Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Sasuke returns, he does it quietly, the Sharingan a cold swath of red in the midnight of Naruto’s apartment. 

Naruto, truth be told, had sensed him coming since Sasuke crossed the border into the Land of Fire. It’d become habit to track him after a while, always with half a mind on Sasuke’s spotty chakra signature as he wove his way from Suna to Iwagakure and then into the highlands of Earth and back again.

As far as Naruto could tell, Sasuke had been sticking to footpaths; he traveled slowly, and often without purpose, wandering the countryside in looping, apathetic circles. He stopped for a while in the Land of Waterfalls. That caught Naruto’s attention. He’d gone to ask Shikamaru to look into it for him — as a friend, something sly under the Hokage’s nose — because Shikamaru’s contacts stretch farther than the wide swath of the Nara’s forests, and his intel comes back quick, always flawless. Naruto had the answer by nightfall. 

“I know you don’t like him,” Naruto sighs, pouting. He’s since taken to sitting on Kurama’s back while they talk, and he sprawls out on his stomach to press his cheek into his fur. Bijuu don’t have a physical form in this dimension, or in any dimension, really, so Naruto doesn’t feel much on his cheek beyond the impression of warmth, but Kurama’s been with him for so long that he knows Naruto means well. “And, to be honest, I wouldn’t like him that much either if it weren’t for— if it weren’t for,” he tries off, voice misting into nothing. 

Naruto closes his eyes. Kurama feels his ribcage expand with a breath, and then another, and then another.

“Because you love him,” Kurama says, as gently as he can manage. Which is to say, not at all, but Naruto kicks his bare feet where they rest against his shoulders, and like that: he knows they’re okay. “I’ve done you many favors, Naruto.”

Naruto scoffs, but he’s been moody most of the day, so there’s not much heat in the sound. “Yeah, I know,” he mutters,.

Then: “Ugh,” he moans. He wants to punch something. Preferably Sasuke, but even with all his suave ninjutsu prowess, Naruto unfortunately still has not yet learned how to detach his extremities and extend them over three hundred miles so he can sock someone in the jaw. Sasuke would never see the punch coming.

Well. Sasuke would never see it coming because it isn't coming, but like hell Naruto’s ever going to admit that out loud.

Kurama breathes hard through his nose. But Naruto recognizes the sound for what it is.

Naruto flips over onto his stomach, upset. “Don’t make fun of me.” 

“He’s coming in from Amegakure,” he replies, sidestepping the topic completely. 

Naruto’s head snaps up. He doesn’t need to ask who, because, between them, there’s only one he. Sasuke. Kurama’s still pissed, so he refuses to call him by name; he’s never been fond of Uchihas anyway.

“Amegakure?” Naruto repeats quietly, frowning. “What’s he doing there?” 

Kurama puts his head down on top of his paws. Closes his eyes. “Beats me, kid.” 

“Do you think he’s coming back to Konoha?” 

Naruto can sense, now that it’s been pointed out to him, the haze of Sasuke’s chakra as he makes steady pace through Hidden Rain. He’d be in the Village in less than two days at speed he’s going, but Sasuke’s been using his soul searching status as an excuse to keep himself away from Konoha. It’s better for everyone, Naruto knows, but it doesn't mean he likes it any more than he used to. The trust Sasuke and Orochimaru hold is nonexistent at best, and being able to put him on active duty feels more like a pipe dream than anything tangible most days.

And for Sasuke—

Naruto realized at some point that Sasuke hated the Village, not simply on principle of his brother’s life, but because it has always been choked with his ghosts.

“If there’s one thing about the Uchiha I don’t envy,” Kurama says, slow to admit. “It would be that.” 

Naruto sinks his hands into the space behind one of Kurama’s ears. He’s brooding. Naruto can sympathize. “Yeah,” he says quietly. It wasn’t easy on him either, but he hears the Sasuke, all of twelve years old, rock crumbling around them, screaming: you’ve never had anyone else— you don’t know what it’s like to lose—

“I got lucky with you,” he laughs, on a breath. Sasuke doesn’t have anyone besides Naruto.

It’s quiet for a while. Naruto’s already in bed by the time the heat of Sasuke’s Rinnegan sparks overhead. Body Flicker Technique, he thinks to himself, sighing. He should've known better; Sasuke never passes up the chance to show off.

Sasuke, like Kakashi, has a permanent disability when it comes to entering buildings through the front door. And Naruto, like Iruka, has come to accept this fact. Sasuke has greater character flaws, he supposes, scratching his head absentmindedly as he flicks through Sasuke’s criminal record. The fact that Naruto can come up with his entire file — classified Level 12, categorized by serial murders, homicides, Village approved missions, and then non-lethal engagements — without much effort is a little concerning, but he looks over to find Sasuke perched on the wall just outside his window, one hand raised to knock, and the immediate rush of relief overrides it all.

Naruto slides out of bed, shuffling over in his slippers to let him in.

“Hi,” Naruto says, because he’s learned during the days Sasuke spent locked up in the bowels of Konoha that he wouldn’t suffer anything less if he can help it: being close again. It’s turning autumn now, just hovering the cusp of September, so Sasuke’s skin is cold and surprised when Naruto pulls him into a hug. “I missed you.” 

Sasuke doesn’t say anything, just stands stiffly with his boots smearing mud and dirt all over the hardwood of Naruto’s bedroom floor, but—

He lowers his head slowly to Naruto’s shoulder, the skin that’s slipped out from the collar of his shirt. Sasuke doesn’t say anything because this costs him enough on its own: his private admission of grief. Naruto feels Kurama shift, curious, as he slides hands up the back of Sasuke’s jacket to curl over his shoulders.

And, then, like a rush of blood — “I’m home,” Sasuke murmurs.

“How was your trip?” Naruto asks, because he knows Sasuke will leave soon. The Village hasn’t learned how to stop stealing from him yet. Nothing here, even himself, is his own. All of eight years old, and the Senior Council wanted nothing but the Sharingan to stay within the Village so they could call it theirs.

“Long.” 

“Yeah, no shit,” Naruto says. He notes dully Sasuke is still missing his arm. Then, because he needs to posture —  it’s unsettling when Sasuke decides to show a sliver of emotion — he adds: “You’re getting my room dirty.”

Sasuke is leaning a dangerous amount of weight against Naruto. Naruto notes with some alarm that Sasuke’s only like this when he’s exhausted, or bleeding out. “Sorry,” Sasuke breathes. “I’m— I’ll be—”

A moment passes, then two.

Then: “Can I use your shower?” 

Naruto frowns. “Yeah, bastard,” he says. “‘Course.”

He leads Sasuke to the bathroom, where he takes an inordinate amount of time in the shower, emerging in one of Naruto’s shirts and a pair of sweats that had been Sai’s, then Sakura’s, then Naruto’s, now a couple centimeters too short on Sasuke. His feet are bare. Sasuke hangs his towel up carefully on the rack hanging over the bathroom door; Naruto can see his silhouette from the light that spills out into the hallway.

He wants to call out to him, but he doesn’t know how, the words clogged in his throat. Naruto isn’t sure where he stands on forgiveness, although he knows where he should be and where he wants to. Sasuke won’t let him give in so easy, and neither will the rest of the Village, but Naruto watches Sasuke shuffle awkwardly into the bedroom with his hair three inches longer than it used to be, hanging damp over in his eyes— fuck if Naruto’s ever been able to say no to the face of him. 

“Come here,” Naruto says, patting the space on the bed. Sasuke makes his way over, sits cautiously. “Did you hurt yourself again?” he asks.

Sasuke just looks at him. Yes, then. Naruto laughs through his nose. 

“Stupid,” he says. He looks up at Sasuke, resists the urge to pull him close. “Why’d you come here if you were injured?” he says. “I can’t help you.” 

Sasuke’s eye is pitch black where it pins Naruto in place. With the light sloping off the planes of his cheek, the smooth turn of his jaw, the lines of him could be almost gentle. Naruto knows better than to judge by looks alone, but— 

“I’ll be fine,” Sasuke says.

He has a gut wound. Not like he was going to tell Naruto, but Kurama tells him that Sasuke’s chakra flow is concentrated in a curved, jagged line that cuts from just below his third rib to nearly his hip. The rest of his chakra is disturbed, struggling to keep him functioning.

Sasuke’s eyes flick over Naruto’s face, like he’s searching for something.

Naruto sighs. He flicks the covers aside. “If you’re not going to the hospital, you might as well sleep it off.”

“I’ll be fine,” Sasuke repeats, because his socialization skills are absolutely abhorrent.

Naruto goggles at him. “I know,” he says, a bit more forcefully than he probably should have. “But you’re not sleeping on my fucking couch, Uchiha. You’re going to crack your head open on the coffee table and bleed out before you wake up.” 

Sasuke’s eyebrows go up.

“I know you didn’t come here just to use my shower,” Naruto says. He yawns, and then rolls over onto the left side of the bed, burying his face in the pillow. “And you’re not dumb enough to kill me in my sleep so we might as well,” his voice is muffled, blankets pooled by his hips.

He opens his mouth to say something else, but the mattress dips under Sasuke’s weight as he crawls tentatively up from the foot of the bed. Naruto stiffens, but doesn’t turn to look.

Sasuke stretches out long beside him, on his back. 

Naruto waits until they’re both halfway asleep, until the bags under Sasuke’s eyes have deepened with old blood — a head injury too, then. The skin there looks more bruised than it should — before curling up on his side to face him.

“Does it hurt?” Naruto asks quietly, finally daring to rest his hand against Sasuke’s chest, feel the running of his heart. He moves closer, and closer, but Sasuke doesn’t move away, the two of them curving into the curves of each other. 

Naruto spreads his fingers out against the thinning cotton of Sasuke’s shirt. His skin is hot to the touch. That’s as close as he dares to get to the wound underneath; Sasuke’s shirt is lumpy from all the bandages, and Naruto’s gut twists itself in painful knots at the sight. 

“Here?” he murmurs, eyes flicking up to meet Sasuke’s, then the way his dark hair spills out against the pillow. “Does it hurt?”

Sasuke’s expression doesn’t change. “No,” he says. And because he’s always been a martyr, and denied himself the definition of pain: “I’ve had worse.”

“You don’t have to pretend like you’re okay around me,” Naruto says. He doesn’t know how else to beat it into Sasuke’s stupid skull. “I don’t need to know. But if—” Naruto presses his lips together. “Orochimaru?” 

Sasuke stiffens. 

“Konoha,” he sighs after a long moment. The sound of his breathing is overloud in the silence between them. “When they sealed my eyes."

And as abruptly as he started, Sasuke stops.  

Naruto feels like he’s been hit. All that time, the days he spent fantasizing Orochimaru’s death, Karin telling T&I just how pitiful it was to live in the sheer stench of his hell, but he never expected—

Sasuke reaches out to touch Naruto’s wrist. Anyway , it says. He looks everywhere but him. “Can you leave a light on?” he asks.

Naruto reaches over, flicks on the bedside lamp. Light floods the room, and Sasuke blinks up at it wordlessly. He doesn’t need to explain, because they’ve always known each other better than they wish they did. Because Naruto had visited Sasuke in his cell, had run his hands across the seal they’d blindfolded him with. He had kissed his cold forehead. Even with his eyes uncovered, all Naruto could feel were the walls pressing down all around, and the darkness seeping into his lungs like a disease.

“I’m sorry,” Naruto rasps. 

