ooc ][ application
[character name]: Uchiha Sasuke
[character age]: 21
[pb]: Lawliet Kenichi Matsumaya
[school year]: sophomore
[major / minor]: Photography, with a minor in Criminology; he has enough courses for at least a PoliSci minor, but has not declared (and doesn’t plan to declare) anything in that direction.
[extracurriculars]: he is That Guy - the one who signs up for all available clubs during orientation, shows up for one meeting where he gives club officers renewed hope in the season’s members, then is never seen again. Unless you count the one party no one really wants to talk about outside of their police record. He vaguely flirted with Debate, but gave up after a solid commitment of three whole sessions. Joined the photography club because they offered several instrument discounts & access to a private dark room, but gave up in stupor once his single neuron got overwhelmed by the pretentious tl;dr of the rest of the members. Guys. Guys. It’s not the meaning of life, it’s just a picture.
Makes an occasional buck on the side by shooting Acting college students’ portfolio pictures; sometimes takes on menial jobs a la, "We need photos of 10000001 tattoos for our brand new catalogue, yes, you have to shoot that horrible old man’s ass, do it, Uchiha." Is often amused.
His main 'activity' is taking shots and sometimes small films of campus events, frequently for blackmail purposes. Yes, unrepentantly. Like a Bawss.
[background]:
(heykwurweyigkr just... putting it out there… that anything that concerns yet unapplied for characters is more than up to their applicants’ change & consideration, this is just an outline that I don’t plan to impose on anyone, orz)
Second son to the rather wealthy main Uchiha branch, Sasuke had an all in all loving family, and not all that much to complain about. One of his few FMLs was the hereditary reduced melanin in his retina; he doesn’t quite verge on ocular albinism, but certainly gives the impression of occasionally red eyes even now, under various lightings. Aestheticism aside, it also strongly impaired his sight. He’s been undergoing treatment since childhood, and he wears corrective black contact lenses even now; he’s sadly been warned that continued eye strain might lead him to blindness.
But back to ickle Sasuke (the nerd). His brilliant brother’s successes frequently eclipsed his achievements, and certainly stole enough of his father’s attention, but Sasuke was never truly neglected: he had his doting mother, and the elder Itachi’s constant affections. He also had LEGO blocks. Lots of them. And trains (red ones). He liked the trains best.
He met Naruto and Sakura during his first school years, and as luck would have it, actually befriended the idiots (The BFF 4EVER, let’s cut our palms and shake like blood brothers because that’s totally cool and completely hygienic, what are you talking about, kind of friends).
They say bad luck comes in threes, which is possibly why this charming acquaintance was followed by the downfall of his close family. To this day, Sasuke can’t really say what happened. He remembers Naruto and he going to the Uchiha estate for dinner, possibly pondering new and mysterious ways to gtfo without eating their vegetables. He also remembers finding every one of his relatives in a bloodied mess. Somehow, Itachi was spared.
Sasuke wanted the natural (to find his brother), and the obvious (to get out NOW), which is why he followed the Craven’s Guide to Massacres and ran. Naruto followed. Eventually, so did the police. The boys were separated, and Sasuke ended up in temporary state custody and in his very own 8 x 8 mental ward. (There were no trains ._. ) He was informed that he couldn’t be handed over to his brother, because bluntly, Itachi was a primary suspect. Incidentally, he also couldn’t be found.
Two things contributed to Sasuke’s eternal woe: his brother’s disappearance act (10/10, would see in a magic act again), and Naruto and Sakura’s apparent silence. Unknown to him, the psychological treatment recommended to him required his isolation from the people and things closely related to that day; he hadn’t broken as hard as he could have, that day, and his exceedingly many doctors weren’t taking any chances. If there was any hope that the child was young enough to somehow forget or come to peace with the event, they’d take it.
Consequently, Sasuke went : ( .
He took Sakura’s, and specifically Naruto’s absence as both rejection and affront, because brothers don’t give up on their own when the going gets rough. Ultimately, he decided they were both simply too cowardly to help him figure out what in God’s name had happened that day, and that if they didn’t want to be involved, Sasuke could certainly understand - no. No, he really couldn’t. What Sasuke could do was make sure they paid for it, and given time, Sasuke would.
The legal situation surrounding the inheritance line was strenuous enough that repeated custody trials between the distant members of his family left him in the care of various lawyers for the better part of his minority. He tried to play teenage detective, but obviously failed. Given the business empire at stake, the case was wrapped up in media love, and Sasuke himself was the subject of some attention; in particular, he caught the eye of Orochimaru, a dubious individual with what Sasuke thought was financial gain in mind. Orochimaru made him realize the obvious: the odds of Sasuke’s earning his vengeance for his family’s death through legal means were particularly slim. Better try the shadier city networks, kid.
