Connecting hollows (Tobirama x Madara)

2. Midnight addictions (Tobirama)

I hadn't particularly liked religion before. Now, I sort of hated it.

Could people, especially priests and deacons and whatever the kids called them nowadays, just, you know, not groom children?

It had been a late night, what with the riots having been caused by that fucking deacon, and when I arrived at my apartment, it was close to midnight. I felt the muscles in my face twitch out of pure tiredness, yet I knew I wouldn't sleep. Not for a few hours, anyway.

I locked the door behind me, walked in from the spacious, grey hallway with the stone floor into the open social area that was living room, dining room and kitchen all in one, bigger than most people's whole apartments, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a gleaming wooden floor. I went to the kitchen and grabbed an energy drink to enable myself to stay awake.

You know, you could just put that Red Bull drink back in the fridge without drinking it? Force yourself to go to sleep?

The thought was so unimaginable, I laughed out loud.

I took the energy drink with me to my bathroom, wanting to at least clean myself up a bit after work. Always having a shower when I came home had been a way for me to practice not letting that have so much control over me. It sort of worked. I didn't need to do it before I had even locked my front door. Not anymore.

I looked at the mirror image in my vast bathroom, that had both a rain shower and a jacuzzi and a sauna. The bathroom had been one of the main reasons why I had bought this place, even if I didn't need any of that shit. It was one of life's wants, not one of life's needs.

My mirror image was questionable, to say the least. If anyone else looked in their mirror and saw my face instead of their own, they would believe they had seen a ghost, surely. I was just so fucking white. It was as if I was a light source, my face visible even in the fucking dark like the fucking moon. If I had cared, I think I would have hated my appearance. I was very tall but too stocky, my face too angular, my nose too flat. But in between my job as the police chief, working out as much as I did and my addiction, there was no space left for vanity.

I washed my face and dried it. I showered my body, taking care not to wet my hair as it was hell when it was freshly washed and I didn't have time for that now, then took my Red Bull to my bedroom. I had to do my uttermost not to run in my eagerness to still my anxiety.

Finally there, I felt my fingers tremble as I took my laptop up from the bedside table, and I didn't calm the fuck down until I had written the password and seen my familiar home screen.

And I started. With the most common ones; PornHub and YouPorn and XVideos. Then onto the more dodgy ones. It was hard, finding something that satisfied my craving seeing I had seen most of it, but after a couple of hours of searching, I found I was calming down.

But even then I didn't stop like a normal person would but kept surfing, telling myself as I always did that if I did it until I was sick of it, it would be a long time before the next. Although that was of course never true. I would be back here tomorrow again.

But I couldn't think of that now. I just had to satisfy my need, which wasn't at all about sexual satisfaction (I wasn't even jerking off) but something else entirely, something I didn't understand. All I understood was that I would go under if I went too long without it.

I watched and watched, one minute here, two minute there, a couple of times a whole film.

When I finally went to bed, it was 4 am and hated myself.

The porn addiction had come creeping up to me. It had started off with me porn surfing in a way I suspected most people did, in an amount that was considered normal. But over the years, I found I had a fascination with it that wasn't there for others. While my friends and partners either didn't watch it at all anymore as they grew older or watched very limited amounts, I was a consumer. I didn't particularly like what I was watching, not more than anyone else, anyway, but I had a fascination with it that I never understood, not even now.

It became a problem for me when sex with partners didn't satisfy me anymore. I found there was something within the visual input porn gave me that couldn't be satisfied with people in the real world. I didn't even always masturbate to it. Quite rarely, in fact. It wasn't about arousal to me, hadn't been for a long time. I could only describe it as an itch that I had to scratch or I would go crazy. I imagined I felt almost the way it people with OCD did, knowing that their rituals were pointless but not being able to avoid them nonetheless because otherwise everything felt wrong.

I became a police officer, having finished top of my class. The stress that it entailed increased my porn watching. I used it for dealing with what I felt when I was out in the field, for what I saw, compensated for burned bodies and bullet holes and intestines spilled onto the motorway after car accidents. I was made chief, and the only thing I had time for outside of that and working out was watching porn. I was thirty-eight now and had no friends, no partners, no acquaintances beyond my colleagues and the worst past was, I didn't even care. I wouldn't change pornography for anything in the world. A life without it was unimaginable. I had tried to diminish it, but to no avail as it was all or nothing for me. Like an alcoholic who became clean and couldn't just have a glass because that would entail they fell back. Sometimes, I tried to convince myself it was better than substance abuse. But was it, really?

At least, if it was a substance, I might die, be released out of this hell that was my life.

I didn't allow myself to evolve that thought. I refused to feel sorry for myself, mostly because I hated it when others did. I had made this bed for myself, and now, I had to lay in it.

I gladly did.

"Chief?"

"What?!" I screamed and looked up from my desk. 

The officer who had just come in jerked. "Sorry, Sir, I can leave."

I sighed.

"No, I'm sorry. I was just somewhere else in my mind. Please, come in."

"It's about the case with the grooming deacon." Oh, fuck me... "The people have broken into his old cathedral and hurt innocents who were attending the mass of the new deacon."

"How are they?" I asked, not because I have a fuck but because I knew it was the socially acceptable thing to ask.

"In hospital. One of them lost her life. An elderly lady."

I groaned, hid my face in my hands. I understood the public rage, but did it have to go out over innocent people?

"And the new deacon?"

I didn't know what made me ask it. I was surprised I did. The officer seemed equally confused, as their frown deepened.

"He's fine, he was at the front of the altar. The mob only made it to the back."

I found I felt relief, but didn't understand why. Why did I care about the new deacon? It couldn't be easy, being in his position. He must be mortified now. Sad for his people.

Maybe, I wasn't as cold-hearted as I wanted to believe I was.

"But we suspect they wanted to get to him. That the new deacon has become a target. That they have a very clear goal. Some of the people we have arrested have hinted at it."

I sighed and called to a meeting. There, I made up a plan with my subordinates that the deacon now had to be followed by an officer for the protection of not only him, but also of his cathedral.

"Who will go tell him?" someone asked.

"I", I said before I had even thought about it. "I will."

I went home and watched porn for five hours. This time, I masturbated to it.