For: alcyonev
Author: octavius_x
For: alcyonev
Title: Monster
Rating: R
Summary: Sasuke attempts Izanagi.
Warnings: Sexuality and mature themes
A/N: I hope this is what you were looking for alcyonev! I enjoyed writing it.
Mod note: Reminder for the author/artist of this submission, please do not reply to comments signed in, if you want to reply anon commenting is enabled.
Monster
"Start with something familiar,” Madara whispers in his ear.
Familiar, Sasuke thinks, familiar like...standing out on the dock of the Uchiha compound and looking up at the face of his father. Twin sensations overlap at the memory of that great frowning face: revulsion in his gut knowing that the man is dead, and underneath it the fear and apprehension he'd always had as a child.
"Try and remember," the still breath from under Madara's mask comes up fetid and hits his face, "remember it the way you remember your parent's death. Every moment of in black and white." He puts his hand on the back of Sasuke's neck, ignoring the way he flinches away at the touch.
"Remember."
He takes another breath and sets his teeth the way Madara had taught him so he won't bite off his tongue in surprise. Madara is a puzzle he still hasn't figured out, continually on the realm of existence and the abstract; he’d insisted Sasuke begin his training with Izanagi they day after they had returned from the attack on the five kages and his final fight with Danzo. Madara had only leaned over Danzo's afterward, and kicked the mutilated arms out from underneath his body.
Sasuke wouldn't have been surprised if under the mask was nothing, a shadow in the shape of a man's body. Just a raw incarnation of vengeance. Sasuke feels the body heat of the other man behind him, the pressure of the hand on his neck when Madara speaks again, "I know you remember that day because I was there."
The crack Itachi had put in the Uchiha fan spread like the fanning branches of a tree. Sasuke sees himself at seven years old, barefoot and running down that alley. It is the day after his parents had been killed and he’d run out of the hospital as soon as the nurse had left. He hadn’t been wearing sandals when he was brought in so he’d cut up his feet running home assured that when he got there everything would be alright.
When he’d come home to the cold house the blood stain on the floor had had no shape, no sense to it. Only the chalk outline drawn on the floor had delineated all that was taken from him. And then he nearly chokes as the chalk outlines in his mind’s eye rise, separate, combine and gain depth. He feels the first breath of Izanagi shudder through him like a thread pulled taunt between his body and the memory. He spins out the illusion, filling in the house with old smells he pondered over as a child: blood, his mother's lemon dish soap someone had used to try and wipe down the tatamis, the deep cold of a large house without bodies to warm it. Disgust rises thick in his throat and he feels the illusion splutter like a candle flame caught in a draft.
Madara hisses and digs fingers into the back of his neck, "Focus."
His mind reels seizes on the way Madara had come out of the darkness the first time in the cave. The muffled sound of his voice behind the mask as if he were coming forward out of the ages. "We've met before as enemies."…The sounds shifts into a half-remembered grunt when Sasuke at age four had pulled Itachi’s pony-tail… and then later after he’d killed him, the long threads of his brother’s hair he’d found stuck to his palm and that he'd pulled so hard around his fingers they’d turned purple and Karin had had to cut. Tight like the knots he on the front of his parent's funerary cards. It is raining when walks the whole way home after the funeral to his new apartment. The idiot from his class has set something in the kitchen on fire. Smoke invades the solitude of his room and blends with shrine incense. He continues to place oranges in front of the pictures of his parents like he’d seen his mother do with the shrine to his grandparents. The oranges dry out within a few days. Strangely enough he remembers the texture of their dried skin under his fingers. Such a contrast to the smooth glaze on the jars of his parent’s ashes as they’d been buried.
Madara’s hand releases him.
Sasuke realizes why he opens his eyes and sees his father's funeral tablet standing in front of him as if it had been plucked out of the Uchiha graveyard--even though he knows that graveyard no longer exists.
Madara walks around it appraising, then squats behind it and gestures for Sasuke to come join him.
"Look." he points. From this angle the tablet is paper thin.
"You haven't realized objects have more than two dimensions. You're still thinking in terms of the laws of this world." He gets up brushing dirt off his knees and leers close. Sasuke pulls away, but Madara grabs his hair and holds him there, "You're also not used to the idea of your father alive yet, which is why we’ve ended up with this. Next time try someone still living."
Although chakra requirements to perform a basic genjutsu are low and the theory relatively basic, the difficulty of this technique lies in the practice of continuing a scenario in such a way that the opponent's mind accepts and believes it. A well trained shinobi mind will automatically detect sensory errors such as smells, sounds, tastes etc. within an illusion, which they will use to negate the jutsu--the best deterrent is not give the opponent reason for disbelief at all. For this reason, genjutsu has come to be regarded almost as an art form, as the level of control and detail required for a convincing and lasting genjutsu are beyond the skill set of a standard jounin-forgoing the advantage of a kekkei genkai. Kunoichi have been found to have a greater affinity for this jutsu due to their more strategical approach, empathy training, and attention to detail. Regardless of the practitioner, once the mind accepts a genjutsu scenario it is one of the most powerful and precarious forms of ninjutsu.
