Chapter Text
Lightening cracked wickedly through the sky, followed by a moment of silence so hollow it felt like the world itself held still. As though the world was shocked by what that flash revealed.
Then came the boom, the sound that always followed after the light and its destruction. The rain came down, an endless icy pour, falling relentlessly down into the darkness.
Falling down to where there was no light, no hearth fires, no illuminating lanterns. Only the glimmer of what could be caught from the bone white moon in the watery reflections.
There was blood too, mixed into the rain. Leaking out of the doors, out of the hall, down into the mud of the street. Mixing with the black of the muck until the eye could pull neither apart in the darkness.
Everything was black now, black and black and only black, save for the ethereal white shimmer of the reflected moonlight.
The animals wandered back into the open doors of the hall, through the open gates, through the endless rain and the thick sucking mud. The animals were calm, it was as though they could not smell what happened inside that hall. As though they were indifferent to the crime. As though they had known to expect it.
‘You’ve chosen to damn yourself and live a cursed existence.’
It was the right thing to do.
Wasn't it?
Wasn't it?
It was something that had to be done. Some that had already happened and as such it was something that could never be undone. He could see that now, the destiny in it, how there had never been another option
He had miscalculated and would not be the only one to pay for that. The only choice that he had now was to keep walking, to bear the weight of the crime that he had chosen for himself.
His heart burned.
The rain was ice cold, he was bloodless.
Empty in a way that also would never be undone, despite being bloodless the center of his chest burned and burned as though his heart was already condemned in hell. He had chosen that too for himself, just another miscalculation.
The fire buried into his still living flesh, the still beating pulse of his cursed heart.
Lighting flashed again, lighting his way, even when he didn’t look up to see it. His sword was filled with the violence of lighting, the secrets of moonlight. His sword was hanging loosely in his hand. Its weight was a burden that he could no more bear than he could let go of.
And the rain continued.
And the center of his chest burned with a fire that was not entirely his.
And what was done was done.
And could not be undone.
Spring came, summer after.
Time passed and Sasuke grew with it, but he didn't change. He didn't become something different. He stayed exactly as he was the moment that his life had been surrendered into the flames of destruction. He learned to fuel his body on hate like dirty lamp oil, to breathe in its toxic smoke. He could not forget, he would never forgive.
How could he when no one would let him?
He lingered in the emptiness of his family's hall. The boards of the walls would not let go of their stains where they had drunk the blood of the dead. They stayed stained with marron no matter what he did. Even the black blood stained dirt of the floor would not let him hide their ugliness beneath the rushes without staining them red in return.
Sasuke had learned to live a cursed half life. To lose hours staring into the ever changing tongues of the hearth flame. To day-dream of it like a secret little world inside a rabbit hole, to imagine what it would feel like to throw himself down inside.
He had learned to accept that he had died that day. That when his beloved brother had killed their family he had killed him as well. Now he was only a set of hands trapped in the wrong world. A heart that bled raw and red no different than those ghostly stains.
Just like him, the dead were not allowed to leave. They remained ever present shadows that had been pressed into the walls, trapped up in the eaves of the houses. They whispered to him, they snaked their fingers between his own when he wasn’t looking. Taking his hands and wrapping them so surely around the hilt of a sword.
They were confused things, fractured and broken, no more a part of this world than the child they had left behind them. Sometimes he wondered if they even remembered this world at all.
The ghosts were little more than single frozen thoughts. Lighting ice cold fires in the hearth and tending to them as though it were important magic he could not understand. Watching him, looking through him without recognizing who he was. Without recognizing that he once belonged to them, that he still did.
Sometimes he hated them. Hated them because he could never touch them and never be recognized by them. Hated them because they had only ever halfway left him and as such he could never leave them, only abandon everything else.
Other times, he only fell more in love with the wrong world, the place that they had gone too, the place that he could never touch with mortal hands.
And he would, he would go to them if it were not for a single word, the only instruction that they managed to hold on to. The only desire they had that death had not been enough to make them forget.
