Purple

“Just how deep do you believe?
Will you bite the hand that feeds?
Will you chew until it bleeds?
Can you get up off your knees?
Are you brave enough to see?
Do you want to change it?”

-The Hand that Feeds, Nine Inch Nails

Starting from his early teens, Naruto had started to jump around with different hobbies. He began to race around his neighborhood on his bike at breakneck speed to practice for the triathlon, an interest he dropped after a quick three weeks. He began to read a lot, imagining being able to have his own personal library and being able to say that he’d read every book up there at least once. But he was more in love with the pride than with the books, and that idea, too, was thrown out the window. He decided to commit himself to his studies, to earn straight A’s and have ivy league colleges banging on his door to beg him to accept admission. Then he’d cracked opened his seldom-touched chemistry textbook, glanced through it, and that idea created a resounding thud as the book hit the wall.

Amongst these hobbies were different kinds of arts. There was writing, there was painting, there was drawing, there was photography, and at one point, there was staining glass. When he first started learning, he’d bought a hundred-some dollars worth of paper paints, cheap glass photo frames, rolls of lead, and a shining new carpet cutter. When he pressed the glass over the paper design, and when he started rolling out strips of lead to trace the thick outlines of the picture below, he used the sharp edge of the carpet cutter to shape and mold the curve of the lead, and to cut off the edge at a straight angle. But, as he often was with many things, he’d been careless with the blade. He sometimes jerked the handle a little too hard, at the wrong angle, and often it rebounded, swinging back along the glass soundlessly and running along the tender line of skin attaching his finger with his fingernail, sliding it into a clean-cut angle of ruby red. Naruto didn’t often notice the pain of it until blood began to pool around his finger, when fingertips began to leave dirty smudges of the darkest red over the glass, thicker and more beautiful than the paint he’d used.

For a few seconds after his initial discovery of the injury, shock served as a completely effective antibiotic to the pain that was far worse than a paper cut. It was like finding a Catholic priest at a grunge concert; he just did not expect it, and was half-convinced that he was seeing things. But the few seconds always passed, albeit slowly, and the pain set in. Than he was off to the bathroom, rinsing his finger off and looking for a bandage to stem the blood flow.

Those few seconds, the few moments of pure ignorance and outright disbelief, had somehow outdone themselves, and for Naruto Uzumaki, the seconds stretched to days, to weeks. But even then, those seconds, those weeks, had to give way at some point, and before Naruto realized what his mind was doing, before he could prepare for it, he completely forgot it all.

It happened one night at 1:04 in the morning. He’d gone to bed only an hour before, having been recently kicked out of the library at its closing time, his mid-term paper only half completed and the worry of its due date a constant nagging feeling on his mind. His dorm mate had been gone when he’d arrived, but this was nothing new. Sasuke had a knack for being absent upon Naruto’s arrival, a constant mystery, but one that Naruto didn’t go to any lengths to solve. Although this school had a considerably less amount of parties than his undergraduate college had, they were still there, just more muted and sane. Although Sasuke didn’t seem like the socializing type, maybe he just liked the drinking. He could be having a beer with the neurology majors. He could be in the game room. He could be reading in some remote part of the campus. He could be staring at himself endlessly in the mirror. He could be anywhere, just not here, and for weeks, Naruto tried unsuccessfully to convince himself that this was a good thing.

It was Sasuke’s arrival that woke Naruto up from his unconscious state, an arrival which Naruto distinctly noticed smelled alcohol-free. Sasuke went into the bathroom and returned five minutes later, naked saved for the boxers he wore, his dirty clothes a tangled bundle tucked under one arm. Naruto watched through cracked eyelids, through the dim light of the desk lamp Sasuke had switched on, as Sasuke lifted the lid of his laundry basket, threw the clothes in, flipped it shut and the light off. The sudden darkness was welcome to his eyes, which were starting to sting from a confusing pain, and the muffled sound of clothes over skin was loud and chaotic in the thick silence of the room. Sasuke tucked himself in the covers, turned so that he faced the wall, and was silent.