Sasuke’s eyes flick up to the ceiling, lashes dark against his cheek. “When will you ever learn, Uzumaki?” he says, and something in the words sound like forgiveness. He’s trying, at the very least. “You need to stop apologizing for other people.”

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Sasuke leaves before Naruto wakes up. He has the decency to leave a note, nothing more than his next intended stop, but he knows about Naruto’s tracking abilities, so the fact that he bothered with anything at all makes him glow from the inside out, makes it so that he can’t stop smiling for the rest of the day. 

He folds the post it note carefully in his pocket, thinking about Sasuke’s quiet presence in his apartment the night before. He’s starting to remind Naruto of the kids they used to be, even had the same look in his eyes as when Naruto caught him staring out over the Naka River the first night after the massacre, but without the anger that had defined him for so long.

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Naruto wakes up to find Sasuke puttering about in the kitchen two months later, almost to the day.

Sasuke’s making a decent amount of noise, dishes clinking as he sets down a rolled omelet on the kotatsu, because he knows better than to wake Naruto up before ten unless he craves an early death. There’s rice and soup, and a cut of fish steaming on a plate when Naruto finally shuffles in from the bathroom. His sleeping cap is wilted, a little wrinkled at the top.

“Morning,” Naruto says, as if he wakes up every day to find a Uchiha in his apartment. He pauses. “I didn’t know I had fish in the fridge.” 

Sasuke puts the pan back on the stove. “You didn’t,” he says. He puts chopsticks in the sink. “I bought it.” 

“Bought it?" 

Sasuke scowls. “There’s this thing called the supermarket; I’m not sure if you—” 

“I know,” Naruto cuts off, loud enough that Sasuke sends him a withering glare. He stomps over and snatches the plate out of Sasuke’s hands. “What the supermarket is,” he says. “I was just surprised because some people never come back to see me.” 

Sasuke kicks Naruto in the shin. “I was here two months ago.”

Naruto wants to break the plate — fish and all — over Sasuke’s head. Goddamn fucking Uchihas . “Two months!” he says, dodging the next kick. “And you were injured! Do you know how many blood vessels I burst when I woke up and found your sorry excuse of a note, bastard?”

Sasuke herds Naruto over to the kotatsu. “Not enough, I imagine.” 

“Six hundred!” 

“You would be dead by now if that happened,” he says. He’s bullshitting, but like hell Naruto’s going to know. 

“You don’t know that!” 

Okay, maybe.

Sasuke’s cheek twitches. “I do,” he says. “I learned about it when I was with—”

Naruto sets the fish down on the table, turns to drive a finger against Sasuke’s chest threateningly. “If the next word out of your mouth is Orochimaru, I’m going to throw you out the window.” 

“I’d like to see you try, dead last.” 

Naruto freezes.

Sasuke hasn’t called him that in years. He doesn’t know what to say next; it feels like several hundred of Lee’s weights have been hammered into the shell of his chest.

“Save it,” Sasuke says. He doesn’t meet Naruto’s eyes, but he leaves a space next to him on the kotatsu. He’s still wearing a whole hoard of traveling gear: a Northern styled cloak, a shirt with a high collar that Naruto knows has lately been fashionable in Suna, but has left his boots in a polite pair by the front door. One hand curls into a fist by his side, half hidden by his knee. 

Naruto swallows. “Okay,” he says, and his voice comes out hoarse. His head dips. Then, because he doesn’t know how else to respond: “Are we…?” Good, he wants to say, but can’t.

Sasuke picks up his chopsticks. “Yeah,” he says, knowing. A pause, long enough for Naruto to count the way his heart shudders and kicks in his chest. “Food’s going cold.” 

It’s a clear dismissal. Sasuke’s closed the topic and Naruto has no choice now but to sit down, leaving a gulf of careful space between them until Sasuke rolls his eyes and points out that Naruto won’t be able to reach anything if he sits that far. He scoots closer, and then Sasuke closes the distance, shoulders brushing. 

Then: “Oh,” he says dumbly. He has a mouthful of rice on one side of his cheek.

Sasuke doesn’t stop chewing. “What?” he says. 

“Nothing.” 

Sasuke sets his bowl down carefully. His hair’s gotten longer, and it looks like he’d taken a bad haircut somewhere along the way, a piece of hair coming loose from where he’d tucked it behind his ear. He doesn’t look up from a spot on the table, but it’s enough to hear him say, “Well,” he clears his throat. The way he holds himself now is now is a far cry from the person he used to be on the battlefield — glaring, cocky, bossy.  His shoulders are curved forward, and he sits unnaturally still. “I’m trying." 

Naruto puts his hand over Sasuke’s on the table. Sasuke doesn’t shrug him off, so he counts it as a victory.

“I’m happy,” he says.

Sasuke licks his lips. “Sure,” his eyes flicker, just the rim of his Sharingan peeking out.

“I am,” Naruto says, more forcefully this time. He grips Sasuke’s hand, trying to get his point across. “C’mon— you know I am.” 

There’s a moment of silence before Sasuke lets out a long breath, and turns his face up to look at Naruto through the fall of his hair. “Yeah, Uzumaki, I do,” his voice is strained. He scrubs at his face with his free hand. Takes a breath, opens his mouth, closes it. “Sorry.” 

“Don’t apologize.” 

Sasuke drops his chin down to his chest, laughing through his nose. It has, believe it or not, occured to them both that the majority of their relationship had been comprised of Sasuke attempting to murder Naruto in cold blood in the name of destroying his last connection to the warmth of this world (or something) — but Sasuke is Sasuke and fuck if all sense of reason has a habit of flying out the window whenever it comes to him. Naruto’s come around to the fact that he’d forgiven him long ago, even before all this bullshit happened. From even before Sasuke had poured his sins in by the ton, and cracked open the earth between them.

Sasuke shrugs. “Everything, I guess,” he says, looking ready to swallow his words even when he says them aloud. 

Naruto lets out a careful breath. “Someone’s been doing a lot of soul searching lately,” he teases, trying to lighten the mood.

Sasuke lifts one shoulder up in a shrug. “It's my job. You've probably dealt with more.”

“I haven’t done shit.”

The Rinnegan is a whorl of unsettled lavender when Sasuke tries for a smile. It comes out too watery by half, but Naruto doesn’t care. Never has, really — Sasuke blinking up at him with a lost, aching sort of resilience. “Like hell, Uzumaki,” he says.

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Naruto cries the first time he visits Sasuke in his cell.

Kakashi is his escort — because he is Hokage, and without his orders Sasuke is to remain in solitary confinement until his trial: fourteen months and eight days of complete darkness. Sakura comes too, though not for Sasuke but for Naruto, rather; she squeezes his hand once when the attending Yamanaka undoes the wards and lets the door swing open. 

Kakashi hadn't let anyone visit Sasuke yet. He'd been too afraid of what would happen if he did. And he'd been right; it hurts like an old to see him now, chained to the bed with his eyes sealed shut. Sasuke doesn’t even move when Naruto squeezes out the shaking syllables of his name. 

He hesitates for a moment, not wanting to scare him off, but then the boy tips his head up to the blind approximation of where they all stand and says, voice rough with disuse: “It’s okay,” he’s sitting on the end of his bed. “You can leave, Naruto,” he licks his lips. “You should go.”

They’ve always known, perhaps Sasuke most keenly of all, that it would end up here if he ever came back. Kakashi wonders if that’s why he’d fought so hard against it in the first place.

Sakura leaves them. Kakashi kicks Sasuke’s guards out, and then stands guard by the foot of the stairs on his own, trying to give them as much privacy as the law offers. He watches as Naruto takes a seat on the bed. 

Beneath the carefully drawn seal, there’s not much of Sasuke’s face left to see. His lips are dry, and his skin in dulled with the pallor of the underground, a waxy sheen to his skin. His cheeks have thinned, and his hair has lost its luster, but the way Naruto looks at him... the way Naruto looks at him—

“Are you well?” Naruto asks, too scared to bring his voice above a whisper. He stares at his knees. Then, fumbling for small talk: “It’s cold down here.” 

They’ve sealed off Sasuke’s chakra pathways, so he can’t access those to keep him warm. 

Sasuke doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even turn to the direction of Naruto’s voice. He’d been catatonic ever since the first round of interrogation, and it seems as if he’s decided to stay that way: takes the blows without comment.

Naruto rambles for a bit, in the way that he’s prone to do when he’s nervous. His hands flutter for a while before settling back in his lap, but then he moves them to Sasuke’s elbow, and then his thigh. Naruto can feel the texture of the straightjacket under his fingers now, and the only outward sign of Naruto’s distress is the way he starts talking faster, pieces together what seems to be a retelling of Kiba and Shikamaru’s unbelievably long, and very confusing courtship. 

The lighting is terrible in this wing of KPD’s cells, but Kakashi swears that Sasuke’s lips twitch upwards in the pale ghost of a smile. 

Naruto’s gone and wound himself up again, swearing up and down that he’ll free Sasuke as soon as he can, I promise; I promise, and that he doesn’t deserve to be treated like this (“What?” Uchiha says, dropping his chin to his chest, amused. “Like a criminal?”) and he can come live with Naruto in his new apartment, that he’ll have a stern talking down to T&I authority as soon as he’s done studying with Iruka and Konohamaru.

“Let go,” is what Sasuke says. 

Naruto freezes. Kakashi sees his shoulders stiffen with a shocked, barely contained breath. “What?” he says, voice shaking.

There’s a long pause. Kakashi isn’t sure Sasuke’s going to answer his question, or talk at all for the rest of the night, but Sasuke repeats: “Let go, Uzumaki,” he says. “You’re going to hurt yourself.” 

It takes Naruto a minute to figure out what he’s talking about, and by the time he’s let go of the buckle that threads the sleeves of Sasuke’s straightjacket to his waist, the metal’s left divots in the skin of his palm.

“Oh,” Naruto says quietly. He smooths his hand self-consciously down his thigh. “Sorry.” 

Sasuke huffs. “Why are you apologizing?” he says.

“I don’t know,” Naruto sighs, reaching out for Sasuke’s face. He cups Sasuke’s jaw with his left hand, and the bandaged right.

Naruto’s shoulders slump imperceptibly.

“Feels like I can’t breathe knowing you’re,” down here. But he doesn’t finish the sentence. The fabric of Sasuke’s blindfold is, weirdly enough, soft to the touch. None of the rough fabric that pieces together the line of his straightjacket. “Sorry,” he says, again, with a laugh.

Naruto’s thumbs finding their way to the gentle slope of Sasuke’s eyes through the blindfold. He opens his mouth to say something else, but the words die in his throat with the touch.

“Is this okay?” Naruto asks, because Sasuke has no other way of telling him no. 

There’s a harrowing moment of silence, when it feels like none of them are breathing, until Sasuke makes a derisive noise and tilts his head into Naruto’s hands. This, in Naruto’s Sasuke-to-normal-person translator, turns out to be a yes.

He spends the rest of his visit leaned in close: the line of his shoulders a relieved curve. When Naruto manages to make Sasuke laugh at one point, the sound comes out too harsh, unsettling and strange, but Naruto looks pleased when he pulls back, a little less like he’s hovering. 

When he gets up, Sasuke tries to follow the warmth of him. His hair tips over across his face, and he looks startlingly young all of a sudden, the weak light cutting across his cheek, his half open mouth. His tongue curls around the words: wait, but Kakashi told Naruto that he couldn’t stay, you can come back next week, and Naruto stops in the doorway of Sasuke’s cell and fists hands by his side. Kakashi knows, then, that this could end in a fight.

