dove

A/N: Sasuke. Naruto. Itachi. And a rambling stream of consciousness.

You want to punch him.

Not the prissy powerpuff smacks from his trophy of a bitch. Not even a dislocated jaw.

You want a single collision of your fist against that idiotic grin, so that when you're done, your knuckles are crushed into your forearm, and the surgeons can't tell his mandible from his ramus from the pigeon shit in this dilapidated parking lot.

But of course, the results disappoint. You don't need a single stitch; it doesn't even hurt. And him, the plaster of stupidity just can't be ripped away.

He spits out a tooth and wipes the blood from his lips. "That all?"

Far from it. Behind a frigid mask lurks a monster clawing away at iron-barred walls as if they were nothing more than pencil lead and chalk, seething with enough hatred to seize him with nine inch nails, rip his flesh apart, and crush his bones. You control that beast and attempt civility one last time.

"Where is it." Your voice comes out flat, but far from calm, a sharp, dangerous edge to it that strikes with warning and burns like dry ice.

He doesn't heed your warning - "like I'd tell you" - and so you snap.

His back hits the pavement. You stomp harder, kick his face with enough force to snap his neck. You yank up the idiot's jumpsuit, your eyeball a hair from his. "I put a bullet in my own brother's heart," you breathe, "and I can blow a hole in your brain. Don't fuck with me." You slam his skull down and grind his head against the concrete for extra measure.

He just chuckles, his lips pulled into a lopsided smirk. "Widdrawlsa bitch, ainit?

Worse than his wry jokes are his humorless eyes. They remain clear, clean, critical, the eyes of people elevated high on pedestals and think they know shit. People you just bless the day their wings melt like wax and they crash into the earth where they belong.

You wonder when the hell he ripped out your eyeballs and stuck them in his own sockets.

After all, this buffoon wasn't the high and mighty king of rubbish years ago, back when his pupils dilated, raw, and he laughed in his idiotic high. He was the fool who pissed on the flag, vandalized school with dicks, and jumped in front of an incoming express K train. Only to flip himself back behind the yellow line and see the joke was on him when there was not a scream, not even an extra blink from an audience of thirty. Subway rats garnered more attention than he could.

Worse yet, this is the same loser who dared challenge you on the first day you were forced to live in this godforsaken shit-hole, and you had the pleasure of jamming his patella, kicking his ass back to his rightful place of cigarette butts and dog crap, then picking up your textbook on fuck-knows-what in one move.

So when the hell did he snatch your dumbass crown, title himself king of rubbish – nonexistent president, imaginary valedictorian, title-who-gives-a-fuck, and dare stare at you back with your own condescending, contemptuous eyeballs.

But his question is when the hell did you claim his spot. The position of trash society finds so repulsive, they can't even look, let alone try to clean you up. The people just waiting for you to fuck yourself beyond repair and rot in some alley with a gun in your mouth.

His question is when did you stop being the egotistical jerkass with the pretty white collar, smarter than all the teachers at this third-rate joke of a school put together, and turn into a dope who can't add two plus fish. When you stop grimacing at this filthy hovel of a city, wanting nothing more than to obliterate its existence from the map, and became into a masterpiece that made the slum itself cringe in shame.

When did you spiral down, down, down, began to bleed, fuck, kill, into nothing but a toxic waste dump, a human toilet, more chemicals stewing in your body than in a restroom closet, bursting the vessels in your brain, eating away organs, diseases infecting every cell. To the point even whores stood above you like goddesses, because while they profited, you paid for your own destruction, money, money, tossed into the air just give you another pill, another sniff, another injection, degraded into a begging slut on your knees, and the amphetamine, dopamine, morphine all fucked you again and again until the day you die.

That white trash before you and his little experiment with speed is nothing in comparison to how far you fell – cannabis, narcotics, depressants, stimulants. Hallucinogens, anesthetics. Any. All. Bleaching away your skin, devouring your nerves, reddening your spinning eyes. In your own vomit, on your stomach, convulsions, heart rate up, down, nonexistent, silence, ants up your arm, in your ear, laughter, blood, jolt of adrenaline, scratching, scratching, the infection down your shoulder in a gruesome tattoo.

It doesn't matter, just one giant toilet that will eat up whatever the world can shit out.

And you are not sorry.

You are not ashamed.

You do not repent, and you do not want salvation.

You just want your goddamn blood money to buy your goddamn drugs so you can swallow them all at once, maybe chug some alcohol to force down the regurgitation, then convulse, scream, and die in a painful, craptastic way that by no means does justice to all the blistering works of art you have done in life.

