Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ Peripheral Vision ❯ Peripheral Vision ( Chapter 1 )

Standard Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Peripheral Vision

It is a given that Uchiha Sasuke has always been a prodigious warrior, equipped with the innate Sharingan and an incorrigible aptitude for skill and growth, complete with a steel drive and vision formidable to the most experience shinobi. On the contrary, in hindsight, Uchiha Sasuke's scan is speckled with immense blind spots -lessons unlearned. For the majority of his life, he has been an immature, detached being. He's knowledgeable of death and war, but he is ignorant of such ordinary things. Life has long been a cracked, shriveled mosaic, and only now, after his extraction from the Sound, has Sasuke begun replacing the missing pieces and refilling the empty pores.

Mundane tasks are such challenges for the Uchiha heir. Interpretation, comprehension of emotion, human interaction -they're all puzzles that his intellect cannot unwind. But really, he is so much more like a barbarian, with his absurd lack of speech and his unmannerly crudeness.

These intrusions in his life are irksome and unwanted, but there's a single exception he has overlooked, half wittingly. Haruno Sakura. The impudent daydreamer who grew up to become a strong, confident medic-nin. She may have abandoned her childhood weakness, but she has clung tightly to the reigns of her diseased, romantic fantasy for Sasuke.

And somehow, the disease infected him, too, acutely, and claimed him as a prisoner. This he can hardly believe because she is incongruent to him in levels of rationality and self-control. But that doesn't mean he wants to put an end to it, this disease.

He wishes he could instate a ventriloquist to communication for him, because Sasuke is so dreadfully inept. Sakura has come to mean so much to him, but it's impossible to express the notion in profound words and structured phrases. She means so much to him, so much more than she'll ever know, more than Sasuke will ever readily admit.

Sasuke realizes soberly and with a tinge of contempt just how much easier it would have been to despise Sakura, because although he is an avid fighter and a seasoned assassin, hate has always been his primary talent. Hate and vengeance.

But when has anything ever been easy for Uchiha Sasuke? Since childhood, Sasuke has always been the black sheep, the lost one, choosing to stray down the difficult, unbeaten path, so long as it guaranteed victory and empowerment. All-consuming hatred for Itachi and a villainous pact with Orochimaru were living proof of that. But wait, they were both dead, eliminated by him personally. So perhaps `living proof' was an error in phrasing. Perhaps they could be likened to scars instead.

Yes, puckered lesions of brown, raised grafts flecked across the terrain of pale flesh, but defective and gaudy in comparison. Some are long and lean while others appear stout and deep in width, but they all erect themselves like statuesque monuments upon a valley. And they burden him. And always, he fails to feign their heavy reminders off completely.

He'll never confess it aloud, but he is so very exhausted and so frail from a lifetime of magnified hatred and precise executions. So his exhaustion has brought about the end of his resolve to cut off humanity from every existent angle. But Sasuke, ever the analyst and strategist, has stored just enough energy to deflect almost every outsider, except for one. Sakura is the only one to have ever breached his devised, masterful façade, and he has displayed no inclination to counter-attack or at the very least, mount a defensive stance.

He cannot say that he loves Sakura, when he has been too shrouded by trauma and frigidness to recall the deep-down substance of love. The only pressing wisp that remains, he thinks, might be the feel of his mother's touch, a vague pendant he has carried through the years of treachery and loss.

Regardless, he has accepted Sakura into his pattern, accepted her in small ways imperceptible to anyone but her, because Sakura has plaintively studied the enigma for years. Every ninjutsu, strike, insult, smirk, and tragedy that is Uchiha Sasuke has been ingrained collectively in her mind, and she has morphed herself into an expert as a result.

He often theorizes that she must view him as similar to a piece of artwork. So opaque and straight-forward from a distance, but queer and engrossing in the close, intimate range, orchestrated by hidden sequences and elaborate staves. And showcased only to the rare few trusted to see (meaning Sakura and literally no one else).

And so, he has waged a peculiar co-existence with this kunoichi. On more than one occasion, he has stopped to question this relationship. Not as an outright vendetta against Sakura, but more a doubt on the cooperative dynamic, because relationships are about two-way effort. With Sakura, he knows the receptions will be insurmountable to the meager offerings (he fears that she will give herself wholeheartedly and without regret, when he can only return shreds of a half-dead, heart-shaped muscle and the remnants of a lost soul).

Of course, no normal person would spend this much time examining the foundation of a brewing relationship, but this is Uchiha Sasuke. So long has he been afflicted by the incessant need to overanalyze and dissect every aspect, to snatch a concept and diminish it to a singular grain of being, and thereby crush it into microscopic wreckage.

Strangely enough, when her hand grabs hold of his, it's all the reassurance necessary. The flurry of doubts and plots and second guesses seems to immediately dissolve. As her hand wrangles more tightly around his, the fingers remain despondent and hang loosely, like the threaded limbs of a ragdoll.

But there is blood flowing through those limbs and those veins, and air pumping through vital lungs. Cells are repairing his innards. And mostly, there is skin to skin contact, pure on cursed, but so justified and so validating.

And it is all undeniable proof that he is alive.