[LOG] Mommy time.
WHO: Uchiha Sasuke & Uchiha Mikoto
WHAT: Mikoto visits Sasuke during his hypothermia!months and Mikoto finds out Sasuke knows Itachi is missing. Angst ensues. So much of it.
WHEN: ... Sometime between August and October.
WHERE: NaruNaruSasu apartment.
WARNINGS: ANGST. Korean. MOAR ANGST.
Mikoto lands at approximately nine in the morning and as soon as the plane touches down she’s mentally far, far away from it. The plush carpet of the jet is nothing compared the plush insides of the all-business coat she’s wearing, but it hardly matters at all. Her focus is elsewhere. She thanks the pilot, bids him farewell in Italian; puts on her aviator glasses to face the encroaching cool, heavy Japan air. (She’s missed it but it certainly institutes a firm melancholy in her like nothing else can.) She descends the stairs onto the fairway and lets the rolling acres of asphalt ride her in.
She flips her phone open after her suitcases are flying away in a taxi that someone must have thought was meant for her. Three weeks in Milan was a long time to endure - she’d packed for the occasion as she always did. Her cell phone screen illuminates. She dials a familiar number, says hello to Fugaku softly, welcomes herself almost-sadly home, and tells him she won’t be home for a few hours more.
She hasn’t seen Japan in a long time.
She hasn’t spoken to her husband in longer.
Margaret pulls up, the car door opens and she is inside and quiet. Her friend comments in gentle French. Mikoto responds quid pro quo, says that she is tired from the flight home. (Mikoto is never tired from the flight home. What a silly concept, she has said before, to be tired by a plane ride.) Margaret says nothing to contradict her.
A good friend.
(“Ciao?”
“Mikoto-san?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Naruto. You know. The roommate?”
“Oh, yes I remember. Of course. How are you?”
“Uh, I’m fine- I’m okay. Um. I don’t know. I don’t think he wanted me to tell you, but, I mean, I don’t really know what else to do.”
“Is something the matter…?”
He had paused for a little too long.
And Mikoto’s heart had exploded.)
It doesn’t take long for them to reach Sasuke’s apartment complex. Honestly speaking, she’d stayed in one very similar to it for a very long time before departing - Shisui and Sasuke’s apartment complexes were remarkably similar, both outwardly and- (Inwardly. Maybe they’ve become more like one another than she first thought. “So that you do not become lost, Shisui-kun.” But that was the same thing she wanted with Sasuke, wasn’t it? Perhaps she was far worse an individual than she’d initially thought.) She tells Margaret that she will call her when she wants her, and ascends another set of stairs. (Like corpses.)
She knocks on the door. The lock is still broken, but she doesn’t like intruding on people. It’s not like her. The door is thick. Wooden. Designed to keep noises and smells and warmth and things in and people-
(“Aniki, get the hell-“)
out.
It’s Naruto who pulls it back ushers her in.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for calling me.”
He seems pained by the tiredness of her face.
“Are you alright?”
She removes her shoes.
“We’ll wait and see.”
Sasuke has long since been for better than for worse.
(It’s leather bound. Underneath his bed, behind a wall of shoeboxes, in one itself, stashed with photographs he pretends don’t exist unless he’s too depressed to even pull himself out of bed long enough to tourniquet it for however way he can. Sasuke has only ever hurt himself once, and Naruto will never know, if he has any amount of luck. It’s leather bound, and it’s his most non-fictional writing he’s ever done, more honest and more dangerous on the eyes than anything he has ever produced. It is not a diary, because he doesn’t touch on it enough. It’s not a 150 page suicide note, because he never says “Goodbye.”
As far as anyone else knows, it doesn’t exist.)
He rests in his bed, Naruko sitting across from him, her presence something he has yet to grow accustomed to with time, because she bothers him in a completely unfair way, because she has never done anything to him but a relative amount of polite and kindness. Never entered his room without permission, always fixed his meals, taken care of the house - Naruko acts very much like his mother and, in her obsessive compulsiveness, far too much like Itachi, but the two are no comparison. Naruko is sitting across from him because she is worried, not because she is entertained.
The meal is sushi (-again. But he isn’t tired of it yet. She has a thousand ways of making it and they all taste different, delicious. But he, of course, will not and will never admit something like that. It is too begrudging.) and the portion is small, chewed very slowly like most of his reactions have been, because it’s been weeks since he returned to Naruto and weeks since he’s had an attack. (Weeks since he’s ran 90 degrees Fahrenheit for any amount of time. Sasuke refused to go to the hospital because if he was there, he would be in the same place as Shisui, and that knowledge is more than enough to raise his stress levels up to a degree where it’s impossible to recover. Instead, Naruko called a doctor to come to their apartment, and he issued an amount of medication and treatment orders for the two blonds. And Naruko and Naruto have followed dutifully.)
Naruko knows that Naruto has been sleeping in bed with him every night, because she is not stupid.
(But it does bother her.)
She stands up, the distant sound of the front door opening and closing signaling the arrival of Sasuke’s mother, and Sasuke himself has not the hearing capacity to hear Naruko, even this close, if she’s talking at a certain decibel.
(Naruko is in front of Mikoto in a matter of strides, and she’s not as sad in appearance as the either two of them.
Naruko looks blank.
“Uchiha-san.”)
And Sasuke breathes.
(To the last degree.)
Mikoto smiles at her softly (smiles always - Uchiha never smile and so it seems that Mikoto takes on task of doing it for all of them, in all of the occasions they should smile but refuse, somehow). She brushes hair behind her ear and takes off her coat with a solemn sort of ease, before realizing she’s wearing the exact same outfit she killed Itachi in. (So it goes.) She almost blinks down at it, as if returning to Japan (as if the soft dewy scent of her youngest in the next room over) has sobered her some and she has suddenly remembered that she had not meant to wear it. (She looks down at it as if she did not put it on. A ‘how did this get here?’ type of expression. Vaguely perplexed. A- “I thought I was going to burn this.” And a- “What made me decide otherwise…?”)