And the only thing stopping you is this flaky, white son-of-a-bitch, so you pound him harder, so hard that you actually feel some phantom pain in your fist, even though you're so sure the anesthetics and analgesics in your system would have long taken care of that problem.

"GIVE." Punch. "ME." Punch. "MY." Punch. "MONEY." Punch. "YOU." Punch. "MOTHERFUCKING." Kick. "CUNT!"

You give yourself a standing ovation for your outstanding use of contradictory profanities – all he had to insult your face on day one was "dribbling piece of dried up crap," which you faintly recall retorting with a much more clever, academic remark that slapped his intelligence, stature, and ego in one go. But that was back when you hadn't turned your brain to gunk, nor degraded your vocabulary to unoriginal blasphemy and sex.

He lowers his eyelid – the one that isn't a throbbing tumor on his face, and says, "Your money? I think not."

With that, he decides your turn's over, shoves your sorry ass off, and returns his debt with extra interest – a knee to your jaw, then a kick to your ribcage. And you stumble back, breathing and heart rate in disarray, mind in a state of vertigo, because what are you but an engine of breakable skin and bones, fueled by chemicals whose acid drips holes into your gears.

And now that your fuel is depleted, it's time to fall apart.

In stark contrast, he is a machine forged of gold and steel, as he resets his jaw. He brushes like dust the little bruises you made, because unlike your pitiful self, he grew up here. He raised himself. Was jumped more times than half the population here can count up to. Spent more nights in jail than days in school. And if there's one thing he can handle, it's the temper tantrum of a pathetic little druggie.

His tongue lapses through his red-stained teeth, across the inside of his cheek. Then, he sucks, spits, and says, "Your money? What I think you meant to say was Itachi's money." The name makes you freeze, cringe, snarl; he ignores. "Which he saved for your college."

College.

You hate that word. It always punches you, makes you itch, nauseous. It chokes you, digging a hand into your heart as images of one person invade into your mind. You hate these images, claw at your hair for them to go away, but they never do. Your brother never goes away.

The sad smile, callous hands. The sound of the apartment door creaking open at 3:55 AM, because he just got home after working three jobs. And instead of sleeping on a subway bench, he wasted his last hour coming home every night just to make sure you were fine, your health was fine, your grades were fine, that you didn't forget to grab a blanket before you crashed on the couch, buried under eighty books-

No, no, no more.

You don't want to remember-

Your brother, who once earned free tuition to the best school in the world, but not even a semester passed before your father got shot in fifty places, your mother found religion, everything went to ash, and you sobbed on the phone, begging for him to not abandon you. You were lost, confused, traumatized. You needed stability, your family, him. His soothing words, his hand in yours, his presence, you needed him more than anything, and-

He didn't need you. Didn't need your shrieks and tantrums and mess. Didn't need reminders of his past when he was oceans away, at a table of friends in a luxurious common room. Among the future leaders, engineers, scientists, all intelligent and passionate, debating of meaningful things, laughing, clicking their delightful bourgeoisie cappuccinos, and calling for him to join them in the latest jeopardy-

He didn't need to check his cell phone that day. One call that lasted less than a minute before the police pried your hysterical self away and he began to desperately call out your name.

One phone call.

That was all it took for him to drop everything, lie through his teeth to the government, then slave away to give you that needle's eye opening at a better life – college, grad school, career, all the things he didn't need to forfeit had he just ignored your childish threats of self-mutilation, turned a blind eye, and left you with your bastard uncle, whose plan A was laissez-faire, plan B was military, and plan C was drown the little fucker on a pleasant Caribbean cruise, then sue the company over the death of his poor, dead nephew for a nice monetary compensation for babysitting the snotty brat.

And what a brat you were, always pretending to be the ignorant, unaware child, who impassively watched your brother's health deteriorate for your sake. Sasuke is just a child. He doesn't know any better. And he shouldn't. That beautiful trump card that allowed you to direct your anger at your brother whenever you pleased, throwing a few glasses or ranting about this crapsack neighborhood. To blamed him, screaming it's all his fault for this sub-par living, for this joke of an education, for everything, after you lost the scholarship and you knew you would never pay back all he did for you.

That ultimate trump card that allowed you to rage all you wanted, cuss all you wanted, because you knew that instead kicking your ungrateful ass to the curb, he would respond with nothing more than a tired smile and a poke to your forehead, saying he'll work harder. After all, you're just a child. This place, this lifestyle isn't for you. You have your pride. You're scared, stressed, in pain. Just bear with this a little more, as your older brother fixes your broken life.

Even if he bled dry, he would fix this. Never once a single complaint, never once a bitter expression. You didn't need to suffer along with him, didn't need the guilt, the pressure – and BC is difficult without a proper teacher, Sasuke, take your time. He understood you, forgave you, kept his word and took on another degrading, strenuous job so you wouldn't need some stupid scholarship.