Naruto sucks in a breath, despondent, looking as torn between anger and disappointment. He seems to settle on the later because the question, when it comes, is simply: “Why?” 

Kakashi meets his eye evenly from across the room. “This was what we agreed on.” 

The look on Naruto’s face is devastating.

The boy can’t help but love him. He couldn’t drive Sasuke out of his heart no matter how hard he tried. And if Obito hadn’t come back from the dead, and the days of Team 7 weighing on his shoulders, Kakashi would’ve turned his back on him too. He knows Sasuke wouldn’t fault him for it, maybe that’s what’s worse. 

“But I can’t,” Naruto says, blinking hard at the floor between his feet. “I can’t just leave him alone.”

Kakashi sighs. “Sorry, kid,” he says. 

“But sensei,” he wobbles. 

“Uzumaki,” Sasuke says. Naruto almost takes himself out turning around to face him. “Just go already,” he sounds quietly amused. “No crying. I’ll be fine.” 

“Sasuke—” 

“I’ll be fine,” he repeats, more forcefully this time.

Naruto’s chin drops to his chest, defeated. He’s still angry, mostly because he’s always upset at the state of the world and its shinobi counterpart, gritting his teeth and his fists and the fine bones of his shoulders and spine.

“I’ll come back soon,” he manages, finally.

If Sasuke had his hands free, he’d wave. Instead, he settles on tilting his head in Naruto’s direction.

“No rush, Uzumaki,” Sasuke says. He leans back against the rough wall of his cell, looking, for all the belts and buckles and seals, a casual motion. “I’m going anywhere.” 

Naruto barks out a laugh. The sound is bitter, and uncharacteristically sharp. Kakashi winces at the deliberate outlining Naruto’s displeasure. “You better not, Uchiha,” he says, his voice stern.

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Sasuke, at some point in time, starts staying the weekends at Naruto’s apartment.

The Uchiha is still unbelievably aloof, but at least he takes his shoes off in Naruto’s house now, and tries not to show up bleeding all over the place. Naruto quietly buys towels for the linen closet, a set of nice slippers that he puts aside in the back of his closet. There’s a spare toothbrush on the bathroom counter, and Naruto’s put out a bottle of shampoo that he remembers Sasuke used to use.

It becomes an unspoken routine for Naruto to come back from missions to find him in his kitchen, wearing an apron he’d procured from an unknown crevice of Naruto’s home. It’s a little jarring, seeing him like this, but there’s something quiet and blank that’s settled in the curve of his eyes and Naruto presses the back of his hands to Sasuke’s face like he's still trying to figure him out, wondering where it all came from.

Naruto isn’t sure what Sasuke does all night; he’d woken up once to see him standing guard by the window like an ANBU escort, face turned away, the line of his jaw stiff and unforgiving. He’d called to Sasuke then, but got no response besides a momentary flicker of red: the color of wet blood. Sharingan.

So today, what’s not strange is Sasuke starting out in bed with him. This has become routine. What’s strange is that, when Naruto wakes in the middle of the night, it’s because Sasuke is still in bed with him when he should be gone by now, the only sign of his absence the weak flutter of Naruto’s curtains from the open window. 

Sasuke is curled up on his side, shivering, the lines across his face drawn tight. His breathing comes out irregular, face wet when he shifts on the pillow.

“Sasuke?” Naruto mumbles, reaching for his shoulder. “Sasuke,” he says, and turns him onto his back, cupping his face to tilt his chin up.

"Brother," Sasuke mutters, and the word comes out long and low and pained. He twists his head on the pillow. The fine strands of his hair are stuck to his face with sweat.

“Sasuke,” Naruto tries again, louder this time. “Wake up.” 

There’s no response. So he presses a shaking hand to Sasuke’s forehead, and another to his chest, and blows a shot of chakra through his pathways, Sasuke’s skin lighting up blue with the force of it. His eyes fly open, and the Sharingan flares to life in the darkness of Naruto’s bedroom.

“Brother,” Sasuke asks, over and over. He sounds too young. “Brother—”

The whorl of his Mangekyou is rimmed with blood. Sasuke’s hands fly to his throat, and he chokes around the words don’t go. He’s delirious, clawing at his skin, crying. Naruto climbs off Sasuke’s thighs and tugs him roughly to his chest. He’s shaking so bad his teeth clatter. Naruto can do nothing but hold him by the back of the head, sweaty hair and all, pressing Sasuke’s forehead gently into his shoulder. His whole body heaves with the weight of his tears.

“It’s just a dream,” Naruto says, pained. He’s never seen Sasuke like this before, never seen him so naked, stripped of all defenses. “I’m here— it’s just a dream.”

Then: Naruto, Kurama says. You have to get him to shut down his Mangekyou. He’s going to overload his orbital pathways with chakra and go blind otherwise .

“Sasuke,” Naruto says. He pulls away, cups Sasuke’s face with both hands until he’s staring up at Naruto with wide eyes, clouded with sleep. “Look at me,” he says. Kurama had been right. Sasuke’s Mangekyou is spinning wildly, and the blood that Naruto’s come to associate with Amaterasu is starting to pool at the corners of his eyes. “Sasuke, look at me . You have to shut your Sharingan down,” Sasuke shudders underneath him. “You have to shut it down. Don’t be scared, Sasuke— it’s okay. I’m right here. I’m not right here.”

Sasuke lets out a strangled noise, blinking frantically. “I can’t,” he gasps. The Sharingan glows in the darkness. “Naruto, it won’t stop—”

“I’m right here,” Naruto repeats. He refuses to let go. “You have to shut it down; I’m right here.”

He grabs Sasuke’s chin, rougher than he normally would, and forces him to hold his gaze. “Look at me,” he says, Kurama’s voice seeping into his. “You have to shut down your Mangekyou.”

Sasuke keeps sucking in these whooping, aching breaths, but Naruto squeezes his chin with one hand and forces him still, repeats his promise until the words turn numb and wanting in his mouth, until the blood dries on Sasuke’s face and his Sharingan slows in its terrified pace, the loops of his Mangekyou finally coming to a pulsing stop. 

“I’m right here,” Naruto repeats, refusing to look away.

One breath, and then another. 

The Mangekyou spins out into the three tomoe of a low-activated Sharingan. 

Naruto lets go of Sasuke’s chin. 

“That’s right,” he says, soothing now. Kurama fades into the background. “Just like that, Uchiha.” 

Sasuke’s eye dissolves into the empty pit of its usual black. He looks exhausted. The bags under his eyes are cut with wrinkles, and his skin is tinged gray. His hold on Naruto’s shirt slips as he pushes Sasuke’s arm aside to reach up and brush hair from Sasuke’s forehead. The strands are matted together with sweat and tears, but Naruto finds that he doesn’t care, just pulls him close. 

“You’re okay now,” Naruto murmurs, pressing his lips to Sasuke’s forehead. He feels Sasuke shudder underneath him, and realizes, belatedly, that Itachi used to press fingers against the space between his brows, too. “I’m here.”

Sasuke exhales: a rasping, terrible sound.

Naruto murmurs things in his ear for a long time, stroking his hand down the curve of Sasuke’s spine. They stay like this, curled and unmoving, for over an hour. And when Sasuke speaks, his voice is barely audible.

“I’m sorry,” is all he says. And Naruto knows it’s because he can’t find the right words for anything else.

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Perhaps, the biggest mistake Kakashi had made was with the Uchiha. 

He doted relentlessly on Naruto—a sort of side-effect from spending so much time with Iruka—and Sakura had sought him out on her own, in the way stable chunin parentage seemed to wont to develop, but it isn’t until years down the line that Kakashi finally pulled his head out of his ass and realized that, maybe, Sasuke needed more family than a couple of genin and squealing classmates could hope to provide back then. 

Kakashi had seen too much of himself in the kid: dead father (and dead mother and dead uncles and aunts and cousins and dead clan ), the perpetual sense of loneliness. He thought that with the burning chakra of Sasuke’s brother, he could’ve cut Itachi off like a wayward limb and restart, but the Uchiha compound still poisoned the blood that ran through him, and the mismatched tomoe of his first Sharingan. Kakashi failed him there first.

“I was going to kill you,” Kakashi admits openly, eyes fixed on the slow crawl of cigarette smoke against a dark sky.

Sasuke sits next to him, legs hanging off the roof of Naruto’s apartment. “I was going to kill you too,” he says. 

Kakashi looks at him sideways. He breathes out a line of smoke through his nose. It had been easier to hate him in the end.

Then: “Listen—” he says, the moment Sasuke puts up a hand to stop him.

“I didn’t want to come back,” Sasuke says, having read his mind somehow. He tilts his chin back to let smoke leak from between his lips. “Even if you tried,” he says. “I wouldn’t have.”

“You could’ve used a father.” 

Sasuke slits a look at him, amused. “Don't strain yourself, Hatake.”

Kakashi huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, well,” he says, scratching his brow. He's at a loss for what to say, really. “I thought you could handle it, being left behind.”

Sasuke laughs. “Oh, I know,” he says. “Trust me, I thought the same.”

“I should’ve gone back for you.” 

“Sure. You should've,” Sasuke says lightly. He had been terribly heartbroken about it at first, but that had only been an added pain to the fevered clusterfuck of his life, so he hadn’t noticed it until years down the line when he stood over Orochimaru’s corpse and thought: is this what freedom is supposed to feel like?

He leaves the words there. Makes it sound like a question.

“Do you hate me for it?” he asks.

Sasuke takes another drag of his cigarette before stubbing it out on the rooftop next to him. He fishes a pack from his pocket and taps out another. A spark of chakra and the tip catches: red, flaming. Katon. 

“No,” Sasuke replies. Kakashi knows it’s easier for him to see the flat look of disbelief he wears with his mask down, but Sasuke doesn’t falter when he catches his eye. He never has, Kakashi supposes. “I forgave you a long time ago, Hatake.”

“Mm,” Kakashi agrees, quiet. He tips his head off his shoulders to look up at the stars, unsettled by the relief in his chest, having seen the honest truth in Sasuke’s eyes.

“And this isn't me asking for your forgiveness either,” Sasuke says, frank.

“You should.”

Sasuke’s smile is wry. He looks out over Konoha’s rooftops. “Well, you stopped being my sensei a long time ago,” he says. “I tried to kill you. Many times I tried to kill you," he licks his lips. Like it hurts to admit, he says: "That’s not a place someone can come back from.”

“Naruto thinks so.”

“Yeah, well, Naruto is stupid.”

Possessiveness makes itself known in the hollow of Kakashi’s chest at that. He’s never been good at sharing the likes of Uzumaki with someone who’s, more consistently than anyone else on the goddamn continent, broken his heart over and over again.

“Hm,” Kakashi says, again, now that he’s sure Sasuke won’t drive a wrist of lightning through the heart of the Village anymore. The painful cut of his love for Naruto is clear. And he paid the price of it with his arm. “We can start over.”

Sasuke's reply comes easily. “It'd do you a disservice,” he says.

“I know,” Kakashi shrugs. “But I’m willing to overlook it this time.” 

Sasuke smiles: foggy, a little distant. “I'd hate me too, Hatake,” he says. He finishes his cigarette, and gets to his feet. “Might finally do you some good.”

Kakashi gets to his feet too. He looks at Sasuke and sees what he saw in Itachi all those years ago. Reaches up, closes the distance. Sasuke flinches when Kakashi steps into his space, but he doesn’t move away even when his hands curl up into fists by his side.

“And this is where your sensei tells you that you’re wrong, Sasuke,” Kakashi murmurs, and reaches up to cup his cheek with both hands, turning his head this way and that like he would with a genin, or a very small child. “I never hated you.”

