Chapter Text
He found he had let himself fall right into a trap.
Sasuke was sitting in the booth at the Korean barbeque, he was pressed against the window with Naruto blocking his exit. In a way it felt like an appropriate metaphor for what his life had become.
The trap, with all his exits blocked and no chance of escape. Would have been bad enough as it was but the company made it unbearable. Team seven was aggressively mustering up a lot of noise as they flitted from one inane topic to the next. Even without his help. Though in truth they had never really needed his help.
These days Sasuke was silent as a ghost and as hungry as a ghost and as distant as a ghost. He felt like he could have been on the other side of the restaurant's glass window for how distant he felt. Or perhaps, pressed between the two panes of glass in his own empty and untouchable world. trapped without escape like the desiccated husk of an insect staring into the restaurant aching and helpless to get in or even just leave.
His feet felt numb.
All he ever felt anymore was numb.
“You can’t be late to everything and so cheap, you can only pick one!” Sakura reasoned at volume, green eyes as light as sliced melon. She was pointing a finger directly in Kakashi’s face. To be fair the yelling wasn’t her fault, her tone respectfully had to be that shrill to be heard over Naruto’s laughing.
Kakashi just raised his hands in long suffering mock surrender. Naruto looked over at Sasuke as stealthy as he could, which for a ninja was honestly pathetic. He’d seen any number of civilians doing a better job of covert watching. So Sasuke took pity on him and returned the look. Naruto’s posture froze for a moment, an opened mouth grin already plastered to his face.The grin, though cartoonish, was only ever half fake, it always reached his eyes. Under the table he kicked Sasuke’s foot.
Sasuke felt sick, his head was aching. So he let it rest against the cold glass of the window and looked away.
“Let's get lots of meat!,” Naruto said, though it was more of a whooping yell. His gaze was still warm like a patch of sunlight on Sasuke's face. “The good stuff, we never get the good stuff.”
“I’m game, as long as you don’t leave me with the bill…again,” said Sakura, half jovial but somehow with a real threat of violence woven in.
Sasuke looked at her while she studied the menu, remembering not too long ago when one of these team seven lunches had been enjoyed to the point where a threat of violence had turned real and Naruto and him both had been kicked out to fight in the street. Come to think of it, they never had made it back inside and Sakura had indeed been left with the bill.
Naruto had paid her back, surely. Though looking at the way he was sweating in his seat now maybe he had only talked about paying her back.
“Mah, mah, Sakura-chan you really are such a good friend.” said Kakashi, eagerly thrusting his own neck on the chopping block. He was immediately cut down with a murderous glare.
“Sasuke!” Naruto sang out bringing the menu with him as he casually leaned in too close. He was using Sasuke as a rather obvious defection tactic, also pathetically employed. For what was now becoming his increasingly apparent guilt for not paying her back.“What do you want, Sasuke?”
Sasuke turned away from the window. Naruto could be surprisingly patient, that is to say annoyingly persistent. Ignoring him never seemed to get very far, Sasuke had learned from his prolonged imprisonment in this idiotic trap to pick his battles. He looked at the menu and pointed at a few things. It was hard to read, everything was hard to read these days.
He suddenly remembered the way it felt to be slowly losing his vision, how it felt to pretend that he was fine. Everything slipped away for a moment like he was in a little boat drifting away from shore.
The desperation as everything became unreachable.
Then.. at some other point.. surrender.
He tried to focus…sometimes, he really was trying, wasn’t he?
He was fine.
Was he fine?
Yes, for fuck sake he was fine.
Though he had his suspicions, there were little signs, hints that there might be something that was... Not fine. The fear was there, blossoming inside him like a whole garden of little pains, he didn’t really understand it. There was nothing to be afraid of anymore but sometimes it just was there.
Like how Naruto sitting between him and the door made him feel like a desperate animal. How if he let it take up any space at all in his head he’d chew off his own leg to escape it. Which was ridiculous, he was being ridiculous. He pointed at the washroom and a little too slowly Naruto got out of his way, just long enough for the fear to transform into rage and then for it to slide uncomfortably back into fear again.
He was fine.
As long as he never let himself think about it he was fine. He went to the bathroom, though his feet were numb, though his legs felt unsure. Though his eyes refused to pay attention, He didn’t let it show. He could still feel that patch of sunshine that was Naruto's gaze on the back of his neck.
It was suffocating.
He was fine.
