[It almost makes him self-conscious, to have his eyes complimented, for all that they mean to his bloodline and for all he's endured to obtain their power. The sorrow and grief, as well as the hard-won achievement. And, even deeper, the memento — Itachi's legacy carried in his body.]
One day I'll show you what I can do with them. [A quirk of lips, playful — just a flash of pride.] You've barely seen anything yet.
Can you do that without... （ a little bit of a flicker of motion towards his own temple. poking the insane divine pillar in his brain, basically. teach him about genjutsu please. ）
As for mine... Christ, well. I've already talked to you about Mon Mahara, so I'll try something different. There's a world that doesn't have a name because as far as I know there's never been anyone there to name it. It's turned away from the sun, and has no rotation — so half the planet is basically baked to a crisp, and the other half is in permanent darkness. But there are thermal vents close to the surface that make it liveable anyhow — and it's...
（ he exhales, eyes closed. imagining it. ）
When I say 'darkness', I just mean an absence of sunlight. But the sky is almost alive. Have you ever seen, ah... shit, what's the word for you. 'Hokkyokukou'? Aurora borealis? It's a constant ribbon of colour from pole to pole. You feel like you could wrap yourself in it. There's no sentient life there, mostly just animals. They've never seen people before, so they're playful and curious, they're mostly herbivores that I came across, they feed on moss and underground tubers. And there are frequent storms, so... there are a lot of places where lightning's struck the earth and created glass out of the silicate soil. There's towering structures built out of it, entirely natural. You can smell the ozone in the air for days before and days after a storm. It's a wild place. I think you'd like it.
I could. If you wanted me to — it wouldn't reach anything deeper in your mind.
[He watches Cy in the telling of that other world, admiring Cy's face in the privacy of that moment while his eyes are closed, those handsome features so familiar now.
It's easy to imagine what Cy describes, an untouched wilderness beneath colorful streamers of light, animals living out simple lives, flashes of lightning brilliant in the eternally dark sky.]
... I think that I would like it too. [It sits on his tongue: We should go. Yet it's left unmanifested, because that freedom isn't theirs now, may never be if they remain trapped in this prison only to be separated into other, alternate dimensions. He doesn't let his thoughts dwell there.] I've never seen those lights, but they exist far in the north of my own world, a place called Snow Country. I've heard stories. That those lights are the spirits of children waiting to be born. Or another, that any child conceived beneath them will be born with fortune. They're a symbol of good luck.
There's only the one limit, and you know what it is and why. Anything else you wanna do, or show me — hell yeah I'm game for that.
（ he's far from fearless — but the ones he has are tamped down, muted and restrained with sasuke. he does not often think of himself as being given safety by another no matter the nature of their relationship — but he does trust sasuke implicitly to uphold it. ）
A lot of cultures think that the northern lights are something to do with the gods — no, by the way — and have stories or lore like that. It doesn't surprise me, especially if it's not rarely seen beyond a certain latitude. If I draw you a picture, could you... I don't know, make an illusion out of it?
Probably, but it might not be the same as you would remember it, because a perfect recreation is something I would have to access from deeper inside your mind. [From a memory, to be specific.] Do you want to see an illusion of those lights on the world you described, or something from my village? We could test it to see how you feel. I don't want to overwhelm you. All an illusion does — genjutsu is what we call the technique — is trick the senses. But for someone who has never experienced that before, it can still be intense.
[A smaller part of him almost wishes it was, but — he knows he would regret it tomorrow. And he doesn't want Cy to worry after him. Shifting, the ice pack is taken, allowing opportunity for him to lie down on the bed and pull Cy with him.]
Do you want to try it now? We don't need to go anywhere.
（ oh are we? lying down again? cy goes with him unresisting, but the conversation at hand is briefly set aside in favour of stealing a series of kisses — against his sternum, his throat, his cheek, his mouth.
only when he flops fully down beside him that he answers properly (and it's luck alone that he remembers to answer) — ）
Yeah, I'm game. We've got some time to kill before midnight rolls around.
[It's an effortless melt into those kisses, chasing after them with his own mouth, sliding his right arm to hook over Cy's shoulder to keep him right there.]
All right. Thank you for trusting me.
