Title: Forgettable 800
Pair: bitpieces of SasuSai
Summary: He doesn't like the way Sai paints.
Notes: more short weird shit for you!

Forgettable 800

-8-

Afterwards, he decides that he needs to make sure his insanity is still intact, so he purchases a box of $6.99 magic markers from Wal-Mart and loops it all over the walls of his apartment. A sun, a moon, a Venus flytrap, three stars in the sky, a savanna predator devouring its prey. Perhaps he'll even throw a few naked bodies and severed limbs in there later, just for sentiment's sake; he's been proliferate of a liberal drug society for so long.

It's only a matter of days, now.

He keeps the photograph locked in the wooden drawer on his art desk. Tucks it between two pages of a book about internet business syndication, binds the cover with some printed Christmas gift wrap, locks the drawer and mails the key to an address he finds in the Yellow Pages. Never wants to see it again, never wants to hear about it, never wants to look at it in the face—in fact, it is very likely that he will physically assault the next person who mentions the name. The memories are precious, the resolve entirely nonexistent. Secretly, he wishes he'll forget about it and maybe remember it while he's on his death bed, wheezing from lung cancer or something else fatal in longitudes.

He does everything he can remember, only to forget.

-0-

Because it's Naruto, he doesn't find it difficult to climb into Sai's bedroom window and try to make everything alright, again.

"You need to talk to him, y'know," Naruto says, dangling his feet on Sai's windowsill, twenty-feet above the ground. He's smiling like a roast duck, and it's kind of infuriating. "Talking makes everything better."

(For you, he thinks, just for you. How many people can walk up to a serial killer and sound halfway sincere, without at least a bullet-proof vest and twenty meters of distance in between? How many idiots in the world are there, who can stubbornly insist that a psychotic bastard is ready to snuggle into your arms? And how does one go about talking? Talking is too difficult for Sai. It requires methodical observation, a strong vocabulary to express one's thoughts, a bit of clever syntax, and a combination of facial expressions that, whenever Sai tries to modify to fit into his face, only end up looking like he's trying to speak Portuguese.)

So he says, "I should, but I do not know how."

Naruto responds with exasperation. "You're pretty stupid, aren't you?"

He's not sure what he's supposed to say to that.

(When it comes to talking, Sai is a fish out of water. And if Sai was the fish out of water, then Naruto would be the pre-evolutionary tetrapod that had claimed land during the Late Paleozoic Era. There was difference, and then there was the Sai-Naruto Difference.)

-0-

This first painting on his wall is the one of a crow in the night sky. Sasuke had told Sai to paint that, or maybe even a polar bear in a blizzard, and Sai had done as he was told, filled-out the beaks and the claws on the bird and shaded it, added darker colors for what he assumed to be shadows inside shadows, crosshatches in the area near where the moonlight would reflect the glossy feathers of the crow.

"Rip it up," Sasuke tells him afterward.

"Why?"

"It reminds me of my brother."

-8-

"Just talk to him," Naruto whines, "Talk to him. He'll listen to you."

-0-

The second painting is a plate of fruit. Peaches and starfruit and oranges and grapes. An odd combination for everyone else, that Chouji had taken one look at and started to smack his lips, that Shikamaru had called too expensive and exotic for him to spend time looking for, that Kiba had decided to be the perfect martini drink, that Neji had stared at for a long time before pronouncing it to be a violation of his own fate.

"Why are there no tomatoes in there?" Sasuke asks.

Sai doesn't know how to respond to that, either.

-0-

"I'm sure they could work something out," he hears Sakura say to Ino one day.

"You've been having that fujoshi dream again, haven't you?" Ino sighs.

801

The last painting is the ugliest one in Sai's collection. Sometimes Sakura likes to tell him that there is nothing but beauty in his artwork, but there is beauty, and there is the exception to beauty. There are palm trees near the shores and soft waters he had feathered in the sea, a bit of pastel in the corner and strokes of watercolour for the tones of the sky, but what makes it impossible is the boy standing in the center of it all. He's dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-complexioned, dark-demeanor; the type of boy that Ino-san would have liked to date.

But he's ugly, because he looks like Sasuke, and Sasuke, according to his own words, would never look like that, not if they'd kidnapped him, castrated him, and fed him cyanide.

In his hands, the boy holds one brilliant red flower.

The petals blow into the sky.

a/n: this is a special edition of my favorite brand of crackangst. if you like it, leave a review. if you don't, buy me a gun. =D