That night his father's ghost walks by the foot of his bed.
The figure is in the distance and ghostly pale. Just the shape is familiar enough. Like the silhouettes they’d had at the academy pinned up for target practice, the shape is enough to identify, to classify its weak points for attack. Head, heart, neck. He'd been good at it. Had drawn his own cutouts at home on wax paper. Cutting down imaginary enemies with his practice shuriken until he was so exhausted he had to flop down on his back and take a breather. He was looking for cloud shapes when his mother had come out to take down the laundry and found a whole army of slain shinobi on her clothes lines instead, "You fighting your own private war now Sasuke-kun?" she'd laughed.
Then wax paper figures were no match for a real opponent. Just like the academy's rudimentary courses on weak points were no match for the lab rooms in the basement where Orochimaru taught him anatomy and where he encounters Juugo for the first time crying in a lab room next to a dead kid. It had taken him some time to be able to walk through the lab rooms looking for Kabuto and not wince at the smells of putrefaction. Sasuke had glanced into one of the rooms and shrugged disinterestedly at a boy half-transfigured by the curse seal and opened on the operating table. There’s still specks of bloody spittle on the boy's face from his death snarl, something he barely notices before a fist the size of a sledge-hammer smashes into the tile wall next to his head. The low light reflects off Juugo's transforming face and then Sasuke sees him--the disfigured physiognomy of an underworld god laboring over his anvil, pounding his guilt into other forms and punctuated only by the sounds of breaking tile. His wordless roar. Juugo’s transfigured hands had continued to beat the wall where Sasuke had been standing until they broke through to the adjoining room...it must be something, he'd thought at the time, to fear your own capacity.
And here he is watching his father's ghost come closer.
He sees the familiar heavy jowls and the high pale forehead Itachi inherited. He’d tried to pull Itachi through Izanagi once and failed miserably. Madara tells him it’s because he's too upset and can't clear his head. Sasuke spits back that he doesn't get upset. Even when he was young his mother had commented on how quiet and well-behaved he was. Fugaku had never spoken to him as a man or as an equal. The deep grooves around the man's mouth more a symbol of his silence than if a seal had been tattooed on his tongue.
The rooms in the clan house had once been a stronghold of whispered conversations and secret meetings, of overhead words his child's brain had dissected seeking entrance into the adult world. All of it had been meaningless and he all too clearly remembers the way he’d mistrusted Itachi for a few misplaced feelings of approval.
The outline of the ghost dissolves like rice paper dipped in water.
The ghost does not come again. The long hallways of the Uchiha house in his mind’s eye remain empty and free of whisperings, a sounding board for other more complex figures.
"Itachi was a master of genjutsu." Madara tells him later. They're sitting on a boulder near the practice field and Sasuke is eating Ramen. “I saw him turn a man to paper and burn him alive, and when the man blinked he was whole and burning again."
"So now you've come for the lesser Uchiha.”
"You're not even trying. Children see things differently than adults. Your depictions from childhood are distorted and unstable, colored by too many emotions. I told you before you need to try someone living."
As he improves Izanagi the long hallways of the clan house narrow to his room in the academy apartment complex. The sounds of his father's sandals up and down the tatami outside his room replay and morph into other repetitious noises... the small plinks against the glass of his bedroom window at 2 am. The idiot would be standing there grinning and they would clamber down the building all boy-limbs, race each other, sweat and curse in the early morning hours to the complaints of tenants as they skid along rooftops, and throw tiles at each other off the roofs of the pompous clan houses. They end only at sunrise when Naruto nudges his shoulder and offers him rice crackers or the occasional slightly squashy tomato.
He'd just say "I know you don't like sweets" and bite into a cream cheese cake. Then they'd get in an argument, likely wrestle it out. Naruto played dirty when he was angry, grabbing his hair and pummeling him, or trying to knee him in the crotch and Sasuke for the most part answers in kind. After they'd thrown an air conditioner unit over the side of the building there was an unspoken agreement to stop using chakra based attacks. Sasuke remembers those early morning fights almost as clear as if he had just returned from them. Shoulders aching in their sockets from twisting free, the ringing sensation in your ears after you've been punched, teeth cutting gums, cutting lips, cutting into his ankle when he puts Naruto into a choke hold with his legs. Bony hips, bruised knees, the slow wet slide of boy skin and the noise that never failed to surprise him when they pulled apart. Naruto tended to wear his clothes loose and once or twice in the forests outside Konoha and they'd been soaked, and Sasuke looks over guessing at the shape of the body beneath the orange jumper. In the summer they do it through wet clothes. Naruto pushing them into a pool or a pond. Sasuke unwilling to shed his shirt--
He starts awake and shakes his head. Madara is playing chess with himself in a corner humming three bars of a song. "You should get cleaned up," the notes of the song rose, "We're going to exorcise the eight tails this afternoon."
He mutters something and gets up. In the shower he tries Izanagi again; it comes easily this time, mind slipping into the familiar route. The water turns to cold sleet. He feels the shift of wet cloth over his skin, the smacking sounds of wet jersey. The illusion, the real of it rises up like a wave, like an inhale and then overtakes him. The apartment roofs. The rough scrape of the concrete on his knuckles. Gasping, smells of fabric softener from the apartment vents and another mouth on his. Lips chapped. Naruto grins once and slides a brown hand down over his cock.
