Alone I am Nothing

Chapter 7

The nightmares were getting worse, the hallucinations ever more so. It was like experiencing a waking dream in which his imagination ran rampant. Tenzō moved through reality while his mind continued to experience the nightmare. There were days in which he wasn't even sure he himself was real. It was a confusing state of mind in which he thought he might be the figment of someone else's imagination, only existing because someone else dreamed him. On his worst days, he actually believed this to be true. He felt as if he was flickering in and out of reality; as if he was merely recurring a transient thought. On his more lucid days, he realised how stupid those beliefs actually were and would chastise himself then try to forget the hollow feeling it left him with.

The hallucinations themselves were becoming realistic in a rather disturbing and sadistic way. They tortured him, and forced him to flee the safety of his camp in fear of his life. Running from shadows until collapse was something he had experienced occasionally before, but it was quickly becoming a regular occurrence. Sometimes he ran from Orochimaru, other times Kabuto or Danzo. Even the Shodaime himself. Whoever he imagined was as real to him as the nose on his face. Usually come the morning after, he would find himself curled up in a ball in some patch of grass with no energy to get back to his shelter. Yet last night, he had somehow managed to crawl his way back, though he remembered nothing after his collapse.

Losing his mind was quickly becoming quite frightening. With every realistic hallucination his mind conjured, Tenzō lost a little more of his tenuous grip on reality. These days, he never felt sure if the person he said hello to was real, or if the stranger that smiled at him existed outside his own mind. Last nights hallucination had been the most real and persistent he had ever experienced. He took some solace in the fact it had been relatively pleasant. Imagining Kakashi sitting solidly beside him and speaking as he was real was a pleasing alteration to what he usually imagined. Then again, it had driven him to inadvertently drain his chakra to dangerously low levels. He worried that one day, that might kill him.

His chakra levels were so drained that he almost felt hollow. Sharp pains shot up and down his limbs and it was clear he would be unable to sit himself up never mind bear his own weight. So he lay there, staring at the ceiling, his only entertainment the flickering shadows cast by the fire outside. It struck him as odd that the fire still burned so brightly. He had not attended it since he had built it, yet it burned brightly as if recently fed and stoked. But then, his memory of the past day was so full of holes that maybe he had attended it and forgotten.

By his reckoning, he had lost an entire day. It was dark outside now, yet he distinctly remembered seeing daylight as some point. His memory of those day lit moments was pure fantasy and he could not trust much of what he apparently experienced. He heard the hoot of an owl, followed by the distant screaming bark of a fox. Despite his disablement, he felt safe in this place. That was, until something moved inside the shelter. Fear gripped his heart and he held his breath, trying to ascertain whether the sound was real or imagined. When he heard it again, he realized that whatever made the noise was very close by. In fact, it sounded right beside his bed. His imagination ran riot and he imagined everything from a large snake slithering at the side of the bed ready to strike, to someone ready to attack him. As he was too weak to defend himself, he lay there, utterly terrified.

His breathing quickened, as did his heart. He had to find out what it was and so urged his tired body to move, but it responded painfully slow. He managed to silently turn onto his side and peek over the edge of the bed, only to recoil from what he saw. He drew in deep unsteady breaths as he pulled away from the edge, sure that what he had seen was a continuation from last nights delusion. This scared him as it had never happened before. Usually he woke up and all the spectres of his nightmares were erased until the next time he suffered one. But there, laying on the floor beside his bed as real as his mind could imagine, lay Kakashi. Steeling himself, he looked again to see if he had disappeared, but Kakashi's sleeping form remained there, sprawled out and fast asleep on the floor.