青い骨の美 - The Beauty of Blue Bones

Chapter 25

Spring
Saturday—8:12AM

Sasuke was prone to nightmares.

Ever since the death of his clan and the rigorous, continuous mental torture of his fragile mind at the hands of his older brother, he has always been prone to nightmares.

There wasn't one day in all his life that he wasn't left panting for air, his shirt soaked with sweat, and his eyes wide with fear after once again revisiting the trapped horrors that had settled in his mind. Over the years, he just learned to live with it; instead of reacting harshly when he would wake up after another night of terrifying dreams, he simply opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. Gone were the blood churning screams, the pools of tears and snot that ran down his face, and the death-like grip on his chest as his heartbeat pounded against his rib cage.

Gone was the scared Sasuke who had become tired of waking up with no one there to remind him that all of it was a dream. He had a nightmare, and he woke up as if nothing had happened. At some point, he simply stopped caring, and he wasn't sure when that was.

In all honesty, Sasuke can [and should] blame his morbid reactions on the village where everything began. For one moment, if he had to ignore the truth behind his clan's death and really peel back the wallpaper that covered the cracked walls of his awful life, he would quickly notice that a lot of things could have been fixed if Konoha actually cared about him. They weren't obligated to, after all, he was the spawn of a demonic clan that had put a bad taste in everyone's mouth—but it would have been the least they could have done after what they put his brother through.

More than a thousand times he had watched his family die, but not one moment was spared to help him handle it once he had woken up. At eight years old, Sasuke saw more death in a single night than any veteran ninja has seen during the wars. Unlike those ninjas, nobody seemed to really care that the eight year old, sole survivor of the Uchiha clan, was just not mentally prepared to actually take care of himself. Ever.

Thrown into an empty house, given monthly checks meant for basic necessities, and expected to continue his academic life even after the continuous decline in his mental health—he was doomed from the very beginning, and he simply accepted it.

There was nothing for him to do about it.

He's gone through his life having the same attitude regarding a lot of things, he couldn't change it, so why should he bother himself? People thought of him badly, so he didn't make a fuss to have them think differently. Everyone thought he deserved to die, so why would he fight them and plead for salvation? It's as simple as that; he didn't care enough because he's been doomed from the very start.

Yet, despite all of that, there was one thing he's fought to keep. If not his mental strength, or his physical one, then it was this one thing. Unknowingly or not, he's always wanted to be supported, to be reminded that there was someone there who had also been doomed from the beginning, ready to accept the mentally unstable boy that he had always been even if he ignored it.

It was why he couldn't let Naruto go even when he vowed to rid the earth of his presence. Naruto had understood, Naruto knew what it was like to be thrown into a hurdle without any support whatsoever, trusted to do something that was otherwise unknown. Naruto knew what it was like to have nightmares and no one was there to comfort him. He knew, and the clear similarities between their lives had made Sasuke fight to validate how he felt because he knew that Naruto would get it.

Up to this point in his life, he had believed that Naruto was the only one who would get it. There would be no one else out there who would ever come to a point where they could sympathize, yet alone relate to the things Sasuke has felt and thought about. It wasn't completely impossible, he knew that, but the chances were extremely low that it might as well be.