Name: Conditional Blindness
Word Count: 556
There are none so blind as they that won't
see.
- Jonathan Swift
He stares at the horizon and watches the fires from the village burning
in the distance reach up and claw at the night sky and at the moon like the
unsteady, wavering hands of a thousand crack-addicts would reach out for the
benedictions promised by their disease; their arms and their wrists and their
fingertips shaking and convulsing with the want and the need and
the hope of a man who's known the taste of heaven and would willingly
subject himself to hell for a holocaust.
His mind is racing as he is
watching the scene unfold before him; his heart pounding in his throat as the
sour-sweet scent of burning flesh and wood and feces races on the wind like a
dirty, senescent breath, and, much like the inferno before him, Naruto feels
the blood in his veins run so fast and so hot that clenching his hands into
fists enough to stop them from shaking so hard that they hurt.
"Uzumaki," a
stern voice calls out to him from the ground, cutting through the thick air
like a knife. "What are you doing up there?"
Naruto looks down at the
ground -- at the scorched earth and the bodies of the dead as they are being
piled into mass-graves that cut through the forest like pythons; thick and wide
and filled to the brim as if they had just eaten and were not ready to
lay still beneath the sun and rest -- and signals, quietly and efficiently as
the ANBU were taught to do, that he's keeping watch.
"For what?" Neji
asks him, pulling his mask back so that Naruto can see his face from where he's
standing. "We've finished the mission already, Naruto."
The blond gracefully leaps
down from the tree and lands right in front of Neji with a small grunt, causing
the Hyuuga to notice (rather belatedly) that Naruto's mask has been cracked
down the middle, as if he had been struck there (which was impossible), or had
gripped it so hard it had bent (which was far, far more likely, and made Neji
worry about what was wrong.)
"...No, we haven't,
Neji," the ANBU Captain says after a moment, glancing down at eyes so wide
that he can see the moon and the earth and the stars reflected in their
infinite blackness as they stare up at him from the ground, the pupils as
lifeless and void of light as the universe he equates them to. "There are
still people here that need to be looked after; still things we need to look
out for."
"What do you
mean?"
"We need to look out
for this, Neji," Naruto snaps, pointing to the child's body at
their feet and stopping Neji's train of thought. "We need to stop
this from happening to us," he continues, pointing at another body. "For
him," and another. "And her," and another,
"...And them; all of them." at every single body in every
grave around them, his arms cast up to the sky. "This isn't right!"
"We...," Naruto
trails, turning his back on the Hyuuga. "...We're not...We're Not supposed
to be like this, Neji. This is wrong! Can't you see that?"
...Neji takes a look at the
graves. Then, looks back at his captain and frowns, not quite understanding
what Naruto wants him to see.
XXX
- Fin
XXX
"...They're just bodies,
Naruto."