‘Kill’
‘Kill’
‘Kill’
And he would, for them, for it was the only particle of purpose left for him to hold on to.
Only he grew too slowly, too weakly. He never had energy or focus or drive. He tried to train himself with a sword, to let those ever watching ghosts guide his hand. He tried to remember the movements his Father had taught him.
But what little good it was when it was so hard to remember.
It is the curse of all children that time drags so endlessly slow for them.
He waited forever in the haunted silence of his house. For a full year he did his best to harvest his own strength but all the seeds he sewed only grew leggy and withered. There was nothing to harvest for his efforts, the ghost only seemed to grow more hateful and restless with each wasted day.
Then came the day when he could no longer feet their icy fingers over his own, the numbing touch of death. The berry sweetness to their breath as they whisper to him.
‘Kill’
‘Kill’
‘Kill’
And he could no longer feel as they weaved their words over and under into his hair braided like secrets. And he could think only of how the dark water of lakes and the stinging brilliance of fire as they called to him and how the dark of the woods and the gleam of the knife called to him and everything, everything became nothing more than a door that could take him from this world.
And he realized he would die here.
Just as surly as he would die to leave.
So he freed the animals and packed a bag with all the tiny pathetic burdens of human life and he set out to the road. To die alone at his brother’s blade just as all those he loved had done before him.
It didn't seem that knowing where to go would matter. He had been driven half mad and in his madness he believed that any road would lead to his brother. That the importance of the task that he had given himself demanded that much.
So he walked until he could no longer walk and then when he became too tired to continue he caught sparse unsatisfying hours of sleep in the indifferent arms of a maple tree.
When the sun bullied him awake, he walked again. He followed the road, the empty white space of the cloudless blue sky, until the raven darkness of night came again. And again. And he encountered no animals upon his journey more than the slightest fluttering of song birds and the crickets that buzzed until the noise of their screaming had blurred to nothing at all.
There was a thirstyness to it, not only for walking but all of the world was thirsty. Even the rivers looked back at him miserable, even their water stung at his cracked lips unsatisfied.
There was so much ache in him that it wasn't something that could be contained in a child's body. It hung around him like a ghostly aura, it dragged its heels into the thirsty dirt of the road and slowed his walking.
The world grew brighter by miles, burst into glistening sparks, like tiny bubbles across his vision. So much thirst as the world dried as it turned dull and dust yellow. Until somewhere at some point the world fell over, and darkness replaced the cursed dryness of the light.
“You awake.”
The darkness asked him, he filled his lungs, his body was in an agony that he wished he had been allowed to leave behind him. He could smell the comforting smell of fresh straw mixed with old wet dog and something wonderfully rich that made his belly ache.
He tried to sit up and open his eyes and the world spun around before it flipped heavily down around him.
“Whoa there kid.” The voice said. There was a shuffle behind his eyes the moment before a thick callused palm was pressed against his forehead. The gesture was so strangely warm, so strikingly kind and paternal that he screwed up his eye as what little moisture remained in him welled up all at once to the surface.
“Easy there,” the voice said, masculine and steady in the dark. Sasuke cracked open his eyes and looked up to a white haired man hanging over him. There was a crack from the fire, he could feel its warmth, the way it soaked all the way through him, somehow without touching any of the freezing aches inside.
The whole world had a blurred wet quality, like he had woken up in a painted image.
“I found you on the road.” The white haired man said. He had one eye that had been cut out of his face, the other was dark and tired and kind equally.
It looked like he was in a simple single room hut, it was clean but nearly barren. Sasuke was on the man's straw mattress, there was a fire going, a cast iron pot with curling benevolent steam. The smell of it was full of fat and salt, consuming Sasuke with a desire he had thought he could no longer feel.
Sasuke didn't speak, he just held the gaze of that one eye. The man didn't look away either, it felt important, not to be the one who looked away first. It felt like they could have stayed that way for life times but Sasuke's exhausted body growled out for whatever was simmering in that pot and like that the spell between them was broken.
