elementalhero | DVD meme, part two of googol

redbrunja requested Insomniac, and here it is! Sorry it took so long~

Beautiful things are made to be broken. She is beautiful. She is about to be broken.

This is a theme I was planning to explore, and forgot in lieu of a gazillion more awesome Palahniuk themes. I touch gently back onto it in a scene at the very end, which I’ll talk about when I get to it, but yeah, this theme was totally never explored. So this opening doesn’t make sense anymore.

She’s several years older than me, and yet, she had turned to me in the bar and asked me to come outside with her. I did so. I don’t know why. And now we stand, facing each other in the empty street.

“I want you to hit me,” she says, “as hard as you can.”

YES.

Why?

Just do it.

I occasionally switch between quote tags and nothing at all to denote speech in this fic. Mostly copied from Palahniuk himself. It lends a mood of uncertainty in memory and unreliable narration to it, I feel.

I haul back and nail her one in the gut, sending her flying into a wall behind her. The street lamp falls and smashes on the ground with a tinkling of glass and smell of smoke, and she stands up slowly, hunched over, while the remaining lights lining the road cast a halo, silhouetting her. I can feel myself wincing; I hadn’t meant to hit quite so hard.

She smiles weakly at me. “Thanks,” she says, and begins to hobble away.

Well, I couldn’t let her walk home like that.

And that was how I met Mitarashi Anko.

Originally, I wrote this scene in a parking lot behind the bar...then realized that there are no cars in Naruto, so...no parking lots. Haha, lol, oops.

In theory, if one were an Uchiha, and possessed of a certain bloodline limit, and if such a one were to, say, kill his best friend and witness his death, then it would be possible for this hypothetical individual to gain a certain power that would grant him control over the most powerful force in nature; namely, the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox.

I know this because Madara knows this.

Of course, now everybody who’s ever read Fight Club knows exactly where I’m taking this, but hey. That line still makes my self esteem go up like whoosh~

I was six when the fox attacked Konoha. I cannot possibly be expected to remember it with such clarity as to corroborate his claimed uninvolvement or dispute it. I will say this: it scared the living shit out of me.

I wonder what the Uchiha were doing at the time of the Kyuubi’s attack.

Madara scares the living shit out of me.

He didn’t always, but then again, I wasn’t always a murderer myself, or a liberator, or a philosopher, or maybe just insane or whatever word we’re calling it today.

And Shisui wasn’t always dead.

Wait...

Let me start earlier.

Oh, Palahniuk, ILU.

I couldn’t sleep.

When you’re ten years old and a member of the Uchiha clan and a universally proclaimed genius to boot, preparing for your first Chūnin Exam, I suppose people might expect you to go a couple of sleepless nights. I had not slept for six weeks, since the day they gave me that damn green vest and told me I was good enough to die with it on as opposed to dying without one.

Yay me.

I really went for a very sarcastic Itachi-voice here. Mostly to reflect the voice of the main character in Fight Club, yes, but then I grew attached to it. I like the idea of Itachi being very bitter and sarcastic underneath his emotionless mask. I ought to do it in another, less derivative work.

When you have insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. A wall appears between you and the rest of the world. I developed permanent lines under my eyes and a close-to-permanent blank look on my face. I found it hard to connect with people—I found it hard to realize who and what people were, other than pale ghosts flickering in front of my eyes like candle flames.

The healers told me you can’t die from insomnia.

I liked that I was able to explain his eye-lines here, lol. Also tying this in with Itachi’s detachment and disconnection with people, for the win.

I was ten, yes. Shinobi mature quickly because they die young, it is said, and I won’t argue with that. I will say this, though: my maturity for my age can be blamed, I firmly believe, on my recurring and damning insomnia. Those extra eight hours in every day wear at the mind, second by second by second etched into your brain until reality is illusion or illusion becomes reality. Maybe that’s why I became so good at genjutsu.

This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

Once again, completely Palahniuk’s, and yet, I still feel so great every time I look at it. Is this how pathological liars and kleptomaniacs feel?

I would spend nights staring holes in the ceiling with my Sharingan, trying to use up all my chakra so I’d have to pass out and sleep to make it up. I would count the dust motes in the shaft of moonlight in the window. I would slip into my little brother’s room and watch him breathe peacefully and wonder if the Sharingan could copy someone else’s dreams. I would sneak out and throw shuriken, trying to exhaust myself the old-fashioned way. I would practice jutsu I’d copied the day before until I mastered them, until I burned my chakra so hard that I would fall where I stood and lay paralyzed, unable to twitch a finger from exhaustion and yet still unable to sleep.

