word count: 1k, where basically itachi and sasuko come into the morgue to identify their parents’ bodies bc they’ve been found in fucked up shape. warnings: mention of bodily harm, but done without any visual context or descriptors, meaning the characters know what happens, but they don’t know how it looks.
“I’m going to leave you both for a moment, excuse me,” The pathologist was kind, and to the point, as most professionals were and for that Sasuko was grateful; people in the scientific field usually didn’t bother her with pitying stares or low empathetic tones. They gifted Sasuko’s mind with factual, concrete information that could not be refuted or challenged. The chill of the morgue or her emotions, she’ll never know what caused her hands to shake. The chill felt like it was cornering her, and adrenaline in her system as she balanced her weight on her left leg again; she did not want to be here.
The silence that came over both Itachi and Sasuko was no longer her friend, turned on her and sentenced her to her turmoil. She knew what her father looked like without seeing him; his jaw slack, eyes liquefied in its sockets and skin taut against the skull. Bloated body in some parts, stitches running down the chest where the autopsy was performed, blunt force trauma to the skin on Fugaku’s left eye, the cheekbone was broken, a fractured right hip, contusions up and down his chest. On his right shoulder, his bone had been pulled from its socket, inflammation had begun to engorge the joint by the time he died. On his arms, back, and chest were calculated fissures into the skin, chemical compounds found in bleach found in his bloodstream along with other compounds; her father’s last moments had been an elaborate torture session that left her father an unrecognizably hollow receptacle of life.
“I don’t know why you don’t get someone else to handle the gruesome shit, aniki. We could’ve just read the fuckin’ reports and gone home,” She griped, behind her brother and repeating what she had always proposed to him. She knew how much this would hurt him because of how much it hurt her. She felt the shallowness of breath creep up her neck, hands fidgeting with her phone she no longer felt she could turn to block everything about this situation out.
Her brother had no response for her, his silence felt like a betrayal, he had succumbed to the hold the air around her had on her throat, like there was food stuck in her esophagus and she needed to lurch something out. It felt like she was slipping into quicksand with every second that her brother left her in silence, yearning for his voice because if she could get him to speak if she could get him to speak if she could get him to speak--, he’s not saying anything, this isn’t right, this isn’t how these things went, what the fuck was he doing??
Itachi, please listen to me! She thought, a heaviness locking her shoulders in place, something towering over them and looming like a timer had been put on her, instincts poised and primed into action. To say anything, to do anything, anything. Impulses of violence flashed in her mind, staring at her brother’s turned back to her, his hands not moving from the stainless steel table their father lie on, his corpse every bit reposed and contained even in death, body positioning controlled and refined. The only difference was that he was cold in a literal sense, now.
Her musings momentarily tickled the bile in the back of her throat, thinking of how cold her father was now producing a cold sweat along her brow, a sick crawling sensation along her arms and legs. Her father wasn’t going to tell her this was all a plan he was in on, nor was her mother.
Her emotions recoiled from that line of thought, focus anxiously narrowing to getting her brother to fucking speak. Clammy hands wrapped around Itachi’s arm, pushing against him, the warmth under her fingers and the sweat slickening her palms additional sensations to amplify the nervous energy in her chest, throat, fingers seeking something substantial to hang onto. “Itachi,” Her tongue heavy and jaw moving useless under the duress of her weak-will, voice sounding like it was underwater and enunciating to compensate for it sounded, “We can get someone else to-to--” The words knotted themselves in her throat, her ribs caging and restraining her chest to expand for only the shallowest of breaths. “Goddammit, stop ignoring me!”
The stillness of the room, red flashes of anger flashed up from her chest and reddened her cheeks, mounting rage ricocheting off the walls and searching for somewhere to land, enflamed by silence and the sterile scent of the mortuary.
“What do you wanna do, look at it?” She mocked, teeth chattering letting her brother go as if his silence had sucker-punched her. Her brother’s jaw clenched, and her heart leaped, nails clinging into the slightest reaction he could offer him and plead, begging for more. “We already know Dad’s body is--” With those words, the wind was knocked out of her, tears blurring her vision of her brother’s face just to spite her. She dragged air through her lungs in a seething flurry of action as she fisted her fingers, red-hot and seething fury in her veins at her brother for not answering her, at the hairdresser for making being late, at traffic, at her coworkers, at her friends, at the world for having the audacity to continue existing while hers had stopped the moment her mommy and daddy went missing.
The sound of Sasuko’s breath scraping against her tense body was a warning; the sound of it leaving was a vehement betrayal of the weeks of tolerance she had built up to this day, the day that she knew for absolute certain her parents were dead. She used past-tense vocabulary, which alienated her brother from being around her because Itachi was an optimist, ripping a wound open inside of her before grief could rip her open. She built this attitude to hide the fact that she had been naive enough to hope that her parents were alive, beneath all the realistic things she said aloud, “They’re both high profile, who wouldn’t want them dead.” “If someone was holding them ransom, they’d be dead by now.
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