He had been fine until six months ago, when on a whim he had tried to slit his own throat. Ever since then his life had been falling apart. The near miss, the event, the attempt, whatever you called something like that. It had shaken him, like his body suddenly now knew what he was capable of and that it couldn’t trust him anymore. His body felt like it wasn’t his anymore. His mind wasn’t his anymore. Whatever he had been before that moment had fallen apart.
Everything was different.
He was different. It was impossible to explain.
And god if he could go back and just put the kunai down and walk away, if he had just stopped…
He’d woken up as the thirteen year old boy that he had once nearly drowned to death under a waterfall on the day he first tried to leave this fucking town. The exact person that he promised himself that he would never have to be again.
His problem was that he suddenly realized that he had never stopped being that person.
Then there were the questions like, why he had done it. Things that there hadn't been an answer for because there hadn’t been a reason. That was also something that was impossible to explain. It had been like his body had just done it on its own. But that wasn’t the kind of thing that anyone could understand, so they just kept asking and asking.
What could he say? There wasn’t anything to say. So he didn’t say anything. He’d been fine. After the war there had been a world to rebuild, and he, even with only one arm, was nothing if not a workhorse. There had been a job for him, a place for him. No one had forgotten the choices that he had made but he didn’t want them to. It had been a smoother transition back into society then anyone could have imagined for him. Smoother than he deserved. There had been the promise that as long as he was useful they would always find a use for him.
Like a sword, trading hands.
Made with no other purpose than to cut.
If he could only go back… It had been a mistake looking back on it. He understood that now, but it felt like something that had happened in a dream. Like something that had happened to someone else. Like something impossible and at the same time inevitable. He felt childishly like he didn’t deserve to be held accountable, like it was unfair.
But he didn’t bother saying that either. Now everything in his life was just the aftermath and aftermath and aftermath. If he could only go back…
If he could only go back, he would have cut deeper.
Trapped in the Korean BBQ, he looked into the bathroom mirror. His own face looked strange, almost unrecognizable. That long pink scar across his neck like it had always been there. His brother's eyes, his mothers hair, all of him just pieces which didn’t belong to him.
And in his mind his fear said: ‘I bet you Itachi can still see you from those eyes.’ And the world felt heavy like a wet blanket over him, and he just blinked and blinked and felt nothing.
He slowly, slowly dragged himself into a stall and promptly failed to throw up. He had to jam his fingers down his throat to get anything more substantial than air out of him. It felt like he was being turned inside out. He was fine. He was better. He was better, Like finally some of the pressure was being let out. He felt better, really, his stomach finally settled.
He was fine.
His head aching, spinning like sharingan. His mind replayed and replayed the body memory of how it felt but he couldn’t tell what it was, the thoughts wouldn’t fully form. The fear was there, burning inside him and he wondered for the millionth time when he had become such a crybaby.
Why his was being so fucking melodramatic.
When he opened the stall, Naruto was standing by the doorway to the bathroom blocking the exit. The look on his face was something like a kicked puppy, like he thought Sasuke was doing any of this just to hurt him. The fear turned to rage, impotent and directionless. He stuffed it down and turned away from him.
Naruto’s eyes were very blue and very pretty, he realized. It wasn’t really his thought, the thought didn’t really seem to belong to anyone. It was just something that lived there in the air between them. Pretty eyes on a pretty face, all standing in the way, holding him down like a chain around his neck.
Naruto grabbed his arm, it was a very firm grip. Almost as though he thought that Sasuke would try to run away from him again. Almost as angry and as violent as Sasuke felt. It felt good. Calmed him a little bit. Making him want things, Naruto’s hands pushing him, gripping him, forcing him around. Forcing him to his knees.
The feeling rose and popped to nothing like a bubble. He closed his eyes as his mind slipped into a fantasy of how it would feel for those hands to punch him in the face. He remembered exactly what it felt like.
How it would feel to have Naruto’s white square teeth biting into him, something new and exciting. His grabby fingers grappling, tearing. What it would feel like to…
“Let’s go back.” Naruto said in a voice that felt far too mature coming from him, he hated that. When Naruto acted like an adult it only made him feel more like he was acting like a child. Naruto’s strong hand squeezed at his arm so he let him lead him back to the table.
“He’ll have to want to get better,” said Kakashi reasonably. Both of his former students weren’t listening to him. He understood that, neither of them were ever able to be very reasonable about Sasuke.
“He just needs to know how much we missed him and how much everyone wants him to be here.” said Naruto unreasonably, his blonde eyebrows knitted down seriously.
But even Naruto couldn’t believe in him enough to make him better.