This paragraph is really powerful, I think. Especially the part with him sneaking into Sasuke’s room and wondering about the dreams. I...just get this mental image of him gently ruffling a young, sleeping Sasuke’s hair, and then silently leave the room, lingering in the doorway before going. D: I’m such a giant woobie.

The instructors would observe my prowess and marvel. My father would nod and rumble his approval. My little brother would watch with private and ever-growing despair. And I would smile politely and wave and internally dread the next night.

“Private and ever-growing despair.” That’s all me. I’m proud of it.

It was on such a night that I met Uchiha Madara.

I had been throwing shuriken for four hours straight. I wasn’t quite sure if I was brave enough to do it with my eyes closed yet; in this dark, it wasn’t like there was much of a difference, but you know how it is when you know your eyes are closed and you naturally try to be more careful and end up making yourself worse off. I had no desire to explain a twisted ankle or fractured wrist to my father in the morning.

I threw the last kunai in my pouch and collapsed against a log, spent. I thought, maybe this is it. I’m so exhausted, maybe this will be the night when I close my eyes and wake up and it’s morning and I’m late and the world will be real again and—

I noticed with sudden sharp awareness that the kunai that I had thrown had somehow made its way to the base of my neck, teasing the ends of my hair gently and scraping the skin ever... so... softly. There was someone behind me.

There’s something so intimate about close-range weapons, I think. Not necessarily in a sexual or creepy way, but just that it connects two people by this thread of danger, violence, but in a sort of beautiful way. Stop waxing poetic, self.

There is a beautiful sort of haunted clarity in the moment you realize you are about to die because you are a stupid child.

I... I think half that line is derived, but I don’t remember from where anymore. I like it, but something tells me that it isn’t totally mine.

The person holding my kunai spoke, and in the crystalline beauty of that moment, hearing his soft but bone-rattlingly deep voice was hearing the voice of God: “A shinobi, much less one of the Uchiha clan, should not be taken so easily. Why shouldn’t I kill you now and spare the other hidden villages the trouble?”

“The voice of God” = allusion to the line that I didn’t use: “...your father is your model for God. If your father bails, then what does that say about God?”

I swallowed hard and could think of nothing but the dark and formless things that wound their ways around my thoughts at those hours. “I don’t know.”

“Will you argue for your life?”

I blinked up at the stars, at the sickle moon. “If not now, then someday. If not that day, then someday after. Any person you ever love will either reject you or die. If you extend the timeline long enough, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero.” A pause, a beat, a breath. “I just don’t want to die without a few scars, that’s all.”

All derived. I know I was heavily, heavily basing this on Fight Club, but come on, self.

The kunai left my neck and I wondered whether whoever was there was going to plunge it into my back or the back of my head. Then he spoke again. “Interesting.”

He dropped the kunai at my feet; I could hear it hit the ground. I shouldn’t have turned around. I did.

I shouldn’t have said “at my feet,” because Itachi is still collapsed against the log. Halfway through writing this scene, I lost track of where Itachi was and what he was doing. Most of this fanfiction was written in bursts from midnight to 2 am over the course of several school nights. Ironic, yes, given the title and subject matter.

A tall silhouette, blacker than the black of the sky behind him, and a mask with a single eye hole and a flash of blood red and all of a sudden I was dizzy and all of a sudden it was even darker and all of a sudden Sasuke was shaking me shouting nii-san nii-san we looked everywhere for you tou-san is furious and I laughed and I grabbed him and hugged him until he had to squirm out of my grasp for air and there were tears in my eyes because the day after you sleep for the first time in six weeks is the day you are reborn from the goddamned dead.

I love that last line. Wait... *looks* All of that is the last line. Oh, run-on sentences, ILU. I love the idea of Itachi being awoken by a very concerned Sasuke, and suddenly displaying all this emotion and hugging his little brother, who is the only one privy to this sort of vulnerable side of Itachi. Need to explore in another work.

She lives in a rundown apartment complex about ten blocks from the bar and twenty-seven from the Uchiha compound, and she doesn’t want my help.

Back to present tense, meaning twelve-and-a-half-year-old ANBU Itachi and eighteen-year-old Anko. I love the numbers and distances in the above sentence, underling the nuisance of taking her home without actually saying it.

“I’ve been punched by hundreds of ninja, ninety percent of them more masculine than you, and I don’t need you to walk me to my house,” she sulks. I have her in a fireman’s carry, one of her arms slung across my shoulders and one of my arms wrapped around her waist. She doesn’t know it, but I have a pair of shuriken hidden inside one of my ANBU gloves that can come out in a second if she tries anything funny with the arm near my neck. I may be chivalrous, but I am by no means stupid.