Naruto moves awkwardly, takes her coat from her hands, noticing how they’ve hesitated, how she looks so suddenly thoughtful about it. He takes it as if, at the same time, he were rethinking the gesture, as if he doesn’t want to touch it for fear of making a mistake. Her fingers are dainty, manicured in the French fashion, and her hand dangles awkwardly in the air for a second before shooting back to push and drag through her hair, like a zen rake through stones and fine white sand. If he notices the unsteadiness he says nothing.
For once.
Instead he turns to look at his sister. “How is he?” Mikoto’s question, really, but she is too polite to be that forward immediately. Naruto’s anxiousness has lingered like a fog for several weeks; he hasn’t left the house once. He’s jumpy. Unstable on his roost. He doesn’t seem to be able to sit still nowadays, but leaving to burn off energy is out of the question. Naruko doesn’t like it. It’s renownedly dissatisfactory to see him so constantly ill at ease - it wears at the nerves in a sick, nauseating sort of way. Like sea sickness. (Like a disease. “Just kill me already!”) His eyes are replaced with two round Easter eggs. (Robin blue. How pretty.) Sparks shoot from his joints at random. He’s nearly unpleasant but it’s only because of how damn hard he’s trying.
He turns back to Mikoto. “He’s in his room.”
Mikoto nods. (Departs.)
Sullenly.
But she is peaceable, atleast.
Her footsteps are delicate in all of the ways he can somehow distinguish them between the footsteps of Naruto and those of Naruko.
(Sasuke loves his mother. He loves her with an unconditional passion that he does not love Naruto with at all, because his mother has always been the person that, if he hits rock bottom - which he has on more than one occasion in his life - is there to hold him and tell him it’s okay. It’s a disgustingly codependent kind of love, especially by Sasuke’s standards, but he loves her all the same, because she has always been there to hold him. Always. Even when Itachi and Shisui stopped and Naruto wasn’t yet in the picture. Sasuke-) loves her.
(Temporarily absolute.)
He’s propped up against a stack of six or so pillows to keep him from sliding back onto the mattress, and when she enters it is only his gaze that finds her, dark eyes layered with rings of insomnia and his once only pale skin tone now a sickly tint of gray. (It’s an ugly color. In his own eyes, Sasuke is always an ugly tone of something, but enough times for Naruto to disagree and steadily his confidence has boosted in the strangest of ways. He has changed because of Naruto in all of the ways he hits a stagnant depression in Mikoto’s (Shisui’s. Itachi’s.) wake. In the wake of the hollow is Sasuke irreversibly insane. Damage to the right frontal lobe is present in almost every famous serial killer that has ever existed. And Sasuke-)
“Mother.”
(He sounds-)
“-How was Milan?”
(Sasuke has only ever been to the Fall Fashion Show with his mother in Italy once, and he found the ordeal to be much too loud and much too Italian for his liking. Too many loose women making passes on him and his older brother, who has been far more than one occurrence, and too many drinks with trace amounts of alcohol shoved into his face. The only time Sasuke ever attended he ended up vomiting all night in his Hotel room after drinking what amounts to almost half a bottle of vodka in barely spiked Italian drinks. Itachi does not know this is the reason Mikoto never made him go again, and for that he is grateful.
And thank god Fugaku doesn’t-
Sasuke stopped referring to them as Mother and Father in his thought process a long time ago.)
He falls silent.
(He crashes silent.)
Mikoto closes the door behind her.
“The same.”
She smiles at him. Rests against the door a second. (As if she will collapse. Fall to the floor and sleep. And die. But she won’t. She can’t. Not right now. And in the end that is what Mikoto must always say to death, when it threatens. “Not right now.I don’t have time right now. I’m sorry. Please. Maybe later. Please.”) All things do not obey her and so it can be said that is not her life that will affect things but the life of those she affects in turn. It’s an odd sort of emotion, to be the catalyst but neither the cause or the effect of it. (The catalyst itself hardly gets any credit at all.) She left her sunglasses in Margaret’s car. (Her shoes are in the entryway.)
She stopped coming here for a while because there was no real telling, in the end, how much Sasuke actually wanted to see her. Mikoto understand the Codependency Theory of Latin American development and she understands that her son is - in some ways - the same: he has evolved surviving by soaking in the towering and monstrous shadows of those around him, by living off of other people’s fame and fortune, and no matter to what degree he hates it, he weans himself from it reluctantly. Indeed, Mikoto has never gotten a call from him, even when leaving messages; not once this summer, and she supposes that was alright. She knows that that is what Itachi wants. She understands, in the long run, that that is what Sasuke truly wants.
(Angry pangs in her chest. “You should take something for this.” Fugaku’s voice torn with strain and worry over her that she didn’t want. His large, warm hands against her lower back, his concern awash with the remnants of his own dignity. They’re getting older. It’s frightening. Why would you worry about me when your son is missing? She didn’t say it. Maybe it was better that she didn’t. Fugaku didn’t know, anyway. And maybe it was better that way.)
“How are you, darling?”
His skin is entirely gray-scale; his entire countenance is nearly blue with it, and it would be frightening if she didn’t know (“Thankyou, Uzumaki-kun,”) that he was going to be okay. He looks almost corpse-like, especially in the fallow light from the hall outside the door. There are no windows in Sasuke’s room. No windows at all. She supposes that makes sense, comes slowly to stand beside him and look over the beauty that is his body, that is her tiny, precious son. (Named after a samurai. She’d held him close to her and stroked his hair. “My baby. My Sasuke.”) Sasuke is so pale in the lighting.
She can’t stop herself laying her hand gently across his forehead, slowly and gently stroking the sides of his face.
“My dear Sasuke.”
(So precious.)
Sasuke’s face goes a tint.
