Chapter Text
"Sa- suk- un?''
He groans and tries to clutch his aching head with trembling arms.
''I- se-- ei! Sas-- -un j-- fa- -int--!''
Okay, scratch that, the arms don't seem to want to cooperate. Wow, ageing REALLY does get to you, doesn't it, he barely had three drinks yesterday and–
Did he have drinks? And was it yesterday? And what was yesterday? He was not quite sure what even happened the last day, and the insane throbbing in his head was not helping him at all.
Someone tried to yank him upwards and--okay, you know, fuck you. He was very close to hurling on whichever idiot decided it was a good idea to move a clearly hungover--or gravely injured since that's what it felt like--person. He took a sharp breath and momentarily opened his eyes, instantly regretting his decision. Bright light filled his vision, and the throbbing in his head has gotten somehow worse. The world spins around him in blurry bright shapes, and he is not sure if he is still laying down, or standing upright, or hanging upside-down. Somebody's hands on his forearms keep gripping him, and the light in front of him gets blocked by a shape--probably the asshole, who tried to move him around.
Motherfucker, he thinks.
And promptly pukes in the general direction of the offender.
Take that, he thinks grimly, and blacks out again.
He wakes up with a start.
The throbbing is gone, and so is the acidic smell of bile. The bastard with a deadly grip on his arms is gone as well. He tries to stir and quickly figures out that he, in fact, cannot move at all.
Is this what being paralyzed is like? He tries to breathe through his nose but finds it clogged--the next best bet is inhaling through his mouth, and his throat burns like he has caught the worst flu. He squirms on the bedsheets (bedsheets! So he did get moved around) and cracks an eye open.
His vision swims again but not as badly as the previous time he woke up. The room around is bright and sterile-looking, smelling of chlorine and something else that he strongly associates with ER. He blinks his eyes, eyelashes glued together, and immediately zeroes on a person across the room.
It's a man, no older than 30. He is twiddling with a cigarette he is holding in his fingers, brows furrowed and staring out the window. He is dressed, frankly, ridiculously--some weird bulky flak jacket over a dark blue jumper with bandages adorning each bicep (what the fuck for?); he got some weird sweatpants on tucked into--surprise--more bandages with--surprise!--more bandages on his thigh, with some kind of... pouch? attached to it. A white sash is hanging over his crotch like the dude is either trying to hide his boner or is cosplaying some weird-ass military surfer. He has got an, uh, tennis headband--this guy just got the weirdest fashion choices--on top of the head full of spiky hair.
Despite the dumb outfit, the Guy is handsome. Stupidly handsome. That still does not explain why the Guy is in the supposed hospital room.
"What,'' he wheezes out at the Guy, finding that it is hard to control his tongue--it's like he both burnt it on a hot potato and forgot how to form words coherently. He opens his mouth and tries again: ''What happened.''
Multiple things happen at the same time: he realizes that his voice is, in fact, not his voice--he sounds like a prepubescent kid that screamed himself raw last night playing some dumb videogame--which shouldn't, no, can't be possible, because he is a grown adult in his mid-20s. At the same time, the Guy lifts his eyes up and smiles wildly, putting the cig behind his ear and taking a step towards the hospital bed.
Also, the Guy speaks. Not in English.
''... Sasuke-kun,'' he finishes whatever garbled thing he was saying, and looks pointedly at the bed. The Guy proceeds to stare down, and crosses his arms on his chest, and starts speaking again.
Nope. This is not better. Either the hangover is still super bad, or he got brain damage, or the Guy is continuing to speak in--uh. Korean? Japanese?
"Sasuke-kun?" the Guy worriedly looks at him, crouching next to the bed.
"What," he stares at the Guy again, trying to squirm away. His body feels--wrong, it feels weak (hangover), unresponsive (apparent paralysis) and, most horrifyingly, small.
