Chapter Text
Red is the colour of truth
Among all the colours of the rainbow, it is the one with the longest wavelength, meaning it is the colour sharpest from the distance
It is the colour of ambulance alarms, the colour of the cheapest wine in her cabinet, the colour of stop signs
neon lights in the downtown china
It is the colour of blood and the colour of sunsets
the colour of end
It had always been your least favourite colour though, always associated with your mother’s red lipstick sneers and your father’s bloody knuckles. The colour smeared across the street and your head right now, vivid and hateful.
See the thing is, you do not regret it, even when you knew you couldn’t possibly survive. Not by a long shot. There were children in the way of a speeding truck that just wasn’t stopping. You drive your car between in the truck and the children. Absently, you recall that he is still speaking to you on your phone, panicked now, begging you to tell him what’s going on. You do not, of course you don’t, you never were that cruel. Something shatters in your chest, and you whisper a faint I love you, forgive me, move on to him. You wouldn’t regret this decision, not when you could save someone. It was a good death. But you couldn’t leave him behind without setting him free. He deserved better, better than someone so broken like you were.
The shards of glass in your hands dig deeper, became more painful. You feel delirious, like a fever dream you keep falling into. You can hear only bits of conversations, panicked shouts and cries. The sirens blaring cover everything else. There’s static in your ears, buzzing that grows stronger.
Your eyesight grows blurry now, the shades of sunset, blending together, just about to melt away. It was a beautiful sight, the last thing you would ever see.
Your eyes close.
The last thing you ever hear, is a plea, “…hold on…” You wonder that if someone said those words to you before, way back when you needed them, if you would be at a better place.
The sky has turned red completely. It looks like a dream, beautiful and illusive.
You fade away.
The world spins, round and round, you spin with it. You try to stand but you have no legs, no hands, no face.
Memories flash at you, some yours, some not so much. Each second of your life, paraded around on smoky screens, in perfect detail. You remember again, that for you, your childhood was a long wish to be somewhere else. You are thankful you do not feel enough to be embarrassed. Then come those days, days that ruined your life after it barely began. You try to move away, close your eyes. You find that you have no eyes. Only thing left of you was a tangible impression, perhaps a cloud of regrets. You find yourself pitiful.
Soon enough, the memories are about him, the best man you have ever known, the man you had grown to love like a soulmate. He looks as happy as the day you met, always so kind, gentle even with the sharpened and raw edges of what was left of you. On and on it goes, until you see the road, the truck, the car, the children and the crash. You probably think it is not advisable to be so detached from your own death. It doesn’t stop, of course it doesn’t. It seems to you that when it actually matters, you always choose wrong. It goes past death, and fades to your funeral. Which, astonishingly, is attended by more than him. At this point, you are sure that you have never been as popular alive, as you are dead. The children you shielded stand around, quite a few of them crying.
Off-handedly, you notice that you have been cremated, nothing left of you but ashes. Good, you prefer that, prefer not being left as a corpse in the ground. Your eyes turns to him, and he looks barely alive. There is no joy left him in now, no spirit left in him. He looks like those statues of stone, no feelings on his face.
Voices echoes around you, a hundred tones ringing together.
Do you regret it, yet?
You don’t. You have always been cruel, and you knew you wouldn’t stay, in the end. He should have known better than to get attached to someone so untethered as you.
(You are a liar. You have always cared too much, felt too strongly. You miss him so much, and it hurts to see him like this. Like he has no longer anything to live for. You are so, so sorry, you never meant for this to happen)
Everything you ever felt starts vanishing, all resentment and hatred, scant traces of content and happiness, like pappus of dandelions flying away. You come to view your life from a stranger’s point of view. Your own life has stopped mattering to you. You don’t care at all.
You don’t.
So be it, little godling, says the enchanting voice that almost makes you shudder in delight. Almost, of course.
You dissolve to dust.
It feels cold.
No, not the chilly kind, on the edge of spring. It’s the kind that seeps under your skin and rattles your bones. The kind that leaves you hollow, leaves you dying. But it shouldn’t feel so cold. It shouldn’t feel anything at all.
You open your eyes to a red sky. Blood red, like the colour you hate, and not the soft colour of the sunset you would have preferred to see. You feel like you’re underwater, watching everything around you from the side-lines, enclosed in a bubble. As a matter of fact, you are on the side-lines, of what seems like an entire damn town? With streets and streetlights and beautiful houses from south-east Asian courtyards from the feudal eras. Thinking about that, it does look like those districts that belonged to nobles.
Beside you someone is dying. A lot of people are dead, actually. Torn apart, cut open so methodically that it is almost as beautiful as it is gruesome. But that isn’t what catches your attention. You hear crying, a child’s cry, to be precise. You wonder what is it exactly you’ve done wrong that children always seem not alright, around you.
You get up, move. It takes a lot of effort, and hurts like hell even when it shouldn’t, but you move. There’s a lot of wandering done, and you keep bumping into zombies and corpses. You find the source of crying, and the blood seems literally flowing here. You walk towards the child, crying so harshly that you see yourself in their place for a moment. You notice soon enough there’s someone monologuing, standing around them as if they couldn’t care less about the child on the ground. Only that isn’t true, because really, by now you know when people lie. That the someone, who is a child himself, really, despises himself for what he is doing, loathes restricting himself from comforting them. You move ahead. The boy doesn’t notice. Nobody ever does.
