Perfect Blindness Chapter 2: Cut 2, a naruto fanfic

Perfect Blindness

These Silences Story 3

- the 2nd story of a series I'm planning involving a singular theme, each featuring various pairings I happen to favor. I don't own Naruto, but I have shamelessly borrowed Kishimoto Masashi's characters, and at times liberally added some of my own little concoctions.

- this story contains implied yaoi, and if you are uncomfortable with this, please do us both a favor and stay away. I shall also be alluding to a lot of other works, which are duly credited at the end of this long one-shot. This is set ideally after the series is over, to which I would daresay is, for now, an AU, precisely because it hasn't ended yet. ; And I'm making my own conclusions, literally, but that's not exactly the point.

- set several years after the current things that are going on. Neji x Sasuke. SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS, please take heed, especially if you don't read, or are not up-to-date with the manga. If it doesn't matter, yey for you. :)

I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears

Do scald like moulten lead.

. - from King Lear, 4.7

We two alone will sing like birds in the cage.

. - from King Lear, 5.3

It was a very brief, but very taxing A-class mission.

You hear him exhale softly between his teeth, slow but heavy, a pant tempered into a whisper. You see him blink sporadically every so often and you frown, seeing the energy systems that carried chakra to his eyes pulse in irregularity that must have been quite painful—hence the telltale pain-tears on the sides of his eyes.

The Mangetsu did not come easily, and did not allow itself to be used without due payment.

You weren't in such good shape either, but you carried your broken arm with dignity, even as it pulsed disjointedly across your chest where you strapped it, a thing of yourself but not of yourself. You've had worse, you've had worse. In times like these you liked reminding yourself of the arrow-holes that cut through your shoulder and side, and how you were still very much a genin at that time.

This was nothing, this was nothing; in the morning, or perhaps if one of them still was awake, you could simply ask one of the House medics to fuse the strained tendons and the fissured bones. It would be good as new. Its dull throb was something you could tuck away to the back of your head until the morning.

You don't want to say it, not even to yourself, but his pain concerns you.

You know how the Mangekyou allowed for genjutsu of such high levels, forcing an acute state of astigmatism on its user in the long run. You also know how the Mangetsu, its shuriken-shaped wheel differing in contours from that of the Mangekyou, didn't quite induce the humiliating myopia of its brother-Sharingan.

Sasuke turns away from you, as if on cue, knowing what you are thinking when you shift your white-eyed gaze like that; the Uchiha are an obstinately proud lot, even at their own expense, and he turns his head away because he doesn't want you to see him wrinkle his brow an effort to ease away the sting of the aftereffect.

You know how the Mangetsu stole its user's vision entirely, the more it was employed, and the more painful it was after being used in a given situation.

Lately, the pain-tears had been more recurring, but he always dismisses it as dust in his eyes or the dryness of the air, but he doesn't know you know.

You know that the pain it extracted from its wielder must be like the pain of a Chidori spreading its fine blue wings across Sasuke's brain, enfolding in its electric feathers the vision that had served him for nearly two decades. It flapped every now and then, sending bursts of ill-controlled chakra into already worn-out optic nerves.

Chi-dori. The call of a thousand birds.

Its sound reverberated in your ears, in the silence of the village at night, much like white noise. As you both make your way to the Hyuuga estates, the darkened houses that flank the street seem to peer invisibly out at you. Like empty sockets, open windows array in quiet scrutiny, inviting the scarce summer wind to cool a sweat-twisted sheet or a slumbering shinobi's fevered sleep. It was strange how such populated places could feel just as haunted as any ghost town, as any family compound perhaps, long deserted by its deceased clan.

Both of you are a sorry sight, but both of you, proud sons of proud clans, carry your pain like a badge. There will be aching ribs and sore limbs in the morning (severe headaches for Sasuke that would perhaps last a day), but the mission was accomplished; the last mutinous Root ANBU pair had been detained and were scheduled for trial when the sun climbed the sky.

He staggers, but you anticipate the movement, seeing the growing wobble of his knees, the short shocks of stillness in his muscles, as if these were little moments of unconsciousness. You reach forward with your good arm, naturally straining your left, and prop him upright back again.

He glares at you, but that is reflex and he's probably only delirious. "I can walk," he mumbles, but adjusts his weight slightly against your shoulder anyway, and together the both of you make your way up the hill, your leaning forms casting one long shadow against a moonlit street.

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The world, it seems, has slowed down to a crawl.

You lay him on the futon, face already drenched in sweat. The wind that wafted in to nudge to feeble life the small chime by the sill, seemed to hold its very self back. His face is contorted in an expression that could have meant pain, and perhaps something else…something else that only you have seen, in the secret hours of your passing. It was fascinating how such a scornful face could twist to a look that was as much agony as pleasure.

Ah, but now is not the time. Not now, when he was dealing with the backlash of the Sharingan. You decide to tell him, by holding a cool hand to his forehead, how unamused you are by his pain, and how he should not keep on volunteering himself with you on your one-person missions because whenever he did, he always seemed to end up using the Mangetsu, and the Mangetsu…

He snarls lightly, but mostly in reaction to a particularly sharp jolt of pain. You move your hand lower, to cover his eyes. He tries to turn his head away (he was good at this), but you hold him firmly.

He stills, but his breath hitches. Between your hand and his eyes, both of you could feel the flow of chakra, yours entering his, smoothening out the strained pathways that contorted and contracted around the areas of his eyes.

