Stillborn Sighs

8/6/2019 Stillborn Sighs

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Disclaimer: NARUTO © 1999 by Masashi Kishimoto & Shueisha Inc. | Fractured Tales Project © 2010 | 340

“ Hell isn’t a kind place, young lady.”

“ I know.”

She answered.

“ It isn’t possible to return to heaven once you’ve left.”

Sakura turned and took a long lingering, contemplative look at the majestic citadel behind the gates.

Then she looked at the old man in the eyes, a sad smile adorning her face.

“This isn’t heaven.”

A light breeze caressed her skin as she turned away from what should’ve been her home,her flimsy white gown fluttering as she took a single step forward.

She was falling.

Stillborn Sighs

T hose lovely red rockets had found him and were swooping in for a last, fatal

kiss.

Sasuke sprinted forward, felt the muddy rumble collapse and twist under his left

leg. There was a sudden, sick jerk of the bone shifting, the broken pieces grinding

together, and then a splitting ache shot like acid up his skin, spiking.

He swore, toppling to the ground, as the machine gun slammed lung-crushingly

into his chest, winding him. Sasuke coughed and spat red, struggled onto his elbows and

shoved himself inelegantly forward, while clawing desperately at the rim and tumbling,

adrenaline throbbing against the back of his eyes, into the shelter-hole.

Around him, the battleground exploded, acid rain and dirt and wicked rusts of

metal tearing across his body. His leg was bursting with a bomb of its own, and pain was

the color of absolute black.

He fell into it, shaking.

***

Someone tapped his shoulder hesitantly. Sasuke stirred, peeled back his eyes,

and tried to blink away the blindness. She came carefully into focus, features lovingly

familiar, her eyes carrying all the home he needed.

“Oh, good.” Sakura sighed shakily. There were dirty crescent moons under her

fingernails. She touched his forehead with her lips, leaving a lipstick mark in blood. He




shifted slightly, trying to shake off the grey skies and the heavy gun Sakura had strapped

to her back, just over her nurse’s uniform.

“This is your nineteenth, Sasuke.” He could feel her smile against his skin. “Just

one more to go. Just one more run, and you’ll be safe. You’ll be an officer.”

“Tch,” he managed the harsh noise, licking his lips twice. Ragged black crows

were circling the sky. He ignored the hand she offered him, though she forced it on him

anyways, carefully helping him sit up. His head spun, green blooming in front of his

vision.




“Here.” Sakura fumbled awkwardly at her waist, then pushed the cool aluminum

lid to his lips, precious, clear water filling his mouth deliciously. He used to drink water

like this when he was a child. But then, it had still rained back then. There had still been

oceans.

“Can you stand?” Sakura asked. Sasuke nodded slowly, and then pushed the

canteen back into her pale hands while hearing the water slosh around inside, shoving

down his own selfish longing.

“Don’t waste that stuff,” he berated, and struggled to his feet.

His leg, which had throbbed quietly, suddenly screamed harshly, the agony raw

and ripping. He gasped and swore—dizziness returning.

“Oh—” Sakura grabbed him again, bracing him with difficulty until the attack

abated. She glanced down at his leg shrewdly. “Don’t step on it. I’ll check that out when

we get back to base.”

Not home.

Never home.

***

“You’ve broken your leg,” she told him. Sasuke frowned, worry lines

accentuated and sharp against his young face. He couldn’t have been older than twenty.

“How long will it take to heal?” he asked clinically. His eyes tracked her lithe

fingers as they tucked fine pink strands behind her left ear. She made a soft, irritable

noise.

“Too long, probably. Six weeks, I’d say.”

He agreed. Too long. His hands were quiet on his lap, but he couldn’t tear his

eyes from her hair. Pink. How the hell had she managed to make it into the army without

shaving it off?

She came to the edge of his bed; curling her arm around his waist and helping

him stand on his good foot, the other dangling gruesomely awkward at the ankle. He

leaned carefully away, aware of how fragile her shoulders felt.

“So, what do you want to do?” Sakura asked, bright green eyes trained steadily

on his own. “I can amputate it, if you want. You won’t get an infection, but it’ll be hell to

walk on, and can potentially take even longer.”

“No,” Sasuke said immediately. He tried to picture himself with a stump of a

leg, swinging furiously for balance as he hopped.

“Thought so,” Sakura replied knowingly. She steered him to a low counter,

backed against the edge of the flimsy medic’s tent, bottoms wavering. Outside the gritty

orange cloth, the carefully cheerful chatter of the camp swelled, sharp voices spiking

above their murmured partners.




Sasuke hissed softly, his own pride pushing away his delicate human crutch and

doggedly struggling to sit on the counter. She tilted her head to the side, watching, very

small under her uniform.

“If I was a good doctor, I’d tell you to keep off that foot and let your crutches do

the work.” She pushed back her hair and smiled wryly. “But that would be stupid,

wouldn’t it?”

“Just do what you have to,” Sasuke ordered curtly. His nerves felt like someone

was methodically peeling them apart and playing a voodoo tune on them.