The man smiled, the look wrinkled up his face in a way that was surprisingly trustworthy. It made Sasuke realize that besides the grey of the man's hair it was only the weight trapped in his eye that made him look old.
“I thought you'd be hungry.” The man said, “how about we make a trade, I'll give you something to eat and you tell me who you are and what you're doing here?”
His pride told him to get up and walk out of the man's house. It told him that he didn't need to listen to his tired body, that he didn't need to fall so easily into the traps of comfort. But the soup, its smell was a temptation too powerful to be rejected.
“Fine.”
The soup was full of chicken meat and vegetables. It hit his body in waves of pleasure, hot and salty and the most delicious thing he could ever remember eating. The man gave him a heel of crusty bread and the moment he stared at it there was no stopping until he felt sick with the fullness. He felt bigger too as though he had been transformed by it.
The man ate with him but mostly he just watched Sasuke eat. There was something of a sad tenderness about him. There was a moment of silence after they were done. Sasuke could see how he had not held up his end of the bargain, how the man was still waiting. He didn't want to tell this man anything about himself, only that wasn't fair at all was it?
There were laws of hospitality, just as binding as any oath, Sasuke knew that. He understood the way it would dishonor him and his parents to break them.
“Go home Sasuke.” The man said before he spoke. He didn't know how this strange man knew who he was. He realized he didn't care.
“I won't.”
“You're just a child, you can't fight him if that's what you think you're doing.” The man said like this too he already somehow knew.
“I won't go back”
He didn't know how to explain it, the ghosts, the blood that could never be washed clean, the cold of the other world that had soaked all the way through his bones. The way that the hall had been so consumed with death, so utterly obsessed with it that he was too. That he ached everyday to die before he had ever been given a chance to live.
How he was so certain that wasn’t life at all.
Instead he said nothing.
The man sighed.
“I can't change your mind.” He said, there was an almost startling amount of respect in that. Sasuke didn't know what to do about that, no adult had ever respected his convictions before.
“No,” he said, looking back to his empty bowl of soup. “No you can't.” The man scratched his wild uncombed grey hair and frowned.
“Then what should I do with you Sasuke?”
“Let me go, I have a man to kill-”
“-And what a job you've done of it so far, all on your own, you've already made it to the part where you die on my doorstep.” There was something playful and injured in the man’s voice.
Sasuke said nothing.
“You don't need anyone.” The man said facetiously. Sasuke felt the world blur, he felt his throat close because it wasn't true. It wasn't that he didn't need anyone, it was just that he didn't have the option. The truth was he needed someone, anyone, so, so ,badly.
The truth was without someone life was just dying in slow motion.
The man looked at him seriously. His dark brows pulled down to his one good eye. Old and tired and so horrible and sad all at once.
“I have my own feelings about the Uchiha, maybe it's not right for me to decide.”
So that was it, he was just going to let him go back out onto the road. It was what Sasuke had asked for, what he wanted, yet it still felt like a fate worse than death. He was about to get up, why put off the inevitable? Why linger in this strange sad kind man's doorway? When the man spoke up again.
“Let's leave it to an impartial third party to decide.”
Sasuke wanted to ask what the hell that meant when a large dog walked around behind him. He was a dark hunting dog, one who looked just as scared, battered and bed tangled as the one eyed man did. The dog looked at Sasuke through tired, bloodshot eyes as though he had just been unkindly woken up from a nap.
“Well then bull, what do you think we should do with the kid?” The one eyed man asked the dog, the dog let out a low tired moan before flopping himself down into Sasuke's lap.
“Well then,” the man said as the dog looked up at Sasuke and swept the floor with his tail in its approval. ”looks like you're staying.”
The man lived in a hovel in the woods and even though he had said that he had found Sasuke on the road. The truth was the path that led from the house to the road was incredibly far, long and winding and no more laid down through the forest then a game trail. He must have carried Sasuke, through these winding trees, all this way through the green of the undergrowth.
What Sasuke couldn’t understand was why?
What would make a man like that go so far?