[Lying with his cheek on a pillow, facing Cy, he allows the Sharingan to bleed into his right eye — a glowing bloom of crimson color.]
You have to look into my eyes. It's what they teach shinobi, you know, when it comes to battling against someone like me — not to make eye contact. All it takes is an instant.
（ that comment about trust inspires a soft little upwards quirk at one corner of his mouth, and he meets sasuke's eyes without pause, well before the boy's ever finished with the explanation. a sign, sure as anything, of just how deeply that belief has taken root.
but it does — hurt, a little. to know that's likely part of why sasuke has been so remote, so isolated. being the last of his clan notwithstanding, to be surrounded by people all your life who are afraid of you because of some innate power you hold and nothing you've actually done would be... fucking awful, actually.
cy lifts a hand to cup that cheek, and doesn't look away. ）
[Cy cannot know how much it means, to have those eyes readily upon his own — or perhaps he does, and this is yet another demonstration of a valuable sentiment he did not dream of discovering here, in this other dimension apart from everything familiar. For a few moments, Sasuke simply lets them lie together, bodies curved in closed parentheses, faces near enough that the nudge of a nose or rub of lips is a suggestion of centimeters. That temptation is too great, so he leans and thieves another kiss before at last pulling the veil of illusion over them both.
The memory of his home, and the forest that surrounds it, is so crystallized in his mind there's no effort in the craftsmanship of this false image. Yet the practice — using the Sharingan's ability in a negligible thread of chakra to manipulate the mechanisms at the forebrain — reminds him what lies deeper within Cy. And, though he does not tread that ground, for a fraction of an instant he can sense it, the corruptive core buried in the recesses of an ancient mind caging a nightmarish entity. It's awake, Cy said. Does it notice the pull of power? As Sasuke builds the illusion over those sensory inputs, can it tell? Is it looking back?
His genjutsu does not manipulate time as his brother's did, so they come to stand in the shade of trees while lying together on Cy's bed, imagination made to seem real. Dappled light shines through the screen of green leaves above; Sasuke tilts his head up, inhaling a full breath of air that smells and tastes like Konoha in summer. Humidity is cooled by the forest around them, but there's still an abrupt transition from the temperature-controlled environment of the resort to outdoors, wilderness, smothering greenery at height of growth. And the sun, riding high above in midday, feels like a knife to eyes accustomed to months of artificial light.
Turning, he looks back — and the village is not far off, a flat plain of grass where the outer boundary of the Uchiha compound opens to the forest. There's a distant sound of children at play, laughter and unintelligible words, but there is no sign of people placed into this illusion, so the effect is almost ghostly.
（ it can, of course. and does. the moments that kulo vayn is fully dormant are few and far between to begin with — but there are times when it is... muted, held down deep in the chains of its own severed strength. there's a reason, cy has mentioned, that he's weaker than the other gods of his world. the reason is that much of that strength — that's been used to kill, to decimate worlds — is bound up in the cage of its true master. what's left is life support. enough to keep his body functioning in perpetuity. enough to give him parlour magic tricks that would be comparatively held in the hands of a semi-competent fraudster.
but at this demonstration of power, subtle and soft though it is, it raises its head.
sasuke has held its interest from the start. it's rare to meet anyone so steeped in war as to catch its eye. and like a predator, it watches with keen, hungry interest at the suggestion of a prey animal in its vicinity — one that might, just might offer up enough of a fight.
but cy is a practiced hand at reeling it back, pushing it down. and he does — and it's worth it, because the immediate beauty of their imagined surroundings makes him draw a sharp, wondering breath. he turns his hand over, watching as the sunlight seems to dapple it. as illusions go, it's certainly one of the best he's ever seen — second only to iantha and her absolute dominion over dreaming. he knows it's fake only because of the forewarning, and because there's a — seam, a division in the mind, a line that kulo vayn tongues at like an open wound. but if not for those two things...
yeah. he can see why people would fear this — although none lives in him, as he stands amidst trees, and rustling leaves, and a warm summer's day. his eyes close, and he just — enjoys the filter of sensation to his other senses, his hand seeking out sasuke's.
his exhalation comes slow and steady, and when he opens his eyes he does meet sasuke's with a faint cant to his head. ghostly impressions aside, there's nothing but beauty here — as much because it is a thing shared as the setting itself. ）
Huh. （ just that one single sound, barely a word, lit with curiosity and love. ） Neat.
