Reunited

[shar1ngan]

Who: Uchiha Sasuke and Uchiha Itachi
When: Immediately after this post
Where: On the beach, where Sasuke's body was burned.
Summary: Sasuke's back! Itachi's going to get him. Tears of joy.
Warnings: Brother issues

Comments

[switch_it_off]

He'd almost forgotten what this place felt like. When he breathed in all he smelled was salt, brine, and old blood. The pull in his chest that fishhooked him back towards the mainland like lateral gravity had taken him several confused minutes to sort, before memory had flooded back. It had happened all at once, sickeningly, clogging up his throat and blurring his vision in the panic of two pasts crashing and merging into one.

Sirens Port, and -- home. How long had he been there? How long had he been here? He remembered dying, he remembered choking and heaving and struggling as the life was strangled out of him, and then darkness. He'd been home, blinking his eyes open to Madara, to hollow inevitability, and there his memories hadn't been twinned. Only here, being back here

[shar1ngan]

Itachi knew immediately when Sasuke turned to watch him that it was his Sasuke, his brother who had killed him and then forgiven him. His feet left the sand before he consciously decided to run, and he darted across the sand to his brother's side, dropping to his knees on the hard, pitted glass that Amaterasu had left.

"Sasuke..." He reached out and took Sasuke's shoulders in his hands, convincing himself that he was real. "You're alive."

[switch_it_off]

Sasuke just stared. If he blinked this illusion would shatter; if he blinked or twitched in any way, he'd distort the genjutsu, or twitch and wake himself and then it would fade through his grasping hands like a fine mist and dissipate away even the memory. If he blinked, Itachi would be gone again and there would only be Madara, hollow and cold behind his mask and his schemes, and it would have to be enough because it was all he had left.

As a kid he'd had a recurring nightmare of falling, tripping over his own feet and toppling off the highest building in the Uchiha compound. He'd always snapped awake in a cold sweat before he hit the ground, but in this dream, in Sirens Port - on this damned island with its power plays and skewed, fucked up politics and confusing holidays he'd never fucking heard of - in this dream, he hadn't woken up until his heart stopped beating. And he hadn't remembered a thing, not until he returned.

"I'm asleep," he whispered vacantly, staring straight ahead. "I'm asleep."

[shar1ngan]

"No, no you're not," Itachi said, worried at Sasuke's strange, disturbingly vacant stare. "Sasuke, you were attacked by SERO and imprisoned again, and they killed you. Do you remember?"

He slipped his arms around his brother, holding him tight as he had done when Sasuke was a child and had nightmares. "But you're back with me, now. It's over."