Chapter Text
Fate was fair, he supposed.
Fate was one of the few things Reo is happy he can't control. To decide and ponder the path one took was a task he would let the gods above deal with. Mere mortals should never have such power. Twirling existence between ones fingers and weaving it into the fabric of time was a delicate craft. Life itself, a forever volatile and shifting medium, unwilling to shift nor bend to the deft hands of fate or the patient ones of time. Only ever tumbling out of thread with the inevitable death.
Death is the greatest equaliser, was what a travelling westerner murmured to him like a comfort on a snow tipped day—the women around them wept and balled—we all end up disassembled and surrounded by the regrets of others who knew. The traveller escaped to the wind after that, his words deftly imprinted in his mind for the coming years. Foretelling of war whispered on the wind as death reaped the doorsteps of those breath was too poor.
Reo swindled that death, it was no time for him to die then. Hokkaido didn't need any more mourning men and weeping women.
With empty breath, he crawled his life to eighty-four and passed in callous December in a new century. Just as he lived, it was a quiet death.
Reo slips under and lets himself fall.
The void, it seems, is more all-consuming, more empty, more void than what he had imagined. Screaming into nothing, Reo watches as nothing but his own vision shake before him. Something is here—or rather, meant to be. The empty is full and when he breathes and gasps for something—oh something, please—there is nothing.
(Oh, the lack.)
Stumbling forward, he tumbled and flipped. His hair thrashing and vertigo thralling—The floors gives way and he sinks to the abyss. A void undone as it cradles him down and he is swept to somewhere in nowhere.
Is this his end?
(Of course not, fate is fair, but cruel is life, child.)
A blear of ringing is what greets him, after what seems to be an eternity in nowhere.
That is, before he is set alight.
Flames scuttle across him, searing against Reo's lifeless yet desperate form. Breath is stuffed into his lungs, so sudden he chokes and sputters. His eyes feel like they are bleeding molten gold—is this his retribution, his equalisation? cast amongst the fire, never to feel the chill again?—a baptism by fire the fanatics would say. So many sensations, yet none he feels.
Something grates against his eyelids, and whatever he's on seems to shift and sink beneath him. Almost like the beaches at Shiretoko—where is that chill, that freeze, oh what he'd do—
What he would do to just open. his. eyes.
There's an age before he feels, or even hears it. Maybe it's the sand—or is it really sand, you're a dead man Reo—or the ring in his ears. He doesn't know and won't for a long time.
"Sasori!"
Sand seeps under his heel, the sun has long set yet his eyes burn.
This is no place of his home, Sasori knows. It has been his reality for the past two years. Perhaps a genjutsu to a scale that none has ever seen before.
He doubts, but nothing is impossible here.
Sasori wakes and lives to it though. Despairing so desperately for snow settling atop the crests of hills, bitter fresh sea air that bites your lungs and that chill that seeps into your joints.
Here? there is no snow nor chill to speak of.
Outside the walls of the village it is a barren land of sand. Ever shifting and morphing, the land beyond is a wasteland to those who are not familiar. Looking out to it rewards you with sand spitting into your eyes and a glimpse of sunken trinkets, lost to the storms and bandits lying in wait.
A doll clinks in his hands. Joints locked with sand and smile etched in with a crude kunai. Somewhere under the boot of the heel is 'Reo'. A keepsake of sorts, to mourn—or rather remember—his life before.
A small piece of sanity to cope with it all around him.
Chiyo still breathes down his neck about his sudden 'changes', years after he crawled out of the desert with a different mind. What does it take for her to let it go.
"Sasori!"
It takes a moment for him to turn before being barrelled into. Komushi switching their positions and lets himself catch the fall. The kid's grin beams up at him. Sasori, no doubt, gazing back unbothered.
"Chiyo-baasama wants you back for dinner," Komushi grins. "Whatcha doin' all the way out here?"
"Just appreciating the stars." The lie is stiff, and inwardly he scoffs. As if that's believable.
"Wanna talk about it?" He pries—well as good a eight year old can pry—and bats his eyelashes like it'd work.
"No."
Sasori finally rolls off of Komushi and lays back against the sand.
