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[beachlass]

Excuse me, Sasuke, I was using that brain until you stole it. And I'll take another beer while you're up.

Naruto and characters belong to Kishmoto et al, not me, aren't you glad?

Speaking of Prozac

Like making funeral arrangements after a death, Sasuke’s return to Konoha was followed by an immeadiate flurry of activity: there were Itachi’s remains to dissect, Sakura was busy minding her genin team in the burn unit, and Shikamaru learned just how ruthless Ibiki could be as Sasuke was ‘debriefed’. Naruto had a lot of paperwork to do, hindered only briefly by the broken arm he’d received pulling Sasuke off Itachi’s corpse. Kakashi read through Come Come Cruise Ship twice waiting in the Hokage tower, ANBU headquarters, the coroner’s office and the hospital. Just as he started the book for the third time, regretfully coming to the conclusion that it wasn’t as good as the classics Come Come Paradise, Come Come Violence or even some of Jiraiya’s later works Come Come Butterfly or Come Come Swordplay; Genma sauntered by, tossing a mission scroll at his head. Kakashi finished his chapter (maybe it wasn’t great, but it was almost certainly better than a mission scroll, besides, there was this part with the sea bass…) and opened the scroll. Resigned, but certainly not surprised, he headed over to ANBU to take custody of his one time student and now prisoner.

 

The odds board went up in the jounin bar before Kakashi and Sasuke left ANBU. By the end of the first week Sasuke had tried to kill Kakashi twice, and himself once. When he set fire to the house they were living in, Kakashi knocked him out and carried to the hospital. Then he demanded something he should have done years ago, when Sasuke was first placed in his charge: a prescription for antidepressants.

 

Over the next few months, the suicide attempts stopped, and the murder attempts could be passed off as training, if you really needed to explain them away. To a Daimyo, or a visiting Kage, or someone who might wondered why there was a localized electrical disturbance in a seemingly deserted clan residence it was a reasonable enough explanation to explain a slightly disgruntled but still alive pair of Sharingan users. They would appear at a local teahouse, one reading porn and the other history, one’s Sharingan always on and covered by a hitae-ite, and the other’s eyes rarely surging from black, fight instincts blunted by the same drugs that kept his anxiety and self loathing in check.

 

After the arrangements that accompany death, the survivors need to learn how to go on living. Survival can look like failure to those standing outside, but to the survivors, exhausted by fighting the same battles year after year, to make it to a quiet hour of drinking tea together is success. Even if it isn’t happiness.

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