Usually termed a “long-range” attack the jutsu is versatile in that it can be used in one-on-one confrontation or in teams. Standard operating procedure calls for use of an illusion as a momentary distraction or camouflage so that physical and mental attack points become vulnerable. While initial usage centers on genjutsu as a tactical tool, in the hands of the right shinobi it is a cerebral powerhouse. Thus the importance of genjutsu should not be understated, advanced practitioners have been known to completely psychologically disable opponents, going beyond strategical uses to covert information gathering and highly effective applications in interrogation. One must understand that once an opponent is “caught” they are completely at the imaginative whim of the practitioner; in essence, the practitioner is a “god” in their own realm.
The big eyes of the summoning statue pivot under their heavy lids and stare at Sasuke. He gives it a wary look and walks over to the body cupped between its giant hands.
"I can't feel my legs; maybe I should consider pegs," comes up from the man followed by a bark of a laugh. Killer bee is lying on his side in a heap where he'd fallen after the eight-tailed beast had been extracted. Sasuke crouches down and twitches the frame of the shades away from the man's eyes. He has blue eyes behind the sunglasses--totally unexpected.
“Hey, kid. You're going to do this to the other one, right? The loud one.”
“That doesn't even rhyme.”
“Yeah well,” a slight cough and blood bubbles up on his lips, “betrayal is a hard word to rhyme to.”
He snorts and turns to leave. He's seen enough “heroic” and uncomplimentary death at Orochimaru's. Besides, the face of the summoning statue and the soft suckling noises it made when ingesting the tailed beasts makes his hair stand on end. It’s hard for him to fathom that these things exist outside of legend. Orochimaru-in one of his saner moments--had described his encounter with a Shinigami: a white demon, with matted hair, beads that clicked together. For Orochimaru’s mix of megalomania and superstition it was no doubt a terrifying experience, but to Sasuke it sounded childish like something out of the movies he'd seen growing up-almost pitiful.
He and Madara are born out of a mythology of vendettas and failures, contained in a story that would continue spiraling out of control like Madara's mask or the faint outline on Naruto's stomach. The worst kind of villain. The kind kids in Konoha had picked the noses of in movie theaters, and the kind perpetually hated in myths. The kind who have no excuse for walking willingly into the dark for their own designs.
It was not uncommon in older theaters in Konoha where the screen was still set quite low to the ground for kids to throw up their hands and interrupt films, fingers acted out little pantomimes of ducks attacking dogs. Naruto had been quite adept; occasionally going so far as to clamber up to the false stage and mime the actions of the protagonist, or even making out with the heroine after the rescue scene. His tongue wiggling in her black-and-white mouth, completely obscene. What Naruto liked best were the three feature silent films they played at night. The ones that didn't quite make sense, but where the eclectic wealth of someone's mind had been dumped. Sasuke thought it was a waste of time, cats leaping and yowling, a violin quartet blossoming in a garden, a short about hunting vampires. He'd almost never gone with the idiot, the only exception he made was when they showed The Legend of Izanagi. It was a massive multi-part feature that drew a particular crowd of highly excitable academy kids, jounin and genin who'd watched it when they were young, and a few occasional pipe smoking seniors. It was a silent film with scrolling subtitles. The effects were corny. The make-up overly dramatic. The man who'd played Izanagi had a bad habit of wearing his wig slightly askew, but more importantly it was one of the few things they agreed on.
They go to see it about eight times. Most of it, the yelling, the spouting blood, escapes him except for the end of Part I, after Izanagi retrieves Izanami from hell. He would turn, not quite looking at her and the captions would scroll 'Your loss means to me the loss of all' and the camera pans around to show his face running with tears. Behind him the first glimpse of Izanami began to appear, and then slowly his head would turn too. He'd turn and see her hideous face beneath the boils and makeup. His expression would change: 'MONSTER!' the text rolls, 'What have you done with Izanami?'
'But it is me' came the reply. The text floated in a sea of black. Her mutilated face like a pale moon above Sasuke. Still beautiful, but spoiled. Like a fruit with a rotten spot in it, you threw the whole thing away. Izanagi would yell and strike at her, tears flying from his face as he emerged triumphant back into the world of the living. But his adolescent brain always dwelled on her expression when the camera panned back to Izanami, her mouth open in silent horror at the realization of her own monstrosity.
Naruto never had much to say about it Part 1. He was always more concerned with the other action sequences of the triple feature: the fight of Izanagi's army versus his wife's horde of 5000 zombies, or the birth of Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and the surly Susanoo.
Sasuke hears a dry cough from behind him in the remembered theatre and he turns, looking for the source. Above him Susannoo is in the midst of destroying Amaterasu's rice fields railing against her in capital letters.