Sasuke sucks in a sharp, sharp breath. His eyes close.

Then, the truth that Kakashi had been holding back for so long. The thing, perhaps, Sasuke has always needed to hear the most.

“I am proud of you.”

☾    ❍    ☽ 

It feels too much like the past retrieval missions, running down hallway after hallway. Only this time, there’s the squad Kakashi had mobilized for the sole purpose of containing Sasuke in case he turned on the village. He hardly expected to stamp them out on active duty, and certainly not for this reason.

“This one doesn’t have any useful information,” Ino says suddenly where she’s draped over Sakura’s back. Kiba drops the missing-nin he’d been carrying, and his body rolls over itself. The group keeps moving, Naruto leading the pack at a breakneck pace. “We have to take the next right for the higher ups. Better chance they’ll spill where Sasuke is.”

“Here?” Sakura asks, setting Ino down on her feet. They’ve come to a stop in front of a sealed door. One glance from Hinata’s Byakugan confirms the wards. Sakura swings a chakra-enhanced kick at the doorknob, hair flying with her anger. From the speckled intel that Shikamaru had gathered, they’re a wayward group of A to S ranks looking to reform the Akatsuki or an organization similar enough. The border between Stone and Waterfalls had been reduced to a power vacuum despite the Village’s attempts to steady the peace, and those who had been beaten into submission by the Akatsuki themselves are now on a bloody hunt to make their names known, killing and clamoring over each other just for a taste of power.

So Sasuke had been asked to complete an unofficial mission from Kakashi’s desk. The instructions had been explicit: intel-gathering, then complete elimination if there was any chance his scouting proved worrisome.

His scouting proved worrisome.

He sent back one of his snakes as messenger, and she’d thrown up a scroll on Kakashi’s desk before curling up by his elbow as he read: Eight. S-rank. Mission compromised.

Now, Ino’s fingers fold into the elegance of a bird seal, Shikamaru waiting to catch her body when she keels to one side, limp. Ino makes quick work of the shinobi in the room. 

“They’re going to kill him,” she says, coming up pale from her Mind Transfer. The color drains from Naruto's face. “The plan was to separate his chakra from his body like the Akatsuki did with the Gedo. I didn’t have time to look in more detail, but—”

The trap closes on them like a well-oiled machine, the entire compound shaking with the fight. Sasuke’s intel certainly hadn’t been wrong . They were after him and Naruto both, the mission was compromised, the mercenaries fell somewhere along the bridge between A and S rank, but there was a distinct difference between his calculated eight and the truth of twenty-three. 

“Tell me where he is,” Naruto snarls, shoving one of the nin against the wall. He’s bleeding — they’re all bleeding — limping from a broken ankle, half his ribs displaced. His vision blurs from the pain of leaking chakra from every open orifice in his body, fingers white-knuckled against the collar of the nin’s shirt. “What are you doing with him?” 

“I wouldn’t waste your breath,” he says, eyes slitting in painful amusement. “It’s already too late, Jinchuuriki. The sealing should be finished by now,” he says, hacking a laugh when horror dawns on Naruto’s face.

“You’re lying,” that’s Sakura now, voice hard. She wrenches someone’s shoulder out of its socket in her anger, eyes ablaze. “Where is he?”

“Dead,” the mercenary says.

“No,” Naruto breathes. “He can’t— you couldn’t—” 

“Oh, but we did, Uzumaki,” he laughs. “And so easily too, given the choice between the Village and himself.”

“He hates Konoha,” Shino says, matter-of-fact. “He would not sacrifice himself for her.” 

Naruto’s shoulders tense. 

“Shino,” Hinata says, warning. “You overstep.” 

“But what would you get out of sealing him away?” Shikamaru asks, fingers still folded together in Rat. “You think Naruto could sway the Daimyo with his undying love for the Uchiha? You couldn’t hope to resurrect Shinju when you know that greater men than you have failed.”

Naruto opens his mouth to say something, but he’s interrupted by the sudden, rocking squeal of the entire complex, the floor shuddering underneath their feet. 

“What is— this level of chakra,” Hinata breathes, grabbing Sai’s arm to keep him from toppling over.

“Sasuke,” Naruto says, pained. He drops the mercenary, turning wildly in every direction before stopping, crossing the room in three quick strides and pressing his hands up against the stone wall. He rears his hand back for a punch, but Sai leaps to catch his wrist before the blow, twisting Naruto aside to let Sakura slam her elbow into the wall, and then the next four after that.

You’re going the right direction, Kurama says, eyes slitted as he tugs Naruto down the corridor. But you have to hurry, Naruto. I’m having trouble tracking him already.

“It’s this way,” Naruto says over his shoulder. He leaps over the rubble without looking back again, hoping against hope that Sasuke will hold out this time around. Bastard’s an Uchiha, and every single one of them that Naruto’s met has been notoriously difficult to kill, so please, Gods be good, just keep him alive, just a little bit longer— a minute, two— 

The team crashes into the last chamber, scrambling to a halt when a dozen kunai are launched in their direction.

You can’t waste time here, Kurama yells, pushing him forward. The final stage of sealing has already begun. 

“Shit,” Naruto swears, slamming through the nin with a Rasengan. His face is damp with sweat and the start of something that could be tears, and he scrambles to his feet, spinning wildly on his heel before Akamaru breaks through the chaos with a loud bark. Kiba waves him over frantically, yelling: he’s in there, he’s in there, we have to hurry. 

There: being a barrier in the corner of the room, pulsating with such violent, dark energy that Naruto has to throw up a hasty counter when it shudders and bursts upwards through the roof of the cave. It’s now that Naruto knows there’s something wrong because Kurama gets abruptly to his feet, eyes snapping open from the lazy, half-slitted look he wears when nothing seems to catch his interest.

This is an Uzumaki seal, he growls, right as six chains — golden and hissing with chakra — slam into the inner walls of the barrier. The Earth rumbles with the force, and Hinata slips out of her Byakugan as the shockwaves roll over their team, clutching her forehead. 

“Hinata!” Ino yells, rushing to catch her fall.

“We have to take this thing down,” Naruto says. 

“No fucking shit,” Kiba says tightly. “Any ideas on how?”

Sakura lands neatly by Naruto’s side, Sai following. “It’s coming undone,” she points out, short of breath. There’s a catch of red on her cheek, and she swipes at it with the back of her hands until it slows to a sluggish purple. The wound’s started closing up on its own already. “I’m guessing it was a four point.” 

“Then the sealing weakened the barrier,” Sai says evenly.

Ino falls in line with the rest of them, Hinata’s arm slung around her shoulders. “Sasuke’s in there,” she says, grim. “Whoever’s doing this has major balls. That kind of chakra blowback’s going to burn all the skin off their skull if they so much as breathe in the wrong direction.”

When the barrier groans, rumbling, the entire team takes a step back.

“What is this?” Hinata breathes, slumping hard against Ino as she activates her Byakugan again. Sweat beads her brow, and Sai comes up quietly on her other side to support her, one arm coming up around her waist to hold her steady. “This fūin,” she says, shaking. “It’s only meant to hold him down. They’re— they’re extracting Sasuke’s chakra with another seal.”

I recognize this, Kurama says, coming alive.

“They’re going to separate Sasuke from his spirit,” Naruto gasps, out of breath. “But keep them in the same vessel. When they want to use him, they can unlock the second seal Hinata was talking about, and he comes back to life.”

“They get to control the Rinnegan,” Shikamaru breathes, connecting the dots for the others.

The air squeals with the sound of raw lightning. Naruto’s head snaps up at the sound.

Sasuke staggers from the dust, bleeding from the eyes and the blood seal carved into his chest, Chidori dragging a long line of scarred earth behind him.

“Sasuke!” Naruto yells. He’s the first to break from the group. He tears across the raised field, scrambling on all fours to his feet, eyes stinging with pain. “Sasuke!”

“Stay back, Naruto!” Hinata yells, watching Shikamaru reach out with a line of shadows to drag him three feet back.

He means to undo the seals, Kurama says.

“He’s gathered what’s left of his chakra in his body,” Hinata says. She takes a breath — deep — and closes her eyes. “He’s going to kill the caster.”

“Isn’t that good?” Naruto says, turning to her. “Hinata— Hinata, isn’t that good?!”

“Naruto,” Sakura interrupts quietly. The others have stepped up close now. “Look,” Sasuke lets the Chidori die. He does a series of seals, horse seal to finish, sucking air into his chest to cast a katon so bright and heavy that the clouds overhead swirl with the heat, rumbling with the promise of a storm. “He’s alone.” 

With a technique like this, it’s possible the caster sealed himself within Sasuke, Kurama says, to curb Naruto’s confusion. Better to control his powers when the time comes.

“He will have to sever the chains first,” Sakura says tonelessly. She was Tsunade’s disciple, after all, and studied her books well. “Then he will kill himself to dispel the last of the chakra, and likely pass his eye on to someone here.” 

“Kirin!” Sasuke yells, half blind as he thrusts one hand up to catch the mouth of his dragon, calling her down from the skies. The stench of pure lightning knocks everyone back on their feet. Everyone but Naruto, who burns himself straight into Kurama’s cloak and takes off after Sasuke.

Sasuke’s dragon swirls once, and shrieks when Sasuke arms her with Amaterasu. She catches the flames between her teeth and arcs upwards in a triumphant, sparking wave before she tears through the skin of his back. There’s a terrified wail that’s caught in the back of Naruto’s throat, but the scream won’t come loose no matter how hard he tries to free it, frozen as he watches the chains flicker and finally snap free. Sasuke collapses onto all fours, spitting blood everywhere.

“Sasuke!” Naruto yells, crashing to his knees next to him. 

His head snaps up, surprised. 

“You can’t do this,” Naruto says. Kurama howls and howls. Sasuke’s Rinnegan is awake and it is hungry, a fever in the crumpled land. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” 

Naruto feels the others come up behind them. Sasuke’s eyes flick up to them, his expression shifting minutely from a mild onset of annoyance to that of blank shock, and doesn’t even protest when Naruto turns Sasuke’s face back to his with two hands against his cheek.

“What. The fuck are you doing here?” Sasuke yells. His Sharingan is dead. He probably doesn’t have enough chakra to sustain it. “I need to get this bastard out of me,” he says. “You have to get back.”

“Foreign chakra is imbued in Sasuke’s own,” Hinata says. “Removing it all would be fatal.”

“No,” Naruto snarls, but something in the sound comes off broken and charred. “No,” he repeats. “I can’t lose you again.”

“You can,” Sasuke says, and the sound of it is so gentle, one hand coming up to curl into the fabric of Naruto’s shirt, just over his heart. “You have to.” 

“Sasuke—” Naruto starts, but the words are kissed out of his mouth.

“Go,” he murmurs, pressing their foreheads together. He’s starting to glow from the inside out, the bloody seal on his chest diffusing chakra by the mouthful. “Be great, Uzumaki,” he says, shoving Naruto away. He winces his way through a smile, hacking out another mouthful of blood. “Love you.” 

The ground shudders, trees swaying. Naruto stumbles back into Kiba’s arms, the shocked silence stretching tense and terrible between them.

“...what?” Naruto rasps faintly. 

Sasuke levels him with a flat look. “I’m not saying it again,” he says, wry. 

Naruto, still, doesn’t move. He can’t.

He looks at Sai, who already has three birds mid-stroke. “Will you take him?” he says. 

Sai looks back at Sasuke wordlessly. “I will.”