(It’s been a long time since he’s blushed easily. It took too many of Itachi’s and Shisui’s touches for him to forget to react to things, and it took twice as many of Naruto’s for him to learn how to, and so Mikoto’s touches are sweet and affectionate in all of the ways a mother should love a son, and so a very distant hue of red occupies his cheeks before returning to the waxy gray. The momentary life. The momentary-) But it only lasts so long. (Only so long.) Sasuke is going to die. (-But of course he isn’t, really. Because Sasuke has been on his figurative death bed for a very long time, stiff and diagnosed with an untreatable and irrefutably terminal cancer. But only figuratively. Sasuke tries so desperately to not be so dramatic.)
Sasuke tries desperately to not perform a lot of his dirty quirks.
(Dirty.
Because-
Itachi.
…)
“I’m alright.”
(Because there’s nothing else he can really say. Because he could never tell his mother he recently almost died, among other things, so he will play like he is fine when really he can barely hear her soft voice over the ringing in his ears, his chest is steadily aching over the strain in his athletically trained heart, and his body is sore in ways he has never been sore before. Sasuke does not know pain the way that Itachi knows pain, but if Sasuke knew Itachi knew pain the way that he does, it would be more than enough for him to strive for it. Strive for pain like a masochist. But Sasuke doesn’t know anyone as deranged as the members of the Akatsuki, let alone has befriended them, so it’s better off he doesn’t know.
At all.)
“I’ve missed you.”
(I really have.
Sasuke doesn’t like to lie to his mother, but for her sake he does it all too often. But in this case, he is not. Not because he missed everyone over break, because the entire time was spent with Naruko doing her summer classes most of the days while he spent time on the beach or alone inside. With the leather-bound. Alone. (Without Shisui. Itachi. Naruto. Anyone.) And without Mikoto is Sasuke easy to fall apart. He is a fragile person as he is, not weak, but fragile, and more codependent than anyone is willing to admit. Sasuke is codependent in all of the ways that Itachi is codependent.
But the Uchiha have gone about Sasuke’s upbringing all wrong.)
Mikoto is just what went right.
(He looks away.)
She strokes his cheeks, pushes his dark hair away from his face, which is fish's underbelly white (blue). She can't keep away from him; she's never been able to, and in that way Fugaku has always had to be after her about lack of propriety, lack of propriety (because nobody touches their son that-) -much? (-way, and certainly not in public.) But of course they do, because Mikoto does and she can't help it, she really can't. If Sasuke is there, so are her hands; if Sasuke's physical presence is known, so are Mikoto's lips on his forehead.
She bends down, kisses a pale cheek. Her lips stick ever so slightly. (Sasuke's skin is damp simply in being as it is. He looks ever-so-slightly swollen in his entirety. She is sick and nauseous with worry over him. Her throat burns and her stomach doubles up, like a woman crying at the opera house.) Mikoto has never really cared for opera, and neither has Fugaku, so they rarely go; very rarely go. There is nothing very wrong with it per se. Mikoto feels more that there is something incredibly wrong with her. (Don't touch him like that.) How she had watched Shisui and gone glassy eyed with her husband in his brother's wife's kitchen. ("Shisui. What a horribly cruel name for a child.") No propriety whatsoever. Her own mother had scolded her for it and never lived to see this beautiful son of hers. It was one of the things Mikoto was proudest of, the profoundness of her love for Sasuke.
"I've missed you too, my darling."
Sasuke is quiet (-not in an awkward way, not at all, because all of the Uchiha have learned to accept silence as anything but awkward. It is the normality of any and all situations, and knowing this does Sasuke often fall into silences in the wake of his family. Because unlike Naruto, they take quietude with ease and relaxation.) for several moments, his fingers pressing into one another, twisting about in a fit of a habit he can't notice (-and Mikoto can't notice, for his hands are underneath the blue covers. Black to him, of course, but a shade of navy to the regular eye. Mikoto and Sasuke have too much in common. But not-)
For what it is worth-
- before he turns his head to her, kissing her lips, hovering close to her (for she is warm. She is only a little warm, as if she might be running a fever, nothing fiery as Naruto is, the epitome of heat that lies close to him every night. Naruko possesses that same heat, but Sasuke has only ever been close enough to her to notice once, at the prom wherein he was announced king of the Prom along with a frightening senior who won dance queen for the second time that year. He only knows Tayuya from the two times she beat him in drinking contests, but Sasuke generally prefers to not remember that.)
His forehead rests against hers.
(If he knew Tayuya, it would be another person to know who is alight in flame.
But he would hate her more.
In her place does he know the even more disturbing girl who draws him so desperately, who stays in his wake for no reason less than what Sasuke chooses to be ignorant to, because he doesn't want to acknowledge the fact that there's another person in the world with similar inhibitions as Naruto-) But he doesn't know about the photographs. (Just as Naruto doesn't know about the book. He doesn't know about it-) And Sasuke, already, is out of things to say, because he loves his mother, perhaps a bit too much (of course a bit too much. Of course.) and the words that exchange between them only seem to clutter, only seem to be, because he has little less to say.
And it's not because his throat burns.
(Because it does.
A terrible, inflamed feeling.
A burn.)
"Do you-"
(...)
He halts.
(Don't want to break your-)
"Do I...?"
Concentration?
(-heart.)