It was a simple fact: Sasuke knew that Naruto was awake. Naruto’s breathing was too loud, too uneven, to pass as a believable lie.

And it was a horrible, deafening truth that Naruto could know this. But he read Sasuke’s movements as easily as he read the movements of his own hand. Whether from fear or from curiosity, Naruto had spent his waking hours studying every single one of the older man’s movements, deciphering every dip of his hand, every tilt of his head, every flick of his fingers, every step he took and every breath he breathed. And he saw the way Sasuke refused to even glance in the direction of Naruto’s bed.

And Sasuke knew that Naruto was watching him. And Naruto knew that Sasuke didn’t mind, that he’d even helped, opting to turn on the feeble lamp instead of the electric lights hanging above their heads, to save Naruto’s eyes from the sudden onslaught of brightness that only fluorescent lighting could accomplish.

Within the dormitory, within the campus, within the world and within his mind, something was very wrong.

And that was when, at around 1:30 in the morning, Naruto completely forgot the very memory that had been haunting him for over eight years.

It was like missing a foot, or a hand. He knew where it should be, he knew what it felt like and how it felt when it touched something, but it wasn’t there. He remembered it--the taste of Sasuke’s mouth, the way he drove his hips, the feeling of the carpet, the smells, the noises, the pain, how it had felt horribly, disturbingly good--just like he remembered that Snape killed Dumbledore in the sixth Harry Potter book.

He couldn’t remember.

His mind wouldn’t let him.

Naruto knew, without any reasonable doubt, that he would no longer have nightmares. It would no longer play like a movie across a screen whenever he shut his eyes for too long. It was gone, only to be remembered if he tried too hard to think on it.

It was gone.

And it made him want to cry.

And then he looked at Sasuke’s back, how it was too tense, how he was awake, too, and how he’d never bothered to notice if Sasuke slept well or not. He looked like a wolf, a beast, some kind of wild animal that had been gunned down and was now waiting for morning, to see if he’d be alive for the next sunrise.

Naruto wanted to go over to him, to put his arms around him and hold tight to whatever wound ailed to him, to step the blood flow like he’d stemmed the blood flow of his fingers years ago, to do whatever he could to make sure Sasuke would be alive, be whole, be there to feel the pain with him (don’t leave me alone again) when the sunlight stole through the curtains.

Ridiculously enough, Naruto had the sudden image of Sasuke in a bright blue tailcoat and pants with gold fastenings, and himself in a frilly, princess-esque dress, and the thought made him laugh uncontrollably through his tears, the resulting sound a hybrid of unintelligible whimpers and heaves. It was loud, disturbing, and would wake Sasuke up.

But it didn’t matter, because Sasuke wasn’t sleeping anyway.

And now Naruto joined him, the two sharing another sleepless night together.

--

Naruto hadn’t spoken to Shino since the day that they’d first met, months ago. Whenever Naruto stopped by to meet with Kiba, the stoic man remained quiet in the corner, reading from a book or pouring over a leather-bound portfolio, the motions of his eyes concealed by the subscription sunglasses that he wore.

“A bunch of newspaper clippings, I think,” Kiba had told him when Naruto inquired as to what was in the book. “Shino used to go to some school out west for criminal justice before he switched here. I think they‘re a bunch of stories on crime cases or something.”

“Criminal justice to medicine?” Naruto had asked. “That’s a bit of a jump, don’t you think?”

Kiba snorted, stuffing his hands into the deep pockets of his jeans. “Not really. Guy’s a freaking nut job.”

Although Naruto knew Kiba to occasionally badmouth his dorm mate, the two didn’t seem to be an all-that-bad combination. Shino was a reserved man who seemed to be seldom bothered by much of anything, making him immune to Kiba’s rambunctious attitude, and Kiba was easy-going enough to get alone with just about anyone, given enough time.