“He just needs to snap out of it.” said Sakura, clenching her fist to show how much she would love to be the one to do it for him.
But if anything violence had only helped to get them into this mess.
Kakashi didn’t say anything, he couldn’t, because in his heart he wasn’t able to be reasonable about Sasuke either.
The problem was, that sometimes there wasn’t anything that you could do for a person. That sometimes they had to do it for themselves. The problem was that Kakashi loved his students, even Sasuke. The problem was that Kakashi was struggling to see him more than the boy who tried to kill his beloved student.
To see the boy beyond the fact that he was the same person who had now turned a blade against everyone on team seven.
“He’s going to try to do it again.” Sakura said, only because Naruto didn’t have the heart too and Kakashi wasn’t completely sure they shouldn’t let him.
“I’ll watch him.” Naruto said, like it was a lifetime commitment, because it was. He didn’t have to think about it, he already had. If the look on his face was anything to go by then asking him if he was sure would be ridiculous.
“Right, well then I think that it might be time for you to consider moving,” Kakashi said, shuffling some papers uselessly on his desk for the visual effect. “There’s been some houses put up in the west side of the village that I think you should consider.” He said passing over a single sheet of paper.
The house that he had selected for Naruto had once belonged to his parents before the village had been destroyed. It had been more or less recreated to what it had once been when they had rebuilt and Kakashi had held onto it for him ever since. Not that he would ever tell Naruto. The thought alone made him feel queasy. He hadn’t even been able to bring himself to offer the house until an excuse had presented itself for him.
“Kami knows how the two of you will be driving each other crazy enough without having to crowd into that shoebox you call an apartment.” He said dismissively as Naruto read over the paper.
“Kaka-sensei!!” Naruto squealed with uncomfortable wet eyes as he lunged around the desk. Yes, he would never tell him about the previous owners, that would be for the best.
“Do you really think that Sasuke will agree to this?” asked Sakura curiously.
“As far as I’ve heard he doesn't have much of a say on anything these days.” Answered Kakashi with an eye crinkling and his lap full of Naruto.
In the end at the Korean BBQ restaurant they all ended up paying the bill evenly, except for Kakashi. Who conveniently found himself having to run unexpectedly on official Kage business before the bill made it to their table. With a brisk self depreciative ’for old time sake’ that did nothing to soften the blow before he poofed out of existence.
Naruto and Sakura grumbled as they walked through the streets on their way home. The sun was setting soft pink into impossible blue. Konoha could still be beautiful even with its constant rotation of construction and those gaudy carved mountains. Sasuke watched as the powder soft light washed over the mountain, over a face that looked like Naruto more and more, everyday.
Beautiful but ridiculous.
Sakura left them with a quick familiar half hug to Naruto's side and a respectful nod in Sasuke's direction. As she turned down her own street, Naruto was telling some long meandering story about something or other, his voice warm and scratchy like the smell of tobacco. Sasuke felt good, his body was so full of Naruto’s expensive meat, It hurt.
Sometimes just being here hurt, sometimes it was all so easy to remember the things that he had left behind. The long, absolutely common days of his childhood, the blood freezing blizzards of the disasters but also those heartbreakingly long summer days spent catching cats, training and bathing in the river under the heat of the sun.
Somehow out of the two, it wasn’t the misery that was painful.
They made their way back to the house with its fresh built wood fence and creeping greenery already latching onto the side. It was a nice place, though Naruto had never really had a home before and didn’t know how to make one. Besides from just letting his stuff spill out into every room. Sasuke tried not to let it bother him, he’d been given more than enough, and certainly more than he deserved.
He kept telling himself that this was temporary, he kept telling himself that he had nowhere to go. He tried to keep to his room, to live small enough that he could pack up the whole of his life at a moment's notice. Yet as the months spun on, sometimes he wondered if he would not think back on this as one of the happiest times of his life.
But sometimes he was suspicious, that maybe he wasn’t alright at all. Maybe everything was actually very, very wrong. He couldn’t decide.
The moment that they got through the door, just after hearing Naruto’s little ‘tadaima’ he felt suddenly tired. Suddenly, like he had to be alone, like he couldn’t stand to look at Naruto’s face for another second. He kicked his shoes off and moved past him to go up the stairs to his room.
“Bye” said Naruto, sounding very small. Right before his door closed over the sound.
He’d cut through his voice box. At first the reason that he couldn’t speak could be pinned down quite easily to that injury. Then, when it had healed he found that there was still nothing he had to say, so he just didn’t. It felt like he had damaged his brain and severed that thin little part that was able to translate thoughts into words, the thoughts were there, just the words couldn’t come.