Mikoto stokes his cheek in an almost absent-minded 'I love you I love you I love you' kind of way. She and Sasuke have not spoken in so long that even her fingertips ache. (With every word he speaks.) There is a clear and transparent adoration that she is littering in soft spots of dappled life across his bones and his face - she pushes his hair away from his eyes, tucks it behind his ear, touches everything tenderly. (I made you.) An obscene adoration and tenderness. She cradles him to her in every way she can and keeps her hands on him for as long as she can. (My precious, precious-) Obscene, her love for him. (And Fugaku has told her so as she has sat, like stone, facing a city that is not hers. Is never hers. In that same sense she cannot embrace Japan she cannot leave it. In the same way she cannot openly embrace her sons she can never away from them.) Sasuke is the son she always wanted. (The daughter she always wante-)
But Mikoto is not Su-moon, and so she has never thought that, not out loud and not to herself, not consciously. She sits down on the bed and it accommodates what weight she has (it used to be - most of it? - muscle but she's waned like the moon in past years, let herself goes as mothers must do sometimes. Mikoto has a life now that she didn't have in high school and so she exercises now and eats correctly but not the way she did then. There was a time when her muscle rippled like water. The first time she and Fugaku had sex, she had been an ocean of physical power - between cheerleading, dance team, bo-jitsu, football, swimming and a moderate of gymnastics, she weighed more then than she does now, and she'd been healthier, in a manner of speaking. She'd more toned than he'd been, which was saying something; her boys got their athletic prowess far more from Fugaku than they did her, but they don't build muscle well, and she doesn't either. She's thin, it's true, but sometimes she worries about the same things that everyone does and she fears that makes her less than what she should be. Less of what she is. Less of-)
"What is it, Sasuke?"
Her voice is gentle, soothing.
(I love you, Sasuke.)
And Sasuke trembles.
(Not because of her, never because of her, but he trembles in the same way he did when Shisui was telling him "Don't you realize-?" and Sasuke found himself falling apart underneath the wake of his words. Off in his own world as he has been since he contracted hypothermia, because the only time Sasuke ever-) "... Geugeoseun apayo haeyo." (-speaks in Korean is when he wants most desperately for Itachi to not understand him. Because for Itachi to understand him would be for Itachi to know how much Sasuke loves him. Because he does, in the end, regardless of what he has done. The only thing that could ever make Sasuke hate Itachi is-) "Itachi-"
He stops short of himself.
(Words blurring together. Sasuke is slightly hysterical over the fact that he almost died, and even more so over the fact that Itachi might be dead. Dead as in truly fucking rotting in the ground, and he can't tell his mother that because he loves her too much, loves her in the fashion that he can kiss her on the mouth in all of the ways that he could never just touch Naruto's cheek and kiss him. Words blurring together because regardless of Naruto and Naruko's care, Sasuke is still very cold all of the time, always shivering at odd moments or finding his teeth chattering erratically until Naruto gets sick of hearing it and brings him some coffee to warm his mouth. The steady shiver now is less like what he has been doing lately and more controlled, silently threatening that it could and will get so much worse if Sasuke dares to leave his mother's arms.
"... Eomeoni saranghamnida."
("Ara so, Sasuke-kun?"
"...")
"Joesonghamnida."
And Mikoto's face creases with sadness.
"Sasuke."
Gazes at him with eyes that could break into pieces at his words. (She's plunged back into the icy water of her existence. White-heat that explodes across her skin, explodes inside of her gasping mouth, gasping lungs, when she comes up, scrabbling, screaming for air. Red is the thread that cascades throughout a frozen landscape.) Red is her worry, her concern. (Sasuke.) She strokes the side of his face, forgives him for everything he has ever done, will ever do. She forgives him for loving his brother the way he does. She curses herself for creating both. (But, perhaps there isn't a point of doing so. Perhaps the real curse lies within the fact that she did - inevitably - produce both into the face of adversity.)
Chinese.
(Her mother had looked at her sternly and said, in a voice made of stone-)
"I'm sorry."
("Two is too many. Get rid of it.")
And-
(Mikoto had slapped her and never spoken to her again.)
"I'm so sorry, Sasuke."
I can't. I couldn't find him. Not anywhere, not for all my searching.
(She had died before Sasuke's birth. And Mikoto had never regretted anything. Because-)
She had never had a sister. Not once.
"No."
Sasuke wants to hold her. (Sasuke loves her. Loves her in ways that he does not and cannot love Naruto, because Sasuke does not really understand to the full degree how he loves his mother. If he loves her too much. She is the only woman he has ever cared about, because she is the only one who has ever shown him the kind of affection he can tolerate. The kind of affection that is so amazingly unlike Naruto's that it's so intensively odd that he cares for Naruto the way he does- Sasuke does not understand himself.
Sasuke never will.)
"Don't be."
(Please don't be, my lovely mother.
My sinless mother.
Itachi won't-)
"Please-"
(I love you so much.)
He's trembling.
(Is Naruto watching?)
But how could Naruto be watching? (He could be listening. But never watching. In most ways, that is the same thing that makes Sasuke beautiful, his selectiveness. His ivory skin, his ebony eyes. His imperfection that lies in overshadowed perfection.) And in this same way is Naruto always watching. Sasuke doesn't know yet about the twelve or so albums filled with him, photographs, photographs by the hundreds, by the soon to be thousands. (Of him. And only him. In positions he will never even remember being in, they are so brief. So secondary.) He doesn't yet know how rapidly the camera clicks, how Naruto's consuming obsession has become compromising, how there is (gut-wrenchingly) a camera installed in every single room of this house. He doesn't yet know how late Naruto will stay up some weekends when he's away and just look at them on his computer, just stare at them in longing.
He doesn't yet know.
And if Naruto has his way, he never will.
And Mikoto isn't involved in such things; so is her lukewarm quality. It is, perhaps, what Sasuke finds most inclusive and addictive about the heated passion of her adoration of him. Mikoto's love is one of the only parts of her that is not as cool as gravesoil, that is not completely focused in an equation. (As all Uchiha will be.) And it is the biggest difference between her and Naruto. It is the very biggest schism between their likenesses.
Because, while Mikoto's gentle finger hum a gentle and caressing 98.6 degrees Farhenheit (exactly perfect), Naruto and his sister burn with heat, their whole bodies a constant, scorching 101 degrees at the least. NAruto is fire to Mikoto's hot water bottle qualities, and so is Sasuke's (...) so baffling.
"I should have been here."
A soft pause.
"With you." (For you.)
