A/N: Before you guys read any further, I must warn those of you who have not read my other One-Shots (most notably, Laudanum, Marche Funebre and Silence) that I enjoy experimentation. Parallax is no exception – this time I am dabbling around with timelines and perception. So if things do not make sense, never fear: I love not making sense. It makes me feel like I have achieved something.

This One-Shot is to thank all my reviewers for Not Ever, who got me up to over 250 reviews. :D

Disclaimer: No, Naruto is not mine. This story bears stylistic similarities to Murakami's After Dark – mainly because that style just rocks. It also has a few references to Plato's Republic (mainly the Simile of the Cave), as well as tiny references to Murakami's Kafka on the Shore.

Anyway, please enjoy, and don't forget to review!

Parallax

--

Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,

This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.

Here's yesterday, last year –

Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast

Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

(Sylvia Plath: A Life)

--

We wake slowly, as if emerging from the depths of a pond.

We blink. Once. Twice. Our sightline wavers with our consciousness, blurs like fog before sharpening into crisp, tailored lines. As we awake the world around us slowly settles, sand grains sinking to the bottom of a jar, and we become aware of our surroundings: a small room, a window, darkness.

For a moment we are overwhelmed.

We do not move.

We keep our gaze fixed on that same spot in that same small room, as if we are peering through the lens of a camera.

When we are ready we redirect the bearing of our eyes – or rather, our eye. (Because, for some reason, everything in the room is singular.) The ease with which the movement occurs startles us, since we have the strange, dreamlike notion that we have not woken for a long time – and things which are not used take a long time to get used to. But this does not happen.

We blink again, a little experiment. But it is not a dream.

Rather, it is as if we are flipping through an undisclosed person's memories.

The notion disconcerts us. But nonetheless we look around again, our sense of curiosity overrules our sense of discretion. The room around us is a clean one. It does not look familiar. Everything is extremely still, as if we are stuck in a photograph of someone long dead. Aside from us, there does not appear to be any conscious thought within the room; the air is pure but stifled, something inherently wrong but impossible to pinpoint. Perhaps it is because the wood-lined window in the far wall is closed. It is as if the room has already been removed from the world outside, a little forgotten presence just nudging the edge of our reality: irrefutably real but simultaneously unreal.

We understand, without having moved or having anyone notify us so, that it is a room in which two objects may somehow – somehow – occupy the same space without appearing otherwise.

For a long time we just swivel our eye, sweeping over every particular detail in the room. There is a bed in the corner, a double one, with black and white sheets tucked mechanically in. It is a low one made of dark brown wood, the kind used by some Japanese families. And yet no other suggestion of that ethnicity inhabits the room – we think again of a dream, in which everything is distinct yet undeniably anonymous, like a name-card viewed through an unfocused lens.

We note the wooden desk. Its surface is one thick sheet of glass, and on it is a metal desk-lamp and a black pencil-case. The pencil-case is open but from our angle, we cannot quite see what is inside it.

Next to it lie two sharpened pencils; the only duality in a room of the singular. They have been placed very carefully beside each other, precisely parallel to the edge of the desk.

Two inches or so away lies a piece of paper, white and approximately A5 in size. One of the four paper edges is not smooth like the other three, but rough, as if something has been torn from it. We notice that it is not entirely blank.

There is writing on its surface. It is in pencil, three short words scrawled very neatly in the centre.

We do not read it. We let its mystery remain, as abstract as our presence.

Our eye wanders.

To the left of us is a walk-in-wardrobe, but its light is turned off and we can't make out very much. The door to it is half-open, as if its owner could not quite decide whether he liked it open or closed. We can still sense his indecision hanging about the room; as if the entire room embodies that indecision, that all-consuming despair.

There is a clock on the wall. Its hands are black on white.

We see that they are frozen at precisely one minute past twelve.

The sight troubles us. We sink backward away from the paralysed time, as if we too are undecided as to what to do.

(Then again, perhaps there is nothing for us to do.)

We let the small room conquer us. We close our eye and we wait.

When next we open our eye we realise that something drastic within the room has changed.

For a moment we cannot work out what it is; but that is only because we have forgotten what it used to look like.