Two shuriken wouldn’t do much, I realize. Originally, it was a modified kunai, but that wouldn’t fit in a glove even if it was small. Maybe I should have left it out, but I wanted to establish that Itachi is being nice, but not incautious. He is a ninja.

“I am not walking you to your house. I am carrying you to your house,” I explain.

Taking things too literally, for the sardonic win.

“Bullshit you are.” She tries to squirm out of my grasp, but I stick a finger in a pressure point near the waist and she jerks and sags in my arms. “No fair. No fair.”

You have to have a vision of the way he’s carrying her to see this.

“We’re shinobi. Where is ‘fair’ in the job description?” I ask (a bit irritably, I admit). “Maybe you shouldn’t ask strangers to hit you. Mind if I ask what that was about, by the way?”

She’s silent for a bit. I guess she does mind. “You’re always trying to improve yourself, aren’t you?” she suddenly asks and I have no idea where she’s going with this. “You know, little genius, kid with a clan and a name and a future and a hundred little gold foil stars to put on the wall chart, and you’re always out there training.” She makes a face. “God, that word.”

That sentence was a train wreck. Maybe she’s going delirious. Maybe she’s bleeding internally. It really would serve her right. “...And?”

Itachi’s dry dissection of her sentence makes the fact that it was a horrible sentence okay.

“And maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer,” she says. “Maybe self-destruction is the answer.”

I left out the “masturbation” line. I didn’t really like it.

We get to her apartment and it’s a mess. Papers, old mission status reports never filed correctly, wooden dango skewers decorating the walls arranged in attractive patterns, you know. I set her on her feet and she scowls at me.

“Thanks,” she says. “Now get the hell out of my house.”

I ignore her and start gathering papers. She asks what the hell I’m doing.

“Cleaning.”

“Bullshit, cleaning.”

“No, really.” I hand her a stack of papers. “Here, it’ll go faster if we both do it.”

She just kind of looks at me and snatches the papers out of my hand. “Who are you, my mother?” she snarls. I shrug.

It turns into a kind of treasure hunt. She finds several as-yet-unopened packs of instant ramen. I find some old pamphlets from the hospital, the kind you just grab off the racks and read out of desperation when you’re holed up in there for a few days with a broken collarbone or some such. These were from Anko’s day, and they were very entertaining.

Awkward transition into “I am (name)’s (organ).” It was hard without Reader’s Digests.

“Oh, yeah, I remember these,” she says, glancing over my shoulder while I stare in disbelief. “I got those when I was five or six with a sprained ankle. The little kid’s versions were hilarious.”

They’re little informational packets about the human body. I read out loud, “‘I am Taro’s Kidneys; I regulate the level of toxins in Taro’s bloodstream?’ ‘I am Hanako’s Left Ventricle’—why do they have to have the cartoon organs speak for themselves?”

Despite that, I think I did explain it okay for all that it was a half-assed transition.

“We aren’t all baby geniuses. I guess some kids respond better to the cute talking lungs,” she says, grabbing the whole stack and stuffing them in a drawer. “I wish I had some they’d give to the older kids at ‘that time.’ ‘I am Hanako’s Uterus,’ ‘I am Taro’s Prostate Gland’...”

“I am Hanako’s Right Ovary.”

“I am Taro’s Testicular Cancer.”

We look at each other and burst out laughing.

I would go out and look for the mysterious ninja every night. After all, I still couldn’t sleep, genjutsu being only a bandage-type solution and not really helping the whole underlying insomnia problem. Plus, I was insatiably curious at that age.

Back to the past. I hope it was clear without me explaining it.

Some nights I’d find him. Even at that cocky age, I was smart enough to recognize that he was letting me find him. Those would be the nights I’d talk for hours about the things I’m not allowed to think about—the village, the clan, the wars, the nature of evil, dark hearts and dark minds and the definition of betrayal and what preferred method of assassination defines me as a person, et freaking cetera. Those nights I’d talk for hours and wake up with a strange, unsettled feeling and seem to remember having a conversation but not being able to remember anything the other party actually said.

I think that could happen even in canon. Madara is such a head trip. Which is why he’s become my favorite Naruto villain, even beating out Orochimaru (gasp).

Some nights I wouldn’t find him. I’d sit perched on treetops and stare out over the village and track the moon as it moved across the night sky. I’d wonder:

If I woke up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?

