Dream 001: from out of this
It is a time of high shadow.
Nagato stands on the hills, and watches the buildings paint the grass black with the help of the setting sun, which casts oblong, twisting webs of darkness. He lifts a hand, and spreads his fingers, feeling as if he can almost reach out and touch the sinking city. As if he could wrap his arms around it, and hold on.
Instead, it is dissolving. He blinks, and the buildings are rocks, now. Rubble. Blinks again, and the rubble is colourful sand, and the wind stirs his hair, and the grains spiral up and blow past him, and around him. His mouth opens to say a word, a thought: Protect me.
He feels far away from his body, and from the country of ruin.
Nagato realizes he is ruined, too, when he looks downwards and sees his fingers dissolving along with the monuments. And then: his legs.
Tossed backwards by the wind which blows up out of the night, and the rivers are high with rain.
Today, he sat with Konan and Yahiko. Smoked from the hookah which Yahiko stole for them. Shared it with Konan, and they coughed together.
This is home: these hills and wastes. It is as home as a parent's voice and scent is home, for other children, for these children have no parents, and so home smells like the flowers on the air, and sounds like the katydids in the summer and the frogs, but it's washingblowingfalling into nothing. Into pieces.
In his body are the eyes of a priest, and the eyes of history. And all around him, his country is becoming history, itself. And he must hold it. Must lift his home from the wreckage. And himself. He's sinking. Sinking in the words he cannot say, in the feelings he cannot name, in the limitations of languages to bring salvation. And then, it is all:
(colourful sand)
The small, simple, bright words of someone very small, in a place dropping beneath the shadowed sunset.
And then comes night.
[He wakes up, and it is like the night was the reality, and this the dream. All around, the colours have returned to the world. This is not Home, where the colours bled away.]