And they simply stay like that, together, for a very long time.
WHAT: Mikoto visits Sasuke during his hypothermia!months and Mikoto finds out Sasuke knows Itachi is missing. Angst ensues. So much of it.
WHEN: ... Sometime between August and October.
WHERE: NaruNaruSasu apartment.
WARNINGS: ANGST. Korean. MOAR ANGST.
Mikoto lands at approximately nine in the morning and as soon as the plane touches down she’s mentally far, far away from it. The plush carpet of the jet is nothing compared the plush insides of the all-business coat she’s wearing, but it hardly matters at all. Her focus is elsewhere. She thanks the pilot, bids him farewell in Italian; puts on her aviator glasses to face the encroaching cool, heavy Japan air. (She’s missed it but it certainly institutes a firm melancholy in her like nothing else can.) She descends the stairs onto the fairway and lets the rolling acres of asphalt ride her in.
She flips her phone open after her suitcases are flying away in a taxi that someone must have thought was meant for her. Three weeks in Milan was a long time to endure - she’d packed for the occasion as she always did. Her cell phone screen illuminates. She dials a familiar number, says hello to Fugaku softly, welcomes herself almost-sadly home, and tells him she won’t be home for a few hours more.
She hasn’t seen Japan in a long time.
She hasn’t spoken to her husband in longer.
Margaret pulls up, the car door opens and she is inside and quiet. Her friend comments in gentle French. Mikoto responds quid pro quo, says that she is tired from the flight home. (Mikoto is never tired from the flight home. What a silly concept, she has said before, to be tired by a plane ride.) Margaret says nothing to contradict her.
A good friend.
(“Ciao?”
“Mikoto-san?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Naruto. You know. The roommate?”
“Oh, yes I remember. Of course. How are you?”
“Uh, I’m fine- I’m okay. Um. I don’t know. I don’t think he wanted me to tell you, but, I mean, I don’t really know what else to do.”
“Is something the matter…?”
He had paused for a little too long.
And Mikoto’s heart had exploded.)
It doesn’t take long for them to reach Sasuke’s apartment complex. Honestly speaking, she’d stayed in one very similar to it for a very long time before departing - Shisui and Sasuke’s apartment complexes were remarkably similar, both outwardly and- (Inwardly. Maybe they’ve become more like one another than she first thought. “So that you do not become lost, Shisui-kun.” But that was the same thing she wanted with Sasuke, wasn’t it? Perhaps she was far worse an individual than she’d initially thought.) She tells Margaret that she will call her when she wants her, and ascends another set of stairs. (Like corpses.)
She knocks on the door. The lock is still broken, but she doesn’t like intruding on people. It’s not like her. The door is thick. Wooden. Designed to keep noises and smells and warmth and things in and people-
(“Aniki, get the hell-“)
out.
It’s Naruto who pulls it back ushers her in.
“Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you for calling me.”
He seems pained by the tiredness of her face.
“Are you alright?”
She removes her shoes.
“We’ll wait and see.”
Sasuke has long since been for better than for worse.
(It’s leather bound. Underneath his bed, behind a wall of shoeboxes, in one itself, stashed with photographs he pretends don’t exist unless he’s too depressed to even pull himself out of bed long enough to tourniquet it for however way he can. Sasuke has only ever hurt himself once, and Naruto will never know, if he has any amount of luck. It’s leather bound, and it’s his most non-fictional writing he’s ever done, more honest and more dangerous on the eyes than anything he has ever produced. It is not a diary, because he doesn’t touch on it enough. It’s not a 150 page suicide note, because he never says “Goodbye.”
As far as anyone else knows, it doesn’t exist.)
He rests in his bed, Naruko sitting across from him, her presence something he has yet to grow accustomed to with time, because she bothers him in a completely unfair way, because she has never done anything to him but a relative amount of polite and kindness. Never entered his room without permission, always fixed his meals, taken care of the house - Naruko acts very much like his mother and, in her obsessive compulsiveness, far too much like Itachi, but the two are no comparison. Naruko is sitting across from him because she is worried, not because she is entertained.
The meal is sushi (-again. But he isn’t tired of it yet. She has a thousand ways of making it and they all taste different, delicious. But he, of course, will not and will never admit something like that. It is too begrudging.) and the portion is small, chewed very slowly like most of his reactions have been, because it’s been weeks since he returned to Naruto and weeks since he’s had an attack. (Weeks since he’s ran 90 degrees Fahrenheit for any amount of time. Sasuke refused to go to the hospital because if he was there, he would be in the same place as Shisui, and that knowledge is more than enough to raise his stress levels up to a degree where it’s impossible to recover. Instead, Naruko called a doctor to come to their apartment, and he issued an amount of medication and treatment orders for the two blonds. And Naruko and Naruto have followed dutifully.)
Naruko knows that Naruto has been sleeping in bed with him every night, because she is not stupid.
(But it does bother her.)
She stands up, the distant sound of the front door opening and closing signaling the arrival of Sasuke’s mother, and Sasuke himself has not the hearing capacity to hear Naruko, even this close, if she’s talking at a certain decibel.
(Naruko is in front of Mikoto in a matter of strides, and she’s not as sad in appearance as the either two of them.
Naruko looks blank.
“Uchiha-san.”)
And Sasuke breathes.
(To the last degree.)
Mikoto smiles at her softly (smiles always - Uchiha never smile and so it seems that Mikoto takes on task of doing it for all of them, in all of the occasions they should smile but refuse, somehow). She brushes hair behind her ear and takes off her coat with a solemn sort of ease, before realizing she’s wearing the exact same outfit she killed Itachi in. (So it goes.) She almost blinks down at it, as if returning to Japan (as if the soft dewy scent of her youngest in the next room over) has sobered her some and she has suddenly remembered that she had not meant to wear it. (She looks down at it as if she did not put it on. A ‘how did this get here?’ type of expression. Vaguely perplexed. A- “I thought I was going to burn this.” And a- “What made me decide otherwise…?”)