He did. And slowly but surely, he began to believe Itachi was the only one who could have done it.
Hitting the age of 12, he informed the court that he’d prefer to stay under a joint custody between one of his family’s lawyers and Orochimaru, and went to live with the latter. The exact details of his involvement with Orochimaru are as Sasuke likes it - between them, and them only. Suffice to say, a bit of backstabbing ended their interaction, and Sasuke walked out with as poor an idea of what had prompted Itachi to allegedly murder his family as ever.
He returned into his lawyers’ wavering custody, and pursued a local high school, entering college as an immediately-declared Criminology student. It didn’t last long. He filled his curriculum with ‘smart’ classes: political science, philosophy, analytical science - excelled at all of them, but idled out, switching specializations as fast as most people switch socks or STDs. Hell, faster.
He finally followed up on a pre-discovered talent for photography, which led him into the major, as well as several ambiguous personal projects. After getting it into his head that the key to his family’s murder was somehow connected to both the area and to the university’s administration, he became obsessed with unraveling everything. To date, he (ab)uses the medical excuse of his sight failing to skip on school as much as inhumanly possible, and to instead snoop around and try to prove his theory. It doesn’t matter that taking down the university would also mean putting his colleagues in academic jeopardy. It’s their problem. They can deal with it.
Incidentally, college also prompted a rediscovery of his 'friends,' Naruto and Sakura. Being the Super Mature Dick from Hell that he is, he still plans on making them whimper a little. (You thought a near-decade was enough to get it out of his system; you were wrong.)
[personality]: silent, apprehensive, visibly thinking, haunted, driven, alarmed, impulsive, occasionally apathetic, recklessly disregarding his own person, and in many ways a failure at his single purpose: cutting all ties in the name of his obsession du jour.
Visible hypocrisy streak aside, Sasuke’s main problem is his inability to truly focus. He wants himself fixated on avenging his family and Sherlock Holmes-ing the whole case, but he can’t bring himself to truly step up and over the people around him for it. He lacks the... well, commitment. His many moments of vicious cruelty are followed by long periods of inactivity - and if he resorts to unconventional, illegal or immoral means to achieve something, he… actually believes it’s (most of the time) not personal. After all, Sasuke keeps grudges - a lot of them (one might say that his whole lucidly insane existence is a giant grudge against Fate & Humanity) - but Sasuke doesn’t seem to burn himself out for each and every one of them.
Sasuke’s 'cool,' Sasuke’s patient, Sasuke is raw in his mania, but Sasuke can’t make himself 100% heartless. That may or may not be why, for lack of better words, Sasuke is... stagnating. He can’t carry on with his life unless he makes peace with his past, but he realizes he is too embittered to ever do that either. He only has his creeping and investigations to live for, and he certainly seems to have made no plans for what happens after; he could have graduated early, with a stellar degree in practically anything, but he opted instead to float through college with the least effort possible. It just so happens that his 10% is pretty darn good. Had it not been for the fact that his enrollment depended on declaring and pursuing a major, he probably wouldn’t even have thought to take one on and stick with it - and certainly, photography was just a means to an end that involved a clearer quality to what he hopes will one day be visual court evidence.
His Nefarious Plots for World Domination aside, Sasuke’s pretty easy to cope with (read: ignore.) He’ll bitch and moan if pestered, and he’ll bitch and moan even harder if his regular program of photography OCD is interrupted. (Yes, get off his gd lawn, it was in his shot). He has a soft spot for (good, that means not you, Ino) theatre, which is partly why he services acting students with their portfolio pictures. He’s willing to talk about particularly cheesy police thrillers at length, and he has no qualms about forcing people into a shot.
His single consistent woe and source of frustration is his sight, which puts into perspective that the more he pushes himself, the harder he’ll pay on the long run - and that, in an end, a long run exists. Every other concern is, by and large, someone else’s emo territory.
Oh, and secret: he has a (dry) sense of humour, and every now and then seems rather smugly pleased to have exasperated the people around him. Yes, you read it here first.
tl;dr: Sasuke doesn’t have a place, but he ultimately isn’t making one for himself either.
[first person writing sample]:
Three grown rats in the cafeteria. Their tails are approximately 10 cm. Too long for mice.
University paper, today’s edition: two rats in the cafeteria. Administration has nothing to say. A picture. They took the shot too fast, so the angle’s poor. It wasn’t a complicated scenario. Somehow, they succeeded in the impossible for that hall: their lighting was too strong. Overfiltered. Photoshopped.