(But then we remember.)

Firstly, we realise that the window in the far wall has been opened. Its dark, straight frame slices a perfect square of outside sky. From time to time the opened glass panel sways with the wind, bangs lightly against the room's white wall.

Next, we notice that the desk has been disturbed. The two pencils with which we are already familiar are not in their original places; one is poking out of the black pencil-case, and the other is lying blunt and slanted on a piece of A4 paper. It is possible to see that the paper has been folded before; it is creased width-wise, but has been opened again and placed flat on the desk.

We strain to see if anything has been written yet. But the paper is disturbingly empty.

We notice that the desk-lamp is turned on. The darkness has thinned from last we saw it and it alters the entire room, as if the different lighting has recalled a different world. The air is different too, pure like before but no longer stifled.

We think of the air after a light snowfall.

There is a door to our right. It is wood, like everything else, and it is closed. In the darkness before we had not noticed it. On it hangs a wall calendar, and the date has been flipped to read the 23rd of July.

When we look at the clock on the wall we see that it is no longer frozen; it reads exactly three.

It is nearly dawn outside and the light from the open window is grey and meek, filtering into the room like translucent film.

It is only then, when we have carefully catalogued every other change in the room's appearance, that we finally note the largest change of all. Perhaps due to our inhuman presence we have an innate tendency to overlook changes that are human. But it is the human presence which we notice last, and although it does not surprise us entirely, it strikes us as having some particular meaning which escapes us.

There are two bodies lying on the Japanese bed.

They are everything which the room is not – there is no orderly way in which they lie on the sheets. Their limbs are askew, unpredictable in genuine human style. For a moment we think that they are bodies only, that there is no life within them – again, that tendency to favour the inhuman – but then we notice that there is some movement within the chaos of their limbs. Their chests are not still. They rise and fall in a familiar, dumb beat.

They remind us that time still exists in the room. The notion soothes, though we are not quite sure why. We relax. For a while, we are completely content.

And then, one body stirs.

Our sight sharpens instantly. The motion disturbs the room, in the same way a breath of wind will disturb a set of scales. We are unused to this sort of disruption and we look on with a strange sort of panic.

Through the sharpened perception that comes with fear, we realise that the bodies are those of two boys.

They are both quite young; their ages similar, although as an inhuman spectator our eye cannot be sure. Perhaps sixteen, seventeen. They are both naked but the sheets twine up to their hips, a great white snake that has swallowed their legs.

The boy who has just stirred shifts slightly onto his side, and then is still again.

The equilibrium returns. We allow our eye to relax.

And then in our curiosity we permit ourselves to observe him more closely.

Even from this distance we are able to make out his features very clearly. In the light from the desk-lamp his skin has been washed an eerie shade of orange. The way he lies there on the bed is especially unique, as there is an air about him which is both disturbing and disturbed. One hand is tucked behind his head and the posture spikes most of his blonde hair down into his closed eyes; the other arm is curled next to his stomach. His face, as we see it in profile, is not so much handsome as striking in the lean, sharp way of a fox.

We linger on him. It is strange, but something obscure about him makes it hard for us to look away.

The other boy lies very close but they do not touch.

It does not seem out of place – they look so dissimilar, so opposite to each other in every way, that such an arrangement feels right and natural. We understand that even in their intimacy (if intimacy it is) they are still separated, in the same way that our presence is separated from theirs on the bed; in the same way that the sky must be separated from the sea.

In the way that reality must be separated from the private workings of the heart.

The second boy is further away from us. It is a little harder to see his face. But nonetheless we see that it is pale and delicate – an arched form of prettiness. His hair is dark and the lamp-light perches there like a raven, we think of oiled black feathers.

The first boy stirs again.

When he opens his eyes we note that they are completely awake, and for some reason there is a wetness within the blue.

Very slowly, we watch as he gets out of the bed.

He is very careful. He does not disturb the space too much. The other boy sleeps on, each breath silent, the room absorbing every exchange of air.

For a moment the boy with the blonde hair stops beside the bed and stares down at his still-sleeping companion. His back is to us and we cannot see the expression on his face. After about five seconds, he turns away and snatches at something lying on the bedroom floor.