Above, the sky is an opaque black, littered with stars and smattered with clouds that look like bleeding watercolours. Swaths of deep blues wash across the expanse, the sky surprisingly clear for the spring night.
—"pretty isn't it?"
Sasori hums, noncommittal.
"Accordin' ta nee-chan there's a bunch of co-constella-tions we can't see since we live in Wind," Komushi adds on, hands trailing across the skyline. "Ya know what a conste-llation is, yeah?"
"Of course I do."
Next to him, he can just see Komushi roll his eyes but he continues. "Right, so, since we're like south of the uh equa-tor the sets of stars we see are way different than the ones up in Kumo.
"Nee-chan calls them eternally beautiful or summin' like that. Always there ta look over us, no matter how hard the day. Still there, lookin' pretty, loong after we're gone. Eternal beauty."
"Eternal beauty," Sasori repeats. He likes the sound of that.
Sasori can hear the sound of him turning to face him. Muddy green staring brightly at him with a toothy grin in tow.
Sasori realises then how much of a child the duo of them are. Two silly little kids rolling about in the deserts. Under the skies, waxing poetry about stars. Somewhere-underneath the sheeted ice and cold—his gut is a blazing, all warm feeling.
"You think we could see the stars in the other countries too?"
Sasori ponders for a moment, letting his thoughts go. "We're affiliated with Suna, I doubt other villages would like us being in their territory for such a... childish reason."
Still he persists, free hand now playing with the discarded Reo puppet. "Yeah, but like, what are they gonna do, kill us?"
"Probably."
"Still! Just say we can. Imagine watching them from those tall peaks in Lighting, the marshes in Water and—ooh! those huuuge forest in Fire! C'mon, Sasori! Think about it!" Komushi pushes, the sun personified in a child's breath. Will bright and burning.
It is a nice picture. Atop the fabled summits of Lightning, watching everything so small disappear beyond the horizon. Sasori can already feel the welcome the chill of the cold again and he yearns. There's that burn in his stomach again, like a snake around his gut it pulls.
(Idly, Komushi reminds him of the setting sun. Brilliant and vibrant, fantastically warm, it is almost home.)
"I... I'd like that too, Komushi," he says reluctantly. "I've always wanted to see the snow."
"Alright!" Komushi sits up now, sand pooling in his fists and eyes looking farther than they've ever been. "So, just the two of us!"
"Alright then," he murmurs. "I'll be in your care."
Sasori does not love this life but he cannot hate it either.
She takes him here once every week since the Incident.
Like any day, the desert is a mirage of dust. There's an urge to squint and cough as his shemagh barely hides him from the turbulence. Such terrible conditions yet he stands to commiserate people he barely knew. This, no matter how many times Chiyo tries to reason, is not for him.
Chiyo is knelt to a kowtow. Head to the floor, hands clenched around petals and bowing low to a stick of burning esfand. Ever bright in the desert musk.
A handful of ground gardenia and thyme is all she grasps in place of her joy—mother—and courage—father. They are now but dust to the wind, flittering and drifting.
If he tries, he can hear her mutter prayers and blessings to the sands and to the skies. Like most things, the wind carries the prayers away. It all leads back to the Pure Land is what the scriptures say, but Sasori was never a religious man.
Still, he let their ashes burn amongst the spices and herbs, let their ashes get stolen away into the wind, let them die in his memory and in reality. He has no regrets about that; he never knew them anyway.
Madly, when Chiyo learned of his sentiment, there's something akin to shock in her eyes but he mustn't know of her hate or prejudice so she smothers him.
Prayer, she hopes, will quell this—this shock at their deaths.
Numbly, he knows it will do nothing at all.
"Kneel, Sasori-kun."
He slips into form. Practiced in a childish sense. Hands fumbling for the right things at wrong times and knees dropping to the sand with two awkward grunts.
The stick of esfand seems to glow brighter as it is wedged into the sands. He can feel it pry open his mind now. Dreamy eyes seeing something beyond the molten incense.
Remember us, it urges. Sasori can almost imaging them, their backs turned and a crooning smile thrown over their shoulders.
And he smiles back. Sand drying his lips, mind high and feet dug deep.
No. No, I will not.