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In Reverse

Day 30: Time Travel (kinda…lol)

@sasuhinamonth

The sandalwood scent of incense retreats, its smoke returning to the burners where they came from.

In a neat line to an open grave, people take turns revoking their goodbyes for the boy resting cold six feet under. Every white lily they drop to the chasm leaps back to their waiting hands.

Hinata hears the creaking of ropes as she watches a group of men lift his coffin out of the freshly dug earth. Guilt stops gnawing on her heart.

Could I have done something that would have saved you?

His family resumes their place in the front row, while the priest withdraws his parting words—he won’t be calling Sasuke a sinner anymore. And then Naruto retracts his awful cries, Kakashi reels in his choked sobs, and Sakura recoils her wails of pure animalistic agony.

Down the back, Hinata pauses to contemplate on the wounded echoes around her—they’re so heavy she could almost see, no, touch their grief in all its blackness. Did I help you to a death you didn’t want, Sasuke?  

Halfheartedly, she listens to the small crowd unmurmuring their eulogies, every syllable going back to the refuge of their throats. And when his coffin returns to the pedestal, the harsh pulse of mourning comes to a stop. The shared sorrow among them quiets down.

As they all walk backwards to the mouth of the graveyard, Hinata quits wondering if there would ever be a kind of strength, a kind of warmth that could fill the hollow in her chest.

—

Outside the morgue, the late morning sun slowly slinks back to the east, and the flood behind her eyes dry up. Hinata surrenders to the violent sobs of panic that won’t be coming anymore.

How dare you. How could you leave me? How could you do this to me? A wave of anger and nausea abruptly disappears from her that for a split second, he was just a faint vision, a blur lying dead on the steel table.

“No. That…mangled thing is not Sasuke. No, I d-don’t recognize it. It’s not him. I’ve never even seen that thing before.” She swallows back this denial as the fire in her chest stops burning. It stops burning the second she unidentifies the dead, dead body.

“Do you recognize this man?” She turns her head away from the disgusting mess.

The operative sets the white sheet back to cover his face and the sight of Sasuke’s graying skin webbed with blood vanishes from Hinata’s mind; she won’t be knowing it’s him anymore.

And the whole world shifts back in place.

The ground returns from under her feet, twin teardrops run back up her cheeks. The suffocating fear that threatens to split her skull open disappears, because now he’s less dead with every breath she draws out.

The quiet of the examining room bleeds outside the corridor, and Hinata backtracks to the entrance of the morgue where her mind empties out the dark unease eating her alive.

—

The sundown finds Uchiha Sasuke freckled with a light drizzling of snow, lying on his back with incredibly blank eyes. He’s surrounded by a strange weightlessness in the air, a vacuum that knows no guilt or ache.

Then the void spits him out.

Clouds of breath retreat to his mouth like a tide as he retakes his last breath.

I wish I had. Sasuke thinks back to the last thought he would have ever had—Hinata’s bright eyes, wide with a silent plead, asking him to stay.

A snowflake lightly stirs in his eyelash before lifting into the iron sky. Pain floods him gradually, then all at once, blocking out every other thought.

(He doesn’t mind the jagged ache in his heart, because it is the same ache reminding him he has a heart.)

The blow of the backhand that knocks him to the ground suddenly jerks him upright and brings him to a kneel. Sasuke shifts his gaze to the trails of lifeblood crawling from the ground, receding to the gaping wound on the dead center of his chest.

All of a sudden, a thick red light blankets the world around him. Everything stills. Through dazed eyes, Sasuke faintly makes out a shadowy figure in front of him. The man opens his hand and catches a sword leaping up to his grasp. He points the blade to the bloody mess of Sasuke’s chest. Sasuke’s vision clears as the man slowly inserts the steel straight to the entrance of his wound. Fuck, fuck.

With the blade buried in his chest, Sasuke feels his insides stitching themselves together around the cold, intruding metal. Then the man yanks out the sword. The wave of pain ripping through Sasuke disappears at once. The copper taste on his tongue subsides. The wound closes.

Looking up, Sasuke locks eyes with his brother, and then heaven stops bleeding.

—

“I’m tired of running away from ghosts.” There’s a jump in his heartbeat when he revokes the confession.

“Why do you have to go?” There’s a crack in her voice when she withdraws the question.

It happens at the pause after he breathes her in, and the realization comes back like a rush: he won’t be leaving her anymore and she won’t be letting him go. Hinata removes the arm that encircled his neck and Sasuke unclenches the hand fisted in her hair.

After leaning away from him, Hinata erases her reply written on the fogged up window. Yes.

Sasuke points a finger against the glass and removes his question smeared on it. You’ll always remember me, won’t you? Every letter disintegrates in the fog building under his fingertip.

They return to sit side by side on the floor, shoulder to shoulder with their backs against a wall, listening to the rain go heavenward, sloppily retrieving its kisses on the roof. His mind erases the memory of him taking a good long look at her—he forgets the way he couldn’t differentiate his pulse from hers as their wrists touched.

(He knows well enough that nothing stays and that everything eventually returns to ashes, plumes of smoke, nothingness—he wouldn’t stay, and she wouldn’t stay, and what they have wouldn’t stay either. But it’s okay. This is enough for him anyway.)

Sasuke rests his forehead against hers, lightly brushing her cheeks and temporarily painting her skin the color of his calloused hands, before he pulls away again to look back beyond the windowpane. So they look on. One by one the little raindrops jump to the clouds.

Up.

Up

they

go.

—

Sorry if this was confusing lmao. Got the idea for the reverse thingy from this poem. Happy SasuHina month!!

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