And after you exploited every ounce of his love for you, and he was ill and bedridden and useless, on his knees, holding dearly onto your hand, his turn to plea – you're sick, you're dying, go to a hospital, please Sasuke – you only thought of the irony and pulled the trigger.

College.

It took a bullet for him to realize there never has been, and never will be, a college for you.

But that's fine. If he cared so much, he would not mind if you took that pitiful amount of money left and used it on something much more productive.

"Yes, college," you bitterly laugh. "Now hand it over, Naruto. I'll see to it it goes to my college."

"Oh, you really are high if you think that'll work," the white trash laughs humorlessly. "Besides, Itachi long stopped trying to send you to college. He just wanted you to live and gave the money to me to somehow save your ass.

"Only, this causes a bit of a problem here. We can agree you're beyond saving. What we do? Put you in a hospital, then rehab, then you can go on flipping some nice burgers down at that shack for the rest of your life? I don't think you deserve even that.

"So, I'm staring at all this dough, and a thought comes to mind. Hey, it's just enough to put my ass in a nice community college. I ain't doing all that terrible in school no more. Sakura, she make a damn good teacher, make me improve so fast, I can't believe where I'm at. I can graduate, I might make it to med school and become one of them psychiatrists to help out fools like you. Yeah, the money is just enough to turn me into what you failed to be.

"What do you think? All this money Itachi died for. What you think he would do with it if he's right here, right now? Who you think he'd choose?"

There is no need state the redundant. Instead you charge at him, nail him, sink your claws into him and toss him into the cracked gravel. Weeds, gum, cigars, plastic bags, bottle shards, a variety of mother nature's defecation, literally and metaphorically, and now, his skull.

He laughs again, amused by your answer, and lands his fist directly against your temporal bone. Something drips. Either sweat or blood seeping. Probably both.

You know you're getting a concussion when he slams you down, know somewhere shards of beer bottles cut into your back. And in the back of your mind, you think about the fractures in your skull, rips in your muscles, the bacteria invading in, the immobilized antibodies, the kick of adrenaline looping one atomic ring after another.

Not that any of it matters. The lining in your heart is dense enough to strangle you in a minute, punch one more time and you're ready for a seizure or stroke. Bones losing density, livers and kidneys shutting down, lungs burning holes.

Permanent.

Irreversible.

The white trash is wrong. There is no burgertastic future awaiting you. You're not going to die five, ten years from now from starvation. You're not even going to make it long enough to be strapped to some life support machine for all the shit in your system. You're going to die any second.

And that knowledge frightens you, makes you shake and want to curl up into a ball, wonder if this is your brother's revenge.

You are going to die.

You are going to die in this ratty parking lot, pummeled to death by some trash who used to be half your size.

You are going to die with the leftovers of your mind going over which cells are destroyed, which tissues are ruptured, which organs have failed, and what will be the ultimate cause of your death out of this colorful selection, all in vivid detail.

This is your brother's revenge, to make your suffer your last moments before he wipes your miserable existence off the face of this planet and cleans his one mistake in life.

The white trash stops, his fist midair. You almost feel cheated, because all he has done is knock out a few teeth, crush your zygomatic bone, and damage a few nerves to an eyeball you're already going blind in anyways.

"How," he demands, panting heavily. "How did you fuck up like this?"

His teeth grinds. "You had it all. Highest grades. The chicks. You were a total dick and I hated your ass, but I still respected you, I fucking looked up to you, I became who I am now because of you. While the rest of us were sitting in our own shit, doing stupid things that got us shot, you were the one guy who knew what the fuck you were doing, where the hell you were going, how to get there. You were the one guy who I thought was going to make it out of this place alive and move on to something big, bigger than all of us. And most importantly, though all the crap you pulled me out of, all the times we helped each other survive this hellhole, I thought you were my fucking friend."

He paces, his eyes searching you for answers, but you don't want to talk and you sure as hell don't want to hear some fucking monologue.

"What the fuck happened to you? Orochimaru? When you were drug dealing, I thought, fine, the money, you need it. Then I learn you're on weed, then crack, then ice, then I don't even know anymore. And after I took two trains, a bus, and walked five miles in the blistering cold to the hospital, my lovely prize was seeing eighty IVs in your veins and a pipe to your stomach. Oh, and a brother you never once mentioned about."

You don't want to hear this. He kicks you back down so you will hear.

"I-ta-chi," he drawls out the name, just to see your pitiful reaction, knowing you hate that name, just as you hate the c-word. "I thought I knew you, knew you better than anyone, because you were just like me in every single fucking way possible – no family, no friends, all the ambition and drive but no destination. But when I learn about him, nothing made sense anymore.