He feels rather than sees the threads of Izanagi illusion change. Sasuke saw a comedy movie once with pirates and heroes slicing through the movie screen to enter, and Madara enters his memory just like that--suddenly enormous and projected above him. Amaterasu's rice field shifts to the field in Konoha where memorial stone would stand, but the movie keeps on running. Amaterasu descending at the climax of Susanoo's rage where they would fight it out, but when she turns around it is a man with long hair, a younger version of the first Hokage. The face he'd seen daily carved into the mountain.
Underneath the words scroll 'So you're leaving?' Vertigo takes him and he pukes into the seat beside him loosing the few threads of Izanagi he’s still holding. The details of the theatre blur, but the movie continues rolling. He realizes the image on the screen is old, like a memory where some of the details are too strong, like they've been reminisced too much and too often. Nobody seems to notice and crowd erupts in cheers as the two began to fight.
"Oh" there is a soft breath behind his ear and Madara is there leaning over the back of his seat. The Naruto from his memory is still sitting beside him yelling and Sasuke watches as Madara steals a piece of popcorn from Naruto chewing on it thoughtfully, “didn't you know, once someone loved me like that too.”
The risks for the user are twofold. Of course, the associated risk is that under stress the user themselves becomes vulnerable to physical attack, but the major weakness of the jutsu is that the intensity of sustaining a convincing illusion jeopardizes the practitioner's mental state. Common initial problems associated with the malpractice of genjutsu include hallucinations and paranoia, which can degenerate into schizophrenia, and finally an inability to separate real and fictitious events. Although it is possible to affect more than one person in a genjutsu, one must remember the strength of the jutsu relies on the belief of the opponent and the ability of a shinobi to sustain that belief. Two minds are harder to convince than one, therefore the chakra requirements for more than one person increase on an exponential scale. A useful axiom is as follows: increased jutsu complexity equals increased risk to the user.
"Sasuke," Naruto says.
He's lying on the ground out of breath and half-transformed to the curse seal. Gravel pressing into his cheek, the texture of it, the damp it leaves on his face. He feels hands turn him over.
Something Madara has to gently correct him on is that using an emotion to fuel a genjutsu is not a disadvantage, “In fact, for Izanagi it's a necessity. Think about it, in order to create something you need to sacrifice something of yourself. That's why the seals for summonings are written in blood.”
“Now,” Madara tells him moments earlier, “Try again.” They are standing in an open field. Tall grasses brushing against his fingertips. He's become more aware of sensations, that there could be a difference between Naruto's rough hands jacking him off and his own. Sasuke doesn't need to see the blonde head of hair to know how what it feels like between his fingers, to know the taste of the other boy's mouth. The last few days before Madara takes him out to try again he's seen shades of him everywhere.
There's smoke in the air, like a grass fire a long way off. He closes his eyes...
...chapped lips and bruised knuckles. Sandals a little too small. The cheap detergent all the kids in the apartment building used to do their laundry. The deep ache in his own body where Haku's acupuncture needles had hit, and Naruto's voice cracking when he asked “Why?” He remembers the ANBU who were standing in for the Uchiha police after the massacre, watched their hands as they finished drawing the chalk outline of his parent's bodies, connecting the circumnavigation. The shape this time is different.
“Good” he hears Madara say from a long way off. A heavy breath on his neck.
He pulls harder, feels the thread behind his breastbone draw up taunt and painful. Bitten fingernails, how small his chest looked without the orange jacket. His own hand punching through the sinews and muscle of Naruto's shoulder. Tomatoes eaten in the company of someone else. How the Miso Ramen always tasted better when he went with Naruto. Freckles. The sad reckless mess of his apartment. The uneven nape of his neck from his six yen barber. And more…he feels it all rise up in him like a flood and he can't contain it. Like a long inhale kept inside, the thread twangs and breaks and then whatever it is inside him give.
“You again! What did you do?” He felt his body being shifted, substantial hands touching his shoulder, wiping the blood off his face with an orange sleeve.
“It's-uh, it's gonna be alright Sasuke-kun. I don't know how I got all the way here, but-I'm going to kick this Tobi guy's ass and then we'll uh, we'll go home.”
Naruto is grinning, looking down at him.
“You-“ he grasps Naruto's hand. Solid. And only then does he realize the implications of what he’s done.
He can almost feel the eyes of the summoning statue turn. Stare. The last jinchuuriki.
Naruto squeezes his hand and gets up, the Kyuubi's chakra already erupting out of him. His skin turning black, bones assembling. He knows this scene. He's seen it before. The hero going forth to his final battle. The field is burning. He sees Izanami's face in the movie theater again, her mouth open wide, a black maw filled with the bitterness of realization.
Madara's eye through the mask winks at him, “Didn't I tell you Sasuke-kun, something familiar?”
It is postulated that forbidden techniques based around the theory of genjutsu (See Izanagi) are able to bring forth illusions into physical realities for a short period of time based solely on the strength of the practitioner's own belief. However this is only possible with significant physical and psychological sacrifice on the part of the user. The consequences of the subsequent dissolution of their reality in the face of the 'real' is the reason anything beyond distraction and discomposure techniques should be strongly discouraged even for masters of genjutsu. Should a situation like this arise it is unlikely a practitioner will be able to resist the seduction of their own illusion.
--Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai (ANBU) Introductory Tactical Manual
For: alcyonev
Title: Monster
Rating: R
Summary: Sasuke attempts Izanagi.
Warnings: Sexuality and mature themes
A/N: I hope this is what you were looking for alcyonev! I enjoyed writing it.
Mod note: Reminder for the author/artist of this submission, please do not reply to comments signed in, if you want to reply anon commenting is enabled.
Monster
"Start with something familiar,” Madara whispers in his ear.
Familiar, Sasuke thinks, familiar like...standing out on the dock of the Uchiha compound and looking up at the face of his father. Twin sensations overlap at the memory of that great frowning face: revulsion in his gut knowing that the man is dead, and underneath it the fear and apprehension he'd always had as a child.
"Try and remember," the still breath from under Madara's mask comes up fetid and hits his face, "remember it the way you remember your parent's death. Every moment of in black and white." He puts his hand on the back of Sasuke's neck, ignoring the way he flinches away at the touch.
"Remember."
He takes another breath and sets his teeth the way Madara had taught him so he won't bite off his tongue in surprise. Madara is a puzzle he still hasn't figured out, continually on the realm of existence and the abstract; he’d insisted Sasuke begin his training with Izanagi they day after they had returned from the attack on the five kages and his final fight with Danzo. Madara had only leaned over Danzo's afterward, and kicked the mutilated arms out from underneath his body.
Sasuke wouldn't have been surprised if under the mask was nothing, a shadow in the shape of a man's body. Just a raw incarnation of vengeance. Sasuke feels the body heat of the other man behind him, the pressure of the hand on his neck when Madara speaks again, "I know you remember that day because I was there."
The crack Itachi had put in the Uchiha fan spread like the fanning branches of a tree. Sasuke sees himself at seven years old, barefoot and running down that alley. It is the day after his parents had been killed and he’d run out of the hospital as soon as the nurse had left. He hadn’t been wearing sandals when he was brought in so he’d cut up his feet running home assured that when he got there everything would be alright.
When he’d come home to the cold house the blood stain on the floor had had no shape, no sense to it. Only the chalk outline drawn on the floor had delineated all that was taken from him. And then he nearly chokes as the chalk outlines in his mind’s eye rise, separate, combine and gain depth. He feels the first breath of Izanagi shudder through him like a thread pulled taunt between his body and the memory. He spins out the illusion, filling in the house with old smells he pondered over as a child: blood, his mother's lemon dish soap someone had used to try and wipe down the tatamis, the deep cold of a large house without bodies to warm it. Disgust rises thick in his throat and he feels the illusion splutter like a candle flame caught in a draft.
Madara hisses and digs fingers into the back of his neck, "Focus."
His mind reels seizes on the way Madara had come out of the darkness the first time in the cave. The muffled sound of his voice behind the mask as if he were coming forward out of the ages. "We've met before as enemies."…The sounds shifts into a half-remembered grunt when Sasuke at age four had pulled Itachi’s pony-tail… and then later after he’d killed him, the long threads of his brother’s hair he’d found stuck to his palm and that he'd pulled so hard around his fingers they’d turned purple and Karin had had to cut. Tight like the knots he on the front of his parent's funerary cards. It is raining when walks the whole way home after the funeral to his new apartment. The idiot from his class has set something in the kitchen on fire. Smoke invades the solitude of his room and blends with shrine incense. He continues to place oranges in front of the pictures of his parents like he’d seen his mother do with the shrine to his grandparents. The oranges dry out within a few days. Strangely enough he remembers the texture of their dried skin under his fingers. Such a contrast to the smooth glaze on the jars of his parent’s ashes as they’d been buried.
Madara’s hand releases him.
Sasuke realizes why he opens his eyes and sees his father's funeral tablet standing in front of him as if it had been plucked out of the Uchiha graveyard--even though he knows that graveyard no longer exists.
Madara walks around it appraising, then squats behind it and gestures for Sasuke to come join him.
"Look." he points. From this angle the tablet is paper thin.
"You haven't realized objects have more than two dimensions. You're still thinking in terms of the laws of this world." He gets up brushing dirt off his knees and leers close. Sasuke pulls away, but Madara grabs his hair and holds him there, "You're also not used to the idea of your father alive yet, which is why we’ve ended up with this. Next time try someone still living."
Although chakra requirements to perform a basic genjutsu are low and the theory relatively basic, the difficulty of this technique lies in the practice of continuing a scenario in such a way that the opponent's mind accepts and believes it. A well trained shinobi mind will automatically detect sensory errors such as smells, sounds, tastes etc. within an illusion, which they will use to negate the jutsu--the best deterrent is not give the opponent reason for disbelief at all. For this reason, genjutsu has come to be regarded almost as an art form, as the level of control and detail required for a convincing and lasting genjutsu are beyond the skill set of a standard jounin-forgoing the advantage of a kekkei genkai. Kunoichi have been found to have a greater affinity for this jutsu due to their more strategical approach, empathy training, and attention to detail. Regardless of the practitioner, once the mind accepts a genjutsu scenario it is one of the most powerful and precarious forms of ninjutsu.
That night his father's ghost walks by the foot of his bed.