“Thank you,” he says. His hands are clenched in fists by his side. Naruto watches him with such terrible honesty, and he’s shocked speechless: eyes wide as Sakura hauls him bodily onto the back of Sai’s bird.

Sasuke presses a hand to the rawness of his chest, feeling blood and pus smear against the callouses of his palm. Feels the tug of his Rinnegan coming alive. 

“Gedō,” he says, the name of Death. Blood spills from his mouth. His hands fold into the simplicity of snake. “Demonic statue chains!”

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Sasuke is not breathing when they circle back for his body. 

Naruto cradles him tight to his chest, uncharacteristically quiet. He presses his forehead into Sasuke’s hair, and wraps his arms tight around Sasuke’s shoulders, and very, very pointedly does not cry. 

Sakura hands are glowing green when she turns to press her hands against Sasuke’s bruised chest, sleeves rolled up past her elbows. It’s just like their first C Rank; it has to be. Sasuke cannot die here, not after he’s faced down the likes of Otsutsuki Kaguya herself and lived to tell the tale. Not to a group of wayward missing-nin with nothing else to their name. 

Sasuke is the last of the Uchiha. He has survived until now. He will continue to survive his Clan and the Sharingan. 

He must. 

Sakura feels a bead of sweat slide down her forehead and into the collar of her jounin vest. The Healings’ infūin burns hot against her forehead. 

Halfway to Konoha, Sasuke gasps— and takes in a desperate, rattling breath. 

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Sai lands them on the rooftop of the hospital.

Naruto, like a blind, drunk man, staggers with the weight of Sasuke in his arms, and limps down eight flights of stairs in search of a healer. 

☾    ❍    ☽ 

After Sasuke’s operation, he is put in a medical coma for three weeks. When both Tsunade and Sakura begin easing him off the sedatives, he still does not wake, and sleeps for four more. Naruto sits by his bed and waits and waits and waits.

Sasuke’s hair falls out from the chakra exhaustion. His body temperature drops, his skin yellows and grays. He looks more sick than the days after Orochimaru branded him with his curse mark, and Naruto finds that he can do nothing else but pray. He’s never been a religious man, nothing like the Uchihas, a clan that honored the Old Traditions as closely as the Senju, but he holds Sasuke’s cold fingers between two hands and begs the gods to bring Sasuke back to him. 

“Don’t go,” Naruto says, having climbed into bed next to Sasuke, tucked him close.

The next day, Sasuke opens his eyes. He draws in a shuddering breath and says: “Naruto.”

The word meaning home. 

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Tsunade has never liked Sasuke. Granted, she barely knows the boy; by the time she was inaugurated, Orochimaru had long poisoned the meat of his heart, and she had seen him for Orochimaru’s sins long before she’d seen his own, but as Sasuke’s ledger list grew damp with the rot of blood and men, the less and less she understood Naruto’s unwavering belief when it came to bringing him back.

She didn’t want to heal him, but Naruto had carried him back to Konoha — already halfway dead — and begged and begged, bent over on the street outside her apartment. She couldn’t leave the Village’s wunderboy like that, and dragged him to his feet with a sigh.

Now, she passes rounds to check up on Uchiha. She’s done this four times a day, every day, since Sasuke ended up flat in Konoha General, and Tsunade wonders distantly if Naruto’s (slightly terrifying) attachment has started rubbing off on her too. She’s certainly less hesitant around him nowadays, though Sasuke has done nothing much but sleep. 

“Tell me again,” Sasuke says, the words coming out rasping and incomplete. Tsunade stops, surprised that the door has been left open; usually Naruto’s better about privacy, but everyone else is asleep at this hour, and she’d only come in to make sure Sasuke would pass the night. His heart barely beats most days. “Naruto,” he says, begging almost. “Tell me again.”

Tsunade moves closer, silent. She freezes at the sight that greets her: Naruto and Sasuke, curled up together under the covers, bodies curved towards each other like tomoe. Sasuke has hair plastered to his cheek with tears, and Tsunade watches as Naruto reaches up to tug the strands loose, tucking them gently behind Sasuke’s ear.

“I love you,” Naruto murmurs, and doesn’t seem to care as Sasuke’s hands tighten further in his shirt. Sasuke’s body is wracked with sobs, and he looks young in a way she’s never seen before. “I love you so much,” Naruto says, voice cracking.

He pulls Sasuke in by the waist, until there’s no space between them, until everything about them becomes one.

Tsunade starts to understand, then. What he does is not for Konoha, but it is for Naruto. This extent of their love is surprising: not because she thought Naruto was naive, but because she didn’t believe the Uchiha was capable of returning his love. 

Sasuke breaks for air. “Tell me,” he gasps, like something in him has finally come loose. He sounds terribly broken.

“I love you,” Naruto repeats, like spreading balm on a wound. Sasuke closes his eyes. “I love you.”

Sasuke sucks in a shuddering breath. “Again,” he says, sounding smaller than Tsunade’s ever heard. He’s still crying. “Again, please—”

Naruto kisses the words out of his mouth. 

“Until the end of the world, I love you,” he says, rougher this time. His eyes are shining in the darkness of the hospital room, noise spilling in from Konoha’s streets to light the spaces and whorls between them. “Gods be damned, Sasuke, I love you, I love you.”

When Sasuke bites down on a choked noise, Tsunade turns away.

She’s heard enough, more than enough, and the sound of Sasuke forming a promise against Naruto’s lips if I have to tear myself apart to keep you safe, I will do it. I will come back from the dead for you. I will shake the Heavens in the name of devotion—

Tsunade hadn’t known before, how to feel about the Uchiha boy. She thinks she has a better understanding now, having seen the way Sasuke’s fingers curled desperately into Naruto’s, the aching press of skin to skin in the hospital bed.

When she goes to bed that night, she hears Sasuke’s voice in her ear: Konoha was never home for me.

☾    ❍    ☽ 

When he is straddling the boundaries of one world and the next, Sasuke dreams of Itachi.

They never talk, and Sasuke simply watches: watches the way his brother moves, how he breathes, how he blinks. How the years have taken a brush to his skin and softened the lines on his face.

It reminds Sasuke how he'd laid his brother in the ground twice now, and his Clan the night after the massacre. He had hauled their bodies through the Compound, wind-chilled and trembling, goosebumps tearing across the dried blood on his skin even as the ANBU came for him, even as the Sandaime called his name from across the torn, hollow streets.

Sasuke had manifested three of his Sharingan’s tomoe that night. He had told no one, not even Hatake Kakashi, the one-eyed outsider of the Uchiha.

Sasuke had been six, but he had not been stupid; no Uchiha was. He knew what it meant to reveal the true extent of his powers. Where his kin had a Clan for protection, he had no one but himself. His secrets have always carried a steep price. And the Clan’s distaste of Hatake ran deeper than most realized; he symbolized the spineless example of what Konoha wished the Uchiha had been: a sort of mindless tool for the Hokage to bend to their will. The Sharingan is the Sharingan, coveted as strongly as the Hyuga Clan’s dojutsu, and guarded twice as deeply.

He knows the Uchiha name has been sullied beyond recognition. It came before him, with Madara, and Sasuke hopes that when he dies, he will be the last, and there will be none after. He’s too tired to care. Having carried the Clan on his shoulders for years—the murders, his brother, three betrayals—Sasuke doesn’t think he can take much more.

“It’s catatonia,” a quiet voice filters through. Sasuke’s brow furrows. He knows that voice. He knows. “There’s not much we can do except continue monitoring, but…” a beat, two. Then, reluctantly, “If you say that he’s been responding to you on occasion,” a pen clicks. “We’ll take that into consideration with his therapy.”

Sound travels strangely in this world. Sasuke reaches out with one hand, not sure what he’s looking for. The hand Itachi has put on his shoulder grows light again. Sasuke feels a kick of fear in his stomach. He will be alone again, after his brother goes. But Brother had found his peace a long time ago. And Sasuke can't deny him this. Not again.

“Sasuke?” someone murmurs. Sasuke puts a hand absentmindedly to his cheek, where the skin has started to warm with the touch of another. “Sasuke, come back to me.” 

Itachi smiles at him. Go to him now, he says, eyes curling into a smile. I will see you soon, little brother. 

Sasuke opens his mouth around a plea, but between one breath and the next: Itachi has faded into nearly nothing, Sasuke squinting against the sudden light in his face.

Hair makes piecemeal of his vision, and the bloodied heat of an active Sharingan does nothing to clear it. It’s only now that Sasuke registers the hand Naruto has on his knee, the other cupped around his cheek. The pain of his body soon follows. The ache in his back, the sharp twist of his shoulders, his ribs, his wrist. Sasuke knows he’s run his chakra pathways ragged from the way his hand shakes, even when Naruto helps Sasuke smooth it out gently in his lap.

“Sasuke,” Naruto says, tone far, far more gentle than the one he typically reserves for Sasuke. That’s his first indication that something isn’t quite right. Naruto reaches up to touch the skin underneath Sasuke’s eye, so light it’s almost as if he isn’t touching him at all. “Can you shut it down for me? Your Mangekyou?”

Sasuke’s throat is dry, and he suspects his voice will come out no better than a brittle noise, so he settles on blinking at him. It takes more of his focus than it should, letting his Sharingan sputter out. Naruto smiles at him, the worry in his eyes growing still. 

He looks like he’s about to ask Sasuke something else, but then the door opens, and Tsunade comes in, Sakura close on her heels. Sasuke looks up from his lap, and realizes belatedly that Kakashi is also in the room, slouched in the corner and doing his best to look disinterested. 

And without thinking, Sasuke opens his mouth and calls Kakashi by name: “Sharingan.”

Speaking is a mistake. It ends with him doubled over from the force of his coughing, his vision filled by Naruto’s eyes — so impossibly blue. He presses a glass of water to Sasuke’s lips and helps him drink, holding it still when Sasuke realizes his hand is shaking too bad to hold it up himself. 

Kakashi waits until Sasuke is done hacking up both lungs and all his teeth before straightening up, and wandering over to Sasuke’s bedside. “Finally with us, Uchiha?” he asks tonelessly.

Sasuke stares back at him blankly. He doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean.

“You were in a coma for seven weeks,” Sakura explains, when the silence drags on too long. Sasuke turns to look at her. “When you woke, you experienced moments of lucidity. Though very emotional, they did not last long,” Sasuke licks his lips self-consciously, only now starting to remember the distant, pleading repetition of: tell me, again. Please, Naruto — “You then lapsed into a period of heavy catatonia in which you repeated the names of your family and a few members of the late Uchiha Clan—” 

Sasuke feels Naruto’s fingers tighten around his. “Sakura,” he says. His voice is pitched low, but the authority in his tone is enough to make even Sakura fall silent without protest. 

Sakura’s mouth is a pinched line. She switches topics easily, however. “The Hokage would like your report of the mission events, Uchiha.” 

Sasuke goggles at her for a moment, then shifts his gaze to Kakashi to goggle at him a little bit longer. Everything is too much, all at once — the light, the sound, the people — and Naruto must pick up on his discomfort because he presses even closer, puts one hand carefully on Sasuke’s thigh. 

He has to swallow down a bitter mouthful of embarrassment. Sasuke doesn’t dare look at Kakashi, because the presence of his Clan is still a burning weight in his chest, and he isn’t sure if he can look Kakashi in the eye without shattering under the weight of his kin. The reminder of just how much he has lost.