[Some tension unwinds in his chest at that, hand automatically shifting within the grip of Cy's own for a better hold, fingers laced. He tugs Cy closer, arms in one long, warm line of contact.]
That's all? 'Neat'?
[The light tone he uses gives away the lack of seriousness — and for a moment he simply enjoys watching the play of light across Cy's face, the color of green hemming them in all around. It is strange to be back here, even in an illusion crafted out of memory. Even if it isn't real, he can pretend it is.]
Those buildings you see behind us aren't there anymore in reality. They were destroyed, as I told you. But this is how it looked when I was a child. After school I would come out here to train. [Sasuke tugs on their joined hands, beginning to lead them into the cooler shade of the canopy above.] Usually alone, but as I said, sometimes with Itachi when he had the time.
（ the air seems emerald green all around them, and cy's fingers tighten in the clench of contact, tugging him a little nearer. ）
It's beautiful.
（ even if there's a sadness there, that this place was unmade. that nothing can go back to how it was. the sorrow and grief that fills him then is not just empathy — it's knowledge that runs soul-deep, what it means and what it costs to destroy a home, or to survive a destroyed one. sasuke was eight, he said, when the world came down around him. eight, and yet still this memory is not timeworn. it's perfect, and whole, and the loneliness of a boy who outlived both the physical place and more importantly, the lives within these walls winds him with a sudden intensity.
he'd meant this to be a happy thing — and it was, and it is. but neither does he make any especial effort to conceal the fact that his lashes are tear-damp, nor that when he turns to sasuke it's with the clear and direct intent of slouching to bury his face against his shoulder. ）
[His arm is ready to take Cy in, relinquishing their hands to better circle broad shoulders, to draw the man in close against him — lips a whisper of contact against a temple where that head bows down, allowing the space of silence. The grief is an outflow shared between them. It aches to see in Cy, because it means more than he can express that Cy would grieve this for him.]
I'm grateful to be able to show this to you, even if it isn't here anymore.
[The old, cherished memory of this childhood place — before violence tore it apart — is not something he would expose easily, and perhaps Cy knows without the admittance. These parts of him are so tightly held, so fiercely guarded at the center of himself, bound up in complicated emotion, engraved like a deep latticework of scars.]
（ his arms are a tightly drawn circle around sasuke, they flex tighter at the tender sentiment voiced so quietly it almost sits beneath a whisper. but it's the thank-you that breaks him, and his shoulders shake beneath the weight of it. trialities of awareness war — he knows that this is not a place shared lightly, he understands how loss underscores it so fiercely, and he knows, too, that this can only be an expression of love.
what follows is a gradual uncoiling. a shift of his arms from the winding embrace to the press of his palms against sasuke's shoulderblades, and a lift of his head from the crook of his neck to something straighter. he kisses sasuke's hair, his temple, and then takes a bracing breath before straightening fully. he makes no effort to conceal his emotions — this is hard, and he lets it be hard. but he also lets it be hopeful — and sometimes those two things can only go hand in hand. ）
[That expression of emotion has meaning too. He won't forget it, or how much it matters to see Cy showing it freely — too accustomed to a world where sentiment is weakness better buried, better concealed, and in the case of his own clan outright dangerous. So as Cy sets those kisses down, he returns with one of his own, claiming the man's mouth in a brief, bold seal.]
Yes. [After untangling their embrace, he seeks Cy's hand once more to lead him along.] If you want to. I can show you where I used to live.
[He won't say it will be easy. He hasn't seen the Uchiha compound himself in years, and it has a — powerful effect on him, even laid within memory like some eternal monument untouched by time, no detail lost in the sightline of Sharingan. As they approach that outer boundary, Cy will be able to see the crest of the Uchiha clan emblazoned on a wall for the first time, the red-and-white painted fan an insignia that naturally draws the eye.]
Our symbol. A fire needs wind to become stronger and more powerful, and a fan creates that wind.
[Itachi once told him this, when he was a child first learning the footsteps of legacy he would follow and eventually outpace.]
