Naruto Fic-thing
Title: Switched
Characters: Sasuke, Yamato
Summary: Two realities collide, and two lives are switched. Now two different Sasuke’s face two very different realities; one a world on the brink of war and one a world determined to break him.
The man was a snake. A snake man. An honest to god, covered in scales, has no feet snake-man. With arms, and a human torso and a scaly, scaly face. That alone was enough to freak any sane person out, but the man in the mask bearing down on the bound figure on the floor was somehow worse. He looked like he was enjoying himself as he stabbed the sharp knife into soft places along the captive’s body. Ever stab was followed by a pause, where the masked man said something and the captive refused to answer, before the whole proses started over again.
Sasuke crouched down low behind the thick stone pillar and clapped his hands over his ears to try and block out the screaming.
It didn’t help.
He shouldn’t be here, had no idea how he got from his living room in sunny San Francisco to a dark, dank cave inhabited by monsters who tortured people. There had been a bright light and a flash and when his eyes opened again he was here, beside his hiding place, watching a man get vomited up by a snake and somehow still be alive and kicking. He hid before even really thinking about what was happening.
All he knew was that if they found him he would die. He had no gun, no knife, not even any rocks to throw at them should either assailant come after him. It’ll be ok, it’ll be ok, he repeated mentally, trying to keep his breathing as even and quiet as possible. They had to leave eventually, and when they did he would get the hell out of here. There was nothing he could do to help the man at the moment, but there was enough noise for Sasuke to be sure that he was still alive.
Something cracked and a flinch ran through him. It wasn’t bone, bone didn’t sound like that, but Sasuke couldn’t have said what did make the sound if he’d wanted to. After it came a ringing silence, and then the soft, steady retreat of foot falls down a distant hallway followed by the slow crawl of scales. He waited a good ten minutes from the time the monster and the man in the mast left before venturing out from his hiding place.
The room was wide, a massive dome that seemed to have been carved into the side of a mountain but he looks of the small roots protruding from the ceiling. There was a damp, red puddle on the floor that Sasuke refused to look too closely at. Instead he allowed his eyes to dart across the chamber, searching for the person Snake-man and his masked accomplice had been assaulting. For a moment Sasuke thought they must have taken him with them, which brought up uncomfortable images of cannibalism and the way snakes digested food that almost made him gag.
He spotted the man as he took a deep, shuttering breath to calm his racing heart. It promptly caused him to take a second and a third deep breath, all to no avail. The man was suspended vertically, sunk waist deep inside one of the cave’s pillars similar to the one Sasuke used as a hiding place only moments ago. He wasn’t moving, and his flopped backwards, his face tilted up towards the ceiling.
Directly above him was a statue, expending out of the pillar. It was a man, face contorted in agony, as his sculpted hands clawed at the air in search of something to pull him away from the stone.
Fuck.
Really, a man in a pillar? Really? How the hell was he supposed to get a man out of pillar of stone and escape from this twilight zone freak show all before Snake-man and his friend showed up again? It wasn’t physically possible to shove a man into a soled stone pillar, but then again, it wasn’t physically possible to have a snake-man slithering around either.
He crept across the room, trying to ignore the painful pounding of his heart behind his ribs. He stopped before the pillar and took another series of deep breaths as he wiped his sweaty palms against his pants. This was bad, this was very bad. If he had any sense he would just run for it now while he had the chance. Itachi always said Sasuke lacked sense, might as well prove him right and keep a man from being eaten in the proses. A quick scan of the room assured him that he and the man were still alone, but not of much else.
“Hay. Hay, you. Mister, wake up,” he hissed, leaning as close to the man as he dared. There was a lot of blood dripping from a lot of unseen sources about his person that Sasuke didn’t want to touch if he could help it. It clotted in the man’s brown hair and dribbled from what looked like fang marks on his checks.
For a moment Sasuke didn’t get any response from the man in the pillar. He reached up and shook the man’s shoulder harder than may have been necessary. His limp head bobbed up and down as Sasuke repeated, “Seriously, I have no idea how to help you. Wake up!”
The man groaned and opened his eyes slowly, like it was an effort to make them work the way they were supposed to. He blinked in a vague sort of way down at Sasuke, utterly uncomprehending and unappreciative of the amount of effort it took to stay calm in this sort of a situation.
