Title: In The House of Sleep
Author: tsubaki-hana
Series: Naruto
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto Masashi
Summary: The echoes belong to someone. [ Tragedy leaves him speechless before it happens. Sasuke centric.]
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"You should rest."

He hears it, and he ignores it, because to sleep now would be to never wake again, and that frightens him, so he instead rubs a (red) eye with a small hand. His fear is irrational, he tells himself, trying to resist the urge to look behind him. There's nothing to be afraid of silly, because the lights are on and okaa-san is in the other room cooking yakitori for dinner...

There is light coming from the window, and it casts him in stark relief onto the wall, a shoji door that *creaks* whenever he slides it to the side to go to his brother's room nearby. It's empty now, because his brother is not often home.

"You won't feel well tomorrow for the academy if you don't lie down for awhile."

He looks at the shadow. There's nothing unusual about it, it's just him he says again. With irritation, he turns back to the book in front of him (The Buddhist Koan, it reads in dark maroon letters on a goldenrod paper. He's not sure why he has it, but somewhere in the fog of his memory he can remember pulling it from a dusty bookshelf.)

He's supposed to be studying, he needs to know the names of several ninja for a test tomorrow and he's not sure if his sensei will appreciate it if he doesn't open the book he should be reading. But this book, it's pages are cracked and smell of mildew and age, and for some reason that unpleasant oldness draws him.

("Sasuke will seek me out.")

Turning to the first page, he reads aloud to himself with a timid voice.

I meet him, but know not who he is;
I converse with him, but do not know his name.

"You miss a lot when you rest. Will you not go to sleep?"

He whips his head back to face the shadow, who does not move, nor does it speak, but instead seems to stare into an unknown distance instead of back at Sasuke as it should. With a small start, he quickly turns his head to match the shadow. What he does not understand, he learns to coexist with.

The floorboards creak as he shifts his legs, grabbing fro the Koan book, all the while thinking that there are other things he could be doing now. He doesn't have to read silly old riddles or stare into his own shadow (because it isn't a mirror, he says in irritation, it is a cast of him, not the real person.) But all the same, he finds himself picking up the book again. The kanji stands out in a strange thin (but so very bold) script.

Words fail.

He puzzles for a moment, because riddles have always never been his strong point. He likes what he can see, doesn't like the convoluting conclusions a few characters can create. There's so much that it can say without ever forming words.

Looking at the kanji again, he drops it numbly, pretending that he doesn't answer the question.

The sun makes him drowsy, catching the side of his face, and making him blink slowly, before closing his eyes wholly. The red color it makes on the shoji bothers him, and he tries to not think of what it reminds (reminded him, will remind, can in a near/distant future) him of.

The sound of his mother in the kitchen disappears for a moment as he looks to the shadow, and suddenly he is caught up in an utter state of fear, because it is as if she was never there at all, or that she won't be there soon enough. He can (did) see the cascade of black hair on the ground, an ugly spill of darkness and gloss, a candle with melted wax and no flame any longer. At the image,

Words fail him.

A dream, he says to himself, looking back over to the shadow of him on the red wall, and it stares back. Then it looks away as he is watching.
And walks away, much taller than himself.

His eyes, once heavy, spring up and dilate, sharply watching the shadow slink away with heavy footsteps on hard wood floors before disappearing into the vacancy of his brother's room.

"Now you won't be able to rest."

The sound of his mother cooking returns to him, but it's like an echo, faintly ringing but barely there. The room is dark, because the sun has set into evening without his knowledge. The crickets chirp and the leaves rustle, sounding like the scraping of nails against the walls as a thousand desperate arms clutch onto the lacquered walls.

Tonight, there will be no slumber for Sasuke in the house that will sleep.

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A/N: Did I ever mention I scare myself sometimes? All the koans are real, and they come from a zen practice of memorizing a riddle and solving it before presenting it to the head priest at a monastery.