The nurses told him that he was fine, they told him that physically there was nothing wrong with him. They looked past him when they spoke to him, and he looked through them in turn. He had become untouchable. Everything had taken on a level of unreality like he was looking through the wrong side of a genjutsu.
It was Sakura who ruined that, with her hand uncomfortably pressed against the injured flesh of his throat. With her chakra like a choking mass that he could barely swallow around, it tasted sticky, botanic green like tea tree oil, like wet fallen autumn leaves rotting in the yard or walnut husks left to turn black and bitter, it clung to him like honey.
‘There's no reason not to expect that you will make a full recovery’
She told him. She was patient, and calm and had the authority, the gravity, that made everything she said feel real and massive. He hated her, hated that she was something different then the annoying girl he remembered.
‘There was damage of course, but lucky for you, healing jutsu was made for that kind of kunai damage.’
Sakura’s warm hands, were somehow only more unpleasant when she pulled them away from him. She touched her instruments, took his pulse, took his blood pressure. Looked into his eyes.
Itachi’s eyes.
He could still hear them in his mind, ‘There was a lot of blood loss, but they got to him in time.’ and of course. ‘He was lucky.’ like he should be glad.
Sakura washed her hands, crossed her legs and went over her findings with him. She wasn’t really Sakura, he wasn’t really Sasuke, they were just a doctor and a patient. They could be anybody, they were strangers and maybe that had always been the case.
Then she paused, there was something else and his honed intuition screamed in his face telling him to run, his heart stuttered, his stomach pitched with acid. She got up to leave, hesitated and looked directly at him as though seeing him for the first time.
“If you had done it, you would have destroyed Naruto.” she said and his heart slammed into his chest as if he had been running at full tilt and been thrown to the ground.
For a second he couldn’t breathe. He wanted to say something. His mind was crowded with things that he wanted to say, but he couldn’t so he didn’t, he just met her eyes. Green and full of both love and hate, and he had no idea how he landed between the two with her, maybe he never had.
“There was a time.” She said, because now he was listening.
“in the chunin exams, the second one. When you broke the arms of that one boy from sound…and I thought…” she trailed off though it had been there somewhere inside her, for a long time waiting to come to the surface.
“I think that was the first time I saw fully what you are. I didn’t want to believe it… I didn’t…not for a long time… Isn’t it stupid that I still love you?” she said finally. He opened his mouth but he couldn’t speak, he could only hold her eyes.
She lingered in the doorway for a long time, but finally she folded up her equipment and left. Completely on her own terms.
“You need to rest.” She said, but what she really meant was that there were things that she had to do now that were more important than him, and she was right, and he was grateful for that.
He woke up in the middle of the night, it was silent and the darkness closed over him as inescapable as a sand coffin. He couldn’t breathe, he panicked thinking that there was something wrong with his throat but there wasn’t. There never was, after all there wasn’t anything physically wrong with him.
Eventually his breath came back to him all in a rush, as though all along all he had to do to breathe was just to want it badly enough. The night air was stifling hot, he had to go… had to do something. So, silently he crept out of bed, down the stairs and out of the house.
Now that he was moving he felt better, the choir of screaming voices inside his mind slowed and quieted down. He tucked his clenched hand in his pocket and wandered. The street lights buzzed overhead, fireflies flashed and the air felt better, more open. His body started to relax, he made it down to the docks at the pond and stood looking out over the black water.
In a moment of nostalgia he blew a fireball holding it inside his chest till his lungs ached and the fire ball came out in a blinding flash of blue. Then he sat down on the wooden boards to watch the steam blow over the surface. He hung his legs over the side of the dock and felt his toes slip through the water's shimmering surface.
When he was a child they had never reached the water, it was funny the way that he still felt like a child now. Still somewhere in his subconscious he was waiting for his Father and his big brother to notice him. They never would, everyone was dead now. Sometimes it felt like they had never existed, sometimes it felt like both at once.
Still right now, everything felt like it was in miniature. He let himself feel like a giant and lay back looking up into the expanse of stars above him.
He let his eyes fall down from the heavens and slowly backwards back down to earth, he had to arch his back to tilt his body for his gaze to land full back to the hillside. He wasn’t surprised at all to see Naruto standing there. It was so dark he couldn’t see his eyes. The daylight blue obscured in shadow. He sat up and lifted his arm in the air. ‘Why are you just standing there idiot?’ he thought out, but didn’t turn around even when he felt the dock dipped with the added weight.
