Chapter 14
There are moments, Naruto thinks, where he remembers the darkness.
There’s a certain kind of viscosity to the memory of fear, one so alike to the memory of helplessness, thick and all consuming. It’s not something he draws up from the dregs of his life on purpose, as if wanting to spend any more time in the shadows of vulnerability that he had been forced into.
He doesn’t will them into being, flashes of a past reality he was swept up into, a pebble carried on the tail end of a relentless wind, thrown to the shore to the ocean to the deep.
Sometimes, though, he blinks.
It’s that quick, the darkness. He closes his eyes long enough to remember the paralytic effect of fear, the daunting dimming of his domain, the taste of iron in his skin.
(In his mouth, his mouth, curled and gaping; his eyes, unblinking)
The darkness thinks to teach him a lesson, and says, “You will know pain.”
He considers the reality of pain. If he had still been young, the child pariah abandoned and detested, he might have thought, it is all I have known.
But Naruto has never been in the business of pitying himself for the hand he’s been dealt, or lingering on despair. He plans immediately to push through it, to make his way to a conclusion that he can be proud of, that he can feel right about. His history is a mountain range of scattered trees decimated into trunks torn down and beaten under promise of resilience, growing tiny but hardy sprouts of belief. He has never met a monster he hasn’t wanted to understand, and so far, none of them have played a game he couldn’t win.
He breathes, and the darkness inhales, taking and taking and taking.
Iron pierces through the delicate wing of Hinata’s shoulder, scarlet over porcelain, and when Naruto blinks he wonders if she tastes the iron, too.
The shadows always envy the light, the flexibility and the resilience of it, and they are not strangers to the want of reaching it.
But monsters don’t touch without intent to maim, and shadows play delicately with the lace trail of light within reach, staining the fringes with the permanence of concentrated malice and manipulation.
A world of black with emphasized images of strangers he wanted to make friends, turning away. Images and memories and retellings of every moment he was left behind by those he doesn’t know and never knew, not the only important thing to recall, but important.
But painful; everything so beautifully and starkly cast in light against shadow, so elegantly and carefully twisted to wound—
Iruka-sensei standing over him, shaking, skin left behind on the blades of a fuuma shuriken, and smiling. The back of a friend the shade so indulgently engulfs, light giving way to dark, a crescent fallen aside.
Hyuuga Hinata’s heartbeat slipping away, her eyes sliding shut.
Naruto tastes the iron of blood in his mouth and hears nothing outside of the one-two gong of his heart, a calling and a warning, both—he blinks, and the monster in the shadows of his mind smiles, too.
The fading vestiges of Naruto watch Hinata’s blood pool around her before the scream trapped in his throat deepens and darkens and it’s not his voice but the monster’s and the darkness—
The darkness wins.