But still, Shino made Naruto a bit nervous. Maybe it was because Naruto knew that he had personal ties with Sasuke, but he still rubbed him the wrong way. Aforementioned weirdo was sitting cross-legged on his bed, once again flipping through the large album of what Naruto now knew to be clippings of past crimes. Naruto was lounging in Kiba’s desk chair, spinning it around a bit in a nervous fashion, waiting for his friend to get back. When Shino had let him in to wait, Naruto got a text saying that Kiba was hanging back to talk to someone from class. Thinking it would be too awkward to just leave, only to come back down in fifteen minutes, Naruto had decided to stay, and was already regretting that choice.

Abruptly, Shino closed the book with a dull snap, causing Naruto’s eyes to fly up to him. Shino slowly, methodically placed the book beside him, gaze presumably fixed upon Naruto’s. “I have a class in ten minutes, so I will be going now.”

“Um, all right,” Naruto said, not sure what exactly to say. “Is it cool if I just stay here and wait for Kiba?”

“That would be cool,” Shino said monotonously, beginning to get up from his bed. “I will be leaving my book here. I would appreciate it very much if you refrain from looking in it.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Naruto said, blinking at the oddness of the request.

“Of course,” Shino said, expression never changing. He toed on his sneakers, gaze never wavering. He pocketed his wallet and his keys and said, “All the same, I feel the need to voice the request.”

“It’s fine,” Naruto assured him, shifting a bit awkwardly. “See ya later?” It came out as more of a question than a proper good-bye.

“Yes, we shall.” Shino crossed the room, finally breaking eye contact. When his hand grazed the doorknob, he said, “Do not look in my book, Naruto.” And then he was gone.

Naruto did not touch Shino’s book.

He didn’t even look at it.

…for five minutes.

And then he had flown across the room, sat himself where Shino had been sitting, and was paging through it at lightning speed.

He was practically begging me to look through it, anyway, Naruto thought as his eyes scanned fervently over the headlines. Leaving it right here. Is he serious. He might as well have handed it to me.

Naruto was not looking through it to see what kind of gory cases were written about in the book, but to see what Shino saw. The man seemed to be very simple; he liked the quiet, he liked to read, he was fascinated by insects, and he was interested in learning medicine. But to keep a portfolio of old case reports, and to look through them on what seemed to be a weekly basic…

Headlines flashed up at him, dozens of mug shots gave him dull, defeated glares. “Carson arrested on suspect of McKinley case.” “Serial rapist apprehended, according to Uppermoreland police.” “Two suspects arrested on Drewmore drowning.” “Police officer shot,” “Murphy arrest on twelve counts of,” “Cop killer,” “three victims,” “young girl,” “murder,” “rapes,” and eventually the focal points of the headlines were the only things that caught Naruto’s eye. He didn’t bother reading the articles, just the titles, looking for some connection, for some clue that would help him unravel Shino’s personality.

He flipped a few pages, and then stopped. The headline, “Police arrest long time suspect for two counts of murder,” was not what caught his attention, but an odd page that he’d skimmed over, not realizing that he couldn’t read the header. He riffled back a few pages, it caught his eye again, and he stopped. Turned the page. And stared.

It was obviously not cut from an actual newspaper, like all of the other articles. This was printed on computer paper, but the format told Naruto it was from some kind of online archive.

Still, it wasn’t the paper that caught his attention, but the words.

The words were not in English.

Naruto might have mistaken the language for Chinese if he hadn’t seen the picture that took up nearly a quarter of the page. It was of a young boy, looking to be around six or seven, untidy black hair slightly matted, the bags under his eyes looking even deeper due to the grayscale print job. But bad print job or no, whatever year this was printed, no matter how small the image, Naruto could pick out this face in a crown of a million.

It was Sasuke.

Naruto tore his face away from the young, haunted eyes staring up at him from the page to squint at the headline. But no matter how hard he squinted, he wasn’t able to gain even a fraction of understanding as to what the article was about.

Naruto flipped the page over, and there was another article in Japanese, also printed from a computer. This was an action shot of two police officers dragging along a handcuffed man. The ink on the page muddled the image, distorting their faces, and telling him nothing.

Naruto flipped the page. “Woman arrested for…” He didn’t bother to read the rest, just flipped back to see Sasuke’s picture again.