“I’m not supposed to be letting you wander around you know?” Naruto whined scratching at the nape of his neck as though he thought Sasuke would tell on him. He gave him an assessing look and lifted a single skeptical eyebrow.
“Hey! you're the one that got yourself in this mess, for all I know you came to drown yourself in this pond or something.” God he was so honest. He looked into Naruto’s truly guileless eyes, the light speckling of freckles over the bridge of his nose like a reflection of starlight.
Reflection of star light, he really did give himself brain damage.
Before slitting his own throat he’d never had… well perhaps… but not like this… well whatever this was, these feelings. This hungry thing that lived in his brain now, yes, fine, it had been in there somewhere, he remembered that but it had been stuffed away in a little box for so long that he couldn’t hear it’s stupid thoughts or feel it’s stupid feelings. Then one stupid little mistake and it was free running wild inside him, just like every other horrible thing in him that he couldn’t control any more.
He rolled his eyes and looked away, something he learned that Naruto took to have the same effect as calling him a moron. Naruto growled under his breath a sound that went immediately to the hungry thing and made it hungrier. And as he tried to cram that back into the box that was so broken it couldn’t hold it any longer, Naruto cannon balled into him and knocked them both into the water.
Sasuke broke the surface, in the same moment that Naruto did. Naruto was having trouble laughing while treading water. Sasuke lifted himself up onto the surface of the water just enough to jump on Naruto and try to drown him. They wrestled for a bit each more trying to push the other under then genuinely spar.
Eventually, Sasuke swam down and Naruto followed after him. They came back up on the underside side of the dock where it was very dark and there was a soft clicking of the dock making a seal over the top of the water. The water was shivering cold, cold enough that he could feel Naruto's body heat beside him. The excitement of their game was suddenly gone, and he was so intensely aware of the other body beside him that any kind of thought he tried to keep together disintegrated.
It was too dark to see the daylight blue in his eyes but Naruto was looking at him like he could feel the same intense awareness. God Naruto could probably feel the way that Sasuke's heart was racing, it must be sending ripples through the water. That was so embarrassing he wanted to fucking die. Sasuke raised his hand up and slipped his fingers through one of the boards of the dock to help keep his body afloat and Naruto came just a tiny bit closer.
The look in his eyes was positively beastial, dark and shimmering in the low light. Naruto inched closer and closer so slowly that it felt like Sasuke’s heart would explode. Then he dipped his face under the water just enough so that he could take a mouthful of water and blow it into Sasuke's face.
When they made it back to the shore Naruto was laughing again and Sasuke felt like his legs might not work to be able to hold him up. The night air froze their clothes over them like horribly binding second skin. Sasuke blew himself a fire jutsu that helped dry him a little and when Naruto whined
“Hey! just help me out here.” He gave him his middle finger.
He wasn’t all that surprised to find out that he was gay, just in the same way that he wasn’t all that surprised to find out that his gayness seemed to be directed at Naruto. In truth both of those things had been living in his subconscious for as long as he could remember. It was only that his body had lost the good sense of leaving those things in that untouchable dead space inside him that disturbed him. There was no more dead space inside him anymore, it was all so horribly alive.
There it was, ‘gayness’ just another unnecessary problem in a life time of unnecessary problems. Though he was suspicious that he would have felt the same way had his interest turned to women.
Of all the things that he had never wanted in his life, having an interest in sex was really remarkably high on his list. Though he had suspicions it was there, somewhere at the back of his mind creeping around being gross and that he had not actually dodged that bullet quite as well as he had hoped. So no he wasn’t surprised.
Maybe if that was all that he seemed to break free from his deep sub conscience then it would have been something close to manageable, it turned out that had not been the case however.
Failing to kill himself had also intimately acquainted himself with his inner child. With all the horrible insecurity and lack of emotional regulation that came with it. He would find himself suddenly becoming the seven year old who was still freshly raw from losing his family, remarkably emotionally unchanged from that time. Only now in an eighteen year old body with one arm and his dead brother's eyes grafted into his skull.
It was honestly pathetic, gayness included.
He woke up in the hospital, his body hurt and his throat was very dry.
Sakura was there at his bed, her honey dew green eyes wide, wet and pleading. Somewhere by the wall Kakashi was looking down on them. He opened his mouth beneath the mask but Sakura stopped him. So it just hung open there, a thumb print divot under the cloth of his mask.