"I—" he begins, but you silence him, because you know what he will say: He will wish he did not have the Sharingan, he will wish he was not born to his clan, he will wish that he were blind. He has said these things before, and always, he never truly meant them. All your lives, you realize, both of you have said so many things you did not mean. All your lives you hurtled blindly, you, proud sons of clans whose eyes see what common eyes do not.

But who can see beyond what is mortal? Certainly not you, no matter how well you thought you could anticipate "destiny" and the way it moved you, both of you, like pieces on a gameboard. You lived in a square, in a cage, of your own intricate construction, and your belief in a fixed future was a spotlight you relied on; a spotlight so bright that it blinded you.

He moved in shadows, patches of darkness as circular as the wheels in his eyes, repeating in his mind what had happened on that night. Again and again, spinning, clouding his vision to the present, blinding him.

This is the irony you both understand, and this is the irony that keeps you together; two pieces in a go board, defining each other, he outlining your shadows, you clearing his sight. You will lean on each other and you will feel, as you feel now, the wetness brimming from his lids as you close your hands over his eyes, as you pour in the last of your strength to combat the stubborn knots in his chakra pathways (everything about the Uchiha is stubborn).

Your left arm sags against your chest where you strapped it across your shoulder with bandages. You recall the dried gauze pressed to the gash on your side, when the ponytailed Root tried to halve you with a sharpened jur, the same side that the spider-mutant burned a hole through. You recall your soft tap to your opponent's nape—the one place where the Byakugan fails—and his body falling and convulsing at your feet.

You recall Sasuke's left hand singing, and cutting through the darkness of the underground tunnel, electric blue, furious, eyes turning in the wheels that would one day turn him blind. That would one day, like your Branch House mark, remove the ability to see movement, and see through illusions.

You lay yourself down beside him, remembering that you have a body too, and your chakra is expendable, and for the moment sleep is a wise and heavy hand weighing on your eyelids, telling you to rest, you equally arrogant and overconfident Hyuuga!

Outside, you can vaguely see the three members of the Eastern Sector patrol leaping across the perimeter of your compound. You see the slow turning of the world as it moved, as it always did, from evening to day. By then, the second morning watch will take its place, and the streets will fill with life. By then the village's eyes will open, like it was the first morning of their lives. By then the children will make their way to school, and Hanabi will toss her head proudly when the teachers tell her that she is to be accelerated a grade. By then they will release the kites, the "Hyuuga's flock," the fastest birds in the whole of Konoha.

By then the house medics will tap lightly on your door to waken you, and they will have their medical implements ready, and they will mend your arm and wonder why you are so spent. By then he too will open his eyes and the tiniest fear nudges against you: that when you look into them, they will not be able to look back at you because the wheels have worn his vision out.

You wonder if his blindness will be, finally, a vast expanse of white, a whiteness that no shadow can possibly penetrate. You wonder if the Caged Bird mark will leave you, in your final moments, in darkness as gentle and as quiet as his stare, especially in the mornings when you are languidly preparing your tools for war, or in the evenings when you would bend over him, and he would raise his head to meet yours.

A darkness as soft as his hair on your cheek and as deep as his eyes when the Mangetsu leaves them seeps across your consciousness.

You fall asleep to the sound of a thousand feathers winging their way to the sun.

Notes:

An amazing thing about NejiSasu is how fitting they seem to be on closer scrutiny (ahahaha. Insert doujutsu joke here). Sure if they got together all the villagers, girls and guys alike, would probably drown the country in drool—both in appreciation, and in jealousy, and possibly even in rabid anger. But then… The pretty dichotomy of white/black, the image of birds (Itachi's form in Chapter 259 of the manga dispels into black birds, ala Madonna), the idea of 'looking', their birthdays being only 20 days and a year from each other… bah, I couldn't resist.

1 Chidori – "One Thousand Birds" It's pretty much the same as "Raikiri" but it's more associated with Kakashi (even if Chidori's the original name), because according to Gai (and we all know he's a walking Wikipedia ;D), it was the latter who split a lighting bolt in two with it.

2 Mangetsu- literally, "full moon." I took liberties with the idea that there could be more than one manifestation of a "higher" Sharingan, Mangekyou (lit. "kaleidoscope," Itachi) only being one of them. I'd imagine it would take a toll on the user as well, and I modified the conditions a little.

3 "Harvest Moon" – typically in September, meaning Sasuke gets his crazy fits once a year. It's like the culminative amount of pain he's had to experience via the usage of his Mangetsu for one year. This is the true reason why he's kept in Hyuuga (ergo Neji) custody, because like 4-tailed Naruto, he can go insane and do an Itachi. The Hokage doesn't want that, so she rightfully assigns the strongest family to watch him.

4 go – the Game. Unlike chess, the squares are not coloured, but the pieces are. The play pieces themselves are generally in black and white. I'd say something about "Sai" but it's the wrong manga series and all you get is the image of man-stomach and incredibly fashionable shinobi-midriffs.

5 These being the 3rd in my "Silences" project, I decided to tackle the "silence" of a gaze—much synesthesia there, but you know how, without saying anything, some people have an "inquisitive" or "meaningful" look that they might as well have articulated anyway. Neji and Sasuke, I believe, would be extremely in-tune with this "Underneath the underneath" sort of conversation.

6 For Shichi-chan.

7 (... Fk you, Billy Shakespeare rocks. ;p)