“Sasuke,” he said thickly. He struggled to move forward, to break free, before realizing he was stuck waist deep in a pillar and so was unable to do much more then shrug his shoulders back and forth.
Sasuke snatched his hands away and jerked backwards, heart hammering even harder inside his chest. He sure as hell didn’t know the man in the pillar, so the man in the pillar sure as hell shouldn’t know him. He didn’t want anyone from a place where monsters actually roamed free and went around torturing people knowing his name. He was willing to overlook it just this once in the face of more pressing issues, like Snake-men and sadists in masks.
“How do I get you out of here?” he asked, stepping back up to the pillar. He tried to inject as much strength into his voice as he could while ignoring the slight shake in his words at the end.
The man was silent for a long moment, just looking at Sasuke. Slowly, like he didn’t really want to take his eyes off of him, the man tilted his chin downwards to get a better image of the pillar. Sasuke watched his eyes move back and forth over the rock before the man answered.
“Jutsu. Stone jutsu,” he said in a croak.
Sasuke had no idea what a ‘jutsu’ was and wasted no time in telling the man just that. The admittance was met with such an awkward silence that Sasuke actually felt himself grow red and shift from foot to foot.
“Are you doing this just to torture me further?” the man asked, sounding tired and defeated. A drop of blood dripped from his face and onto the floor.
“No,” Sasuke hissed, fists clenching in furry. “I’m trying to help because a giant fucking snake is walking around this place, and if you really want me to just leave you here to get eaten then fine!”
The man continued to look at him, the angle awkward and the look hard. If he hadn’t been so certain that he was going to be eaten soon the situation might have been funny.
“We don’t have much time here,” Sasuke snapped, looking back towards the exit the snake went through. “They may be back soon.” And he didn’t intend to be here when they were.
“Poison. In my blood. It’s stopping me from using any jutsu. Suck it out and I should be able to break free.”
“Suck?”
“The puncture wounds. Suck the poison out, but don’t swallow it.”
Something disturbing tried to crawl up his throat and for another terrible second Sasuke thought he might vomit. The man continued to stare at him, something challenging and almost hostile in his eyes. It wasn’t fare, there was no reason for this man to be so angry at him when all Sasuke wanted to do was help. Sasuke opened his mouth, intent on refusing, when he thought he heard the sound of scales slithering over stone making its way towards him.
He lurched forward, pressed his lips against the puncture wounds on the man’s cheek and sucked for all he was worth. Blood filled his mouth. The moment it washed over his tong it began to burn with a dull acidic pain that definitely wasn’t normal. He pulled back, spat the blood out onto the floor and swiped at his mouth hurriedly. Even that didn’t stop the burn, so he scrubbed his tong against his shirt sleeve in an effort to relieve the discomfort.
“Good?” he asked, trying to ignore how disgusted and terrified he felt.
The man screwed his face up in concentration. Sasuke could see the tendons shifting and straining in his neck as he tried to do whatever it was he thought would set him free. It didn’t work.
“Almost. Do it one more time,” the man commanded.
Sasuke gave something very close to a whimper as he once again pressed his lips to the man’s cheek and drew more blood and poison out. This time the man did not wait for him to stop or even step away before trying to break free.
All at once the stone splintered and cracked around the man. A small mound of stones pelted into his stomach and face before a half ton of limp body slammed into him. Sasuke crashed over backwards, panicked and accidentally swallowed as much of the poisoned blood as he managed to spit out. The man was twisting on top of him, large blooded hands reaching out to grab at Sasuke’s wrists and shoulder. The man tried to jerk him over onto his stomach.
Sasuke could hear a rushing in his ears as he struggled and kicked at the man with all his strength, but it didn’t seem to do a bit of good.
“Stop it! I just helped you!” he said in desperation. He tried to stay quiet even as he struggled, but somehow it just wasn’t working. His throat was burning now because of the blood, and he couldn’t tell if his head was spinning from the fall or the poison.
The man didn’t care. He shoved Sasuke’s face down into the hard floor, arms twisted back up behind his back and bound by something suspiciously like wood.
“Just go to sleep, Uchiha. When you wake up this will all be over,” he said grimly.
The last thing Sasuke remembers was a sharp, pinching pain along his neck and then the world faded to black.