He didn’t know how long he stared at it, but when he heard a key slide into the doorknob, Naruto jumped up as if struck my lightning. The book was back on the bed in a second, he was standing in half. He was halfway back to his seat when Kiba bounded through the door. One look at his face told Naruto that he was safe; he seemed too enthralled, too energetic to notice much of anything. Naruto was shocked that Kiba even noticed him.

“You won’t believe this!” Kiba said. “That girl I said I was staying behind to see? I got her number!” And he had, on a scrap of loose-leaf paper which he now waved in front of Naruto’s face like it was the Nobel Peace Prize. “God, Naruto, she’s gorgeous, you should see her. She had this long, black hair and these beautiful gray-blue eyes and--hey, man, are you okay? You look like you saw a ghost or something…”

--

“Ugh, of all the things to wear….”

“What? What’s wrong with this?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong with it, I just hate the color.”

Sakura paused mid-motion, her pause halfway up her arm. “What’s wrong with you? You’ve never cared about what I wore before.”

Naruto shrugged, battling the urge to cringe at her long-sleeved flannel blouse. It was pretty, on some level, and something he knew she’d just bought from a shopping trip to Lucky Brand Jeans. Branches of a sakura tree wound around her forearm and elbow before erupting into an explosion of pink petals, the flourishing foliage contrasting sharply with the rest of the deep purple of the rest of the garment.

Naruto was silent for several long moments, and that was what drove Sakura to finally ask, “Do you want me to change?”

That snapped the blond out of his reverie. “No, no! It’s fine. Just because I don’t like the color doesn’t mean it doesn’t look good on you.” Unsure if she needed extra convincing, Naruto tacked on, “Every color looks good on you, Sakura.”

She giggled, rolled her eyes, and then hooked her arm through his and pulled him up from where he sat on the edge of her bed. “C’mon. You read to go?”

No. “Yeah.” Naruto grinned widely, and it felt horrible on his face, muscles cramping with the effort to keep up the expression. Sakura seemed to buy it easily enough, though.

“Then let’s go!” She pulled him out of the room and shut it behind her, pocketing her keys.

Truthfully, Naruto was ready for it to be over. The date he’d been looking forward to for days now seemed like an unwelcome chore, and he couldn’t wait for the moment that he’d drop her off at her door.

Naruto had started hanging out with the red-headed med student about a month ago, along with Kiba and some of his other newly acquired friends. A week after that, they’d seen each other again, in a much smaller group. A few days later he’d seen her at work, and a week after that they’d gone to Starbucks together over their break between classes.

Sakura was beautiful, Naruto knew. She was blunt, too, and wasn’t afraid to smack him over the head whenever he said something stupid. She was smart, having gotten into this university with a full-paid scholarship, and was armed with a colorful arsenal of jokes about the other professors and students that Naruto couldn’t help but laugh at. She was the type of person he’d like to bring home to meet Iruka. Iruka would like her, he’d approve.

And yet, Naruto had to keep on telling himself these things constantly in order to keep himself even minimally interested. He couldn’t quell the uneasy feeling inside of him that he felt whenever Sakura smiled at him, obvious interest making her beautiful emerald eyes stand out even more. It was like he was betraying someone, and Naruto knew exactly who that someone was, and it wouldn’t leave him be, no matter how often he beat her down.

“So where do you want to go?” Sakura asked him, sliding her hand alone his forearm to tangle her fingers with his, giving them a playful squeeze.

Naruto grinned. “Wanna go to Weinriche’s?” Weinriche’s was a small joint café and bakery that resided just outside of campus, serving fresh desserts and deli sandwiches. Naruto had gone there once to grab a cup of coffee with Shikamaru, and it tasted better than any cup that Starbucks could brew.

Naruto studied the way her face lit up at his words, and the way his eyes lingered on hers for a few moments too long made her blush slightly and she looked away, a small smile on her lips. Naruto knew that he was giving her the wrong impression, but honestly, he couldn’t help it. He’d been studying everyone’s faces lately, taking in and examining every minute detail. After two months, Naruto felt like he could read every person at face-value. He knew if they were happy, or sad, or pleased, or angry.