The Guy's face looks consistently more and more worried, and he stares at a bedridden form like he wants both to explode with worry and simultaneously be anywhere but here. The Guy garbles out some more Korejapanese and swiftly stands up, throwing another worried--Jesus, what the fuck is he so worried about? He is not the paralyzed one!--glance at the bed, and quickly exits the hospital room.
A number of things happen over the course of the next probably-hour.
First, he realizes he can't remember not only what he was doing last day, but also days before that. Memories come out hazy, and frequently it feels like half the things he is trying to remember is just plots of films because they got a movie-level idiocrasy: someone breathing fire, or producing a fireball, he guesses; a bunch of children throwing knives at each other; a massive empty district with a sad shrine with many aged photos. He also remembers much more normal stuff: the view out of the window onto a busy road junction full of cars; a stuffy smell of subway station; default Windows background on a probable-work PC. Most importantly, though, is the fact that he doesn't remember his name. He wrecks his brain trying to pick out literally any name in relation to himself; then wrecks his brain some more to come up with any name. Literally nothing comes to mind, and he frowns so hard for a while that his face starts to hurt.
Then, the body problem. He does remember being taller, broader, stronger. He also remembers being tiny and surrounded by big things.
Maybe I'm dreaming, because what kinda witchy fuckery is this, he thinks after some time of looking over his prone (SMALL! So small) form on the bed from the vantage point of a pillow.
Then, the people come in. They keep speaking Japarean, or whatever this language is, and he cannot comprehend where one word starts and the other ends--the entire conversation is one-sided, and he keeps his mouth shut and bites on his tongue in hopes that he is really just sleeping and pain will somehow bring him back into reality.
They keep repeating this 'Sasoke-un' stuff, he is not sure how that one is spelt either, but then again, he never participated in a Spelling Bee.
Or did he? It's hard to figure out ANY information about himself or his past self, and half the shit he does remember is just the same knife-throwing tree-jumping samurai-kid-movie-thing. Did he watch some kinda TV series and then just black out? Did he die in front of a TV?
He wants to punch his past self for apparently doing nothing but watching movies since there is virtually nothing else that his brain deemed worthy of remembering of his past life.
Regardless, back to Saska-koun. Since he can't remember his own name (and the people deliberately keep repeating it in his face) (and sudden selective amnesia decided to take out any name he has ever learnt), he will address to himself as Susoke.
Sasuke twitches when one of the people clad in some weird softcore version of a hazmat suit places a hand on his forehead. Doctors usually ask permission to touch, don't they, and he likes his privacy, thank you very fucking much.
Then, more weird shit starts happening.
The hand on his forehead starts GLOWING GREEN, and Sasuke feels like he is gonna hurl all over again. The green stings his eyes, and realistically this shit can't be happening, alright, there was nothing in the hazmat guy's hand to let him shine like a glorified hand-cyborg-glowstick.
Cyborg man's lips twitch in a frown and he turns around to the Guy from before, and says something (okay, whatever, Sasuke guesses no one will deem it important to bring a translator or whip out a phone or whatever) that makes the Guy frown.
Yeah no shit, thinks Sasuke with dark satisfaction.
''Sasuke-kun," says the Glowstick Hand in a surprisingly gentle tone, like he was talking to a scared cat or a small child.
He then says some other shit in The Unknown Language and Sasuke's patience starts to run out.
"Where the fuck am I? Did you kidnap me?" he snarls at the Glowstick, and that makes him frown deeper. "Did you fucking drug me?"
The Guy From Before says something that sounds like a curse, short and sharp, and then the two men start hurriedly talking between each other completely ignoring Sasuke's heated glares from the bed.
"Hey! I'm talking to you!" Sasuke spits out, trying to prop himself up on too-weak elbows.
Glowstick and The Guy turn to stare at him for a change–Glowstick with a look like he was trying to dissect Sasuke with his eyes alone, and The Guy with a strange somber expression of pity. Glowstick spoke again and Sasuke blanched at him.