（ the symbol catches his eye — cy may be, before almost anything else, a mathematician — but what is math if not the foundational art of the universe? there is a simplicity and beauty to the numeracy of everything known and unknown that is older than everything but atoms.
but the paper fan... he'll remember it. he'll try to. as long as he can carry it. like the other little details of sasuke he's tucked away like precious things, more worth in knowing that as a boy he once sat desolate in the ruin of a garden with plants pulled up around him than in all the gems and jewellery in all the worlds he's ever set foot on. ）
I want to see it all. Whatever you're comfortable showing me.
（ he knows each stone tells a story. he knows, too, that at some point they'll walk past a place where the body of a kinsman fell. ten years is not enough time to put that to rest, given how grief is nested alongside love, inseparably entwined in the core of who he is. but sasuke would not take him here, nor show him these things if he didn't wish to. there is importance in visiting graves and in old homes. ）
[Cy is right. There is no road to walk without trespassing on the final resting place of one of his clansmen. All of them were killed here — in the open, fighting back, or hiding within the privacy of their homes. Their deaths are irrevocably burned into his mind, such that as he navigates the path inward, he sees it all around him again, slumped bodies and vacant faces and so much blood. His hand only tightens on Cy's, weathering this, ensuring that what they view now in the illusion of the Sharingan is the quiet serenity of a neighborhood beneath the noon-day sun.
There are shopfronts arrayed down the center street, where once his aunts and uncles were busy at work, calling out to him as he would run past on the return from school. Those places look desolate now, empty and hollow, strange as skeletons in the severe shadow created by bright daylight. Sasuke is silent the entire way; it is the bereavement of what was lost, but also a reverence and respect for the dead, that keeps him from speaking.
Eventually, their walking takes them to the home he remembers. They pass through a wooden gate. A plain footpath leads to the single-story house, an engawa wrapped around the outer walls bridging manmade structure to gardens — a koi pond, hanging paper lanterns, a stone pagoda, hakone grass, a sōzu, small fenced-in plots for crops. There are summer flowers in bloom, a colorful flurry of hydrangea and camellia and osmanthus, fragrant scents brooding in the open air. It is not an excessively large house, but clearly elevated in a display of status as head of the clan.
He gently tows Cy with him, up onto the back porch, and then stands there looking into the garden with his head slightly bowed, hair slipping into eyes.]
（ cy crowds in close. in the strictest sense, he can't use his body as a shield here — but if there is a moment when sasuke's hand tightens on his, or when a step seems to stutter past a certain place where the fall of a body might have once held ground — those are the times that cy lifts their hands to press a kiss to his knuckles, or butts his head down against sasuke's own, gentle and grounding.
there is beauty here, but he can't say the parallels to aikelyk settle the soul. whether it's some reedy thread of sasuke's own feelings on the matter buoyed up under the illusion, or his own experiences with places of death and violence, but it's not entirely unlike setting foot on hallowed ground.
like sasuke, he does not try to speak. when they reach the house that's built out with that much more detail, that much more love — he knows. home. and as they stand on the engawa, cy settles an arm around sasuke's shoulders and pulls him close. ）
It's beautiful.
（ sasuke does not need to tell him that he's never shown anyone else this place like this. some things can simply be known. the scent of the flowers suffuses the air, the gentle sound from the ponds and the deer-scarer that clacks rhythmically as it fills and empties, fills and empties.
he wants to go inside. but instead, he just sits down at the edge of the porch, tugging sasuke down with him, in against him. so they can overlook the beautiful yard and its gardens and its swimming koi, and while away time. ）
[Without protest he goes down onto the wooden porch, settling comfortably into Cy's body like territory charted and well-known, physical affection a buffer against the emotion that subdues him now in its endless tide. He doesn't know how long they stay there, but it's enough to feel as if the angle of light has changed — its yellow cast slanted through trees, shadows softening at the edges. If only a change in the weave of illusion, it feels real. He can pretend they're truly here together for a moment.