It is a bundle of clothes. He pulls on some pants and an orange shirt.

And then he turns as if to look around the room for the last time, his blue eyes lingering on every detail in the same way that we have done already. He takes in the window, the desk-lamp, the pencil-case, the two pencils askew; the wall calendar, and the wooden door, and the walk-in-wardrobe.

He does not look in the direction of the bed. Instead he raises his hand to his eyes, half-angrily, as if to swipe something away.

And then finally he looks at the clock on the wall, and for some reason it has frozen at exactly one minute past three in the morning.

It seems to remind him of something. And when he turns his face back toward us we realise that a single wet line has trailed its way down from his eye, and the expression within the two blue spheres seems to denote an entire history. It is something more than we – a mere eye, a viewpoint invisible and suspended in space – can comprehend.

The boy goes over to the desk. And he takes up one of the pencils – the sharp one half-buried in the pencil-case – and he scrawls three short words on the paper, above the crease.

This time, we strain to see those words.

23rd July: 1439

They mean nothing to us. We are all confusion.

They appear to mean something to the boy writing them, however. When he is finished he leans back with an unreadable look in his eyes, then in one fast movement tears the paper in two at the crease.

The boy on the bed rolls over in his sleep, but doesn't awake.

The half of paper with the three cryptic words is placed neatly on the desk. And then the two pencils, now both blunt, are placed together next to it, precisely parallel to the edge of the desk.

The boy puts the other half of the paper in his pocket. He switches off the desk-lamp.

When he reaches the wooden door he sees the wall calendar again, and he hesitates.

Finally, he flips the page over to the 24th of July.

It seems to end everything.

He opens the door and we watch him leave.

And the room fades to black around us, and suddenly we are unconscious of anything at all.

We come out of the unconsciousness sharply and the room is back before our eye. This time it is late evening, and the sky outside the open window is dark and tinged with a pastel grey. We catch small glimpses of streetlights, like violent pinpricks. Other than the fading light from outside, there is no source of illumination in the room.

The clock reads exactly six. The minute hand is ticking.

The boy with dark hair is standing beside the bed, struggling with a shirt. He has ironed it and it fits him well, but he appears to have some trouble with the buttons. His lip is twisted into an annoyed frown as the shirt slips through his fingers.

Goddammit, we hear him say.

In the end he gives up, leaves the last two buttons of the shirt undone. He rolls up his sleeves. His arms are slender, they contain an unnamed strength that seems to bristle beneath the skin. We watch as he goes into the walk-in-wardrobe. His shadow shifts around in the semi-darkness like a spectre and then he comes out again, as if unsatisfied with something.

He sits on the bed. He clasps his hands – pianist's hands – in his lap.

And then restlessly he stands again, tries the last two buttons once more, manages them. His motions are jerky and he seems to be angry, although about exactly what we cannot tell. We can only watch. Finally, he sits back down on the bed.

We see that the covers are folded very neatly. There is only one pillow.

The scene fades into a silence that only pictures can emulate, broken only by the soft-spoken ticking of the clock.

When the time is one minute past six the door to the room suddenly opens.

The boy on the bed looks up. Another presence has poured itself into the room, it is the boy with the blonde hair. We remember his note left on the other boy's desk and we look at him curiously, as if by staring we might be able to understand him. He is wearing familiar-looking cargo pants and an orange shirt.

He has injected an unstable energy into the room. We are afraid that something will overbalance.

We watch as the boy flops onto the well-made bed.

I'm so glad it didn't rain today, he says.

He seems to delight in upsetting things. The boy with dark hair looks down at him, there is a sort of irritation in the dark-orbed gaze.

I just made this bed, Naruto, he says.

All the better. I love messing up beds that have just been made.

As if to prove this he flings his arm around, trying to coax as many creases out of the linen as possible. His companion makes a disgusted sound and stands, moves to the doorway.

I thought I told you to call before you came over, he says pointedly. Itachi only just went out.

I know. I saw him go out.

He's coming back soon.

I'll just slip out when I hear the garage door opening.

He doesn't always open the garage, and it's a tone sharper than scissors. And once he gets up to my room he'll know you've been here. The bed's a complete mess.