He never asked and in return the man never told him. He only nursed him to health, indifferent and uncomplaining as though he were a long lost member of the man’s family. The man never told him his reasons, he never told him how it was he knew him or what his opinions on his family were, he never even gave Sasuke his name.
Was he hoping that Sasuke would ask?
Sasuke never did so instead the man just welcomed him into the house, fed him and treated him like he was just another of the many dogs that roamed unsupervised around the woods. Half wild but still always coming home like clockwork to share in the end of day meal.
Sasuke felt like that too, just another stray dog, unleashed but still not leaving. Wandering away but always running back to the sound of his own name.
“Can you hold a sword?” the man asked him one day, they were standing at the edge of a wide clear river. It was the place where the man collected his water, the trip was long and slow, but so were the days, there was so much time to waste on such simple human things.
Sasuke didn’t answer, he just squatted down on one of the high rocks that created a natural border around the river and squinted into the dryness of the sunlight.
“You’ll have to know to kill that man.” The one eyed man reminded him patiently, filling his pots. Bull climbed up onto the rock beside him, leaning his weight into him comfortable and warm.
“I know.” Sasuke said after a long moment.
“That’s good.” The man said with that smile, the one that was both warm and sad. There was another long moment. The river rushed over itself, churning formlessly below him.
“Show me, Sasuke”
The man knocked the blade out of his hand, again, it was relentless. It wasn’t even close, in fact the man was just standing there as though he wasn’t paying attention at all.
“If you're going to try to come at me, you’ll have to come at me with real intent to kill.” the man reminded him in a bored voice. He had been, he had been trying for days, it was so frustrating that the gap in skill between them was so vast that the man probably couldn’t even tell the difference.
“Don’t sulk kid, just pick up your sword.”
Sasuke did as he’s told, not because he is told of course. Only because it was the only way to keep chipping away at this man. Sasuke gripped his sword and attacked again, the man didn’t even bother blocking. He just stepped out of the way dodging him as easily as if they had already practiced this before.
Even the dogs that had collected all around them to watch didn’t seem the least bit worried that he would harm their master.
The one eyed man without looking, twisted like a branch in the wind, somehow always nowhere near Sasuke's sword. The man yawned with a muted apology, and the dogs watching all around them followed suit. All of it would seem almost dizzyingly lazy, if Sasuke wasn’t panting for breath and sweating through the wool of his coat.
The man didn’t even lift his own sword once as he easily kicked the sword out of Sasuke's hand sending it back down into the mud. Seething Sauske swore to himself that he will never show the man the respect of asking him what his name was.
“You're really bad at this you know?” The man asked him in a voice that was almost playful but still managed to do everything to tear apart at Sasuke's last shreds of dignity. For a moment he hated him, all the way down into his boots. Despite all hospitality, despite that this man had given him nothing aside from unconditional kindness.
“Mah, mah, don’t look so scary, Sasuke.” The mad man said with that grating smile of his, “let’s have some lunch and then try again.”
And so they did, and he tried and tried and tried.
And though he didn't notice he was getting better.
Rain comes, leaves fall.
Winter passes in a flurry of snow and the crunching of permafrost.
Spring returns with blossom heads and the singing of birds and Sasuke stronger than he once was. He was always getting stronger, he was changing into something different, a dirt road torn up by the tracks of wild dogs running amok. Rain water pooling in the paw prints left behind and in it things grow.
He prayed every day to remember his hatred. He meditated constantly on the idea, whispering his ghostly instructions over and over and over through the long darkness of the forest nights.
‘Kill’
‘Kill’
‘Kill’
He was afraid that he'd forget. The same way that he had one day in the summer heat and the snapping click, click, click of flying grasshoppers he accidentally asked the man ‘who he thought he was?’ and in doing so learned his name.
Kakashi wasn’t a stable foundation, he could never be something that anyone could ever really count on. Not that he pretended to be. He was too haunted, he wore the curse of his haunting as something obvious and infectious.
Sasuke never asked him to explain, and in return Kakashi never asked Sasuke to leave and somehow years passed that way. Slipping out like the tide, quiet as a whisper.
