and the more frequent arguments between your parents you were still able to hear behind closed doors.
“It isn’t something he needs to be a part of,” your mother said the night after your uncle died. She didn’t disagree with your father too often, but the sound of their hushed whispers would start to escalate after Itachi was promoted to chuunin.
In some aspects, she was even more resolute than your father. She was strong in a more unassuming manner that threatened to uproot the image of your father standing tall, and sometimes you admired her more than you did Itachi and your father you wanted to be.
The soft face she shared with Itachi became marred by the dark circles beneath her eyes that made her appear older than she really was. As Itachi became more estranged, your mother began to direct more of her attention toward you, but when the veneer of your family already wrought with cracks created jagged lines on the pieces not yet broken, you found yourself still holding on trying to seal the ruptures by putting yourself in Itachi’s place.
What you can interpret now, you couldn’t have known at the beginning. You were five then, when it started with the death of your mother’s uncle, and it would be far too late when you realised how distorted the image you held of your family truly was.
“He isn’t so young a child that he should be shielded from the idea of death,” your father said to your mother, voice terse but not yet raised. “With Itachi, you didn’t-”
“Sasuke’s different from Itachi,” she said, “Because Sasuke’s not...”
You didn’t care to hear the rest as you continued further down the hallway. You snuck into Itachi’s room instead of your own, tried to slip beside him in his bed even though you already knew he was pretending you didn’t wake him up.
On the day after her uncle’s cremation, your mother agreed to allow you to attend the final ceremony being held by the Naka river, where his ashes would be thrown.
She led the small procession alone, wearing in a white kimono made of newly woven silk and adorned with delicate ivory trim. Dark hair reaching past her shoulders laid fallen down her back. Large sleeves billowed behind her like the wings of the butterfly you’d seen Itachi easily crush the week before.
“Remember this, little brother,” he’d said the day after returning home from his first mission alone. To you, he held out the butterfly then caught and killed by a deft hand. “Never take for granted the fragile nature of our existence.”
You watched him turn over his palm to abandon the remains on the forest floor, but they’d been no sooner blown away by the breeze.
“Otherwise, you’ll suffer to live bound by ambitions that can easily be made obsolete by something even as fickle as the wind.”
The daunting words didn’t register much in your mind then, although for whatever reason they resonated at the ceremony that night. You clutched Itachi’s hand, following the procession ahead of you with timorous eyes that made you wary to stray from the fingers curled within your own.
Yet as the crowd slowly began to part, slowly revealed the marvel of white paper lanterns drifting along the river, you let go of Itachi’s hand.
You chased after the stars spilled from the sky that suddenly seemed within reach. Itachi’s soft calls were ignored as you lost yourself in the sea of white obstructing your view. On the other side of the crowd refusing to part, you tried to be careful, tried not to trip while navigating through dense patches of tall grass interceding the narrow path leading to the wide mouth of the river.
The already heavy fabric of the white kimono that enveloped you became heavier when you stepped into the water that was too cold. Large sleeves falling past your hands became harder to keep above the surface the further you waded into the river. Higher the water rose. Up to your chest, almost above your neck, but you were almost there, almost close enough to touch the paper lanterns that reminded you of the stars.
With a desperate cry, your mother snatched you from the stars that were suddenly out of your reach. Her prayer beads broke away from the string loose around her neck as she fell to her knees into the water with you in her arms.
You shivered and squirmed against her, tried to escape the feel of your wet clothes clinging to your skin. She continued to hold you close, though, squeezing too tightly with the threat of never letting go when you told her you were only trying to get close enough to touch the paper lanterns. The words she murmured into your hair you’ve long since forgotten, but it was the sight of Itachi that held you still against her chest.
Too clearly, you remember the palpable fear in dark eyes. The ashen quality of his skin was almost matched by the white of your kimono. You watched him breathless with your mouth trembling at the tremor of his hand pushing away the hair stuck to your face, from his lips heard the silent whisper of your name amidst the commotion around you, and in that one moment you were almost afraid to think he would have taken you out of your mother’s arms had your father not been standing beside him.
“...Sasuke,” you hear, again and once more, but you realise it’s not Itachi calling you.
“You feel cold,” Naruto says, and you turn your face from the hand resting against your cheek.
Wobbly legs almost cause you to lose your balance, but you manage to stagger from his hand that reaches to steady you. “Don’t touch me.”
“Really cold,” he says with a frown. “Too cold, Sasuke.”
There’s a strange prickling sensation that almost makes your fingers feel numb, but you don’t feel cold. Aside from your headache and the growing pain in your chest, you don’t feel much of anything.
Hard, you press the heel of your palm against your temple. You tell yourself to breathe out. Almost forget to breathe in when your eyes begin to burn beneath the waning glare of the sun.
Vaguely, you hear him call your name as the horizon west begins to waver and blur. Trickles of yellow and reds bleed into the whites overlapping in the distance. Gravity shifts your vision down. Your knees hit the ground, start to sting at the snow seeping through your pants and into your skin.
You try to stand but sway trying not to fall. Your hands push against the arm around your waist holding you upright.
“Sasuke, you-”
The arm tightens when you continue to struggle, but you need to leave. You can’t stay here. You can’t pretend to seek solace you don’t-can’t-want for the death of a man who never existed.
In this place with just the two of you, where there can no longer be such a thing as Itachi because he’s no longer out there waiting for you, won’t ever be again, and this time when you close your eyes, in the dark all you see is blue.
Blue Dahlia I