Naruto moves awkwardly, takes her coat from her hands, noticing how they’ve hesitated, how she looks so suddenly thoughtful about it. He takes it as if, at the same time, he were rethinking the gesture, as if he doesn’t want to touch it for fear of making a mistake. Her fingers are dainty, manicured in the French fashion, and her hand dangles awkwardly in the air for a second before shooting back to push and drag through her hair, like a zen rake through stones and fine white sand. If he notices the unsteadiness he says nothing.
For once.
Instead he turns to look at his sister. “How is he?” Mikoto’s question, really, but she is too polite to be that forward immediately. Naruto’s anxiousness has lingered like a fog for several weeks; he hasn’t left the house once. He’s jumpy. Unstable on his roost. He doesn’t seem to be able to sit still nowadays, but leaving to burn off energy is out of the question. Naruko doesn’t like it. It’s renownedly dissatisfactory to see him so constantly ill at ease - it wears at the nerves in a sick, nauseating sort of way. Like sea sickness. (Like a disease. “Just kill me already!”) His eyes are replaced with two round Easter eggs. (Robin blue. How pretty.) Sparks shoot from his joints at random. He’s nearly unpleasant but it’s only because of how damn hard he’s trying.
He turns back to Mikoto. “He’s in his room.”
Mikoto nods. (Departs.)
Sullenly.
But she is peaceable, atleast.
Her footsteps are delicate in all of the ways he can somehow distinguish them between the footsteps of Naruto and those of Naruko.
(Sasuke loves his mother. He loves her with an unconditional passion that he does not love Naruto with at all, because his mother has always been the person that, if he hits rock bottom - which he has on more than one occasion in his life - is there to hold him and tell him it’s okay. It’s a disgustingly codependent kind of love, especially by Sasuke’s standards, but he loves her all the same, because she has always been there to hold him. Always. Even when Itachi and Shisui stopped and Naruto wasn’t yet in the picture. Sasuke-) loves her.
(Temporarily absolute.)
He’s propped up against a stack of six or so pillows to keep him from sliding back onto the mattress, and when she enters it is only his gaze that finds her, dark eyes layered with rings of insomnia and his once only pale skin tone now a sickly tint of gray. (It’s an ugly color. In his own eyes, Sasuke is always an ugly tone of something, but enough times for Naruto to disagree and steadily his confidence has boosted in the strangest of ways. He has changed because of Naruto in all of the ways he hits a stagnant depression in Mikoto’s (Shisui’s. Itachi’s.) wake. In the wake of the hollow is Sasuke irreversibly insane. Damage to the right frontal lobe is present in almost every famous serial killer that has ever existed. And Sasuke-)
“Mother.”
(He sounds-)
“-How was Milan?”
(Sasuke has only ever been to the Fall Fashion Show with his mother in Italy once, and he found the ordeal to be much too loud and much too Italian for his liking. Too many loose women making passes on him and his older brother, who has been far more than one occurrence, and too many drinks with trace amounts of alcohol shoved into his face. The only time Sasuke ever attended he ended up vomiting all night in his Hotel room after drinking what amounts to almost half a bottle of vodka in barely spiked Italian drinks. Itachi does not know this is the reason Mikoto never made him go again, and for that he is grateful.
And thank god Fugaku doesn’t-
Sasuke stopped referring to them as Mother and Father in his thought process a long time ago.)
He falls silent.
(He crashes silent.)
Mikoto closes the door behind her.
“The same.”
She smiles at him. Rests against the door a second. (As if she will collapse. Fall to the floor and sleep. And die. But she won’t. She can’t. Not right now. And in the end that is what Mikoto must always say to death, when it threatens. “Not right now.I don’t have time right now. I’m sorry. Please. Maybe later. Please.”) All things do not obey her and so it can be said that is not her life that will affect things but the life of those she affects in turn. It’s an odd sort of emotion, to be the catalyst but neither the cause or the effect of it. (The catalyst itself hardly gets any credit at all.) She left her sunglasses in Margaret’s car. (Her shoes are in the entryway.)
She stopped coming here for a while because there was no real telling, in the end, how much Sasuke actually wanted to see her. Mikoto understand the Codependency Theory of Latin American development and she understands that her son is - in some ways - the same: he has evolved surviving by soaking in the towering and monstrous shadows of those around him, by living off of other people’s fame and fortune, and no matter to what degree he hates it, he weans himself from it reluctantly. Indeed, Mikoto has never gotten a call from him, even when leaving messages; not once this summer, and she supposes that was alright. She knows that that is what Itachi wants. She understands, in the long run, that that is what Sasuke truly wants.
(Angry pangs in her chest. “You should take something for this.” Fugaku’s voice torn with strain and worry over her that she didn’t want. His large, warm hands against her lower back, his concern awash with the remnants of his own dignity. They’re getting older. It’s frightening. Why would you worry about me when your son is missing? She didn’t say it. Maybe it was better that she didn’t. Fugaku didn’t know, anyway. And maybe it was better that way.)
“How are you, darling?”
His skin is entirely gray-scale; his entire countenance is nearly blue with it, and it would be frightening if she didn’t know (“Thankyou, Uzumaki-kun,”) that he was going to be okay. He looks almost corpse-like, especially in the fallow light from the hall outside the door. There are no windows in Sasuke’s room. No windows at all. She supposes that makes sense, comes slowly to stand beside him and look over the beauty that is his body, that is her tiny, precious son. (Named after a samurai. She’d held him close to her and stroked his hair. “My baby. My Sasuke.”) Sasuke is so pale in the lighting.
She can’t stop herself laying her hand gently across his forehead, slowly and gently stroking the sides of his face.
“My dear Sasuke.”
(So precious.)
Sasuke’s face goes a tint.