There were three rats. The fur was jumping off the bones of one. It slid behind the counter. The cafeteria registry women said enough. There are no quotations from them.
Note: misrepresented information propagates.
Let’s make a wager.
I have nothing to say. The rats have nothing to say. The cashiers don’t speak proper Japanese. One of them is fat and waddling. The swell of her stomach isn’t uniform. She has a cancer, or a child in it. If she finds the rats’ nest alone, she will miscarry.
There will be no article on that subject.
Note: unpleasant information that isn’t scandalous doesn’t propagate.
The wager is, at the end of the week, there will be only one rat, because the missing third will have eaten up the other two.
Behind the counter. In front of the pregnant foreigner. Wherever. He’ll eat them alive.
[third person writing sample]:
Sasuke’s attacker hits like a hurricane. Not the first time in a dark alley.
"Here we belong..."
-and this Sasuke can tell you in 9.81 m/s^2 of Fuck you, in media res, scrambling to legs that held (won’t hold longer), legs that blemish and bruise and break, catchfall on a wall (don’t rhyme when you’re bleeding), catch the - catch the motion.
It’s not the first time he’s been punched.
"Born to be... to... to... be..."
Free. He’s free of his bones. Weightless.
It’s not the first time he’s heard that knot of words either. His assaulter’s lost mercy. He has lost sense, he’s lost reason, he’s lost the words and the gall and the tune, and he’s high. (It’s in his hair. It’s in his eyes, and they share them, red, swollen eyes, light cradled everywhere on a stained retina. High. So high. Sasuke can tell. Sasuke doesn’t want to.)
And Sasuke’s gagging.
Breath on his shoulder - beer, cheap, it reeks - before winter waits on chills and it’s air. Air that quivers in speckles, air that rubs his wound wrong. He has to wonder (between the third and fifth punch, and they happen, this - this happens) what this man wants.
Young man. Young man, hello. Young man, what do you want?
Young Man, I want to pull the white out of your eye socket. I want to dig my nail in the pulp. I want to see the vines clutter and worm around it.
There is a point after which men are animals, when they crash and ask for candy and amphetamines and steel, when they redeem the steel against someone else’s innards, take their money, and go. Cut the pockets. Cut the watch. Cut the tip of a tongue, if it’s fucking pierced - and they go. (No one stays. It isn’t emo, it’s common sense.)
There is a point when strangers accost strangers, pin them on bleak old club doors (and Sasuke knows, knows he shouldn’t be there, knows he’s been told so, once, twice, forever, he knows), and then ask no further questions. There is a point (punch six, to be precise), when they hope the target grows weak and wary and a little bit cold, because it’s freezing and wet - We should be sleeping now. Hibernating. We’ve ruined our - our metabolic cycle - and no one should be out. Alive. Here. Tokyo. It’s not for human beings. It’s for men like the Young Man, it’s for worms.
As a species, they have a point where they prey on strangers, beat them to a pulp, take their money, and get high. It’s not personal. It’s a limit. It’s a barrier. It’s convenient.
Sasuke supposes they have reached that point.
(He does gag this time.)
For the past hour, he has been innocently minding his own business in the seedier parts of town, and everyone else has minded his business with him. (Artificially). He has been kicked out of clubs, kicked in his pride, and now he is kicked. He has been deprived of information, dignity, but not caution, or quarrel, and now he will be deprived of his money. And his camera.
It’s a digital. (His guts can’t take another punch, but if he throws up on his coat, on the pocket, the one with the nice heavy bulge and the nicer chain, his camera’ll live long and prosper.)
Young Man, who’s still trying to earn his next high, agrees. He agrees in uppercuts, and groans, and in shoving Sasuke forward, agrees in getting the rust of tile on his shirt, agrees in - "Fighting t’surrrrrrviiiiii... ve... we the... we... the..." - agrees in Queen lyrics.
It is a sordid agreement, the kind that won’t heal, that makes Sasuke bold and a little excited. Show’s over. Show must go on.
Front tickets: observe, the wild Sasuke in his habitat. He snaps.
Just like that, 180, role reversal, change the camera. The thing about druggies is - what you have to learn, if you spend five minutes on any street and none of them on the bus station is - they have no balance. Sasuke does the inevitable (slides forward emptily, recovers his arms, sidesteps, swipes Young Man’s feet clean by the ankle, breaks his fall with an elbow slid under the sternum, stopping his breath, then pushes. Crack. Something cracks before Young Man is propped against the wall in Sasuke’s stead, and it could be the wind (so cold, too cold), and it could be Young Man’s temple. (What was it in Sasuke’s hand when he hit? Was this a punch? Has Sasuke not been hit for a small army, and unlike him, well fed - a splendidly well nourished legion, and Sasuke’s taken all their hits, and here he is, alive, living, and here Young Man lies, out cold, despondent? How is it sensible for one man to go down after one hit, and another to take so long, so many?)