Derived. Doesn’t pack the same impact as in the book, because no airplanes to transition to Tyler with. I probably should have left it out.

One night, I stayed in and read old clan history books. The Sharingan, the Senju clan. Old clan wars. Old clan leaders. Old clan grudges. Uchiha Madara.

I blinked and turned back a page.

The “old clan (insert word here)” was supposed to suggest pages turning, hence the cut-off of turning back a page to Uchiha Madara.

Anko and I end up sitting out on the roof, talking for the rest of the night. She produces a cigarette. “Got a light?” she asks, in the tone of voice used by smokers everywhere when they know you don’t like to see them smoke but aren’t going to say anything about it. Just to show off, I race through some signs and breathe the tiniest little goukakyuu no jutsu onto the end of her cigarette. She snorts. “Cute.”

Come on, you know you want to see that. Little baby fireball, come on. Heh. I think that as characters go, Anko would be the next in line to be a smoker, but I guess you can only have one authority figure smoke in kid’s lit.

“You asked.”

“Bit of a waste of chakra, I’d think,” she says, inhaling deeply.

I can see why literary people like the act of smoking so much—there’s so much you can do with it in a dialogue scene, since it’s action, but not so much action as to detract from the conversation or be very jarring. If only it weren’t scummy and cancer-causing.

“Bit of a waste of lungs,” I mutter. She only smiles. “Is this more of your ‘self-destruction’ policy?”

She shrugs, exhaling the acrid smoke towards the moon. See what I mean? “I once dated Sarutobi Asuma, so I guess maybe,” she admits. “That didn’t work out, and now I’m addicted, damn that guy.”

“Shame.” I flick my Sharingan on to better watch the fading, fading trails and swirls of her secondhand smoke winding out into the atmosphere. Her chakra is midnight blue and strangely captivating. Thinking better of it, I phase back into normal vision so I don’t get caught staring.

I don’t know where I got her color from.

“You kind of remind me of him, you know,” Anko continues, talking through a mouthful of hot carbon monoxide and god knows what else is in that crap. Itachi does not like smoking. Good man.

I’ll bite. “How so?”

“You brood.” She smirks. “Brood and brood and brood. Sarutobi Asuma, grooming to be another Hokage and on his way to greatness and genius and godliness and more words starting with ‘g’ and he was miserable. That’s why he smoked. Only miserable people smoke.

“And there’s you, don’t think I don’t know who you are. Uchiha Itachi, crown emperor of everything mothers want out of their little ninja children, chūnin at ten, ANBU at twelve, pride of the entire clan, and do you know what?” She blew smoke in my face. I tried not to cough. “You are one gloomy little killjoy.”

Anko is channeling so much Marla Singer, it isn’t even funny.

“And you gathered this in two hours of knowing me.”

“I knew when I looked at you.” She takes a deep drag. “And then, there’s me. I am perfectly happy and free as a lark and you know why? No one expects jack shit out of me. I am the crazy snake lady.”

I love the idea of Anko referring to herself as the crazy snake lady. I plan to use it in my next (or second-to-next) ItaAnko.

“I thought only miserable people smoked.”

“We’re all miserable.”

“You’re contradicting yourself.”

She breathes smoke in my face again, just to bother me. “We are not beautiful and unique snowflakes,” she says. “We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world, and one day, every one of us that is alive now will be dead and there will be people alive who don’t even exist right now. None of us will ever be content. None of us will ever be complete. None of us will ever be perfect. So if there’s something you want to do, shit, do it.”

All derived, save that last sentence.

I’m twelve and a half and she’s telling me this.

“Don’t wait. The world’s falling apart as we speak.”

She’s eighteen and she’s given up on life.

I am Taro’s Suddenly Accelerating Heartbeat.

“Really.”

Her chakra is midnight blue and I am kissing her and I can taste nicotine and wonder if this is how she got addicted.

After the first time he says it, “Her chakra is midnight blue,” becomes code for, “We are having an intimate physical relationship.” I’m not even kidding.

The man was hanging upside-down on a tree branch.

“You’re Uchiha Madara,” I said.

He fell down. There was a loud thud and crash of twigs. He popped up three trees away, completely unharmed. I was unfazed—this was the kind of thing he did. “Uchiha Madara? Me?”

Remember, this guy is also Tobi. God, I love Madara.