She let out a breath, “I can brace it. It’s not going to get any better, though, if

you put any pressure on it. So try to lay off the field action, if you can. If you run on it,

it’s going to hurt like hell, but I’ll make sure it won’t get any worse.”

“Thank you,” Sasuke managed, and gritted his teeth. Everyone knew they had

run out of painkillers two months ago.

***

He managed to make it back to the campsite in an hour, leaning on a crutch

intended for a man several inches shorter than him. Sakura followed him fretfully. He set

his teeth.

“You’re allowed to sleep, you know. I’m not going to keel over and die if youshut your eyes.”

She glanced up at him from under her eyelashes. Pink. She had abandoned

make-up a while ago. War had proven to be less glamorous than she had imagined. “You

do an awfully good job of trying to.”

A couple of men who hunkered down around a camp fire snickered. Sasuke

scowled at them, but they paid him no mind. The medals clinked against one another on

his chest; tarnished, picked clean from the corpses of their previous owners. Nineteen of

them. Just one more to go.

“I’m registering for the battle tomorrow,” he said suddenly. Her arm arrested

him, cold gaze freezing him in place.

Sometimes he imagined that he was in love with Sakura. This was not one of

them.

“Don’t you dare,” she said quietly, “Give it a week, Sasuke. You can afford to

be out of it for a week.”

He could hear his teeth begin to grind. The men had stopped laughing, either

because of the tone shift, or because they were out of range for eavesdropping. The

crutch plunged into a shallow trench left by a previous attack, and he very nearly fell, the

injured ankle snapping as he bumped it. He bit his lip, gnawing under the permanent scab

there.




“I want to go home,” he said quietly, “I just want to be promoted so I can leave.

My time will be up. We can get out of here.”

Sakura’s lips pressed together, sharp enough to cut his fingers on. She wore her

anger cold.

“Every time you go out there,” she said softly, “I wonder if this is the time you

won’t come back. Don’t do this, Sasuke. Not tomorrow. Please.”

He had never been infatuated with her. There had never been the puppyadoration, the excited thrill he got from being near her, the rush of dazed confusion,

hormonal over dosage.

But there was still something there.

He took her hand and didn’t say anything. He knew she wouldn’t drop it, half

expected her to anyways.

She didn’t. But her grip was bone-shatteringly desperate.

***

He opened his eyes to an angel for the second time that day. It was the same

one.

In the moonlight, the tips of her hair turned silver. Her head was bowed, eyesclenched shut.

He watched how the light curved white and burning over her shoulder,

bleaching her into a portrait. She looked eerily beautiful—drowned and blue in her

wedding dress.

She was whispering, soft hisses slipping inaudibly together. The sheets pooled

into harsh lines around her waist, cold shadows dripping from her shoulder blades.

He sat up carefully, and reached across the space between them, her skin cool,

veins warm. His hand cradled the back of her neck, and he drew her back towards him.

He imagined the broken wings, hanging ruined from her shoulders. Her shoulder

blades were bare of the things he had imagined, but the imagination insisted.

She glanced at him over her shoulder, the skin in her neck stretched andcrinkling. He mouthed the word, reluctant to ruin the secret silence.

What?

She raised her voice, just slightly.

“The enemy fire will not harm Sasuke Uchiha. The enemy fire will not harm

Sasuke Uchiha. The enemy fire will not harm Sasuke Uchiha. The—”




“—enemy fire will not harm Sakura Haruno,” he interrupted. Her eyes widened

solemnly. He had the nagging sense that he had said something right. He plunged past it.

“What, are you religious suddenly?”

She gleamed.

“If you say something enough times, then maybe it’ll come true.”

He didn’t know what to say to something as blindly stupid as that. His chest felt

warm as he lay back down, warm enough that his leg faded into the background.

She came to rest beside him, two people on a cot designed for less than one. Just

before she drifted off, her mouth found his own, and he could taste that strange, clear

thing on her lips. When her eyes closed, he repeated it into her hair.

“The enemy fire will not harm Sasuke Uchiha.”

So close. They were so close to going home. He just needed to survive this one

last mission.

***

She had not been lying about his leg. He couldn’t have gotten more than three

paces before he crumpled, gasping, and kept forwards from then on by a steady crawl.

The flash was all he saw before the ground ripped up inches from his right arm.Sasuke slammed off to the side, millimeters faster than the machine gun bullets, and he

felt one of them tear through the webbing between his thumb and index finger, but only a

nick. Then he was safely curled behind a small mountain of his own friends, and he came

out again, pushing off with his bad leg and even if he couldn’t see, he was shooting, he

was shooting, he was—

He kept with the killing, even after the enemy soldier was dead.

The bullets ran out.

Sasuke dropped back down, his breath shaking but hands steady as he wrestled a

new gun from a dead man.

Just another mile to go. Just another mile.

He got to his knees and started crawling.

***

His knees were bleeding sluggishly around the gravel embedded in them. He set

his teeth and kept going, eyes stinging. He did not want to shut them. He would not die

now. He could not die now.

He had promised her. He had promised her on day one, told that red-eyed slip of

an underage girl that he was going to make it—told her that if he could survive once, he

could do it again. Nineteen times. He had to do it for both of them.