There was only one person that Naruto couldn’t read. And this was why he went to such lengths to pay such close attention to everyone else.

Although Naruto felt that he could understand Sasuke through his body motions and actions--he slammed things a bit too hard on the desk when he was annoyed, he was lonely when he put headphones over his ears to drown out whatever conversation Naruto was having on his phone and then took them off to try and engage him in conversation once the blond man hung up, he was in a good mood when a frosted bottle of Coke was left on Naruto’s desk from the vending machine in the hallway--he could never understand his face. The expressions in his eyes, the way his mouth was set, seemed to run the complete opposite direction of the way his body moved. It was like his face was receiving AM transmissions while the rest of his body ran on FM.

And then there was the other reason that Naruto kept watch so carefully. There was still that complex, unreadable expression that Sasuke got on his face every now and then, one Naruto could not decipher, and one which he desperately wanted to understand.

They held hands all the way down to the café, talking about mundane things which held Sakura’s interest, even though they didn’t particularly capture Naruto’s. Their conversations were safe and easy, the façade he was fighting to keep up made easier by this fact.

When they were seated across from each at a small table by the large landscape window and had placed their orders, Sakura changed the topic from her roommate Ino’s antics the last time she’d gotten drunk (less than twenty-four hours ago) to more dangerous waters. “So I heard that you got Sasuke for a roommate.”

Naruto nearly choked on his coffee. “Y-yeah,” he stuttered, frowning slightly. “Who told you?”

“Shikamaru told me,” Sakura said, not seeming to notice that she had almost succeeded in killing Naruto with words alone. “Sasuke, Shikamaru, Kiba and I all went to high school together,” she informed him. “Didn’t he tell you that?”

Naruto didn’t know which ‘he’ she meant, but as none of them had bothered to tell him, he just shook his head ‘no’.

Sakura nodded, swirling her spoon around her mug of hot chocolate. “So how’s rooming with him? Shikamaru said that you guys knew each other from middle school or something.”

“We knew each other, yeah.” Naruto shrugged, feigning nonchalance even though his internal organs felt like they were catching on fire one by one.

“Mmmh,” Sakura hummed. And then, absent-mindedly, almost as if she were saying it to herself, she said, “Kind of sad, isn’t it?”

“What is? That we knew each other?”

“No, no,” she laughed, but sobered up almost immediately, looking ashamed of her small fit of giggles. “His story.”

“His story?”

“He never told you?”

“Told me what?”

Sakura looked reluctant to say anything, eyes darting to the left before returning to Naruto’s. “I don’t know if I should tell you, if he didn’t say anything…”

“What, he told you himself?” Naruto tried not to let disbelief color his voice too completely, but the slight hardening of Sakura’s eyes told him that he wasn’t all too successful.

“No. His friends, Shikamaru and Shino, they did.”

“Then what’s wrong with me knowing?”

Sakura bit her lip. “I had… a reason.”

“I live with the bastard,” Naruto said teasingly, even tough his motives were anything but. “Isn’t that reason enough?”

“Mh. I guess.”

Naruto waited, but Sakura’s silence didn’t seem to indicate that she wouldn’t say anything, just that she was thinking hard on something. His instincts didn’t let him down.

“Shino showed it to me. In some book that he kept for his criminology classes.”

Naruto froze. A ticking began in his eyebrow. For a guy who didn’t talk all that much--

“Well, more like he left this book lying around one day and told me not to touch it.” She chuckled, but it was a bitter-sounding noise. “There were these weird articles he’d printed out in Japanese… Sasuke’s picture was in them. My mom is Japanese, and she taught me the language since I was little, so….” She worried her lower lip for a few moments, and just when Naruto opened his mouth to press her for the information she so clearly knew, Sakura spoke again. “When he--Sasuke--was six, his parents were…” She trailed off again, and this time Naruto did say something.

“They were what?” He had a pretty good idea of what the “what” was, but he needed her to say it, almost like closure. He needed to hear the words from somewhere else besides his mind in order to believe them.