And all the while Sasuke got stronger.
“I'm going to leave.” Sasuke said. It was winter, they were at the river, wet snow covered the ground all around them, heavy, dirty and horrible.
He had been meaning to say the words for ages, years even. Only they hadn't been something he was willing to commit to. It was always something to put off, a decision for later. He only said it now because he was starting to think, in those soft gentle moments between sleep and waking about what it might mean to stay.
He was starting to forget hatred.
“When?” Kakashi asked him as lightly as though he had not stayed in his life for years longer than he should have.
“When things thaw.” He said after a moment. They looked out over the water, it felt like one of them should say something. Only that neither of them knew how. It was so massive, Kakashi had become such a massive part of his life. He never should have let that happen but there was no way to undo it now,
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Then Kakashi took a giant gulp from the pot, it was something he always did after he finished filling it. He had a way of turning even the most mundane things into rituals full of obscured meaning. Sasuke felt the loss sudden and real like an arrow to the heart and turned away.
They both had really done the best they could not to learn to care about each other hadn’t they?
“I need to kill him.” He explained, though, why he didn't really know. After all, Kakashi already understood and accepted his reasons.
“You've gotten better.” He said. Sasuke didn't know what to say to that. Should he thank him, probably, he didn't.
“I don't know how to find him, he could be anywhere, he could be dead now for all I know.”
Kakashi sighed.
“There are ways to find anyone in this world.” Kakashi told him gravely.
“You know how?”
“It's not worth it.” Kakashi said, finally turning back to him, “I hoped you would see that on your own.”
“You can't change my mind.” Sasuke said there was another moment of stillness, of the freezing water trapped in the slush easing through his boots.
“That doesn't mean I have to help you,” Kakashi said, he sounded small, weak and so, so old.
“I didn't ask you to.”
“Sasuke.” Kakashi said there was a weight to him. Burdens that had rooted him in place since longer than Sasuke had known him. He whispered out like a secret. “You don't have to do this, you've sworn no oath.”
“My blood is my oath, I thought you understood that.”
Kakashi just sighed like he did, he looked out across the river, out to places he could not go to.
“Yes, of course I understand that”
Then the snow melted, neither of them said anything. Still they waited until the whole world had been thoroughly thawed for some time. Spring came again, the trees transformed from grey to green, leaf buds flowered from tight hard points on their branches. Still Sasuke hadn't left, Kakashi hadn't asked him to stay either. Still it felt like he was lingering in the man's doorway.
“I'm leaving at the full moon.” He told him, when still Kakashi hadn't mentioned it, or even acted as though anything would be different at all.
“Okay,”
“I just wanted you to be aware.” Sasuke said, he felt weirdly irritated but he didn't understand why. What did he want? Some kind of display of emotion at his leaving? How could he possibly expect that?
“Understood.” Kakashi said simply and then as an after thought he added “I have some business in town. Can you watch the dogs while I'm gone?”
This was perhaps the strangest thing Kakashi had ever asked him by some margin. Kakashi hardly ever had any business in town and certainly no one had ever done anything that could even generously be called ‘watching the dogs’.
“Watch them do what?”
“Ah, well you know, this and that.”
He waited for Kakashi, the sunlight was full and weak. It was bitterly cold in a way that refused to be dispersed no matter how closely he sat to the fire. He tried not to think about his family home. It should have been easy after all he had hardly spared a thought to it in years but I kept creeping back to him.
Clutching at him just like that ghostly spring cold.
The memory of those ghostly fingers, as they grasped at him as he had tried to sleep as a child. How he had never been sure then if they had been trying to pet his hair to comfort him, or to seize him by it. To throw him up from his rest. To demand as they always demanded.
‘Kill’
‘Kill’
He looked at his hands, they had become hardened, calloused from the sword work. Thick, wider and stronger than they had been then, but something inside him had become softened too. It was too easy, being here, being safe and comfortable. To never be alone, to know that there was always a set of eyes watching over you whether it was the dogs or Kakashi's old single eye.