“There was some damage to your voice box so don't try to use it just yet.” She said. She pushed some paper and a pen into his hands. She was shaking. When he tried to sit up. He felt very strange like he was somewhere else watching this through someone else's eyes.
“You're alright now, you're going to be alright. But we need to know what happened, Sasuke please write down what you remember, we need to know who did this to you.” she said.
He didn’t understand, he tried to focus, tried to figure out what the hell she was saying but it just wouldn’t fall into place. He looked up to Kakashi, the slight curve of his frown barely visible. The look of sharp and careful understanding on his face.
Then he realised, Oh…oh it wasn’t him that didn’t understand, she didn’t understand. He took the pen from her and had to concentrate on drawing the single word.
‘Me’
She just stared at it for a second, he could see in her eyes that she still didn’t understand. That didn’t matter because Kakashi did, he always had. He swooped in like an eagle perched on the edge of a building would swoop in to catch a smaller more fragile song bird. Sakura was shaking.
Kakashi scooped her up in his wings, and..
“What does this mean?” She asked, Kakashi wrapped himself around her and tried to shush her. “What do you mean ‘me’? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?” she yelled trying to get up but Kakashi was already there all around her shushing her like she was a horse spooked by a snake at its heels. He was holding her steady so she wouldn’t lean over and shake him. It all felt far too private and intimate to have to watch.
Sasuke looked away and watched the wall until he heard the click of the door.
He listened as Kakashi took her seat, it was just the two of them now. Kakashi let out a sigh. It was long and world weary. He could hear the clock tick. Kakashi said nothing. Sasuke couldn’t even if he wanted to, so he didn’t.
The clock ticked. He watched the wall, it seemed to move, the texture of the wall breathing with each breath he took.
The clock ticked. He refused to look at Kakashi, he couldn’t, not because he was afraid it was just… Something, something else.
The clock ticked, his body relaxed and he realized how tense he was. It was almost painful how he had been holding his body, how had he not known?
“I could have done more.” said Kakashi, it was so quiet and such an immensely stupid thing to say that Sasuke felt just as shocked after it happened as he would have if Kakashi had just told him he was the one who slit his throat.
The clock ticked and he wanted to tear it out from the fucking wall.
Kakashi stood up, the sound that he made was so loud that Sasuke doubted that he had spoken in the first place, that he hadn’t just imagined those stupid fucking words. Then he walked out and closed the door behind him with that same soft click.
Was he supposed to feel guilty about this? Was that what this was about, well fuck that, he refused to feel anything about this. He refused to care about Kakashi and his fucking feelings. So what if Kakashi felt self pity because his Father killed himself. So what if Sasuke killed him self too, it wasn’t Kakashi’s fucking bussness.
Sasuke wasn’t responsible for making him feel better, Kakashi wasn't a child, he shouldn't need Sasuke to hold his hand and tell him everything was going to be alright. Sasuke wasn’t… he wasn’t… this wasn’t a betrayal, if anything he should be fucking glad that he was willing to solve this problem for him, he’d always been a problem. He’d always been just a bomb just waiting to go off.
Kakashi wasn't his Father, he’d never even been close, team seven wasn’t a fucking a family. This wasn’t… he wasn’t…
Sasuke was choking, he couldn’t breath and the fear was so violently real. The shock of it was as if he had been living his life in darkness and someone turned on the light. He gasped, his body spasmed. And suddenly he was sobbing, uncontrollably. The feeling, whatever it was, hit him so hard it didn’t feel survivable, it was exactly like when he first realized his family was all really dead.
It was exactly like when he saw that they were taking the bodies away to prepare them for burial and he realised fully for the first time that he would never again be in the same room as his parents, never able to share air with them again, exactly like that.
Like he had been transported through time, like he was still looking into his brother's eyes, the swooping feeling of Itachi burrowing into his mind, of being trapped forever in that moment as it replayed and replayed. And here he was after all that time STILL here right here, RIGHT here, like he had never had a single experience since.
And he sobbed and sobbed, and wanted so painfully that someone could come and hold him or end it or hold him or something or anything… but there was nothing and no one could save him from this.
He wanted someone, so hard that he could remember his Mother with perfect clarity. The way she smelled and the exact shape of her fingers. Like she was the only one who could hold him and make him feel better now, only she couldn’t. There was nothing that anyone could do to stop this, and there was nothing left in the world to anchor himself to. He was alone, completely alone, on the wrong side of a closed door.
The clock ticked.
The clock ticked.
…To be fair he could have done more, but Kakashi had a habit of quietly leaving rooms and shutting the door behind him.