Then finally Sasuke stands, sliding open the shoji screen at their backs, hand coaxing Cy with him in order to lead their path inside. Almost without thinking he sheds his shoes. The house is cool and quiet, outdoor noises a gentle ambience through the open screen. He does not spend much time navigating through the greater rooms, in particular avoids one that remains closed — and it may be only a trick of the light, a wrinkle in the Sharingan's veil, but the door to that rooms seems darker, further away, burdened by an old scar of grief and kept purposefully out of the sunshine.
They pass through the kitchen, the hall that had once seemed endlessly long to him — and find themselves in a child's bedroom, everything tidily kept. Motes of dust look golden in the light spilling in through a half-curtained window. A green dinosaur watches them from atop the bed with beady black eyes.]
（ he sheds his shoes when sasuke does, and follows him with a silence that speaks truth to millennia of ease in this body, a dancer's grace in every easy step. while aware of that distant, darkened door — it holds no curiosity for him, and does not draw the eye. he can infer the meaning in the space between sunlit rooms.
he told sasuke: he knew early on that this story was not a happy one.
but the bedroom is brighter, and he has to duck a little under the door that's not meant to accommodate someone his size. most houses in japan are like that — one of the reasons he hasn't spent much time there in earnest. funny little similarities, these ties of language and architecture and cultural nuance.
there is an ache in him that settles and cools like molten glass, something that takes the shape of love drawn through fire — because as an engineer, as an architect, as someone who has spent so much of his life around people, this room tells a story. it's tidied by a child's hands, cleaned by a mother's. the bed has few adornments save that little toy. the colours are the sort of neutral that suits children best when they are expected to be seen and not heard.
the loneliness, he thinks, had its genesis here. it started here long before this house became a tomb, became rubble, became something ploughed under and grown over. he stands in the centre of it for a long time, silent. just letting the space press in around him, against him. holding sasuke's hand in a tight knit of their fingers. ）
I begin to see why you don't vibe with my messy room.
（ the words are meant to be light — and they are, but there's a tenderness laid just beneath them, foundational, that cannot be missed. ）
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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Yeah, that hasn't escaped me.
（ look, weird uchiha eyeball things — he at least takes them in stride. ）
They're beautiful — your eyes. I get they're dangerous too, with what you've told me. But they suit you.
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One day I'll show you what I can do with them. [A quirk of lips, playful — just a flash of pride.] You've barely seen anything yet.
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（ he settles back, giving sasuke a solemn look. then: ）
If you were going to show me a place on your world, what would it be and why?
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If it was in person... I'd take you to the forest beside the home I grew up in. I used to train there a lot. Sometimes with Itachi.
[The ice pack is losing some of its frigid shape; he shifts, adjusting his seat.]
Same question. If you were going to show me one place, where would it be and why?
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As for mine... Christ, well. I've already talked to you about Mon Mahara, so I'll try something different. There's a world that doesn't have a name because as far as I know there's never been anyone there to name it. It's turned away from the sun, and has no rotation — so half the planet is basically baked to a crisp, and the other half is in permanent darkness. But there are thermal vents close to the surface that make it liveable anyhow — and it's...
（ he exhales, eyes closed. imagining it. ）
When I say 'darkness', I just mean an absence of sunlight. But the sky is almost alive. Have you ever seen, ah... shit, what's the word for you. 'Hokkyokukou'? Aurora borealis? It's a constant ribbon of colour from pole to pole. You feel like you could wrap yourself in it. There's no sentient life there, mostly just animals. They've never seen people before, so they're playful and curious, they're mostly herbivores that I came across, they feed on moss and underground tubers. And there are frequent storms, so... there are a lot of places where lightning's struck the earth and created glass out of the silicate soil. There's towering structures built out of it, entirely natural. You can smell the ozone in the air for days before and days after a storm. It's a wild place. I think you'd like it.
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[He watches Cy in the telling of that other world, admiring Cy's face in the privacy of that moment while his eyes are closed, those handsome features so familiar now.
It's easy to imagine what Cy describes, an untouched wilderness beneath colorful streamers of light, animals living out simple lives, flashes of lightning brilliant in the eternally dark sky.]
... I think that I would like it too. [It sits on his tongue: We should go. Yet it's left unmanifested, because that freedom isn't theirs now, may never be if they remain trapped in this prison only to be separated into other, alternate dimensions. He doesn't let his thoughts dwell there.] I've never seen those lights, but they exist far in the north of my own world, a place called Snow Country. I've heard stories. That those lights are the spirits of children waiting to be born. Or another, that any child conceived beneath them will be born with fortune. They're a symbol of good luck.