He felt lost, stabbing and bleeding though. He wasn’t sure if it was for what he had now, or what he had been then.
‘Kill’
And it was good to leave, wasn't it?
There would always come a time when a person had to do away with childish things like comfort and friendship that bound them. Where they had to learn to dedicate themselves to something bigger, more important. Like honor, duty and justice.
There was a rush of sound, an excited chorus of dogs, running and barking. Greeting Kakashi as though he had been away from them for so much longer than the hours that it took to make his way to and from town. Sasuke got up from the fire side, he made his way out to the celebration and wondered if he would miss this too.
He gazed out into the undergrowth. Despite the sun and the endless track of washed out blue sky above them the woods remained dark and wet. Coils of ferns pushed up from the sweet dirty smell of the undergrowth, mushrooms and fungus blossomed unseasonably all along the belly of the pathway. In the distance a dark shadow was making its way closer amongst the trail and darting bodies of the dogs.
Kakashi indeed was back, he was riding on the back of the body of a black horse. It was beautiful, silky and shining black with a single small patch of white that ran from its forehead down to the tip of its nose and painted its hooves like boots.
“You have a horse.” Sasuke said. As Kakashi slowly meandered up into the clearing past the path. The one eyed man looked down at the horse under him as though he wasn't sure himself how it had got there.
“It would appear so.”
“Why?” Sasuke asked, there was no work here that needed a horse, no indication that Kakashi had ever desired one. He leveled Sasuke with a look like he thought he was being stupid as he eased himself out of the saddle and back down on to the ground.
“I wonder…” Kakashi said lightly, then he smiled when he saw that whatever his reasons were, they were still something that Sasuke didn't understand.
“-Ah well you see I've had this cute little stray around here who's decided it's time for him to leave...”
“Is it for me?” Sasuke asked, somehow it was both the only thing that made sense and still something impossible to understand. “You bought me a horse?”
“Ah yes, I did. You don't like her?”
“What?” Sasuke asked, how could he possibly not like her? Kakashi didn't say anything, he just gave Sasuke the space and silence to let it sink in.
“I thought you didn't approve of me leaving.”
“Yes, that's true I don't.” Kakashi said, “I know I can't stop you… I understand that it's something that you have to do for yourself. Take her, I’ve named her Chidori. It's no good to go alone on a journey like this and it will make me feel better knowing you have her to look out for you.”
“That's…” Sasuke could feel his throat closing up, his eyes flooding as if he might do something as embarrassing as cry, instead he looked away to the dogs still yapping and wandering in close. Licking at Kakashi’s hands to pet them, looking for Sasuke’s affection too.
“...I've made another decision.” Kakashi said after a moment his voice was heavy and grave.
“What's that?”
“I'm sending Pakkun with you.” Kakashi said. There was a moment of silence. Pakkun walked out from the rest of the pack just as seriously. As though he had already been debriefed on his task. He sat down and looked up at Sasuke knowingly.
“He'll lead you to someone who can help you find your brother. You'll need to bring them something of his and…”
“And?”
“I wouldn't tell you it's dangerous, I know you know that. I only hope that if you come to find that the hunt isn't worth the kill, you'll be a good boy and find your way home.”
As if he could ever bear such dishonor as that.
Sasuke looked away again and he could feel his throat closing again, a dam to the flood. Kakashi reached up and petted him on the head like he was just another of his dogs, he didn't know if it was meant to be a joke, still the gesture was so sweet it ached.
“...thank you.” He said, after life times had passed in the dull cold and he had regained control of himself. Kakashi smiled, old and sad and kind.
“Mah, mah, Sasuke, don't go soft on me now.”
He started down the road, back to his families abandoned and forsake hall. Chidori was a goddess on legs, he couldn't speak it but her company was a comfort. Her strength was already pulling at the reins of his own. Helping him walk the path to the place he had hoped not to return without bloody hands.
Pakkun followed along behind them. He was one of the smaller of Kakashi’s dogs but his size hadn’t held him back from taking control over the pack. He had old eyes just like Kakashi. The easy companionship between the two of them, the utter trust, the wordless obedience all spoke stories that had never been told to him.