Her hands had been shaking, clamped white-knuckled over her gun. He had to

pry it from her, gotten her into a medic’s uniform, gotten her safe. She would never have

to kill anyone again.

But the five percent of people she wasn’t able to save—that five percent was

destroying her.

Death didn’t become Sakura, he realized, and so he kept coming forward

stubbornly, breath ragged.

He was so close. So close.

He was going to go home. He was going to go home.

“The enemy fire will not harm Sasuke Uchiha,” he muttered, as he played the

weary sniper and kept going through the underbrush. Of course, he had to make sure he

wasn’t going to bleed to death first.

He was going to go home.

He supposed that she would just have to come with him.

This was one of those times he supposed he was in love with her. It was easier to

admit when she wasn’t around.

From the corner of his eye, a red flag fluttered proudly in the breeze. Panting,Sasuke struggled upright and lurched towards it, something like joy, or maybe just relief

flooding his chest.

Here was the sweet escape.

He crossed the finish line.

The war was over for him. Over head, the clouds that never rained stirred, and

he tilted his head towards them from his cradle of security. That was what the war was

about, the bloody clouds and the fantasy of rain. He supposed they were fighting for the

right to live.

He could almost taste the water Sakura had given him.

He limped to the nearest officer, and held out his hand. “Number twenty.”

“Ah,” the man said calmly, and held out his hand for a shake. “Going home?”

“Yeah,” Sasuke said. He had to work to keep the grin from his face. “I’m taking

someone with me.”

“Hmm,” said the man, a little crease of displeasure taking down his brows. But

rules were rules—and considering that for every field mission you went on, you had a

fifty percent chance of dying, no one would argue against their rights to leave.

“It’s a nurse,” Sasuke spoke quickly, “from base 7. You’ll be wiring them—

what?”




The man’s face had abruptly slackened, old eyes cloudy with age and something

like pity.

“Base 7?” he repeated slowly. Sasuke nodded jerkily, a quiet horror already

growing inside of him.

“It was just—it just got hit,” the officer said quietly. “The whole place is just a

cigarette scar on the map, kid.” After a moment, he clapped Sasuke’s arm as if in

apology.

Sasuke’s head was full of white noise, as everything carefully faded into the

distance—all of it held carefully apart from that unmanageable reality.

The medals fell from Sasuke’s hand, clinking together like they were weeping.

“So…” the officer prompted the suddenly hollow young man, “Where’re we

sending you?”

Sasuke continued to stare off into space, as though he hadn’t heard the question.

Finally, he turned. “What?”

“Where’s your home?” The officer sighed.

Sasuke shook his head slightly, turned silently, his medals glinting abandoned in

the dirt, a perfect twenty.

“Gone.”

***

He waited for two days for her to miraculously survive—and then went in to

identify her body. His shoulders twitched, dog tags clattering. That was her. That was

Sakura, cold and dead, her wings ripped off for the autopsy, still on the table.

When he stepped outside, people were screaming. It took him a second to realize

that it wasn’t out of fear—

It was raining.

Sasuke tilted his face back up to the sky that was finally merciful, water

peppering his face with tears. He licked his lips—and suddenly realized what Sakura’s

kisses had tasted like.

Quietly, he broke.

***

It is easy to become a war hero when you aren’t afraid of dying.

***

Sometimes the reporters came to him, shoving microphones underneath their

savior’s nose and jabbering in high, fluttering voices, “Do you ever have trouble sleeping

at night?”




No.

“Do you know what you’ll do in the future?”

No.

“Do you have any war buddies you keep in touch with?”

No.

“Are you happy, Mr. Uchiha? Now that all of this is over?”

Sasuke hesitated a second too long, then looked straight at the camera, his voice

steady.

“Yes. I’m very happy.”

If you say something enough times, it might come true.

***

It almost never stopped raining now—flooding the barren earth, threatening the

world in a different way. Sasuke stood on the street corner as it beat down on him, eyes

closed and skin as cold as marble as he leaned into the rain.

T he Endymion Effect

a. Time: 0 (reference point)

In what would traditionally be considered the cockpit, there was a skylight that

showed the sky as it would have appeared on terra firma. It was a pathetic excuse of a

night light, a spaceman’s version of Blankie or Teddy, meant to give comfort to the team

of engineers manning the cabin. Personally, he’d prefer something less delusional, as no

way in hell could anybody mistake it for a real window.

They were seated at the heart of the gargantuan ship, an amalgam of carbon and

alloys, specifically designed over decades to withstand extremes in pressure andtemperature. No translucent material had such properties, even in these times, and

nobody would want to see outside, anyway, no one who knew what it looked like in

actuality. None of the constellations would look familiar, would slowly and continually

change as the craft drifted aimlessly about the distant arms of the galaxy.

“For all of eternity,” had a pompous, fatalistic tone to it that would easily turn

off a modern-minded listener, but it was a quite feasible time frame to their exile, no

thanks to the highly-developed, compulsively-paranoid technologies of his mother

civilization. A black hole or an ill-timed supernova might be their only hope for a swift

demise, but see, he wasn’t holding his breath for either.

Stillborn Sighs

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