The other boy sits up. We see that his eyes are a lot more sober now, and they are narrowed in query. He tips his head to the side.

What's the matter, Sasuke? You're not usually this pissed off.

Who said I was pissed off, snapped out like pebbles.

I did. And the bed rumples again as the boy pushes himself off, goes to the other standing by the still-open door. Is everything okay? Did something happen?

No. But before you go, you'd better make that bed again.

I was planning to make it a lot messier tonight, if you know what I mean.

He's met with two darkly reproachful eyes. The exchange interests us, if only because it seems to hold some unvoiced significance. Finally the boy with gold hair sighs, backs away to the bed again, sits down very demurely.

I hate it when you're like this, Sasuke, he says with an honesty that's brutal.

The other crosses his arms and looks down at his bare feet.

I never asked for it to be this way, he says.

A pause. And then the boy named Naruto says, No, me neither.

We do not know what it is they are referring to. But that only serves to sharpen our interest, make our collective eye study each word and gesture with a minuteness we had not quite employed before. When at last the boy at the doorway comes to sit back beside the other we analyse him, we strain to become him.

A streetlamp outside is malfunctioning. It winks on and off for three seconds before going out.

And we hear, very gently: Happy birthday, Sasuke.

A small laugh. It is not entirely happy. You remembered?

Of course. I wouldn't forget something as important as that. 23rd of July, Sasuke's birthday. I have it written down somewhere.

Wow. And here was I, thinking that you were illiterate.

We understand that it is a very feeble attempt to lighten things. Both boys seem to know this already, because neither smile at the comment. Instead, they just sit there. The clock ticks on.

And then, a sudden burst as if he cannot hold it in any longer: Sasuke, I'm really sorry that I'm leav –

Don't be. And that ends it.

The sky has darkened considerably now, but what the time really is we cannot determine, because the clock has managed to freeze again. It still reads one minute past six. Neither of the boys seated on the bed seem to notice that the silence is now complete.

When it is broken it is broken by the boy who began it. His ink-black hair covers most of his eyes. It is obvious he is trying to hide some emotion.

What time do you leave tomorrow? he says very quietly.

Blue eyes don't meet him. I leave in the morning. Around six or so.

Have you packed?

Pretty much. I've left out my toothbrush and things like that. Things that I'll use tomorrow before I leave. I'll have to drop by the bank on the way to the airport, though.

Do you need me to drive you?

And it's a No, too quickly.

And then it is as if they have suddenly lost all motivation for speaking, they lapse into silence again. It is so absolute that they don't even move, don't stir a finger, as if they believe that by staying completely still they can fool time into stopping.

And it is true. Time has. But they both do not know this.

Finally the boy named Sasuke shakes his head as if to pull himself out of a dream, stands up again. He goes to the wood-and-glass desk and he opens a drawer, takes out a black pencil-case.

Well, if you're going to go tomorrow you'll have to give me your address and telephone number; spoken briskly, as if to compensate for something. I'm not going to spend a whole day trying to track you down on the Internet.

The other boy laughs. The spell breaks.

Only you would take a whole day, Sasuke, lightly as air. He stands as well.

We watch as the pencil-case is opened, rummaged through. And the black eyes frown again as they did when they were doing up buttons, blink once or twice as if to clear the vision.

The blue eyes notice. Concerned. Sasuke?

Can't find a sharp pencil. He takes out a pen.

To point out the obvious: That's a pen, Sasuke.

I know that, but he is disconcerted, the mistake worries him. He puts the pen back. Can't see properly in this light.

The boy named Naruto goes to him and takes the pencil-case away, extracts a pencil. It is blunt. He puts it on the desktop and tries again. This time he finds a sharp one, he tests the point on his finger.

Here.

But the dark-haired boy is not looking at him, he is opening another drawer, looking for a piece of paper. The sheet he pulls out is white, completely blank, a fresh A4 sheet. He puts it down.

But his companion is still lingering on something else.

Sasuke, can't you see the pencils properly?

Irritable again, Of course I can, Naruto. Don't be a pain.

It's not that dark, you know.

Just write your address for me, will you?