“There is nothing to report, Hokage-sama,” he says faintly. Kakashi straightens with the honorific. Sasuke is notoriously rude, and completely disregards military hierarchy on a daily basis. It’s jarring to hear him speak like his other, law-abiding shinobi. “I infiltrated the base per mission parameters. They distracted me with a few men, then began the sealing process.”

Kakashi doesn’t miss a beat. “You could’ve fought them off easily enough.”

He feels far more like Danzo and Sarutobi than Sasuke ever believed he was capable; Kakashi hadn’t been appointed by Tsunade by chance. The eyes that watch him are the same ones that have been through two great wars. Sasuke feels it now, the sheer weight of his presence. 

“So I wonder if you had been so eager to destroy the Village that you would turn yourself into a tool for others to use to their benefit.” 

Naruto’s hand grips Sasuke’s knee hard enough to bruise. His chakra rolls with anger, and the leaves outside the hospital window are stripped clean from the trees. “Hokage-sama,” he grinds out. A warning. 

Sasuke’s fingers are limp in Naruto’s. 

“If you maintain your silence, Uchiha,” Kakashi continues, and Sasuke notices now how Sakura refuses to interfere. “You may end up forcing my hand.”

“You—” Naruto says, chair scuttling backwards on the tile as he shoots to his feet. His eyes are turning red, and his skin burns hot where it makes contact with Sasuke’s. “I know you read the reports. And I know what I saw. I know what Sakura saw— what everyone on the goddamn retrieval team saw. Don’t give me this line of questioning and expect— and expect—” he stops abruptly, shaking with anger. “He almost died to keep our Village safe and yet you still come here while he’s recovering just to accuse him of betrayal?”

Kakashi’s arms are slung loose in his pockets. His expression is mild when he says: “Just covering all our bases, Uzumaki.” 

Naruto is implacable with his anger. Sasuke manages to lift his arm and stop him from closing in on Kakashi. The fabric of his jacket is softer than he imagined it would be. “Calm down,” Sasuke murmurs. He manages, with some effort, to tear his eyes away from the spot on the wall he’d been staring down, and tilts his chin up to meet Naruto’s eyes. “Sit down, Naruto,” he says. “You’re making everyone nervous.”

Sasuke flicks his eyes over to Sakura: long enough to see the whorl of chakra that’s gathered in her fists recede.

“There were eight nin at the base, Hatake,” Sasuke sighs, turning to him. “They offered me a choice between the Rinnegan and war. They had men stationed here and all over Stone,” he says. “I had no time to send for backup, and I wasn’t willing to take chances,” he says. “But I could reverse the seal once they let their guard down.”

“You must’ve known it would’ve taken you with it.” 

Sasuke frowns at him. “Are you saying you wanted me to blow up half this Continent?”

“I’m not saying anything.”

Sasuke stares at him for another long moment. Then he lets out a breath, slumping back against the half-raised bed. Everyone’s eyes follow him expectantly, most of all Naruto’s, but all he does his roll his eyes up at the ceiling and blow hair from his face. “You’re a right piece of shit, Hatake, you know that?”

The tension drains out of Kakashi’s shoulders. He moves around Naruto’s coiled presence, picking up the chair he’d toppled over and setting it upright. He takes a seat, slumping into the chair with a sort of annoyed, world-weary laugh. “Language, kid,” he says, although it’s less a reprimand and more an exhale.

Sasuke doesn’t flinch when Kakashi finally looks him in the eye. It’s been a while since the man acknowledged his presence in the same crude way he used to. A little crass, and rude enough.

Kakashi scratches his cheek through his mask. “You feeling okay, Uchiha?” he asks.

“Fucking peachy,” Sasuke deadpans.

There’s a long, long silence. Kakashi’s shoulders are curved forward when he moves to rest his elbows on Sasuke’s bed. There’s something low in his voice when he sucks in a breath and holds it there, fingers curled into fists before he looks up, out the window, and says: “You were catatonic for three weeks,” he says. “Unconscious for four. They had you on a ventilator when you first came in.”

Sasuke laughs through his nose. “I didn’t reverse the seal the right way,” he says, in lieu of an actual response. He doesn’t know what else to say, but the silence is starting to feel stifling. “They took part of me to the other world. I met Itachi. My Clan.”

Kakshi just nods. Sasuke looks at him, surprised. 

“You’ve been there?” 

“I met my father in that place,” Kakashi answers agreeably. “When I died fighting Pain.” 

Sasuke, actually, has been there twice already — once with Naruto, a second traveling alone — but some things are meant to be kept secret, even if Kakashi is sharing all this aloud with even Tsunade in the room. “He talk to you?”

“Some,” Kakashi shrugs. “Not for long. You?”

Sasuke quirks a wry smile. “One sentence,” he estimates.

“Maa,” he laughs, though he looks surprised, caught off guard. “What can you do? Itachi was always a terrible conversationalist.”

Sasuke laughs; he’d forgotten, briefly, that Kakashi had been his brother’s CO while he served his first years in ANBU. But he doesn’t know how else to reply, so he looks away into the others’ faces. And, here, Sasuke had been thinking that both Naruto and Sakura would’ve known this side of Kakashi better, but they’re both rooted firmly to where they stand, eyes wide with shock.

It’s clear that Kakashi isn’t going to offer him anything else. “Another time, then?” Sasuke asks.

Kakashi puts a heavy hand on Sasuke’s knee and grips lightly when he staggers, almost, to his feet. Command has never looked so immensely terrifying as it does now, worn on the face of his broad shoulders.

“Okay,” Kakashi says, arranging himself in a familiar slouch on his slinking way to the door. “I’ll send word.”

Sasuke dips his head, relief seeping into his skin. So they are alright. “Sir,” he replies. 

The silence in the room is palatable then, everyone watching Kakashi leave.

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Sasuke had thought for a long time that he knew what loneliness was, and had made his peace knowing he would bury his brother in the ground, but when Tobi’s mask had come off and he heard Kakashi’s terrified rasp of Uncle Obito’s name, Sasuke had looked back at Obito from across the battlefield and tried to piece together the same smile that belonged to Mikoto (Sasuke had not thought of his mother in a long, long time), the whole world threatening to crush him whole. 

This is what the Uchiha name as been reduced to. Every one of their hands tainted with blood and betrayal. Sasuke is no different. He thought it would be enough for him to watch Itachi die and know that he had been the one to drive a knife through his heart, but after Sandaime had confirmed to him the terror of the truth, Sasuke felt for a hurtling moment an emptiness inside him, the loss of anger that had driven him so long and so far and through the deaths of so very many. Sasuke had grown up with anger trapped under his skin like a second skin. He doesn’t know who to be without it.

“Izuna,” Madara rasps, a smile playing on his lips. 

The Shodaime’s hand is a heavy weight on Sasuke’s shoulder. “You look like his little brother,” he explains quietly. The Shodaime had been the one to call him over, and Sasuke had followed because this is the great Senju Hashirama, the Dragon Slayer, the Lord of Beasts, and he sees Naruto in him, or he sees Hashirama in Naruto; he can’t be bothered to decide which. He wonders if this kind of terrible and great devotion is a kekkei genkai within itself, because there’s no reason for anyone to have followed their love to the end of the world unless accounted for by a great amount of stupidity. And gods does Naruto have stupidity to spare. “Izuna died a very long time ago in a skirmish against my family,” Hashirama says. “And Madara’s grief changed him.”

Madara’s Sharingan flickers in and out of existence.

Sasuke looks up at the Shodaime, and sees a flicker of pain cross his eyes. He must understand the weight the Uchiha dojutsu brings to each of its users. Grief, to flood the orbital pathways, and grief, still, to keep it alive.

“Izuna,” Madara says, again. His breathing comes out strained between his teeth.

His Sharingan sputters out.

“I'm sorry, Izuna,” Madara says, and a tear rolls from his eyes, tracing a wet line down to his temple. “How do I face you— knowing what I have done?”

“You are a good man, Madara,” Hashirama says, crouching low until his shoulders are level with Sasuke’s. The Shodaime puts a gentle hand on Madara’s knee. “He will be glad to know you are well.”

Madara’s eyes, which have strained to look at Hashirama, roll back to fixate on Sasuke’s face. There’s a thin line of blood that escapes from the corner of his mouth. “Did you see it all?” he asks, pleading now. “You must have watched over.” 

Sasuke is not a kind man, but he is not cruel either. So he says, voice shaking with every word: “Yes, brother. I saw.” 

“Have you been with Mother for very long?”

Sasuke nods. Madara’s fingers are starting to slacken in his. “She's waiting for you to come home,” he says. He feels the weight of both the Shodaime and the Nidaime’s eyes on him.

Madara searches Sasuke face for a long, long time. Then his eyes fall shut, breathing ragged. Sasuke has seen enough men die in the bowels of Orochimaru’s lair to know that Madara’s run out of time. “Every day, I thought of you,” Madara says. He can't quite manage anything else.

“I'm sorry,” is all Sasuke can say. “I'm here.”

Sasuke’s face is wet. He started crying and didn’t even realize.

“Mother won’t be so mad if we come home together.”

“Of course,” Madara murmurs. “She always liked you better.”

The Shodaime puts one hand on Madara’s forehead. Sasuke can feel Hashirama’s arm come around his shoulders in some semblance of comfort, but it’s of little use: the Edo Tensei's already been released.

“Izuna,” Madara whispers, again, stilling.

Sasuke can't find any of the right words to say. Loneliness bear down on his shoulders. He's never felt so hollow. 

When the Shodaime’s touch eases from his shoulders, Sasuke presses his ear harder against the stillness of Madara’s chest, searching for warmth, for someone, for home, and cries and cries and cries.

☾    ❍    ☽ 

When they get married, it’s after Naruto is three weeks late coming back from an S-Rank with Tenten and Hinata. Sasuke worries himself sick, stuck at home with nothing to pass the time except days of compulsive reorganization, getting down on his hands and knees to scrub the floors until the team comes limping through the gates, Naruto looking like he’d fallen off a fucking cliff. The MRIs had shown something lodged in the base of his neck: close enough to the spine that a wrong move would end with him paralyzed. 

Sasuke had been denied entry to Naruto’s room. He had been denied, even when he made his case to Sakura, saying that he wasn’t going to kill off Konoha’s darling while he couldn’t even open his fucking eyes, we live together, we’ve always lived together, just let me see him, I need to know if he’s okay, fuck you— I love him, I love him, please don’t let him die without me there—

They let Sasuke in.

Naruto looks awful, and Sasuke is shocked so speechless and terrified that he freezes in the doorway with something painful clawing itself up his throat at the sight. Naruto is still; he is never, never still. Even in his sleep he kicks and claws and mumbles. He curls fingers around Sasuke’s waist, presses his lips into his skin, and when he’s awake, Naruto talks with too much energy; he’s always fucking smiling. Even when Sasuke’s being bitchier than usual, even when Sasuke groans and pushes half-heartedly at his face, telling him to get away.

Both Sakura and Tsunade had scrubbed in for Naruto’s surgery, but the nurses say that it’s still too early to know if a full recovery is even an option. There should be no lasting damage — the operation had been impossibly textbook — but Sasuke’s life is a series of snapshots of Konoha, Orochimaru, and a truly disgusting number of snakes punctuated by the endless circle of his brain funneling Naruto, Naruto, Naruto into his head, and. Well. Old habits die hard.

Sasuke comes up to the side of the bed. Thanks to Kurama, there aren’t any superficial wounds: just the thick bandage that’s been wrapped around Naruto’s head and throat. He looks the way he did after their class’ clusterfuck of chunin exams, and Sasuke is surprised by how steady his hand is when he reaches out to brush fingers against Naruto’s cheek. Something in him, staring down at the closed curve of Naruto’s eyelids, howls. 