"You had a fucking brother," he shouts. "If I were shit-high, I might just jump off a bridge for you. But had I found you in that bathroom with that needle in your arm, that shit in your stomach, I sure as hell wouldn't have brought you to some fancy expensive hospital, sitting by your side the entire time holding your hand. When that doc said there was no hope for you, all I thought was how you fucked up, how you abandoned me, how I didn't want to see your sorry ass die. I wanted to run out of the room.

"This the difference between him and me. He didn't leave, didn't move an inch, just stared at you with this... look in his eyes that you don't see everyday. Maybe not even in a lifetime. Said he preferred to invest in humanity, but maybe this time, he would negotiate with God. No, he didn't give up hope, couldn't give up hope to the point I thought he was high and delusional.

"And it was about then you can screw any fear or disappointment or worry from me. Man, I wanted to rip that pipe out of your throat and kick your ass off the bed. You don't deserve no pity. You weren't like me at all. I was fucked up, sure, but you had someone who cared for you, loved you, went through the ends of the Earth and back to save you, and you still landed yourself in that shit.

"Who did I have? One grade school teacher who cared a damn before he got shot, who made me feel good about myself to live till puberty. But had I someone like Itachi in my life, working that hard for my sake, there'd be no fucking excuse to ever turn out like you did. Had I had someone like Itachi in my life, I'd work real hard in school, be a doctor, aim for presidency, walk on the fucking moon! I'd do that shit you'd only hear about on the news, because if someone loved me that damn much, made me feel that important, I'd have a reason to become something, something he would be proud of, and return him ten... hundred... thousand-fold, buy him a fancy mansion and treat him like king."

He says it as if the two of you are any different. As if in your situation, he would do any better, would never slip.

Because once you slip, even a little, you only fall, fall, fall.

See, as humans, you make a measure of yourself. What you are, what you can be. You have the potential to be a prodigious student, attending that prestigious private school and coming out top as a wealthy lawyer, doctor, CEO. But if you get mentally, physically, and financially fucked up, then maybe you can retain the potential of a genius kid struggling to get into a good school. But if you, for a modicum of justice in this world, decide to punch a crooked-nosed, racist, capitalist pig of a superintendent and lose your scholarship, then maybe you have the potential of an average loser trying to get into a normal college.

And the more you compare, the more you realize how much you have lost, the more you feel you have nothing left to lose, and the more you are willing to fall deeper to regain what you've once had.

Does the piece of white trash honestly think getting himself a nice fat A makes him any better? Maybe he should have a wonderful, loving big brother of his own. Maybe then he'll know how it feels to hear the door creek open every night at 3:55 AM. Maybe then he'll know how it feels to have the covers pulled over his shoulders, the books stacked neatly, all while he tries to not cringe at the smell of diesel, cigarettes, dish soap, and cheap motel shampoo, the last of which makes his gut cave itself inside out. Maybe he'll know how it feels to have his face stroked by a hand leather-thick and cracked, knotted and stained black with unforgiving chemicals.

Maybe he'll know how it feels to internally cry to sleep every night while he hears apology after apology, sorry there is no heat, sorry the food is meager, sorry you were lonely this holiday, sorry you had no help on your homework. Sorry he will have to break his last promise to you because ginger tea and penicillin only goes so far, and he will have to leave you in a few more years. Will please you forgive him.

Will you forgive him, in the form of a bag, thirty silvery pills that you cannot afford. But that's okay. Buy a crow, sell a dove, and one of those magical pills can be yours, make you real smart, perfect every examination. Even the additional profit can be yours.

Yes, the white trash should have his own loving big brother, because then he'll know how it feels to be too ashamed to look him in the face, to see the shadows under his eyes, the strands of grey hair, the same battered jacket looser and looser against his thinning body. He'll know how it feels to want to kill himself every time he fails, because death seemed more merciful than disappointment. He'll know how it feels to die when he wakes up in a hospital bed, his hand held in forgiveness, a body collapsed against him, years of money and life wasted.

He'll know how it feels to hurt so, so much, yelling at his loving older brother to fuck off, hand over the money, shut up, no more, no more, SHUT UP, until he's convinced a single bullet can put an end to this pain.

Maybe it still can.

Maybe then you can wake up from this nightmare, back in your bed, your older brother by your door, teasing if you wet the bed again as he shuffles your hair and shoos you down to Mother and breakfast.

The white trash is too busy calling an ambulance to notice the gun directed at him.

I take it out of your hand, and smirking, point it to the roof of your mouth.

Then strip Itachi of the last thing has on this earth.

You did dare me.