The boy we know as Sasuke is folding the sheet of paper. Perhaps it is his nature but he does not like to waste things, he prefers things exact. The A4 sheet is creased width-wise, as if in preparation to be torn in half.

Can you even see the edges of that piece of paper clearly, Sasuke?

It is enough. The paper is opened and slammed down onto the desk.

If you don't want to write it, then don't, the fringes of each word furious, dipped in ink. Why would I give a damn. If I had my way, I'd never see you again.

When the desk-lamp is switched on the room suddenly warms with orange light, as if our eye has been altered into an orange-tinted lens.

Can you see the pencils now, Sasuke?

Just shut up, will you!

And we can feel his anger, we can feel it lathering up the walls like soap. Our eye focuses on his face and to our surprise and confusion we see that there are fresh tears there. It is as if he has been forced to acknowledge something he would rather ignore. He pushes past the other boy and goes to the bed, lies down and turns his face away from the light.

The black pencil-case is set down. The sharp pencil is thrown into it, but it does not land perfectly, it lands halfway out.

Sasuke.

No movement. My eyes are fine.

Did you see the optometrist?

I told you, they're fine!

And the boy in the orange shirt goes to him, stands over his prostate form on the bed. The open window bangs against the wall.

You can't tell a pencil from a pen and you're trying to tell me that your eyes are fine?

He has not miscalculated – the pricking works, it opens things up. There is something about anger which breaks barriers down.

The boy sits up. His face is hard and we almost do not recognise it, the flint in his beautiful eyes goes cold. His prettiness turns harsh. And we realise then that that strength in his arms we had noticed before, that dark strength hidden behind the porcelain skin, unleashes itself in moments like this; becomes a force which shows itself in his eyes, like a circle of fire around black stone.

I'm going blind, Naruto, hissed furious as cold flame. I'm going blind. They told me last week. How's that? How's something like that to think about on your eighteenth birthday?

Blue eyes blink. What are you –

And you know what? He's crying. They can't stop it. I'll be completely blind within a year. I'll be completely blind –

Sasuke –

– within – one – year!

Stop. And it's arms around his shoulders, pulling him back, away from the nightmare. Stop, Sasuke. Just stop for a moment.

Naruto –

It's alright. Just stop.

The sobs lose momentum and we watch with a kind of strange pity the dark eyes close, the black hair coming down to hide him again, the way he clings to the orange shirt. They are together now on the bed and it's hard to tell where they are separate. Perhaps, we think then, they are not meant to be separate.

And it's an image so different to the one we were expecting, because the way things break down in the room is abrupt, leaving no space for warning. The force in the pale figure has drained out like water. The tanned arms hold him.

They say nothing more.

If the boy named Naruto does not quite understand – if he has questions – he does not ask them then, he keeps them all to himself.

After a while the room quiets and the dark eyes open.

They are sad and resigned. They have never been more beautiful.

How can I count them when I can't see them, Naruto? I couldn't even count them by myself tonight.

His companion seems to understand, even if we don't. He gives a soft smile.

I'll count them for you, a heart-given promise.

It is a lie. They both know it. But aren't all promises lies when you strip them away bare..?

The black head bows. And then he says, very quietly, When you're gone I'll count them every year until you come back.

Another promise. Another heart-given lie.

And when they kiss it is slow, and lingering, and pained. Our eye does not process the scene quite as what it is – because what we see is undoubtedly warped by the act of our perception, in the same way that an instrument must alter everything that it measures. We see the two boys sitting on the bed as if through a veil; we can catch their movements but not anything else.

Because, after all, we are not quite present – we are but an eye, just a viewpoint only.

(Separated from reality by the private workings of...)

And so when the two boys make love we see very little but their shadows, sharp against the stark-lit white wall. And as we watch the shadows melt from two into one, become unified, finally singular as if that is the correct way of things.

Those shadows are haunting. They are impressions only.

And because we are removed from them we cannot understand them, they remain our mystery.

We realise then with a jolt that our eye is fading.

And just before we let the blindness overwhelm us we strain once more to comprehend, to connect with the two bodies (one shadow) on the bed.

We catch three words, spoken soft like a prayer:

Happy birthday, Sasuke.

They are not what we expect. We do not know what to make of them.