The figure is in the distance and ghostly pale. Just the shape is familiar enough. Like the silhouettes they’d had at the academy pinned up for target practice, the shape is enough to identify, to classify its weak points for attack. Head, heart, neck. He'd been good at it. Had drawn his own cutouts at home on wax paper. Cutting down imaginary enemies with his practice shuriken until he was so exhausted he had to flop down on his back and take a breather. He was looking for cloud shapes when his mother had come out to take down the laundry and found a whole army of slain shinobi on her clothes lines instead, "You fighting your own private war now Sasuke-kun?" she'd laughed.
Then wax paper figures were no match for a real opponent. Just like the academy's rudimentary courses on weak points were no match for the lab rooms in the basement where Orochimaru taught him anatomy and where he encounters Juugo for the first time crying in a lab room next to a dead kid. It had taken him some time to be able to walk through the lab rooms looking for Kabuto and not wince at the smells of putrefaction. Sasuke had glanced into one of the rooms and shrugged disinterestedly at a boy half-transfigured by the curse seal and opened on the operating table. There’s still specks of bloody spittle on the boy's face from his death snarl, something he barely notices before a fist the size of a sledge-hammer smashes into the tile wall next to his head. The low light reflects off Juugo's transforming face and then Sasuke sees him--the disfigured physiognomy of an underworld god laboring over his anvil, pounding his guilt into other forms and punctuated only by the sounds of breaking tile. His wordless roar. Juugo’s transfigured hands had continued to beat the wall where Sasuke had been standing until they broke through to the adjoining room...it must be something, he'd thought at the time, to fear your own capacity.
And here he is watching his father's ghost come closer.
He sees the familiar heavy jowls and the high pale forehead Itachi inherited. He’d tried to pull Itachi through Izanagi once and failed miserably. Madara tells him it’s because he's too upset and can't clear his head. Sasuke spits back that he doesn't get upset. Even when he was young his mother had commented on how quiet and well-behaved he was. Fugaku had never spoken to him as a man or as an equal. The deep grooves around the man's mouth more a symbol of his silence than if a seal had been tattooed on his tongue.
The rooms in the clan house had once been a stronghold of whispered conversations and secret meetings, of overhead words his child's brain had dissected seeking entrance into the adult world. All of it had been meaningless and he all too clearly remembers the way he’d mistrusted Itachi for a few misplaced feelings of approval.
The outline of the ghost dissolves like rice paper dipped in water.
The ghost does not come again. The long hallways of the Uchiha house in his mind’s eye remain empty and free of whisperings, a sounding board for other more complex figures.
"Itachi was a master of genjutsu." Madara tells him later. They're sitting on a boulder near the practice field and Sasuke is eating Ramen. “I saw him turn a man to paper and burn him alive, and when the man blinked he was whole and burning again."
"So now you've come for the lesser Uchiha.”
"You're not even trying. Children see things differently than adults. Your depictions from childhood are distorted and unstable, colored by too many emotions. I told you before you need to try someone living."
As he improves Izanagi the long hallways of the clan house narrow to his room in the academy apartment complex. The sounds of his father's sandals up and down the tatami outside his room replay and morph into other repetitious noises... the small plinks against the glass of his bedroom window at 2 am. The idiot would be standing there grinning and they would clamber down the building all boy-limbs, race each other, sweat and curse in the early morning hours to the complaints of tenants as they skid along rooftops, and throw tiles at each other off the roofs of the pompous clan houses. They end only at sunrise when Naruto nudges his shoulder and offers him rice crackers or the occasional slightly squashy tomato.
He'd just say "I know you don't like sweets" and bite into a cream cheese cake. Then they'd get in an argument, likely wrestle it out. Naruto played dirty when he was angry, grabbing his hair and pummeling him, or trying to knee him in the crotch and Sasuke for the most part answers in kind. After they'd thrown an air conditioner unit over the side of the building there was an unspoken agreement to stop using chakra based attacks. Sasuke remembers those early morning fights almost as clear as if he had just returned from them. Shoulders aching in their sockets from twisting free, the ringing sensation in your ears after you've been punched, teeth cutting gums, cutting lips, cutting into his ankle when he puts Naruto into a choke hold with his legs. Bony hips, bruised knees, the slow wet slide of boy skin and the noise that never failed to surprise him when they pulled apart. Naruto tended to wear his clothes loose and once or twice in the forests outside Konoha and they'd been soaked, and Sasuke looks over guessing at the shape of the body beneath the orange jumper. In the summer they do it through wet clothes. Naruto pushing them into a pool or a pond. Sasuke unwilling to shed his shirt--
He starts awake and shakes his head. Madara is playing chess with himself in a corner humming three bars of a song. "You should get cleaned up," the notes of the song rose, "We're going to exorcise the eight tails this afternoon."
He mutters something and gets up. In the shower he tries Izanagi again; it comes easily this time, mind slipping into the familiar route. The water turns to cold sleet. He feels the shift of wet cloth over his skin, the smacking sounds of wet jersey. The illusion, the real of it rises up like a wave, like an inhale and then overtakes him. The apartment roofs. The rough scrape of the concrete on his knuckles. Gasping, smells of fabric softener from the apartment vents and another mouth on his. Lips chapped. Naruto grins once and slides a brown hand down over his cock.