“They were murdered.” She averted her gaze from his. “His older brother killed them.”

Naruto’s jaw unhinged. He hadn’t expected that one. A memory of the second picture, of two cops and the handcuffed man, flashed across his mind. Now his brain was pasting features on that warped face. Someone who looked like Sasuke, maybe. Older. Maybe thinner. Maybe more boyish. But with glaring eyes, an evil red, swirling and hypnotizing. The face of a demon.

And then the first image, of a scared little boy, eyes darker than the black text that confined him to a newspaper article where the whole world could see it.

“He was in a hospital for a while after that,” Sakura said, still not meeting Naruto’s eyes. He was glad for that. He wasn’t sure what she would see there. “They released him after a couple years, but I don’t think he fit very well into the schools there… At least, that’s what Shikamaru told me.”

“Shimakaru?” Naruto echoed, not really caring, but confused nonetheless. His thoughts were too disturbing, too distorted for him to accurately decide what it was that he wanted.

“Yeah. He went to the same high school as Sasuke and Shino, remember?” She laughed again, and this sounded a bit more genuine. The spell of depression was gone, and Naruto hadn’t noticed that the atmosphere had been so tense until it lightened. But still, the fist that had clenched about his throat was making it difficult to think, to see straight. Spots dotted his visions, and he wondered half-heartedly if he’d faint again.

“I think I know why Shino wanted me to see it, too,” Sakura mused, but Naruto had sensed that the important part of their conversation was over, and he was now wondering how he could get out of this date. Fast. “I had a huge crush on him, you know,” she said, needlessly in Naruto’s opinion. It was written all over her face. “I was always pestering him. I followed him everywhere. I used to think I was in love.” She met his eyes now, and the shocking green that had once appealed to Naruto now seemed normal, and he was longing for dark gray irises that didn‘t look at him so oddly, like she thought he was a different person than he knew he was. Even though he hated those eyes, and everything that went along with them, he was beginning to think he’d rather let himself hate than force himself to like. “But hearing about what happened to him made me realize that I wasn’t ready. I had a lot of problems in school, and if I couldn’t fix myself, how could I possibly fix him?”

She had his attention back. “’’Fix him’?” Naruto repeated, eyeing her incredulously. “What do you mean by ‘fix’?”

Sakura’s eyebrows puckered inward as she frowned. “I guess ‘fix’ is the wrong word,” she amended. “What I meant was--”

“No, you said what you meant,” Naruto cut her off. He didn’t need to fabricate an excuse for an early dismissal anymore. This was plenty enough an excuse. “What? You think just because he’s different, he needs ‘fixing’?”

Sakura was really frowning now, hurt entering her eyes, confusion. She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand Sasuke, or Naruto, the two of them together, she didn’t get it. Neither did Shino, with his obvious hints and his clues, or Shikamaru, with his keen eye and his analytical mind. Neither did Kiba, who Naruto spent time with every day, he never got him, clicked with him, knew him. Neither did Iruka, who’d raised him since he was a child, who taught him right from wrong, who had taken in Naruto to appease his loneliness and therefore could never understand that hollow ache Naruto had carried in his chest from since he could remember. The only one who got him, who knew him, who made him feel like he existed fully in the world instead of a mere partial existence was off somewhere that wasn’t here, having a beer with the neurology majors for some semblance of the company he tried to pretend he didn’t want, in the game room watching friends and wondering what the appeal of the games was, reading in some remote part of campus because books were the only things that wouldn’t scorn him or try to dissect him, or staring at himself endlessly in the mirror wondering if he’d ever like what he saw, just like Naruto did whenever he caught his reflection.

Alone, utterly alone, with no one to hear him or to believe his story--not even the one person who he claimed to love. The one person he had left.

“We don’t need fixing,” Naruto grit out. “And we most definitely don’t need anyone to try.”

“I don’t understand,’ Sakura said, once again stating the obvious. “I’m not trying to fix him or--” say it, say me, “--I don’t get what you’re saying, Naruto.”

