Perfectly Imperfect Love

Suspicions

Tenchi was lying in his tent, trying to control his trembling form desperately. His hands wouldn't stop shaking, and his eyes were closed tightly.

His hallucination of his dead teammate was slowly eating away at him, along with the altered dream of the woman who once held his heart.

What the hell was wrong with him? He couldn't tell. He had thought, no, he knew he had purged himself of any feeling or connection with the his two squadmates of team 7. So why was it bothering him? Why couldn't he get their faces out of his head? And most of all...

Why was he feeling...anything?

It had been ages since he last felt any sort of strong emotion. Of course, he still felt. Fear, loss, anger, humor; he could still go through these emotions. But it never affected him. And they were always dark...hollow. As if they were trying to fill an empty shell of existence.

Perhaps, deep down, subconsciously where he could never reach, he still held a flicker of attachment to Team 7. Not anything remotely close to what once was, but the basis of what he felt back then still remained. The joy, the laughter, the pain, the suffering. All of it was still there. A memory; something he can still recall, but it's a blur.

Sasuke and Sakura. The two people he once dedicated his life to. One, he put everything on the line just to bring him home. The other, he devoted his every thought and action towards making her happy.

The thought of the Uchiha left a bad taste in his mouth. To this day, it still disturbed him how little he cared about Sasuke's death. Even after years of training and working, just to get him back, he didn't care that he had been killed.

But, then again, the hallucination he had would differ. It wasn't brought on by a genjutsu or a poison; he merely saw Sasuke, back from the grave, and killed him. He wouldn't bring it up to Hana or his superiors, though. It was a one-time thing.

Why would he hallucinate him, then? And why would it affect him so much?

He supposed it was a foreign concept for Sasuke to be dead. All his life, Sasuke had been alive, and had meant something to him; a friend, a rival to surpass, a brother. That all seemed so...strange now.

For one reason or another, his thoughts drifted to Hana. When he woke up with her body wrapped around his a week earlier, his abdomen fluttered with...something he couldn't describe. It was far from negative, but he didn't like the emotion that ran through his whole being when she had comforted him. It made him uneasy and on edge; moreso than he had ever been in Oto.

Whenever that happened, he was so confused and conflicted with all everything that was going through his mind, he almost spilled the beans, per se, and told Hana about her.

A wistful sigh escaped his lips. It was hard to get out of his head now. No matter what he did, the pink-haired girl he once loved would forever be burned into his memory. Before, she was nothing but that; a faint echo in the distance. But now, Hana's genjutsu brought her back into reality.

It no longer filled him with a sickening, gut wrenching feeling whenever he thought of her; that hadn't happened for years. Instead, it was almost...bittersweet. Too bittersweet.

The dream he had of her brought back everything he had once felt before his time in ANBU. Love, anger, jealousy, fun, joy, happiness; a whirlwind of emotions. It was all a wound upon his mind that had caused him to join the black ops in the first place and now; he didn't even know what they were. He couldn't even remember what it felt like to be in love, or to genuinely laugh, or to feel suffering. He merely...existed. Nothing more, nothing less.