Graverobber141
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He appeared like a fleeting shadow at the edge of vision: a dark silhouette against the black of the night, moonlight dancing across his pale skin as he gracefully flickered across the fray like a ghost.
Hazel eyes wide, Amaya thought that was what the flash of wavering cloak and sparking metal was: a phantom, or perhaps a god. The sounds of steel meeting steel and screams of terror thundering in her ears like a consuming chant, the girl fell back into the wet earth slicked by the unyielding downpour of her home country, and watched with a mixture of awe and fear as the revenant sliced down foe after foe. The natives of the village behind her, all wielding makeshift weapons, could only stand immobilized in the same fashion, like motionless figures painted against a backdrop.
They had come a few hours ago, these ninja without headbands, demanding information that the villagers did not have, and when they were denied, had laid siege to the out-skirting settlement like the hounds of hell; though the people who called this place home had refused to go gently and quietly, it had been nothing sort of a slaughter. Outmanned, out-armed, out-trained, they had engaged with war cries and determination that were quickly broken, transformed from lions into sheep with the first wave of men that had fallen uselessly, only managing to scratch the armor of their tormentors.
And then he came, an answer to a silent prayer, a god of death and destruction to rain down judgement upon those who had taken their loved ones from them.
And he did it effortlessly.
"Amaya-chan!" Her father's voice broke through the white noise, and she felt his presence skidding next to her, his hands gripping onto her shoulders tightly as he dropped his sword into the mud. "I told you to wait inside!"
But she had wanted to fight. Fingers grasping into his roughspun tunic, she couldn't tear her eyes from the wraith. "What is he, otousan?"
"I don't know," he answered honestly in a taut voice. Gripping ahold of her tightly from behind, he began lifting her up when it came from their side: a fury of kunai. With a curse, he went to turn on his heel, shield her with his own body, when the nameless apparition appeared before them. Katana rising, the dark-haired man stopped what weaponry he could not deflect with his own body, and with his dual-colored, hardened stare -- a mixture of blood red and ringed purple -- boring into them both, he demanded in a low voice: "Move!"
Gripping more tightly into her father's shirt, Amaya looked over his shoulder as he started running back toward the rows of stone buildings, and watched as their savior rushed out to meet the last of their assailants. After the bodies fell, a roar of triumph rose from the populace, only to die out in muttered concern, as the cloaked man, the phantom who appeared in their time of need and moved like an indestructible force of nature, stumbled across the corpses, and collapsed into the runoff of the rain.
"Otousan! Stop!" The young girl screeched, tearing herself from her father's arms as she ran across the battlefield to fling her fingers into the black cloak. "He's hurt! We've got to help him!"
"Amaya-chan!" One of the nearby villagers was quick to pry the sobbing girl from the stranger, looking desperately toward her father for direction. "Sadao-san?"
Kneeling down, the elder man called Sadao examined the kunai that lined the injured man's back, his mouth forming a thin line at the sight of a dark liquid that stained the metal, yet wasn't blood. "Poison."
"What do we do?"
Looking up to watch his distraught daughter, Sadao grunted, as if the answer was obvious. "We take him in."
***
In rare moments of clarity, Sasuke thought bitterly how, after all he had been through, the mountains he had climbed and conquered, that it would end here, due to a poisoned kunai wielded by a insignificant lackey. And he was immune to poison, wasn't he? He supposed to every rule there was an exception, and his life had been nothing but exceptional: an endless, chaotic fight for survival, understanding, and now redemption.
And here his forgiveness awaited him: sprawled out on a cot in the backroom of a shack, his body feverish, expelling his fluids in a desperate attempt to rid itself of the venom that assaulted his veins. There was an elder man who tried to ask him questions, an elder woman who shoved the other away, and did her best to ward off the darkness that was slowly taking over Sasuke, like a debt wanting to be paid. And then there was the curious girl who stood on the threshold of the room, peeking from behind the door to catch a glimpse of the dying man in her home.
Those moments of comprehension were fleeting and far in between; mostly he dreamed in a febrile haze, his mind lost in its melding of reality and fiction. But wasn't that one of the last things his niisan had told him? Reality was subjective.
Naturally, he dreamed of his brother. An empty compound. Completely, consumingly silent. Sometimes he would sit beside Itachi, the blood-red moon shining in through the opened door, cascading an overarching shadow along his smaller form. Sometimes he would be chasing crows with red eyes, delving deeper and deeper into a dead forest, catching brief glances of that shadow eating away at his own. He was always young in those mirages, and so very, very desperate. Disgustingly so.
Sometimes he dreamed of that night: a torturing image that replayed before his eyes with a flash of crimson and spinning tomoes, over and over again, like a repeating circle of hell, his punishment for his sins, and it was those nights when he was the most vocal and violent, when his chakra would flair, and if it hadn't been for his lack of strength, he probably would have killed those around him.
And then, his head rising from the drowning depths of the ocean, breaking the surface of the murky waters that wanted to claim him, he would dream of her. Pink-hair and a emerald gaze that held so much kindness he was entirely undeserving of, a selflessness he could not understand. Seated under the blossoming trees she was named was after, he watched her from afar, and felt pain deep within his chest, because he knew he couldn't join her. His path stretched behind him, underneath darkened clouds that rumbled with thunder, lightning flashing across the sky.
Her name slipped past his lips a few times, barely audible.
"There's nothing more I can do, Sadao," he heard the elderly woman mutter one night, during a time she thought he was asleep. "He's on borrowed time."
"I've sent for a healer," the one called Sadao answered quietly. "Can you keep him stable?"
"I'll try," the woman replied, though she sounded less than pleased. "...But this stranger -- his left eye, that's not natural, and I've seen flashes of red in his other, like the sharingan. It's a risk to keep him in the village, especially when he is probably going to expire soon anyways, and after what happened--"
"He saved our village," the man grumbled in a tone that allowed for no argument. "That is a debt we must repay."