“Obviously.” Naruto clenched his eyes shut tightly, opened them a few moments later--alone, alone, he’s always so alone, because he left me, he left me all alone even when he promised he wouldn’t, even when he knew how it felt--and decided that he needed to leave. A dismissal danced on the tip of his tongue, but he retracted it. A good-bye took its place, and then an apology, and they were all fighting to get out at once.

In the end, Naruto said nothing. He pushed himself away from the table, a twenty dollar bill in his hand, and placed it on the table. “For lunch,” “Sorry,” “I have to go,” “Don’t talk to me again,” all of them fit, but none sounded right.

He left without another word.

--

“Naruto? Hey! How are you?”

“I’m doing good.”

“Is… something the matter?”

“Yeah. I need to ask you something.”

“You know you can ask me anything.”

“I’ve never asked you about this before.”

“Naruto, what’s wrong?”

So many things.

Naruto was alone in the dorm. As he’d expected, it was empty save for the orange light flowing in through the window, casting a dim red glow over everything, turning gray shadows to burgundy and the ceiling into a deep, dark pink. It was ethereal, it was nostalgic, and it was hurting enough that he couldn’t hide it from Iruka.

But still, Naruto had to know.

Even if it ripped open every single little memory, even though he didn’t want to remember… he did. On a certain level. The absence of the nightmares didn’t bring the salvation that it should have, only made him more lonely than before. They were the only things telling him that his past was what he thought it was. They were all that made him feel justified in his fragile hatred, all that would allow him to keep Sasuke in his proper place in his world.

Asking would make him remember. And he would remember the truth, he would remember it all.

Part of him didn’t want that, while the other part begged him to have the courage to ask.

He wanted to remember.

He didn’t.

You can remember anything, if you want it hard enough.

He wanted to remember.

He wanted the hatred back.

He needed to remember.

“Do you remember when I came home that night in the eighth grade? When I was all beaten up?”

There was a long, static-filled pause. And then a resigned, “Yes.” The way that he said it made Naruto think that he’d waited for it for a long time, and now that it was here, he wished the time had stretched out longer.

Naruto paused too. “What did the doctors tell you?”

Iruka sounded confused as he answered. “They told me you were bruised all over your body--a bruised rib, I think they said--and of course, and the six lacerations on your face.”

Naruto winced. He couldn’t feel them, but he knew they were there, marking him, but as what he didn’t know. “Nothing else? They didn’t say anything else?”

“No,” Iruka said slowly. He sounded hesitant, like he was withholding some piece of information. “You’d hit your head pretty badly. The doctors told me to wake you up every hour the first two nights you were home, in case you got a concussion. They said that that’s why you didn’t… remember much of it.”

And the doctors were right, Naruto thought bitterly. He didn’t remember a damn thing now.

“Did they say what they think cause it?”

Iruka was quiet for a longer moment before he said, “Why are you asking?”

“Because I need to know, Iruka.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

“The bruising was--well, it’s pretty self explanatory, don’t you think?”

“What about the cuts?” Naruto pressed. “The ones on my face?” The ones I have to look at every day, that I feel when I’m in the shower, the things that everyone sees first before they even look me in the eye.

“A switchblade, or an army knife. The cuts were thin and fairly clean.”

Naruto let out a sigh, and waited for the memories to close in on him like a tsunami. But no such thing happened.

“And we don’t have a scrap of evidence to convict the bastards.”

Excuse me? “What?”

“I went to the school a few days afterwards to explain to the principle that you wouldn’t be in school for the remainder of the year,” Iruka explained. “And while I was there, he told me about something one of the teachers overheard in the hallway.”

“What?” Naruto repeated, impatient.

“You remember that gang that used to float around your school? The one that was constantly causing some kind of trouble?”

Naruto snorted. “The ones who wore those stupid black jackets all the time with the clouds on them?”

“Yes, them. The teacher overheard the big one--K-something, I don’t remember--talking about how he… gave you those scars.”