Young Man is limp when Sasuke rests his arm by the elbow on his chest to keep him stead, and ready, he is limp and luminous like a classical metaphor for an overly pretentious black and white movie about Growing Up and Moving On. Sasuke can see him now. Can breathe.
Young Man is young.
(Sasuke is young.)
He could be sixteen.
(Sasuke is twenty.)
He could be dying.
(Sasuke is -
Sasuke is tired. )
Distantly, he has been tired for a million years, and all of them long. Young Man’s throat is a pillow, and Young Man reeks. Sasuke breathes in - hard and sick for a moment - lets him slide down the wall until he’s a pastel breadth of grey-grey-black-white on the street. Crouches by, passing a hand over Young Man’s face, the bridge of his nose, the lips, then the brow, the lids, his lids, Sasuke’s finger pre - Does Itachi have your eyes? -presses.
“This was a delay.” He can still speak, though blood on his teeth signals rupture somewhere. Should have moved sooner. Should have got himself out of this, because it’s useless, it’s unreasonable, it’s an episode, and it brought Sasuke neither whim, nor information. He is no step closer to Itachi, to that day, to his schoolwork. He is not even remotely, pleasantly, enviably plastered.
He’s just a bystander.
There are things Sasuke has seen that no blind man should, no living man, no species. There are things that make him a very old soul, and his step on dirt older, and his strain. There are things that make him turn the TV back on, tape, rewind, always rewind, CNN and BBC and rewind and catastrophe. (He saw a hurricane on the news last night. Three times. The woman looked at him, looked him deep in the eye through a reflective lens, looked at him and no other, same woman every footage, and the teeth she’d scavenged were rotten and old, and she said - said to him, said, “We lost everything.” Said it to a world, and he wanted to tell her, “I can get it for you. I can get you Naruto’s number, and he’ll build your house from the brick.” So he switched channels and watched her on prime time again. Pleading.)
He reaches forward, thinks, for a moment (thinks) - And kick them while they move - but Young Man is already down. Young Man’s breathing. Ides. Ideas. Sasuke breathes with him, leans forward, catches the foreign glint of gold (fake, the real one likely sold), and whispers, because unconscious or not, he can tear Young Man’s ear apart. Whispers, sings, really, “Who wants to live forever...?”
He thinks - and he thinks as he undoes Young Man’s frail coat, when he finds the expected, pack clean of syringes in the innermost pocket - that his family would like to answer that question. He unwraps them, one by one by one, snaps the needles tight into their holsters, then litters them on the ground. One in Young Man’s hand (close the fingers, you reek, close them), the other on his lap. A lot in the grime, swimming like swine.
A lot, and something’s missing.
It takes Sasuke a moment, but the trick is half the journey, and he sinks a blunt nail in his punch-opened lip, where the cut is deep - deepens - does it once, and twice, and again, until his fingertips are just a little red, and he rests enough of that paint on Young Man’s face. Hands. Shirt.
There - camera out, steps back. Done.
(The lighting’s bad. If there were police, the headlights would do. The image is incomplete. He is not a master yet. He is out of jail.)
"Wasted addict spreading his legs for a dose." Click. "Roll one." Click. Click. Click. "Still four."
Click.
There’s blood on his chin and dust on his clothes, and there’s - there’s - Sasuke shrugs, he has to confide, because there’s -
"...portfolio review tomorrow."
There’s a always deadline.
(And he doesn’t know, really, doesn’t know what this was all about, why you’d take a beating, man healthy and tall, why you’d let some strange druggie make you a little bitch, why you’d lie there, just lie, there were no lies tonight, and tonight again, tonight hurricane woman’s on Channel 4, tonight, it’s an exclusive. )
Other Notes:
♦ his sense of fashion makes baby Jesus cry.
♦ goes through phases of reading very little, then incredibly much; likewise, sleeping .
♦ infrequent smoker (cigarettes only), mostly to look cool in certain environments. ._.
♦ frequently tries to raid the college’s lab supplies and whatever records he can get his grubby hands on to prove that something’s wrong there; is not nearly as subtle about it as he thinks.
♦ fond of tomatoes and plain white rice.
♦ has a vague artistic talent, and an unmitigated hatred for postcards. This is not the non sequitur you are looking for.