(It’s been a long time since he’s blushed easily. It took too many of Itachi’s and Shisui’s touches for him to forget to react to things, and it took twice as many of Naruto’s for him to learn how to, and so Mikoto’s touches are sweet and affectionate in all of the ways a mother should love a son, and so a very distant hue of red occupies his cheeks before returning to the waxy gray. The momentary life. The momentary-) But it only lasts so long. (Only so long.) Sasuke is going to die. (-But of course he isn’t, really. Because Sasuke has been on his figurative death bed for a very long time, stiff and diagnosed with an untreatable and irrefutably terminal cancer. But only figuratively. Sasuke tries so desperately to not be so dramatic.)
Sasuke tries desperately to not perform a lot of his dirty quirks.
(Dirty.
Because-
Itachi.
…)
“I’m alright.”
(Because there’s nothing else he can really say. Because he could never tell his mother he recently almost died, among other things, so he will play like he is fine when really he can barely hear her soft voice over the ringing in his ears, his chest is steadily aching over the strain in his athletically trained heart, and his body is sore in ways he has never been sore before. Sasuke does not know pain the way that Itachi knows pain, but if Sasuke knew Itachi knew pain the way that he does, it would be more than enough for him to strive for it. Strive for pain like a masochist. But Sasuke doesn’t know anyone as deranged as the members of the Akatsuki, let alone has befriended them, so it’s better off he doesn’t know.
At all.)
“I’ve missed you.”
(I really have.
Sasuke doesn’t like to lie to his mother, but for her sake he does it all too often. But in this case, he is not. Not because he missed everyone over break, because the entire time was spent with Naruko doing her summer classes most of the days while he spent time on the beach or alone inside. With the leather-bound. Alone. (Without Shisui. Itachi. Naruto. Anyone.) And without Mikoto is Sasuke easy to fall apart. He is a fragile person as he is, not weak, but fragile, and more codependent than anyone is willing to admit. Sasuke is codependent in all of the ways that Itachi is codependent.
But the Uchiha have gone about Sasuke’s upbringing all wrong.)
Mikoto is just what went right.
(He looks away.)
She strokes his cheeks, pushes his dark hair away from his face, which is fish's underbelly white (blue). She can't keep away from him; she's never been able to, and in that way Fugaku has always had to be after her about lack of propriety, lack of propriety (because nobody touches their son that-) -much? (-way, and certainly not in public.) But of course they do, because Mikoto does and she can't help it, she really can't. If Sasuke is there, so are her hands; if Sasuke's physical presence is known, so are Mikoto's lips on his forehead.
She bends down, kisses a pale cheek. Her lips stick ever so slightly. (Sasuke's skin is damp simply in being as it is. He looks ever-so-slightly swollen in his entirety. She is sick and nauseous with worry over him. Her throat burns and her stomach doubles up, like a woman crying at the opera house.) Mikoto has never really cared for opera, and neither has Fugaku, so they rarely go; very rarely go. There is nothing very wrong with it per se. Mikoto feels more that there is something incredibly wrong with her. (Don't touch him like that.) How she had watched Shisui and gone glassy eyed with her husband in his brother's wife's kitchen. ("Shisui. What a horribly cruel name for a child.") No propriety whatsoever. Her own mother had scolded her for it and never lived to see this beautiful son of hers. It was one of the things Mikoto was proudest of, the profoundness of her love for Sasuke.
"I've missed you too, my darling."
Sasuke is quiet (-not in an awkward way, not at all, because all of the Uchiha have learned to accept silence as anything but awkward. It is the normality of any and all situations, and knowing this does Sasuke often fall into silences in the wake of his family. Because unlike Naruto, they take quietude with ease and relaxation.) for several moments, his fingers pressing into one another, twisting about in a fit of a habit he can't notice (-and Mikoto can't notice, for his hands are underneath the blue covers. Black to him, of course, but a shade of navy to the regular eye. Mikoto and Sasuke have too much in common. But not-)
For what it is worth-
- before he turns his head to her, kissing her lips, hovering close to her (for she is warm. She is only a little warm, as if she might be running a fever, nothing fiery as Naruto is, the epitome of heat that lies close to him every night. Naruko possesses that same heat, but Sasuke has only ever been close enough to her to notice once, at the prom wherein he was announced king of the Prom along with a frightening senior who won dance queen for the second time that year. He only knows Tayuya from the two times she beat him in drinking contests, but Sasuke generally prefers to not remember that.)
His forehead rests against hers.
(If he knew Tayuya, it would be another person to know who is alight in flame.
But he would hate her more.
In her place does he know the even more disturbing girl who draws him so desperately, who stays in his wake for no reason less than what Sasuke chooses to be ignorant to, because he doesn't want to acknowledge the fact that there's another person in the world with similar inhibitions as Naruto-) But he doesn't know about the photographs. (Just as Naruto doesn't know about the book. He doesn't know about it-) And Sasuke, already, is out of things to say, because he loves his mother, perhaps a bit too much (of course a bit too much. Of course.) and the words that exchange between them only seem to clutter, only seem to be, because he has little less to say.
And it's not because his throat burns.
(Because it does.
A terrible, inflamed feeling.
A burn.)
"Do you-"
(...)
He halts.
(Don't want to break your-)
"Do I...?"
Concentration?
(-heart.)