The world had something wrong with it, Naruto knew, but no degree of wrong could keep him from hanging on to Iruka’s every word. It hurt to listen, but it would be excruciating to stop. In his mind passed the image of a large, burly black student who’d been years older than his classmates, with six thick, whisker-like birthmarks running across his cheeks, and his grin full of yellowing, chipped teeth, sharp eyes a sharp contradiction to the rest of his dull nature.

“There were rumors flying all around the school--him and his friends probably started it, you know how kids were when you were that age--about your… sexuality. Kisame, I think it was--he was bragging about how his gang had followed you on your way home from your friend’s house and--”

Iruka stopped talking, and the pain inside of him escalated higher, faster, more deadly, guilt exploding in his veins and making his heart ache horribly with each undeserving beat it made. Spots turned his vision askew. He couldn’t see straight anymore, think rationally.

Iruka mistook his silence for anger. “Naruto, you have no idea how sorry I am,” he croaked. “I should have taken them to court, I should have tried harder, but it--at that time…”

Naruto knew what Iruka was saying without prompt. Their small, two-person family had been in a financial bind at the time, and hiring lawyers, securing dates for court, would strain their already snapping budget. The move alone had almost pushed them to bankruptcy, and Naruto felt that it was more beneficial to him than taking a bunch of malicious, lonely teenagers who would never learn or find help to court.

“It’s fine, Iruka,” Naruto said blandly, unable to push any real reassurance into his tone. “I understand. I wouldn’t have wanted you to try it, anyway. What’s done is done.”

What’s done is done.

What’s done is done.

I can’t fix it anymore.

What have I done?

“Naruto?” Iruka sounded worried. Naruto knew he needed to say something, to offer something, to placate him. To get rid of that guilty tone.

But Naruto could hardly fix himself. What made him think that he could fix Iruka?

“I have to go, Iruka,” Naruto said tonelessly. “I have class,” he lied, even though they both knew that on Tuesdays, Naruto’s classes ended at two.

“Naruto!”

“Bye, Iruka.”

Naruto snapped his phone shut.

Turned it to vibrate.

Listened to it buzz on his pillow for the next half hour before it stopped, staring at the ceiling, wallowing in the red of a dying run, remembering, forgetting, uncovering, sinking and drowning in countless things, so much that he didn’t think anything could keep him afloat the entire mess. Didn’t think he wanted anything to.

You can remember anything, if you want it hard enough.

Naruto didn’t care if it would alarm every single God-damned person in the building. He couldn’t care less if it disturbed every single living soul on the entire campus. He never done this before, but the adrenaline was pumping through his veins like wildfire and he couldn’t hear anything but his own heartbeat, telling him that he was alive. It told him he was in pain, that his mind had succeeded in tearing and ripping itself into bloody little shreds, that his sanity was in tatters and was putting up a blood-stained white flag. His heartbeat told him that through all of it, from when he was panting beneath Sasuke’s all those years ago to the quiet and solemn glances he received from onyx eyes now, that through the ache he felt to his very core, through the over-whelming guilt and the humility and the sheer absurdity of his own actions, that he was alive.

He was alive, and surviving, and that his physical self would always be here, waiting for when his ravaged soul felt whole enough to come home.

He was alive.

He was so very alive.

And it felt so very, very wrong.

It feels so wrong.

Naruto tilted his head back hands tearing whole in the bed linens, skull cracking against the wall behind him, back arching, throat ripping and tearing, the scream tearing itself loose like a wounded and deranged animal that had been backed too far into a corner for too long.

But his heart was beating, and the echoing melody of his scream ran in perfect sync with it.

I’m still alive.

Author’s Notes: I think I should say this, especially after this chapter, but when I started planning the story in my mind I realized I had two options: I could write about every moment, every encounter, and have this stretch out into thirty chapters, or I could do something like… snap shots, I guess, where I wrote the important parts and alluded to the rest. Obviously I chose the snapshot option. I’m not sure, but reading over it now makes me afraid that it seems rushed. If it does, then I apologize.

The final part won’t be out for a while, as it’ll probably be longer than the first part. As always, any questions, comments, concerns, or flaming bricks, drop a review, send an e-mail, a threatening note tied to a rock that you’d like to send flying through my window…

-Kodak