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（ he's far from fearless — but the ones he has are tamped down, muted and restrained with sasuke. he does not often think of himself as being given safety by another no matter the nature of their relationship — but he does trust sasuke implicitly to uphold it. ）
A lot of cultures think that the northern lights are something to do with the gods — no, by the way — and have stories or lore like that. It doesn't surprise me, especially if it's not rarely seen beyond a certain latitude. If I draw you a picture, could you... I don't know, make an illusion out of it?
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Probably, but it might not be the same as you would remember it, because a perfect recreation is something I would have to access from deeper inside your mind. [From a memory, to be specific.] Do you want to see an illusion of those lights on the world you described, or something from my village? We could test it to see how you feel. I don't want to overwhelm you. All an illusion does — genjutsu is what we call the technique — is trick the senses. But for someone who has never experienced that before, it can still be intense.
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（ also, it has been about fifteen minutes so he gently eases sasuke to sit up so he can pull the ice pack away. ）
How's your ass feeling, first?
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[A smaller part of him almost wishes it was, but — he knows he would regret it tomorrow. And he doesn't want Cy to worry after him. Shifting, the ice pack is taken, allowing opportunity for him to lie down on the bed and pull Cy with him.]
Do you want to try it now? We don't need to go anywhere.
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only when he flops fully down beside him that he answers properly (and it's luck alone that he remembers to answer) — ）
Yeah, I'm game. We've got some time to kill before midnight rolls around.
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All right. Thank you for trusting me.
[Lying with his cheek on a pillow, facing Cy, he allows the Sharingan to bleed into his right eye — a glowing bloom of crimson color.]
You have to look into my eyes. It's what they teach shinobi, you know, when it comes to battling against someone like me — not to make eye contact. All it takes is an instant.
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but it does — hurt, a little. to know that's likely part of why sasuke has been so remote, so isolated. being the last of his clan notwithstanding, to be surrounded by people all your life who are afraid of you because of some innate power you hold and nothing you've actually done would be... fucking awful, actually.
cy lifts a hand to cup that cheek, and doesn't look away. ）
Okay.
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The memory of his home, and the forest that surrounds it, is so crystallized in his mind there's no effort in the craftsmanship of this false image. Yet the practice — using the Sharingan's ability in a negligible thread of chakra to manipulate the mechanisms at the forebrain — reminds him what lies deeper within Cy. And, though he does not tread that ground, for a fraction of an instant he can sense it, the corruptive core buried in the recesses of an ancient mind caging a nightmarish entity. It's awake, Cy said. Does it notice the pull of power? As Sasuke builds the illusion over those sensory inputs, can it tell? Is it looking back?
His genjutsu does not manipulate time as his brother's did, so they come to stand in the shade of trees while lying together on Cy's bed, imagination made to seem real. Dappled light shines through the screen of green leaves above; Sasuke tilts his head up, inhaling a full breath of air that smells and tastes like Konoha in summer. Humidity is cooled by the forest around them, but there's still an abrupt transition from the temperature-controlled environment of the resort to outdoors, wilderness, smothering greenery at height of growth. And the sun, riding high above in midday, feels like a knife to eyes accustomed to months of artificial light.
Turning, he looks back — and the village is not far off, a flat plain of grass where the outer boundary of the Uchiha compound opens to the forest. There's a distant sound of children at play, laughter and unintelligible words, but there is no sign of people placed into this illusion, so the effect is almost ghostly.