Mikoto stokes his cheek in an almost absent-minded 'I love you I love you I love you' kind of way. She and Sasuke have not spoken in so long that even her fingertips ache. (With every word he speaks.) There is a clear and transparent adoration that she is littering in soft spots of dappled life across his bones and his face - she pushes his hair away from his eyes, tucks it behind his ear, touches everything tenderly. (I made you.) An obscene adoration and tenderness. She cradles him to her in every way she can and keeps her hands on him for as long as she can. (My precious, precious-) Obscene, her love for him. (And Fugaku has told her so as she has sat, like stone, facing a city that is not hers. Is never hers. In that same sense she cannot embrace Japan she cannot leave it. In the same way she cannot openly embrace her sons she can never away from them.) Sasuke is the son she always wanted. (The daughter she always wante-)
But Mikoto is not Su-moon, and so she has never thought that, not out loud and not to herself, not consciously. She sits down on the bed and it accommodates what weight she has (it used to be - most of it? - muscle but she's waned like the moon in past years, let herself goes as mothers must do sometimes. Mikoto has a life now that she didn't have in high school and so she exercises now and eats correctly but not the way she did then. There was a time when her muscle rippled like water. The first time she and Fugaku had sex, she had been an ocean of physical power - between cheerleading, dance team, bo-jitsu, football, swimming and a moderate of gymnastics, she weighed more then than she does now, and she'd been healthier, in a manner of speaking. She'd more toned than he'd been, which was saying something; her boys got their athletic prowess far more from Fugaku than they did her, but they don't build muscle well, and she doesn't either. She's thin, it's true, but sometimes she worries about the same things that everyone does and she fears that makes her less than what she should be. Less of what she is. Less of-)
"What is it, Sasuke?"
Her voice is gentle, soothing.
(I love you, Sasuke.)
And Sasuke trembles.
(Not because of her, never because of her, but he trembles in the same way he did when Shisui was telling him "Don't you realize-?" and Sasuke found himself falling apart underneath the wake of his words. Off in his own world as he has been since he contracted hypothermia, because the only time Sasuke ever-) "... Geugeoseun apayo haeyo." (-speaks in Korean is when he wants most desperately for Itachi to not understand him. Because for Itachi to understand him would be for Itachi to know how much Sasuke loves him. Because he does, in the end, regardless of what he has done. The only thing that could ever make Sasuke hate Itachi is-) "Itachi-"
He stops short of himself.
(Words blurring together. Sasuke is slightly hysterical over the fact that he almost died, and even more so over the fact that Itachi might be dead. Dead as in truly fucking rotting in the ground, and he can't tell his mother that because he loves her too much, loves her in the fashion that he can kiss her on the mouth in all of the ways that he could never just touch Naruto's cheek and kiss him. Words blurring together because regardless of Naruto and Naruko's care, Sasuke is still very cold all of the time, always shivering at odd moments or finding his teeth chattering erratically until Naruto gets sick of hearing it and brings him some coffee to warm his mouth. The steady shiver now is less like what he has been doing lately and more controlled, silently threatening that it could and will get so much worse if Sasuke dares to leave his mother's arms.
"... Eomeoni saranghamnida."
("Ara so, Sasuke-kun?"
"...")
"Joesonghamnida."
And Mikoto's face creases with sadness.
"Sasuke."
Gazes at him with eyes that could break into pieces at his words. (She's plunged back into the icy water of her existence. White-heat that explodes across her skin, explodes inside of her gasping mouth, gasping lungs, when she comes up, scrabbling, screaming for air. Red is the thread that cascades throughout a frozen landscape.) Red is her worry, her concern. (Sasuke.) She strokes the side of his face, forgives him for everything he has ever done, will ever do. She forgives him for loving his brother the way he does. She curses herself for creating both. (But, perhaps there isn't a point of doing so. Perhaps the real curse lies within the fact that she did - inevitably - produce both into the face of adversity.)
Chinese.
(Her mother had looked at her sternly and said, in a voice made of stone-)
"I'm sorry."
("Two is too many. Get rid of it.")
And-
(Mikoto had slapped her and never spoken to her again.)
"I'm so sorry, Sasuke."
I can't. I couldn't find him. Not anywhere, not for all my searching.
(She had died before Sasuke's birth. And Mikoto had never regretted anything. Because-)
She had never had a sister. Not once.
"No."
Sasuke wants to hold her. (Sasuke loves her. Loves her in ways that he does not and cannot love Naruto, because Sasuke does not really understand to the full degree how he loves his mother. If he loves her too much. She is the only woman he has ever cared about, because she is the only one who has ever shown him the kind of affection he can tolerate. The kind of affection that is so amazingly unlike Naruto's that it's so intensively odd that he cares for Naruto the way he does- Sasuke does not understand himself.
Sasuke never will.)
"Don't be."
(Please don't be, my lovely mother.
My sinless mother.
Itachi won't-)
"Please-"
(I love you so much.)
He's trembling.
(Is Naruto watching?)
But how could Naruto be watching? (He could be listening. But never watching. In most ways, that is the same thing that makes Sasuke beautiful, his selectiveness. His ivory skin, his ebony eyes. His imperfection that lies in overshadowed perfection.) And in this same way is Naruto always watching. Sasuke doesn't know yet about the twelve or so albums filled with him, photographs, photographs by the hundreds, by the soon to be thousands. (Of him. And only him. In positions he will never even remember being in, they are so brief. So secondary.) He doesn't yet know how rapidly the camera clicks, how Naruto's consuming obsession has become compromising, how there is (gut-wrenchingly) a camera installed in every single room of this house. He doesn't yet know how late Naruto will stay up some weekends when he's away and just look at them on his computer, just stare at them in longing.
He doesn't yet know.
And if Naruto has his way, he never will.
And Mikoto isn't involved in such things; so is her lukewarm quality. It is, perhaps, what Sasuke finds most inclusive and addictive about the heated passion of her adoration of him. Mikoto's love is one of the only parts of her that is not as cool as gravesoil, that is not completely focused in an equation. (As all Uchiha will be.) And it is the biggest difference between her and Naruto. It is the very biggest schism between their likenesses.
Because, while Mikoto's gentle finger hum a gentle and caressing 98.6 degrees Farhenheit (exactly perfect), Naruto and his sister burn with heat, their whole bodies a constant, scorching 101 degrees at the least. NAruto is fire to Mikoto's hot water bottle qualities, and so is Sasuke's (...) so baffling.
"I should have been here."
A soft pause.
"With you." (For you.)
And they simply stay like that, together, for a very long time.