Sasuke & Sakura : Nightlights

🔽 Bleeding Skies 🔼

Published On: 03.10.2018

Words: 5.9 K

🔸🔹🔸🔹🔸🔹🔸🔹🔸🔹🔸🔹
 

The sky is red with her tears tonight. She cannot heal herself anymore. Years and years and years of pain should have left her numb, but she feels. She feels torridly. It doesn't stop. It never stops. She can't live with this anymore. She cannot die either. She's lost to herself and to the world. Nothing can bring her back.

She has nowhere to go. There is no saving grace for her. She often wonders what she has done in the past to warrant such a fate. She would not wish this stark, raving, maddening loneliness and pain upon even her enemies. She has been torn body and mind. She has nothing.

The chains in her hands are proof enough that freedom will never be hers. She wants to become numb and resigned, but the gods above must have something against her, for she still feels. Even after everything, she hopes.

Perhaps if she hadn't made that breakout attempt the last time fresh air was allowed to her, she would not have to wear these chains day in and day out. She fears the day those soldiers will return from war to demonstrate their victory over a woman who has been rendered incapable of fighting back.

Maybe she would have had a better fate if she'd been sold like her friend. She slaps the thought the moment it occurs to her. Ino died painfully with a lesser fighting chance than she has. It was that day that she remembers losing all her faith in anything higher above.

Light doesn't reach those under the ground.

A few days later, a woman comes in to deliver food instead of the usual tray slid under the door. Fear courses through her veins, for this can only mean they want her to look presentable. The only reason to allow this would be that the war has ended.

But even after days of prepping her and dressing her, no one shows. The relief is unable to overpower her mounting apprehension though, for something worse will come if not those soldiers. Some time later however, the gods she has stopped believing in give her a chance, though it isn't how she expects.

She eyes the iron door with trepidation as it is finally pushed open after two days and the silhouette of neither the man who has kept her captive nor the woman who manages the slave house emerges. Then, another joins him. She backs into the wall as if she needs it to swallow her up before this final breach breaks her.

She squints to recognize her captor after all. She would know the foul smell and voice anywhere. "Let me introduce our special maiden to you, sire," he says. "Virgin, this one."

She instinctively tries to pull her knees to her chest. To hide what they want. To protect the last of her dignity.

"I have saved her for our best, highest paying customer. After all, this foreigner is special."

So, the war isn't over yet, if soldiers aren't here. She silently thanks whoever needs to be thanked that she was a highborn in her country - that she has had a better chance than those of low birth had. Here, of course, they are all just bodies with a lower or higher bid.

She hears murmurs outside the door in the darkness before she sees the light. Torches and scented candles, she recognizes. The room is suddenly lit up as if it were a festival itself as torches are fixed in their holders. Each one feels to her like a final end of a kind. She feels her eyes fill with water.

"Have fun," she finally hears her captor's cruel voice and then the door closes with a final slam that rattles her insides.

This is how Ino must have felt, she thinks. Petrified. Alone. Powerless.