Interlude - He Who Lives in Illusion

"If you ignored the benign ghost that haunted the place and the witch who lived inside, it was practically the picture of normalcy."

- Deborah Blake, Wickedly Ever After

xxx

-February 11th-

The silence woke me up like a splash of breeze, it was there before it suddenly disappeared, replaced by faint ticking of the clock.

I roamed my eyes around the room, squinting them in order to see better. It seemed there was no one inside my nursery.

Finally.

I blinked my eyes. Once I opened them again they were vivid crimson in color, black tomoe were spinning lazily at the edge of each pupil.

I leaned my head against my pillow and tilted my head up, staring past the window into the gravel-grey clouds, watching with incredible clarity as beads of water fell into the rooftops. Although it was a quite mundane sight, I savored every twitch of movement I saw and burnt the image into my memory. I never thought that it would come to this, an existence so dull and meaningless that I craved for every ordinary thing I could get.

My life was the epitome of uncertainty. When I was not sleeping I would be plagued by my anxiety. I lived in constant fear, worrying whether my time was already near. It was hard not to, especially when one was a mere helpless babe. Yes I ate, I shat, I bathed, and I slept – I did whatever baby things that my progenitor expected me to do, but otherwise I felt nothing. I felt no excitement, no exhilaration that I would usually feel when I started my day, no nothing. I might as well be dead for all I care, I knew I would not notice the difference.

My undeveloped eyes also did not make my predicament feel any better. They were a hindrance more than they were useful. They could not tell the difference between two targets, they were not well coordinated, and they were not able to form a three-dimensional view of the world or see in depth. The images they produced were simply bizarre, and processing them just caused me a headache.

Thus, in times like this, when I was alone in the confinement of my crib, with no one else who would forcefully deactivated my sharingan – perhaps they feared that I would prematurely damage my eyes or that I would run out of chakra and died from sudden infant death syndrome, who knew. I then would use them to observe anything this bare room could offer me – be it dust, stain, or tiny cracks in the ceiling; sometimes Sasuke too, whenever the boy visited, that way I could observe his language pattern and learn it. It was better than spending my time moping and generally doing nothing.

That was where things started to become problematic.

Although the sharingan allowed me to see things with near-perfect clarity, my definition of reality became quite… twisted, suffice to say.

I began to notice how… real my surrounding looked – even though it was supposed to be unreal – and I... I began to question my own mind.

You see, the things around me, they did not have black lines that accentuated their color and separated them from each other. They have depth, a dimension, when they were supposed to be as flat as papers. However, no matter how real they looked and how detailed they appeared, I simply could not shake the feeling that there was this panel of glass that separated me from the outside world.

It was like I was watching everything through a TV screen. No matter how indubitably real the show seemed, I would instinctively know that it was simply an act, the fruit of someone else's imagination and creativity, and my surrounding was no different. It was simply a lie, a fabricated illusion that existed for the sole reason of messing with my mind.

I theorized that everything was only a dream. After all, dreams represent unconscious desires and wishes, they provided a psychological space where overwhelming, contradictory, or highly complex notions could be brought together by the dreaming ego that would be unsettling while awake. My existence in this world was incongruous enough that it should be a dream, it made sense.

Except it was not.

Dreams had errors, glitches, something that differentiate them from reality, no matter how small and insignificant they were. Inside dreams I should have been able to manipulate my surroundings, even instantaneously combust this cursed room on fire if I wanted to. But no, I could not, no matter how much I wanted to.

I had observed this room extensively for any sign of incongruity and inconsistency with the little time I had in between my slumbers, and so far I had found nothing significant. The gravity was fine, things behaved normally, and they obeyed the classical physics laws. Everything behaved the way they were supposed to, exactly like how I remembered in my own world.

It made me confused, thoroughly confused. What I saw, under a normal circumstance, would be ruled as a reality, as I had no evidence to prove it otherwise. However, at the same time, my mind was also contradicting my previous thought by refusing to accept what I saw as a reality because it knew that this world was only flat drawings on Kishimoto's desk.

It was infuriating.

I was stuck in this metaphorical bubble of existence and I could not quite figure out what I was doing or how to get out of it.

I was stuck in a loop, where I continued to entertain myself in order to preserve my sanity in a place where I was practically blind, deaf, and mute, by having an internal debate with myself over the nature of my surrounding, over and over, chasing the answer but never reaching any resolute conclusion, like a madman.

xxx

I blinked my eyes to make sure that I was really seeing it.

Even with my awful eyesight I was sure, no, I knew that I would not miss it.

It was there.

Why is it there?

I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand. It was still there.

I was seated on a highchair in the kitchen. Mikoto had started to give me solid foods in addition to breast milk. I was surprised that the mushy food was not as disgusting as I thought, it tasted quite good actually, and I could feel the taste of the sweet potatoes in it.

Mikoto brought the spoon into my mouth again, and her face came into my line of vision. There it was – black colored numbers on top of her head.

I wildly moved my arm and not-so-accidentally pushed the sippy cup in front of me onto the floor. When Mikoto knelt on the floor and went to pick the plastic cup, I immediately activated my sharingan and used them to observe the crown of her head.

I stared in confusion as the numbers suddenly disappeared.

Is it an illusion?

Just as Mikoto was about to get up, I immediately deactivated my eyes and wildly moved my arms again to pretend like I was happy about something. I considered my mission as a success when Mikoto seemed to be more amused rather than annoyed by my antics.

Now I could see the numbers again.

The numbers decreased constantly – ticking, ticking – like an exam clock, making sharp gnawing sounds inside my head. I had to admit that it started to bother me quite a bit. I did not even bother to think where the numbers came from, and why now, or why I could see it, because that thing looked like a countdown.

Ticking, ticking, ticking.

I watched in morbid fascination as the numbers ticked by. Every time the numbers decreased, one second would also pass by.

I memorized the numbers and converted them into days, but the result did not match up with the time when I estimated the massacre would happen. Then I divided them with the sum of seconds within one year, still no match. After that I divided it by phi number just for the hell of it, but I still did not find the formula that would produce the closest date.

Reaching a dead-end, I made two temporary hypotheses to explain the numbers, at least until I saw other people – who hopefully also had numbers on top of their head. I theorized that the numbers I had by converting the original number into sum of days were Mikoto's natural lifespan, that she would have lived a quite long life if she had not been killed during the massacre. It was either that, or my calculation was totally wrong and Mikoto was already fated to die in the massacre, which was just plain sad.

Either way, regardless of the numbers, I for the time being assumed that the numbers were a countdown, Mikoto's death countdown most likely, because what was the purpose of the numbers if not to signal something crucial?

I waited for a moment, waiting for something to resurface from within me, something that I was supposed to feel, but it never came.

I did not understand.

Where was it, that heroic sense of duty to save this woman? She was a kind-hearted woman and an even more supportive and caring mother. She definitely did not deserve to be killed by the son she had carried and raised through thick and thin in cold blood. She even loved me, a nobody, and put up with me despite all of the worries and headaches I put her through. Shouldn't I feel something?

Well... I supposed I should, but I don't. If she died I might actually start crying, but no more than that. I feared more about my life actually.

When did I become so selfish?

If things went normally, Mikoto would die in the massacre – and regardless of the countdown, it would not be long from now.

My heartbeat sped up and my neck started to sweat as I digested the information.

First thing first, I needed to make a plan to save myself. Once I was done, I might make another plan to help others. I should not overly concern myself with them. After all they were just drawings, a combination of imagination, paper and ink. They were not even a real person, so they did not really mean anything, right?

Right?

...

…

…

I myself was not sure about it anymore.