And then the blackness claims us; we give way to our blindness.

We have returned to the room as we initially perceived it.

It is different now. We are no longer in the corner – we are hovering above the desk.

We are looking down. We see the paper.

We see the words.

10th October: 1500

And we see a hand, quite pale. It is familiar. We know it is ours.

It has just finished writing the 0 on the end. It tears the paper in two.

And then it sets two pencils down upon the glass desk, both sharp, both straight, both perfectly placed.

They seem to mean something. They cannot become one.

And above us the clock reads exactly midnight, we know it cannot breathe anything other.

We turn away. As we pass the walk-in-wardrobe (door closed, finality) we pause, we turn back as if searching for a friend. We open the door fully and stand before the mirror inside.

Our eyes are black. Our hair is black.

We are the boy named Sasuke Uchiha.

Except we are not young now; the years have slipped away from our fingers. We are a man of twenty-four. And as we stand there we hesitate, as if waiting for something to happen – as if waiting for someone to come in through the room's only door.

The uncertainty kills us. We leave the wardrobe door half-open.

And then we see the wall calendar, with the white squares numbered like small, neat graves: our days, our months, our memories.

We flip the wall calendar forward a day.

(And the clock on the wall strikes one minute past twelve.)

And then we leave the room, just as it has always been; we leave it like that, and we never return.

("Are those contacts?"

"Of course they're contacts. I'm short-sighted. I've had them ever since I was five."

"So you can't see things that are far away when you're not wearing them?"

"Depends how far away they are. Some things I can't even see with my contacts in."

"Can you see the stars?"

"Not clearly. They're just a huge white wash to me."

"That's kind of sad."

"What is?"

"That you can't see the stars."

"It's not that bad, you know."

"Have you ever counted them, then?"

"No. What's the point? There are too many. There has to be around a million. And with my eyes, it would take too long."

"There aren't a million, there are only 1500. That you can count, I mean."

"You've counted?"

"Ever since I was little."

"What for?"

"I count them every year on my birthday. Every 10th of October. It's just a habit, I guess. A way of keeping the time."

A pause.

"But if you know it's 1500, then you don't need to count them."

"You can't always get 1500. That's the perfect score, but you lose count and stuff. Usually I end up with around 1400. I've never once gotten 1500. They say that when you get exactly 1500, something good will happen to you."

"Are you counting them again this year?"

"Probably not. I'm going to Japan to study and I won't have time."

"Are you ever coming back?"

"Maybe."

A pause.

"I'll count them for you then. Every year on your birthday and on mine. Until you come back."

"I thought you said you couldn't see the stars."

"I'll get better. I promise. And anyway, if I get 1500, something good will happen to me. Right?"

A pause.

"You don't have to."

"I know. But it will help me pass the time. And who knows? Maybe the day I get 1500 will be the day you come back."

"But how will I know you've gotten 1500?"

"You don't need to. Just promise me you'll come back when it feels right to come back, because that will be when I've gotten 1500. It'll happen. Just promise me."

A pause. It is long.

And then:

"Alright. I promise. I promise.")

Owari.

The future is a grey seagull

Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.

Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,

And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,

Crawls up out of the sea.

(Sylvia Plath: A Life)

A/N: It's a little vague, and there are plenty of things I didn't explain about their relationship, but I think that it fits. Like I said in the story, sometimes you don't need to understand everything. You can't if you're not part of it. You can only see little portions, little shadows, and everything else you will have to leave to mystery. And I think that is how a well-told story should be: not explicit, but to leave enough for the reader to wonder, to imagine. My favourite stories are ones like that.

Oh, and for those who struggled with the unorthodox timeline: it was a reverse one. Well, sort of. I thought it would be very interesting to have a story in which for us, time goes forward, whereas for the characters in the scenes we are observing, time goes backward. (Kinda like we are travelling forward through Sasuke's own memories in reverse. If that makes any sense.) And it's because of the timeline, and also because of some of the major themes I was flogging, that I titled my story Parallax – hope you picked them up! :D

If you didn't get something, drop me a PM or a review, and I'll try my best to explain it to you.

So did I do a good job? Review, review, review! I would love to find out!