“I recognized your Sharingan in this book,” I said, throwing it to the dirt before me. All Sharingan look the same to the untrained eye, but each has minute and almost completely undetectable differences from person to person, differences so small that only another Sharingan can pick them up. I fully support this in my headcanon. “And your chakra is weird. It isn’t normal. And some of the oldest clan histories claim that Madara had been supposedly sighted on several different occasions following his alleged death.” Madara = Elvis of the Uchiha clan. Or, like, Sasquatch.

The ninja shrugged. “Hunches. Circumstantial evidence. You can’t prove anything.”

“So there’s something to prove?”

“Of course! I’m Uchiha Madara, one of your forefathers, and you get to talk to me in person! Aren’t you excited?” He flung his arms wide, as if expecting a hug. I didn’t move. “It’s not every day you meet a living, breathing relic.”

“I met you two months ago. The novelty’s worn off,” I pointed out.

Itachi balances out Madara’s ridiculousness with his complete deadpan. I love it.

He folded his arms. “You’re very perceptive. I’ve been waiting for you to figure it out.”

“Why?”

“No real reason.”

Liar.

Bad, bad transition. I had no idea how to end the scene. I also needed to start the “liar” motif for use in a later scene, but ended up just kind of tacking it on there. Ugh, self.

You wake up in Sunagakure.

You wake up in the Land of Lightning.

Every mission needs shinobi and every shinobi needs a mission and you’re just going through the motions of find this man kill this woman obtain this document. Push a button, pull a lever, do your part to keep the wheels of eternal war spinning. Love this paragraph, especially the wheels of eternal war.

You don’t understand any of it, and then you die.

One of my favorite lines from the book, and I end up using it so well in a later scene.

You wake up in the Land of Water.

You wake up in Kusagakure.

Anko is right, I think. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.

You wake up in the Land of Stone.

A really good parallel for the airplane/airport motif used in the book. I really liked this, even though it was a dinky little transitional portion. It sets up a couple motifs that I reuse later that would not be as powerful if they hadn’t already been mentioned once.

This next scene didn’t even exist in the first draft. I got so excited with all the Itachi and Madara scenes that I forgot about Anko. Jade brought this to my attention, thankfully, and I came up with this little gem.

“This is probably illegal,” I say.

Anko pulls out the spray paint. “Of course, that’s why I’m doing it. Besides, everyone will assume it’s that Kyuubi kid.” I so think that some ninja would pull pranks and blame Naruto.

“Uzumaki?” Itachi knows his name. :D

“Yeah, he does this all the time and doesn’t get caught. Despite being six or seven and constantly watched by genin, chūnin, and jonin alike.” Anko stopped and laughed. “Come to think of it, he’ll be a great ninja if he can keep that up.” She misses her chakra-enhanced footing for a second and bangs her face off the side of the Second’s head. “Motherf—” Sometimes I think that judicious censoring makes swears sound worse than they do when you just say them.

“You’re going to be short some teeth if you keep that up,” I offer. Anko sticks her bloody tongue out at me. That’s bloody in the sense of “covered in blood,” not the British pseudo-swear.

“Everything falls apart.” She starts decorating the Nidaime’s left cheek with a giant smiley face. The trails of spray paint slowly run as they dry, making the smiley face look kind of creepy.

I am Taro’s Dorky Grin. Aww.

She yells for me to come down and help her out, dammit, and I walk down Sarutobi’s head and give him some eye lines like mine, just for the hell of it. Anko gets a huge kick out of that.

Madara’s over on Anko’s other side, defacing the Shodaime Hokage, and I wonder when he got here. “Inventive!” she shouts at him for his use of yellows in the eye and nose areas.

Yellows in eye and nose area = liver disease. Also, the idea of Madara graphitizing the Senjus makes me lol so tremendously hard.

I love Anko. Aaaaawwwww.

It’s a strong word for a thirteen-year-old to be talking about an eighteen-year-old with. I love her. She doesn’t treat me like I am the prettiest and most unique of the snowflakes, and my father hates her, reason enough by itself, and I can sleep when I’m with her. We can lay out under the stars and talk and kiss and her chakra is midnight blue and nothing else (see?) and I can fall asleep in her arms and wake up next to her so close that our eyelashes brush each other. They have great eyelashes, both of them. Itachi especially. With her, I can know what it’s like, for a few hours at a time, to be content and complete and perfect.

That’s all.

Anko and I sneak under the Yondaime’s chin and make out. This is probably illegal and neither of us cares. Her chakra is midnight blue and tastes like dango, or maybe that’s just her breath and I’m trying too hard to purple up my prose. I love that sentence.

Despite how happy I am right now, I can feel Madara watching us, and I know whatever he’s thinking can’t be good.

Oops, too large. Will continue in two seconds.