His company was different, more watchful, more like Kakashi was here with him. There was a comfort to that yes, but also the unshakable feeling that he was still very much a child and should be treated as such.
The trees all around them were starting to grow back their leaves, there were crab apple and plum already breaking out their blossoms, dry green scented, with delicate white petals like a reminder of the already vanished snow.
The longer they continued down the road the more it became familiar. This part of the road was not something that he had seen since he was a child, he was surprised to find how much of the memory had baked itself inside him, stained deep under his consciousness.
The sky overhead was cloudless, an endless vibrant plane of blue but still he felt the creeping shivering cold seeping into him. The darkness that lingered in the bramble, that grew darker and more forsaken the longer they went. The woods all around them grew darker, the undergrowth creeped out into the packed dirt of the road consuming the trail. The trees had all transformed back from green to grey their dead branches pointing accusationally like skeletal fingers.
The branches were filled with old caterpillar nests that hung empty over him in thick clusters like cobwebs. He could feel it, soundless in the trees all around them. The watching, the haunted still half living thing that dragged the world to the door step of death. Chidori, stopped in place and turned him around as he urged her to step forward.
It wasn’t long now, the house was there, just a turn out into the overgrown road in the woods, just a hike beyond where they were now. He tried to urge her on and still she refused him. Pakkun sat and looked up at the two of them with old disappointed eyes like he was trying to tell Sasuke to get a hold of her.
He stepped off the horse and pet the white strip of her nose and whispered to her as soothingly as he could manage. As she slowly stopped her fidgeting. Pakkun scratched indifferently behind his ear.
Sasuke led her by the bridle down the small overgrown path, he did his best to show her that he was not afraid, it helped somewhat. Pakkun patiently followed up from the behind, as they walked.
It grew colder, darker. Darkness and sorrow clawed at his breast, his heart was somewhere in his throat. He both wanted so desperately to know what had happened to his home and was so afraid to see it for himself but he wouldn’t turn back. He would do what he had promised.
Then the trees finally parted and he could see it again, the familiar little collection of houses, the great hall standing there, spindly green things growing clean out of the thatch of the roof. Moss, so thick growing over everything like a layer of green snow. Twisting black berry vines that had woven its way through the buildings, their leaves dry and yellow brown, only the whips of their thorns holding on to life.
And he could feel them.
The unsettled dead, and their anger hanging over him.
He hung his head down humbly and prayed.
He entered into the hall, the rushes had long since rotted away but the stains of blood remained dark over the dirt of the floor.
As he entered into the house the fire lit in the hearth, igniting the long dead packed grey ashes, floating above them like the flames from another world. He stepped closer to the fire, broke a chair in the hall to throw the brittle wood inside needlessly just so that the fire would have something to consume.
“I’ve come back,” he told the fire, as he took a seat on the floor beside it. Pakkun wandered into the hall after him. He seemed unshaken by the ghostly fire but you didn’t make it far as a small dog without bravery.
The flame turned blue.
He heard the whistling howl of ghostly voices, there were so many voices. All of them whooshing in too fast from a world too far and too hollow to be understood. He waited, the screaming settled, and then started up anew in another gust. Pakkun stood beside him, pressed his side against Sasuke’s arm, he wasn’t sure which one of them was protecting the other.
‘Kill’
“Yes, I’ve come back to kill him.” Sauske said.
He held the gaze of the flame, it blazed, raising high above his seated head, licking black streaks against the walls. The screaming intensified cold like a winter storm but still it was all too loud, too muddled to be of any use at all.
And for a moment he felt outside of himself, for a moment he wondered how he had ever been able to live inside this house for even a moment.
“I need to find something of his, something that can help me find him.” He told the flames.
All at once they died, plunging him into darkness so quickly it stung his eyes. Then the fire lit back up with an intensity that had Sasuke and Pakkun both leaping away. Getting up to their feet and heading towards the door.