Then his gaze seeks Cy's.]
no subject
but at this demonstration of power, subtle and soft though it is, it raises its head.
sasuke has held its interest from the start. it's rare to meet anyone so steeped in war as to catch its eye. and like a predator, it watches with keen, hungry interest at the suggestion of a prey animal in its vicinity — one that might, just might offer up enough of a fight.
but cy is a practiced hand at reeling it back, pushing it down. and he does — and it's worth it, because the immediate beauty of their imagined surroundings makes him draw a sharp, wondering breath. he turns his hand over, watching as the sunlight seems to dapple it. as illusions go, it's certainly one of the best he's ever seen — second only to iantha and her absolute dominion over dreaming. he knows it's fake only because of the forewarning, and because there's a — seam, a division in the mind, a line that kulo vayn tongues at like an open wound. but if not for those two things...
yeah. he can see why people would fear this — although none lives in him, as he stands amidst trees, and rustling leaves, and a warm summer's day. his eyes close, and he just — enjoys the filter of sensation to his other senses, his hand seeking out sasuke's.
his exhalation comes slow and steady, and when he opens his eyes he does meet sasuke's with a faint cant to his head. ghostly impressions aside, there's nothing but beauty here — as much because it is a thing shared as the setting itself. ）
Huh. （ just that one single sound, barely a word, lit with curiosity and love. ） Neat.
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That's all? 'Neat'?
[The light tone he uses gives away the lack of seriousness — and for a moment he simply enjoys watching the play of light across Cy's face, the color of green hemming them in all around. It is strange to be back here, even in an illusion crafted out of memory. Even if it isn't real, he can pretend it is.]
Those buildings you see behind us aren't there anymore in reality. They were destroyed, as I told you. But this is how it looked when I was a child. After school I would come out here to train. [Sasuke tugs on their joined hands, beginning to lead them into the cooler shade of the canopy above.] Usually alone, but as I said, sometimes with Itachi when he had the time.
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It's beautiful.
（ even if there's a sadness there, that this place was unmade. that nothing can go back to how it was. the sorrow and grief that fills him then is not just empathy — it's knowledge that runs soul-deep, what it means and what it costs to destroy a home, or to survive a destroyed one. sasuke was eight, he said, when the world came down around him. eight, and yet still this memory is not timeworn. it's perfect, and whole, and the loneliness of a boy who outlived both the physical place and more importantly, the lives within these walls winds him with a sudden intensity.
he'd meant this to be a happy thing — and it was, and it is. but neither does he make any especial effort to conceal the fact that his lashes are tear-damp, nor that when he turns to sasuke it's with the clear and direct intent of slouching to bury his face against his shoulder. ）
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I'm grateful to be able to show this to you, even if it isn't here anymore.
[The old, cherished memory of this childhood place — before violence tore it apart — is not something he would expose easily, and perhaps Cy knows without the admittance. These parts of him are so tightly held, so fiercely guarded at the center of himself, bound up in complicated emotion, engraved like a deep latticework of scars.]
Thank you for letting me.
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what follows is a gradual uncoiling. a shift of his arms from the winding embrace to the press of his palms against sasuke's shoulderblades, and a lift of his head from the crook of his neck to something straighter. he kisses sasuke's hair, his temple, and then takes a bracing breath before straightening fully. he makes no effort to conceal his emotions — this is hard, and he lets it be hard. but he also lets it be hopeful — and sometimes those two things can only go hand in hand. ）
Can we walk through it?
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Yes. [After untangling their embrace, he seeks Cy's hand once more to lead him along.] If you want to. I can show you where I used to live.
[He won't say it will be easy. He hasn't seen the Uchiha compound himself in years, and it has a — powerful effect on him, even laid within memory like some eternal monument untouched by time, no detail lost in the sightline of Sharingan. As they approach that outer boundary, Cy will be able to see the crest of the Uchiha clan emblazoned on a wall for the first time, the red-and-white painted fan an insignia that naturally draws the eye.]
Our symbol. A fire needs wind to become stronger and more powerful, and a fan creates that wind.
[Itachi once told him this, when he was a child first learning the footsteps of legacy he would follow and eventually outpace.]
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（ the symbol catches his eye — cy may be, before almost anything else, a mathematician — but what is math if not the foundational art of the universe? there is a simplicity and beauty to the numeracy of everything known and unknown that is older than everything but atoms.
but the paper fan... he'll remember it. he'll try to. as long as he can carry it. like the other little details of sasuke he's tucked away like precious things, more worth in knowing that as a boy he once sat desolate in the ruin of a garden with plants pulled up around him than in all the gems and jewellery in all the worlds he's ever set foot on. ）
I want to see it all. Whatever you're comfortable showing me.