“We’re expecting him to make a full recovery,” Sakura says, after a long moment. 

Sasuke nods. “Okay,” he says quietly. 

“Visiting hours will bar you from being here overnight.”

Sasuke just looks at her. Sakura looks at him back, then rolls her eyes. She knows that he’ll find a way in — he’s like Kakashi in that sense: somehow everywhere at the same time yet perpetually late to all his appointments.

“But spousal and partnership rights gives you more liberties,” she says. 

Sasuke had gone back to blinking wordlessly at Naruto, but he looks up at her when she speaks. “Wouldn’t we would both have to sign the paperwork?” 

Sakura’s shoulders rise with a breath. “There are ways to get around that,” she says, but offers nothing else.

She busies herself by finishing up Naruto’s chart, dropping the board into the slot by the foot of the bed. Sasuke stays quiet — he’s never been one to talk anyway, the silence comes between them like an old friend — and she notes with a strange pang in her chest that Sasuke’s curled his thumb around the pulsepoint in Naruto’s wrist, slumped in his chair like he can't get enough air. 

“I can fasttrack things through the Hokage’s office,” Sakura says.

“Okay,” he says faintly. It sounds more like he’s trying to convince himself that it’s the right thing to do, even if Sakura knows this is what Naruto’s been wanting for since the start. “Sure.” 

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Sasuke spends more time in Naruto’s hospital room than Naruto spent in his; it says enough on its own because both Sakura and Kakashi had to wrestle Naruto out of the room when Tsunade came for another session with Sasuke, but Naruto, at least, has a better chance at a full recovery. Just about everyone thought Sasuke had bought it back with those missing-nin, and that there was no point waiting for him to wake up if his soul had already moved on after he broke the seal on his chest. 

“Ow,” is the first thing out of Naruto’s mouth when he opens his eyes. His vision is blurry and caked with sleep, but he feels someone’s hand tighten around his and relief floods his chest. Sasuke, he thinks, without even having to look.

Kurama rumbles a few mindless reassurances, then spends about ten minutes bitching about the right ass he’d made of himself during that mission— what were you thinking, charging off like that alone — Naruto replying with nothing more than an embarrassed laugh, scratching the back of his head while Kurama chews him out for his stupidity.

Sakura and Tsunade come to check up on him, Kakashi and a couple others filing into the room in quick succession. Apparently Naruto’s injuries had put most of Konoha into a frenzy, and it’s good to see him well. 

The Uchiha stayed with you this week, Kurama says, but offers nothing else.

So Naruto turns away from the puttering conversation he’s holding with Ino and Shikamaru, over to where Sasuke’s sitting by his bed. He looks the same as he always does — impossibly pretty, and too good to be wasting his time here. The only sign of his distress are the bags under his eyes, and the line of his mouth; they’ve spent too much time learning the insides of each other for Naruto not to notice.

The world fades to a rush of white noise and nothing when Sasuke lifts his eyes with some effort from the bedspread. Ino’s probably still talking, but Naruto can’t hear: just sees the smattering of freckles coming in on Sasuke’s pale cheek, the way he’d tucked a piece of hair behind his ear, only to have it come frayed and undone now. His eyes are dark, pitless, but Naruto’s always known how to read his silences, and the things Sasuke doesn’t know how to say.

So— “Hi,” he says, trying for impish but managing only a rasp. “You come here often?”

Sasuke’s expression pitches, but he doesn’t try to punch Naruto in the face either, so he considers that a win. “No,” he says. “But you were here, so it’s not like I had much choice.”

Naruto laughs. “Bastard,” he says, reaching across his body to thumb at the crease between Sasuke’s eyebrows. “Kurama says you stayed,” he murmurs. “How come Sakura didn’t kick you out?”

Sasuke looks at him. There’s uncertainty in his eyes. And Shikamaru’s soul must somehow possess Naruto’s body for a second, then, because when Sasuke’s tongue darts out to wet his lip right Naruto connects the dots: sees the necklace he’d given Sasuke the last time they’d both been out of the hospital around his neck, the strange, halting way Kakashi had been acting earlier, like there was something he couldn’t quite say out loud. And Naruto’s never known a man like Hatake Kakashi to be uncertain. 

“Oh,” he says on an exhale, feeling his eyes soften the way they do whenever Sasuke’s heart is involved. The meat of it had rotted away into nothing, even when Sasuke had tried to save it time and time again, so Naruto does his best to be kind, to be gentle. “I missed our wedding night, didn’t I?”

Sasuke’s expression crumples. He’s so dead-eyed most days that this comes like a punch to the gut, and Naruto realizes, distantly, that everyone else has gone quiet, has seen the way he turned his cheek against the pillow so that he can reach out with one arm and lay it gently over the top of Sasuke’s head.

Sasuke dips his head low to accommodate the weight, setting his jaw with something hot and terrified in his eyes when he admits: “I thought you weren’t going to wake up.”

Kurama rumbles an agreement, but says nothing else, eyes slitting shut.

In the week and a half that Sasuke’s been here, he’s learned the best way to sleep, which books to read, how to angle his body so he can see the steady rise and fall of Naruto’s chest. He’s pulled his chair up so close to Naruto’s bed that he’s practically sitting on it. There’s pain that’s grown roots somewhere deep because there has always been a sun inside Naruto’s skin that makes him glow from the inside out; it hurts Sasuke when he looks for too long. But he’s always been a hungry, stupid, and greedy man; he stares even if he’s bound to go blind someday, it’s better than the nightmares where the darkness in his blood rears its head back and swallows him whole.

Sasuke hides his face in the bedsheets and the blankets, feeling stupidly relieved when Naruto stays quiet, doesn’t ask. His hand is heavy over the crown of Sasuke’s head. Sasuke’s entire body shakes with the force of his tears. The others are frozen, intruding.

“I saw us in a dream,” Naruto tells him, when the silence drags too long. He looks at Sasuke like there is else but this. “Where you rode a dragon who wore your Mangekyou,” he says. “And when she came to the stars, the gods married us there: in the place where they don’t know the name of Death, and even the light called you their son.”

Naruto takes his hand off Sasuke’s head, tucks a piece of hair behind his ear. So— 

“Look at me, Sasuke,” he says, achingly gentle. “Please.” 

Sasuke’s eyes are swollen with tears when he lifts his head from the blankets. His lip is bleeding from where he’d been working at the skin, raw, and his hair runs ragged all across his face.

“I could not leave you even if I tried,” Naruto says, holding him firmly by the jaw. “The gods won’t let me.”

The raw, skinned husk of his voice terrifies even Tsunade — the woman who has fought three Great Wars on the front lines and returned alive. This is sacred and ancient love. 

“I’m right here, Sasuke,” Naruto says, voice breaking. Sasuke’s cheeks are swollen. Naruto presses his thumb to the corner of Sasuke’s mouth. “I’m right here.”

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Naruto’s birthday, for the first seventeen years of his life, never brought him any good memories. Now, barely pushing twenty-one, he finds that old habits die hard. It’s difficult watching ANBU lower Konoha’s flags half staff, and then being forced to stand for the ceremony like his stomach is trying to claw its way out of his chest.

Their class is present because they’re all high ranking officers now, and bound by both honor and shinobi duty to appear. It’s a miserable half hour of his day wasted, and Naruto shoves hands into his pockets and escapes the first minute he gets; he can’t stand the sympathy in everyone’s eyes when they remember it’s his birthday by the time the drum ceremony is over.

Kurama rumbles a half-apology — he’s just as dense as Sasuke when it comes to emotions — but Naruto waves him off. It wasn’t his fault that Madara had broken his mother’s seal that night. It’d been the Sharingan’s, he thinks, swallowing against the hard lump in his throat when he remembers what the Uchiha’s dojutsu has been reduced to. 

Sasuke finds him, not because Naruto had made himself difficult to find, but because he can read Naruto’s moods like the back of his hand, and he plops down, unfairly graceful, next to where Naruto’s dangling off the top of the Yondaime’s carving on Hokage Monument. The carvers managed to get all of Minato’s features wrong, but it’s okay: Naruto’s burned the features of him into his mind already — having retraced them over and over in the hours he couldn’t sleep at night.

Sasuke isn’t clingy or touchy or particularly affectionate — the way he demonstrates his strangled form of endearment is kicking Naruto around on a training field for a couple of hours — and it’s really no different now, except that the gratuitous demonstration of his Body Flicker Technique leaves Sasuke close enough their thighs and shoulders are pressed together, fingers tangled when they both lean their weight back on their arms to watch the city come to life below.

“I got you a present,” Sasuke says, after they spent what must be most of the morning etching embarrassing tan lines in their skin. Sasuke’s cheekbones are flushed pink from the sun, and Naruto leans in to press his lips along his cheek because he can. Sasuke goes redder, if possible, but his deadpan expression doesn’t change, Naruto pulling back to watch Sasuke fumble around for a bit before pulling out a box. 

Oh, Naruto thinks, eyes going wide.

“Is that…?” he asks, his entire chest trying to take flight.

“It’s an engagement ring,” Sasuke says, having always been terribly succinct. “If you’ll have me.”

“What,” Naruto breathes.

I’ve been here this whole time, he wants to say, but the words are choked up in his throat, and he can’t seem to force them out. Sasuke looks at him with that flat stare. If there’s one thing that Naruto can say about him in this moment, feeling as if the world has come to a sharp halt, is that Sasuke doesn’t lie about the things he wants.

Sasuke’s looking at Naruto now, assessing almost. “If it isn’t what you want…” he says, strangely hesitant.

Naruto grabs his wrist before he can withdraw. “No,” he says, a little too fast. He looks up from the ring-box and into Sasuke’s eyes, biting the corner of his lip as he closes one hand around Sasuke’s: ring and all. “I do,” he says. “Really.”

Sasuke blinks at him for a minute, shoulders tensed like he’s about to withdraw. Naruto tightens fingers around Sasuke’s wrist. “I just can’t promise—” Sasuke tries, a piece of hair slipping out from behind his ear. “I never had to forgive you, but Konoha— I don’t know if...not even if you’re here; I can’t promise that.” 

“I don’t care,” Naruto says, fierce. There was a time when all he wanted was to be able to reach out with one hand and touch Sasuke outside a dream: solid, whole, real. And Sasuke is here now, sitting with one thigh pinned under Naruto’s knee, letting Naruto curl fingers around his hand, let Naruto press into his space and kiss him just to pour the years into the press of mouth to mouth. 

Sasuke’s mouth parts easily; he lets out a breath like it’s been punched from his chest and kisses back because he’s allowed those things now, Naruto fumbling with the box until he can slip the ring from its cushion and work it onto his finger. 

Sasuke pulls away, and reaches out to bring Naruto’s hand to the light. “It belonged to your father,” he says quietly. Naruto flinches, shocked.

“What?” he chokes out. “How did you—?”

Sasuke’s thumb slips low to press against his pulsepoint. Checking, again. “Orochimaru,” he says quietly, shoulders hunched forward as if he’s preparing for a blow.

“Oh,” Naruto breathes. His boy had brought him an Uzumaki ring because he doesn’t know how to tell him any other way— I love you . Naruto cups Sasuke’s cheek and draws his face up to his. “Thank you, I’m,” he says, voice wobbling. “Thank you— thank you.”