Usually termed a “long-range” attack the jutsu is versatile in that it can be used in one-on-one confrontation or in teams. Standard operating procedure calls for use of an illusion as a momentary distraction or camouflage so that physical and mental attack points become vulnerable. While initial usage centers on genjutsu as a tactical tool, in the hands of the right shinobi it is a cerebral powerhouse. Thus the importance of genjutsu should not be understated, advanced practitioners have been known to completely psychologically disable opponents, going beyond strategical uses to covert information gathering and highly effective applications in interrogation. One must understand that once an opponent is “caught” they are completely at the imaginative whim of the practitioner; in essence, the practitioner is a “god” in their own realm.
The big eyes of the summoning statue pivot under their heavy lids and stare at Sasuke. He gives it a wary look and walks over to the body cupped between its giant hands.
"I can't feel my legs; maybe I should consider pegs," comes up from the man followed by a bark of a laugh. Killer bee is lying on his side in a heap where he'd fallen after the eight-tailed beast had been extracted. Sasuke crouches down and twitches the frame of the shades away from the man's eyes. He has blue eyes behind the sunglasses--totally unexpected.
“Hey, kid. You're going to do this to the other one, right? The loud one.”
“That doesn't even rhyme.”
“Yeah well,” a slight cough and blood bubbles up on his lips, “betrayal is a hard word to rhyme to.”
He snorts and turns to leave. He's seen enough “heroic” and uncomplimentary death at Orochimaru's. Besides, the face of the summoning statue and the soft suckling noises it made when ingesting the tailed beasts makes his hair stand on end. It’s hard for him to fathom that these things exist outside of legend. Orochimaru-in one of his saner moments--had described his encounter with a Shinigami: a white demon, with matted hair, beads that clicked together. For Orochimaru’s mix of megalomania and superstition it was no doubt a terrifying experience, but to Sasuke it sounded childish like something out of the movies he'd seen growing up-almost pitiful.
He and Madara are born out of a mythology of vendettas and failures, contained in a story that would continue spiraling out of control like Madara's mask or the faint outline on Naruto's stomach. The worst kind of villain. The kind kids in Konoha had picked the noses of in movie theaters, and the kind perpetually hated in myths. The kind who have no excuse for walking willingly into the dark for their own designs.
It was not uncommon in older theaters in Konoha where the screen was still set quite low to the ground for kids to throw up their hands and interrupt films, fingers acted out little pantomimes of ducks attacking dogs. Naruto had been quite adept; occasionally going so far as to clamber up to the false stage and mime the actions of the protagonist, or even making out with the heroine after the rescue scene. His tongue wiggling in her black-and-white mouth, completely obscene. What Naruto liked best were the three feature silent films they played at night. The ones that didn't quite make sense, but where the eclectic wealth of someone's mind had been dumped. Sasuke thought it was a waste of time, cats leaping and yowling, a violin quartet blossoming in a garden, a short about hunting vampires. He'd almost never gone with the idiot, the only exception he made was when they showed The Legend of Izanagi. It was a massive multi-part feature that drew a particular crowd of highly excitable academy kids, jounin and genin who'd watched it when they were young, and a few occasional pipe smoking seniors. It was a silent film with scrolling subtitles. The effects were corny. The make-up overly dramatic. The man who'd played Izanagi had a bad habit of wearing his wig slightly askew, but more importantly it was one of the few things they agreed on.
They go to see it about eight times. Most of it, the yelling, the spouting blood, escapes him except for the end of Part I, after Izanagi retrieves Izanami from hell. He would turn, not quite looking at her and the captions would scroll 'Your loss means to me the loss of all' and the camera pans around to show his face running with tears. Behind him the first glimpse of Izanami began to appear, and then slowly his head would turn too. He'd turn and see her hideous face beneath the boils and makeup. His expression would change: 'MONSTER!' the text rolls, 'What have you done with Izanami?'
'But it is me' came the reply. The text floated in a sea of black. Her mutilated face like a pale moon above Sasuke. Still beautiful, but spoiled. Like a fruit with a rotten spot in it, you threw the whole thing away. Izanagi would yell and strike at her, tears flying from his face as he emerged triumphant back into the world of the living. But his adolescent brain always dwelled on her expression when the camera panned back to Izanami, her mouth open in silent horror at the realization of her own monstrosity.
Naruto never had much to say about it Part 1. He was always more concerned with the other action sequences of the triple feature: the fight of Izanagi's army versus his wife's horde of 5000 zombies, or the birth of Amaterasu, Tsukuyomi, and the surly Susanoo.
Sasuke hears a dry cough from behind him in the remembered theatre and he turns, looking for the source. Above him Susannoo is in the midst of destroying Amaterasu's rice fields railing against her in capital letters.
