Distant Echoes

8 - The books that never existed

The road that led to his house was just a path paved with memories.
At night, when he crossed the threshold of the door, he seemed to hear the screams of all the members of the Uchiha clan to whom his brother Itachi had taken his life.
Maybe it was just an illusion of his mind?
Maybe the air around him didn't really smell like blood mixed with dust?
Yet, as he walked through those places, he seemed to lose his breath.
It smelled of old, of death.
Speeding up, Sasuke arrived in front of the new house he had built the year before, inhaling hard, as if he had held his breath until then.
He liked to think that space had been built recently, because at least there, no one had died.
He grabbed the wooden bowl, filling it with the rice that the woman cleaning the inside of his house had prepared for him and let herself wander with his mind.
The memory of a breath that smelled of mint and feverish skin burned in his thoughts, like a surprising and unexpected dream.
When he had detached himself from that cursed woman, remaining a few inches from her face, he had looked at her expression and the details of that perfect doll: pink cheeks, liquid eyes, swollen lips.
As if he had been burned, he turned away from her.
What was wrong with him?

Up to a year and a half before I ever met her, until winter, spring, summer and autumn before I saw her only as a ghost, a soul pained by the devastated mind. Until two months before, he had not had mercy to throw it from a dizzying height, while flying on his falcon, until a month before he had perhaps thought that the girl Hyuuga was just a harmful and toxic habit that filled his time, and now what had become again?

Why did he find himself just before throwing himself at you like there was no tomorrow?
Hinata remained the only one who had never run after her since she was a child.
Every time Sasuke thought he was the only one who heard her talk, he really laughed.
Together they were something broken, something sick and incurable, we had no way out.
He could grab his slender neck, break it in two, and it would be none.
Nothing would stop him from sticking his fingers in his flesh and putting pressure in the desired places.

It would be over in a second. But he did something else. It was the first time that she really kissed a person, the accidental kisses with the idiot did not count, they were not liked on both sides, they sucked enough, while the one with her had perhaps been beautiful? Her full lips were fresh and conveyed a tingling sensation through her skin. The hum of electricity that had passed through each of his neurons had been exhilarating. Perhaps the darkness that he had inside had felt attracted by that shadow like him that was always close to him, always present in his days.
Of course it had to be.

All he did was screw up, and after all, how many times did he screw up with all his bad choices? He put his hands on his face, grinning.
Almost two years in Leaf Village did that to you?
She still had to get clean from her, she couldn't keep up that addiction.
He couldn't keep getting poisoned, now that he'd crossed the border, he had to break that twisted bond.