If Sasuke’s hands did cooperate with the rest of his body, he would’ve probably slapped himself, or pinched, trying to verify that what was going on is real.
Over the Glowstick’s forehead, in a neat font, letter after letter, a phrase ‘We’d need to do more tests’ started appearing, before erasing itself and conjuring a new phrase: ‘to know for sure’.
And all of that.
In English.
Sasuke blinked. Then he blinked again.
The Guy From Before smiled sadly at Sasuke, and then shot a side-eye to the Glowstick. Neatly, over his tennis headband on his forehead, new words started forming as well, syncing to his lip movements: ‘I will report to Hokage-sama then’.
‘It is quite unfortunate that this happened to young Uchiha-san’, said Glowstick's forehead.
‘Did you already consult the Yamanaka?’ appeared on The Guy’s forehead, some letters being obscured by him turning a bit away from Sasuke, so he was not completely sure what the Yam–an–a was.
‘Not yet, but we sent after them,’ said Glowstick’s forehead.
Neat, Sasuke thought. Creepy as fuck, but neat.
How the fuck did he trigger the closed captions–actually, never mind, his head hurts as it is. Sasuke decided that everything that was happening was a feverishly mad comatose dream since he apparently drank himself into an early death. He knows nothing about comatose dreams, but he watched one of those dude-in-a-coma-dreams-of-alternate-world series (... did he? He couldn’t recall), and he remembers that the moment the guy died in his ‘dreamworld’, he died in ‘real life’ too.
This entire concept makes no sense, but Sasuke will try to roll with it until he learns more about what the fuck is going on here.
The Guy and the Glowstick are still talking with each other when they exit the room, and when The Guy briefly turns his head to look at Sasuke, his forehead says ‘... –utsu inciden–...’.
And like that, he is gone.
Sasuke’s day couldn’t get any worse.
Sasuke’s day got worse.
A tall guy with a blonde ponytail entered the room alongside the Glowstick--The Guy From Before nowhere to be seen–-and smiles at Sasuke.
‘Hello, Uchiha-kun,’ his forehead says.
“Hn,” eloquently responds Sasuke.
‘Are you feeling better?’ asks The Ponytail. ‘You have gotten hit by quite a nasty jutsu back there.’
Nasty… what? Sasuke furrows his brows.
“Hn,” from what he has gathered, only HE can see the captions. Everyone else expected him to speak Japanese. His English-sounding flailing apparently provided no effect on those people, and worse yet, it made them do aggressive touching of his persona. Sasuke did not want any unrequited touches from men clearly bigger than him.
Better not to speak English for the sake of his own preservation, then.
Fuck, he really hoped he’d get out of coma soon.
‘I am going to look at your head, alright?’ says the caption, and Sasuke squirms away into the pillow before Ponytail can even start moving.
“Mmnh,” Sasuke almost-whines (he does NOT whine, he is old enough not to whine), and Ponytail gives him a mild smile.
‘Don’t worry, I am just trying to see if that justu left any permanent effects on you,’ and he moves closer to Sasuke, as Glowstick and another suddenly-manifested hazmat suit guy immediately pin him down.
Ponytail places a palm on Sasuke’s forehead.
Oh hellllll nah, snarls Sasuke inside his head.
And then, his vision whites out again.
Memories-–these aren’t his memories, they’re not, they’re–-flash before his eyes, all blending into one big, horrible red haze of terrifying eyes pinning him to the spot, and blood being spilled everywhere, and he sees a woman–- mom- –being stabbed and stabbed over and over and over and over and over agai–
The palm is gone from his forehead and Sasuke is hyperventilating, eyes big and wild and wet. He is thrashing against the hold of the two men holding him, and cries harder, blindly staring somewhere, anywhere, where the world is not painted redredredred.
He barely registers a touch to his neck, and just like that, Sasuke is gone into dreamless sleep again.