The flames crawled up the walls, the whole hall filled with horrible foul smelling black smoke. The two of them ran back out into the open air and weak spring sunlight. Chidori startled as they burst out, but when he turned back there were no flames, no smoke, only the vile smell of it, acid and deadly, suffocating like a blanket over them.
‘They don't want me here.’ A childish part of his heart complained. He buried down the pointless rejection of it. What did it matter what they wanted? He didn't want to be here either, in fact he was the one who had left first.
He felt the sudden weight of his task and the impossibleness of it. How was he supposed to find something that had once belonged to his brother? Even Pakkun wouldn't have been able to find the smell after so many years, he swallowed that fear down too.
He would do it because he had to. Because there had never been a second option and really it was as simple as that.
So he did.
He went back inside and searched the building to try to find anything familiar. He became so sure that he would know it, the moment he found it. The ghosts followed, angry, confused, lighting fires that never seemed to catch, screaming, freezing the earth and turning his fingers purple beneath his nail beds.
As the protection of the spring sun began to set Chidori stomped and brayed clouds of objection into the growing darkness. Pakkun came back in to find him and to bite his sleeve and drag him away.
He untied Chidori and told Pakkun to take her to the road. It was a mad thing to do, but it didn't feel mad. Not as he watched the two of them scamper down the trail, leaving him alone. The air grew colder as though their living bodies had been the only source of heat.
He decided that he would not leave this place until he had found what he had come here for. Not even when the silver whispers of ghostly bodies caught the light of the moon, like a weak transparent mist. Not when he could feel their icy dead breath against his cheeks familiar as home.
‘Kill’
They said, like even now they did not understand what he was trying to do. He spoke to them, if only to sooth the rough patches of his own battered nerves. He tried to explain.
It didn't do any good.
‘Kill.’
And in the witching hour, in the light of the wild twisting ghostly flames he found it. A box, buried beneath the upturned furniture and rotten blankets. He recognized it, the familiar ornate sides, the textural hand carved patterns. He lifted the lid and let it clatter against the blood stained packed earth of the floor.
Inside there was a carved bone amulet, a crows skull tied along a long leather cord. Though the leather of the cord had become stiff and brittle with moisture and time, the amulet had remained unchanged.
He remembered how his brother had carved it himself, how he had been so jealous that Itachi already had the dexterous fingers to make something so beautiful.
He had forgotten that, the pettiness of his siblings' love. How he had admired his brother with a deep bone aching envy that could only come from love. He felt like two different people, forced to share the same body.
That the breakage of who he was had been going on for so long unnoticed that now that he was conscious of it he didn't know what to do.
He sat there for a long time in the short freezing haunted dark before he realized he didn't have any reason to stay here anymore.
“When I come back, he'll be dead.” He told the hall. The flames raged up angry crawling up the walls igniting the thatch of the roof, making him cough to the terrible acidic smoke.
‘Kill’
The ghosts screamed as indistinct as a storm.
“Yes, I promise you that.” He said. The beams of the roof cracked under the weight they bore, under the sudden heat of the flames. Though he wondered if that was only illusionary too.
“I swear that to you, that is my oath.” He yelled over the howling inferno all around him. His breath still somehow made white clouds against the black of the smoke.
“I'll lay you to rest, I'll set you free.” He told them.
And he would because there wasn’t another option for him.
There never had been.
He'd set all of them free.
He walked through the black wildness of the trail back to the road and when he broke free of the bushes he was surprised to find that he could see the full expanse of stars dotting the sky. So beautiful and free that it was unbearable to witness.
Bright crystal white, daffodil yellow, cherry blossom pink and forget-me-not blue. Beautiful and unreachable, Calm like a benevolent witness. And he tasted the vile acid of the ghostly smoke like a curse that had sunk through his skin.
And he felt the great chasm between himself and the world.
Pakkun and Chidori were both there as witnesses too, both beautiful under the starlight. He showed them both the bone carved amulet of the crow skull. Pakkun let out an old dog's grunt of approval and turned away, leading them down the road.
To things yet unknown.