You kneel in front of the child, ignoring the aching in your chest and they notice you. Well, it is nice to be remembered sometimes. They look at you, and in the corner of your mind, you notice they’re half dead, and fully wishing to be dead. The other boy still doesn’t see you, and you are thankful for it. You are pretty sure that you couldn’t even fight a cockroach with the way you can barely breathe with the throbbing in your chest. You open your arms, and hum a lullaby only half-remembered. The child scrambles to you, and hides himself. He rocks himself mumbling things you catch only half of. You hide him in your arms, and turn your eyes towards the elder one. Your eyes catch red ones
WHatShApPEnIng…leTMeGo…wHatsHaPPEeNinG… savemeplease… leavemealone… ithurts…ithurtssomuch…pleaseleaveme-aloNe…imsorry…idontwannadie…pleasedontletmedieagain…no…pLeaSeDoNtHuRtMe …
It stops. You still have the child in your arms, crying but less hurt. You push his face in your shoulders and cough roughly. There’s blood on your hands. You breathe again, once more, second time, once more.
It starts again.
You scream.
You die.
---
You drown and you choke and you burn and you die, over and over again, tearing yourself apart in the cycle. You’re delirious and wondering how many times a person can die before they wither away. There’s a child on your lap and you are covered with blood and you don’t even know if it’s yours.
It stops again.
You spot an opening, and push the child away, into the unnaturally dense fog that has gathered somehow. Somehow, you know he will be safe. But you also know that there’s no place for you anymore. You are left here, alone again, with this nightmare of an existence.
The child disappears into the fog and people get up again. The boy kills them once more and it is like a bizarre cycle, winding and rewinding time. You know what is coming for you now.
[MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT--]
You look him in the eyes again, masochist that you are, and barely have time to ask, “Why…?” before everything glitches. You do not know yet, but the world spins backward for a moment, time turns, tides stop, the moon turns red and the sun black.
Reality gLitCHeS
Amaterasu smiles and Tsuki-Yomi laughs.
[The Sage won’t see you coming at all, you are their child after all.]
The world fixes the faults in the matrix, time starts again, and everything moves as smoothly as it could, and no one realises anything has changed
(Oh, but it has, something has changed and nothing will ever be the same again)
Yamanaka Inoichi looks at the tiny boy in front of him, younger and by far smaller than even his daughter. There is still blood on his yukata and hands and small flecks on his face. For all purpose he looks like those glaze-eyed pretty dolls Ino used to play with. Somewhere, the father in him flinches at the very thought of interrogating the Uchiha, nothing more than the bystander to the massacre, found blood-soaked on the red streets, blank and cold. The only survivor. They all had known that tensions had run high in the village, since Minato’s death, and had even recognized, distantly, that the Uchiha were being systematically isolated. Not even in his bloodiest nightmares had he ever thought something would like would happen.
He breathes, and speaks, “What happened yesterday night, Sasuke-san?” He doesn’t speak, which was fair enough. But he does lift his face from the curtain of hair he was hiding it in, and the sheer agony and betrayal and distrust in his eyes cut at him. No child of Konoha should feel unsafe in their own home. But the boy in front of him does, and why wouldn’t he? He’s had his entire life torn apart in front of him, everything he’d loved and lived for snatched away in the blink of an eye. By his beloved brother, no less.
Everyone worth their clearance rank knew the adoration the Uchiha heir held for his brother, the way Uchiha Itachi, self-proclaimed Pacifist had almost slit the throat of a drunk man who had dared to touch his brother. It had caused a huge scandal among those with clearance high enough to wade past the red tape and S-Rank secret status stamped on it. Sasuke-kun, Uchiha-hiko, to be precise, because if Itachi had been the future emperor, then the boy had been the prince, kept closeted and away from the world by the clan, as the second-born child in the main life in decades, the last happening during the Shodai's reign.
Sage wept; everything has gone to shit since the Yondaime died. They wouldn’t even let him assign him a counsellor. They want him stuffed back in the very compound he was tortured and betrayed; his family killed in front of her. He wouldn’t be released until he had given them answers, answers he most likely did not have. The very thought of an innocent and terrified child, kept locked in T&I for reasons he had no hand in, made him want to hurl. And the Sandaime didn’t ever protest, not that he had any trust in the spineless man their Hokage had become. Kami damn the village elders to Jigoku.
“Where is Uchiha Itachi, Sasuke-kun?”
He doesn’t want to do this. Not even the cruellest in T&I want to do this. Interrogate a traumatised child, an innocent child. A child of their own village. But he will, because he is a loyal shinobi of Konohagakure.
[And when he goes home, he will hug his child to his chest, wave away her protests, and tell her over and over again that he loves her, that she’ll be safe]
Everybody knows that someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.
This is how Uchiha Sasuke died, in whispers no one heard.
What took his place was a ghost, someone who did not die when they should have. A patchwork of memories, thread of gold and mended just enough to stop them from shattering. A shoddy job, if you will.
A D Y I N G S T A R
[darling, sleep now, I promise you’ll be safe with me]