（ he knows each stone tells a story. he knows, too, that at some point they'll walk past a place where the body of a kinsman fell. ten years is not enough time to put that to rest, given how grief is nested alongside love, inseparably entwined in the core of who he is. but sasuke would not take him here, nor show him these things if he didn't wish to. there is importance in visiting graves and in old homes. ）
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There are shopfronts arrayed down the center street, where once his aunts and uncles were busy at work, calling out to him as he would run past on the return from school. Those places look desolate now, empty and hollow, strange as skeletons in the severe shadow created by bright daylight. Sasuke is silent the entire way; it is the bereavement of what was lost, but also a reverence and respect for the dead, that keeps him from speaking.
Eventually, their walking takes them to the home he remembers. They pass through a wooden gate. A plain footpath leads to the single-story house, an engawa wrapped around the outer walls bridging manmade structure to gardens — a koi pond, hanging paper lanterns, a stone pagoda, hakone grass, a sōzu, small fenced-in plots for crops. There are summer flowers in bloom, a colorful flurry of hydrangea and camellia and osmanthus, fragrant scents brooding in the open air. It is not an excessively large house, but clearly elevated in a display of status as head of the clan.
He gently tows Cy with him, up onto the back porch, and then stands there looking into the garden with his head slightly bowed, hair slipping into eyes.]
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there is beauty here, but he can't say the parallels to aikelyk settle the soul. whether it's some reedy thread of sasuke's own feelings on the matter buoyed up under the illusion, or his own experiences with places of death and violence, but it's not entirely unlike setting foot on hallowed ground.
like sasuke, he does not try to speak. when they reach the house that's built out with that much more detail, that much more love — he knows. home. and as they stand on the engawa, cy settles an arm around sasuke's shoulders and pulls him close. ）
It's beautiful.
（ sasuke does not need to tell him that he's never shown anyone else this place like this. some things can simply be known. the scent of the flowers suffuses the air, the gentle sound from the ponds and the deer-scarer that clacks rhythmically as it fills and empties, fills and empties.
he wants to go inside. but instead, he just sits down at the edge of the porch, tugging sasuke down with him, in against him. so they can overlook the beautiful yard and its gardens and its swimming koi, and while away time. ）
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Then finally Sasuke stands, sliding open the shoji screen at their backs, hand coaxing Cy with him in order to lead their path inside. Almost without thinking he sheds his shoes. The house is cool and quiet, outdoor noises a gentle ambience through the open screen. He does not spend much time navigating through the greater rooms, in particular avoids one that remains closed — and it may be only a trick of the light, a wrinkle in the Sharingan's veil, but the door to that rooms seems darker, further away, burdened by an old scar of grief and kept purposefully out of the sunshine.
They pass through the kitchen, the hall that had once seemed endlessly long to him — and find themselves in a child's bedroom, everything tidily kept. Motes of dust look golden in the light spilling in through a half-curtained window. A green dinosaur watches them from atop the bed with beady black eyes.]
... This was mine.
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he told sasuke: he knew early on that this story was not a happy one.
but the bedroom is brighter, and he has to duck a little under the door that's not meant to accommodate someone his size. most houses in japan are like that — one of the reasons he hasn't spent much time there in earnest. funny little similarities, these ties of language and architecture and cultural nuance.
there is an ache in him that settles and cools like molten glass, something that takes the shape of love drawn through fire — because as an engineer, as an architect, as someone who has spent so much of his life around people, this room tells a story. it's tidied by a child's hands, cleaned by a mother's. the bed has few adornments save that little toy. the colours are the sort of neutral that suits children best when they are expected to be seen and not heard.
the loneliness, he thinks, had its genesis here. it started here long before this house became a tomb, became rubble, became something ploughed under and grown over. he stands in the centre of it for a long time, silent. just letting the space press in around him, against him. holding sasuke's hand in a tight knit of their fingers. ）
I begin to see why you don't vibe with my messy room.
（ the words are meant to be light — and they are, but there's a tenderness laid just beneath them, foundational, that cannot be missed. ）
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cw: suicidality
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[crazy intensifies]
it's okay they're both weird tbh
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talking about trauma during sex the cysuke way
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(fade to marathon sex + collars + probably sasuke crying again)