He feels rather than sees the threads of Izanagi illusion change. Sasuke saw a comedy movie once with pirates and heroes slicing through the movie screen to enter, and Madara enters his memory just like that--suddenly enormous and projected above him. Amaterasu's rice field shifts to the field in Konoha where memorial stone would stand, but the movie keeps on running. Amaterasu descending at the climax of Susanoo's rage where they would fight it out, but when she turns around it is a man with long hair, a younger version of the first Hokage. The face he'd seen daily carved into the mountain.
Underneath the words scroll 'So you're leaving?' Vertigo takes him and he pukes into the seat beside him loosing the few threads of Izanagi he’s still holding. The details of the theatre blur, but the movie continues rolling. He realizes the image on the screen is old, like a memory where some of the details are too strong, like they've been reminisced too much and too often. Nobody seems to notice and crowd erupts in cheers as the two began to fight.
"Oh" there is a soft breath behind his ear and Madara is there leaning over the back of his seat. The Naruto from his memory is still sitting beside him yelling and Sasuke watches as Madara steals a piece of popcorn from Naruto chewing on it thoughtfully, “didn't you know, once someone loved me like that too.”
The risks for the user are twofold. Of course, the associated risk is that under stress the user themselves becomes vulnerable to physical attack, but the major weakness of the jutsu is that the intensity of sustaining a convincing illusion jeopardizes the practitioner's mental state. Common initial problems associated with the malpractice of genjutsu include hallucinations and paranoia, which can degenerate into schizophrenia, and finally an inability to separate real and fictitious events. Although it is possible to affect more than one person in a genjutsu, one must remember the strength of the jutsu relies on the belief of the opponent and the ability of a shinobi to sustain that belief. Two minds are harder to convince than one, therefore the chakra requirements for more than one person increase on an exponential scale. A useful axiom is as follows: increased jutsu complexity equals increased risk to the user.
"Sasuke," Naruto says.
He's lying on the ground out of breath and half-transformed to the curse seal. Gravel pressing into his cheek, the texture of it, the damp it leaves on his face. He feels hands turn him over.
Something Madara has to gently correct him on is that using an emotion to fuel a genjutsu is not a disadvantage, “In fact, for Izanagi it's a necessity. Think about it, in order to create something you need to sacrifice something of yourself. That's why the seals for summonings are written in blood.”
“Now,” Madara tells him moments earlier, “Try again.” They are standing in an open field. Tall grasses brushing against his fingertips. He's become more aware of sensations, that there could be a difference between Naruto's rough hands jacking him off and his own. Sasuke doesn't need to see the blonde head of hair to know how what it feels like between his fingers, to know the taste of the other boy's mouth. The last few days before Madara takes him out to try again he's seen shades of him everywhere.
There's smoke in the air, like a grass fire a long way off. He closes his eyes...
...chapped lips and bruised knuckles. Sandals a little too small. The cheap detergent all the kids in the apartment building used to do their laundry. The deep ache in his own body where Haku's acupuncture needles had hit, and Naruto's voice cracking when he asked “Why?” He remembers the ANBU who were standing in for the Uchiha police after the massacre, watched their hands as they finished drawing the chalk outline of his parent's bodies, connecting the circumnavigation. The shape this time is different.
“Good” he hears Madara say from a long way off. A heavy breath on his neck.
He pulls harder, feels the thread behind his breastbone draw up taunt and painful. Bitten fingernails, how small his chest looked without the orange jacket. His own hand punching through the sinews and muscle of Naruto's shoulder. Tomatoes eaten in the company of someone else. How the Miso Ramen always tasted better when he went with Naruto. Freckles. The sad reckless mess of his apartment. The uneven nape of his neck from his six yen barber. And more…he feels it all rise up in him like a flood and he can't contain it. Like a long inhale kept inside, the thread twangs and breaks and then whatever it is inside him give.
“You again! What did you do?” He felt his body being shifted, substantial hands touching his shoulder, wiping the blood off his face with an orange sleeve.
“It's-uh, it's gonna be alright Sasuke-kun. I don't know how I got all the way here, but-I'm going to kick this Tobi guy's ass and then we'll uh, we'll go home.”
Naruto is grinning, looking down at him.
“You-“ he grasps Naruto's hand. Solid. And only then does he realize the implications of what he’s done.
He can almost feel the eyes of the summoning statue turn. Stare. The last jinchuuriki.
Naruto squeezes his hand and gets up, the Kyuubi's chakra already erupting out of him. His skin turning black, bones assembling. He knows this scene. He's seen it before. The hero going forth to his final battle. The field is burning. He sees Izanami's face in the movie theater again, her mouth open wide, a black maw filled with the bitterness of realization.
Madara's eye through the mask winks at him, “Didn't I tell you Sasuke-kun, something familiar?”
It is postulated that forbidden techniques based around the theory of genjutsu (See Izanagi) are able to bring forth illusions into physical realities for a short period of time based solely on the strength of the practitioner's own belief. However this is only possible with significant physical and psychological sacrifice on the part of the user. The consequences of the subsequent dissolution of their reality in the face of the 'real' is the reason anything beyond distraction and discomposure techniques should be strongly discouraged even for masters of genjutsu. Should a situation like this arise it is unlikely a practitioner will be able to resist the seduction of their own illusion.
--Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai (ANBU) Introductory Tactical Manual