He pulls Sasuke into another kiss, this time harder than the last. Naruto thinks he should feel guilty, pushing Sasuke flat onto his back to make out with him on the top of his father’s stone likeliness, but Sasuke’s mouth has fallen half open with surprise, and his chest curves up in warm planes against Naruto’s where they lie together and his vision whittling down to the way Sasuke looks underneath him. 

The sun has warmed the cliff-face pleasantly, and Naruto dips his head down to kiss along the length of Sasuke’s jaw and throat, feeling his arm come up to wrap clumsily around his waist. Then Naruto shifts around until he can hear Sasuke’s heartbeat from where he’s laid his head on his chest, Sasuke’s arm curls around his shoulders, fingers sinking, familiar, into his hair. He cards lightly at the hair at the base of Naruto’s head, tugging lightly at his earlobe.

“Will you stay?” Naruto murmurs into the silence. He’ll take anything Sasuke gives him, though—always will.

Sasuke is quiet for a long while. Then he takes a breath, deep enough that Naruto lifts his head off Sasuke’s chest, spreading his fingers out across the space above his heart. 

Naruto doesn’t miss a beat. “Uchiha,” he says. He’ll take any chance he can to rile Sasuke up. He likes the exasperated look he pins Naruto with, the way he tries to tamp down on a smile. But—  “I don’t want to keep you here. You don’t owe the Village—” anything. Fealty, loyalty, his strength.

“Dead last,” Sasuke replies. He lets Naruto hang a head over his, blocking out the sun with all that blonde hair, starting to grow out like his dad’s. “Why do you think I came back?”

The smile freezes on Naruto’s face.

“What?” he asks, for the umpteenth time that day.

Sasuke reaches up, tracing two fingers across the scars on Naruto’s cheek. “I hate Konoha,” he says. His chest rises with a breath, throat tight. It's never been about this goddamn Village.

Naruto feels his throat close up. “Sasuke,” he says, hopeless and raw. 

“I tried to hate you for so long,” he says. “I tried to get rid of you, but you put yourself inside me and the skin grew shut and then I couldn’t push you out— I couldn’t get you to leave,” Sasuke blinks, looking away. Then: “I wanted you so bad,” he confesses, the words coming out a broken whisper. “I wanted you so bad.” 

Naruto presses his hand harder into Sasuke’s chest. “You have me,” he promises. His father’s ring is cold on his finger.

“Because you made a promise,” he says. “To Sakura.”

Naruto wants to slap Sasuke across the cheek. His stupidity, sometimes, still manages to astound him. “No, bastard,” he chokes out, everything rushing up into his throat at the same time. “Gods, why would you even think— how could you believe that—”

The look in Sasuke’s eyes stops him cold. The words die out in Naruto’s throat as he bites down on a curse and crashes their lips together, holds Sasuke down and tries to get him to fucking understand, goddamn fuck— 

“Because I love you, stupid,” Naruto says, slapping Sasuke’s chest, open-handed. He’s angry now. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

Sasuke carefully pries Naruto’s hand from his chest. 

He searches his face for a long while, and then slumps back against the ground without another word.

Naruto just sits there, gobsmacked. “You’re supposed to say it back, bastard.” 

Sasuke reaches up and laces their fingers together. “Okay,” he says lying back to let Naruto kiss him. “Happy birthday.”

☾    ❍    ☽ 

Unsurprisingly, Shikamaru is the one who finds them first. Well— he finds Sasuke first, since he’d split off from Naruto half a street down. Shikamaru blends easily into the shadows, but Sasuke, having spent most of his childhood trapped underground with Orochimaru, picks up on the wordless offer of a smoke and slumps back against the back wall of the restaurant, flicking two easy fingers to light Shikamaru’s cigarette before his own.

Sasuke inhales, feeling the heady rush of nicotine enter his bloodstream. “Too loud for you too?”

He and Shikamaru have never been close, but Sasuke’s always held grudging admiration for him. Shimakaru barely moved a muscle on the field, and had little to no ninjutsu prowess besides his family’s kekkei genkai, but the way he moved his brain was far beyond any one of their classmates’ abilities. He only moved when it was an absolute necessity; Sasuke spent a good portion of his time huddled in Orochimaru’s lair trying to replicate Shikamaru’s ease at assessing the battlefield. 

“Kiba is,” Shikamaru exhales a long line of smoke. He tips his head back until it thunks against the wall. “Enthusiastic.”

Sasuke slits a sideways look at him. He’s surprised they got together, mostly because he thought Kiba was straight, also because he thought Shikamaru might settle for someone quieter, though — Sasuke’s mind goes straight to Naruto — and thinks: maybe I was wrong . “I know what you mean,” Sasuke says. 

Shikamaru laughs through his nose. The two of them likely took the most roundabout way to meet up with each other: Shikamaru having slunk out of the restaurant, Sasuke having dropped Naruto off to the party a good block and a half away so he wouldn’t have to deal with the rest of the Konoha Twelve. “How is it?” he asks, when he really means: how are you holding up in the face of never-ending devotion? “The two of you.” 

Sasuke flicks through his many, many years being on the receiving end of Naruto’s eardrum-shattering enthusiasm, the hardheaded determination that seems to pour from every follicle of his body. “It’s...going,” he lifts a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. Sasuke doesn’t mean to be cryptic; he just doesn’t know how to put it into words— whatever it is between them. He flicks ash from the end of his cigarette. “You?”

Shikamaru sighs. “The sex is great,” he admits, in the same drawl he’s sported since pre-genin. His transparency doesn’t surprise Sasuke as much as it should. Shikamaru has greater secrets to be keeping that what Kiba does with his dick in bed. “But I can’t seem to find the goddamn off switch the rest of the time.” 

Sasuke hums, non-committal. “You get used to it after a while.” 

Shikamaru grunts, thumbing at his eyebrow. “It’s been eight years,” he says. “I’ll get used to it when I’m dead.” 

The two of them stand around for a while after, even when the conversation’s dried up and Shikamaru does nothing but offer Sasuke a second, third cigarette. The day’s been trying for them both, and it’s better they skulk around in an alleyway together rather than dampen the celebration inside anyway. 

Sasuke doesn’t quite have Shikamaru’s trust now, but he’s never had it in the past either, and as long as the Nara’s far-reaching swath of contacts doesn’t find Sasuke poking his head into anything suspicious, Sasuke suspects that maintaining their working relationship won’t be an issue in the future.

There’s only a tie of operative respect that keeps the two of them from parting ways completely; that, and the fact that Sasuke brings Shikamaru intel on occasion, things that he can’t very well bring to the Hokage’s attention. Red tape is a bitch and a half to work around, and Shikamaru understands that sometimes things need to be taken care of by blade instead of diplomacy.

Sasuke will never tell Naruto about the things he’s done to keep Konoha safe. His allegiance is skewed to the point of ignorance, and he fights for this boy alone. If Kusunagi’s blade is all Naruto needs to keep on, then Sasuke is willing to do just about anything for him.

Sasuke drops the last stub of his cigarette to the ground, and crushes it underfoot. It dampens with a hiss, smoking as Shikamaru does the same. Sasuke turns on his heel to make his way back uptown to Naruto’s apartment, but Shikamaru calls: “Uchiha,” and he freezes mid-step.

“What?” he says, turning back to him.

Shikamaru inclines his head. “You should join,” he says. 

Sasuke scoffs. “You fucking dumb or what, Nara?” he says. “Nobody wants me there.” 

“Naruto does,” Shikamaru points out mildly.

“I’ll see him later.” 

Shikamaru looks at Sasuke for a long moment. “You should come,” he repeats. 

Sasuke considers him for the length of one breath, two. Shikamaru doesn’t say anything else, and watches him evenly.

Sasuke goes.

☾    ❍    ☽ 

To the others’ credit, nobody freezes up when he pushes his way into the restaurant after Shikamaru. Apparently his word goes around here, and there’s only a moment of tension when Sasuke can’t find a place to sit (the table is so goddamn small, chairs crammed together, no elbow room to begin with), but Naruto shifts aside for him and beams up at Sasuke like the day he’d come to Naruto’s apartment with his meager possessions and asked if he could stay.

Sasuke isn’t hungry, and he’s not willing to fight both Choji and Kiba for scraps, so he sits back in his chair and watches the others fight over each other in the dim of the restaurant. He’s sitting so close to Naruto that Naruto is practically in his lap, Sasuke trying to keep a steady distance between them but failing every time Naruto puts a hand on his thigh, turns a shoulder against his chest to put food in his mouth or something equally as asinine. 

“I’m fine, Uzumaki,” Sasuke sighs, for the umpteenth time that night. Naruto doesn’t believe him. His cheeks are pink from the alcohol and the rising heat off the grill, and Sasuke knows that once Naruto’s put two, maybe three, more shots in his body, he won’t be able to stop whatever comes next; regular Naruto is an armful of punches and kicks, drunk Naruto is regular Naruto but twice as violent. So when Naruto’s gone and claimed Sasuke’s lap as his, Sasuke sits back and lets him have it. 

He ends up being used as Naruto’s coat hanger a minute later, Sasuke watching Naruto, with all the drunken bravado he and Kiba have stirred up between them (Ino’s about to join, which is a prospect twice as terrifying as any combination of the Konoha Twelve), as he strips himself of jacket, shirt, and vest, leaving him in nothing but a pair of horrendously orange pants and the thick line of his boxers slipping loose. 

Naruto now is just as beautiful as Naruto elsewhere. Sasuke finds that he’s staring, but can’t seem to drag his eyes away: the deep line of his collarbones, his bright eyes, his sweet mouth. He’s no longer the kid that Sasuke had left behind when he first deserted Konoha; Sasuke can feel the solid weight of him when they’re pressed up this close. Naruto is slender, still, but there’s power in his arms that casts shadows over his skin and wrist, the way his shoulders have broadened, the scars that Kurama refused to heal tracing its way out from the collar of his shirt.

Sasuke runs his fingers across the deepest one — a jagged, pockmarked thing. The scar has deepened to a reddish-brown, not entirely out of place against the tan Naruto’s picked up running so many missions, but it still makes Sasuke frown being reminded that Naruto isn’t as invincible as he pretends to be.

Naruto shivers. “Having fun there, Uchiha?” he says, turning halfway in Sasuke’s lap. His eyes are bright when he looks down at him, and Sasuke resigns himself to a long tirade of verbal abuse, but, surprisingly, all Naruto does is press lips against Sasuke’s temple, one hand pushing the hair on his forehead up and back. Sasuke lets the kiss tip his head to one side, but doesn’t resist much further, content enough to slouch in the corner of the booth and keep close.

Sasuke hums a reply, and shifts under Naruto’s weight. When he turns back for more food, the collar of his shirt falls open again: enough to expose the scar and let Sasuke close his lips around the overheated skin, a chaste, dry-lipped kiss. Naruto shivers, squirming a little, but he doesn’t say anything about it: just keeps talking with Tenten— something about the last mission they’d ran together.

At some point, Sasuke picks Naruto up, setting him aside to slide out of the booth with an excuse of needing to use the bathroom. Naruto knows he doesn’t actually, but Sasuke has a notoriously terrible track record when it comes to dealing with people, so he just squeezes his hand in passing and watches him leave. His disappears with starting ease into the crowd, Naruto caught off guard when the group turns on him to gossip, falling on him like vultures circling a kill. 

“Holy shit—” 

“What the fuck was that, Uzumaki?” Kiba shouts, already six shots in and losing coherency quick than Shikamaru can reign him in.

Lee offers Naruto a beaming smile. His teeth glitter under the overhead lights. “I’m glad you have made amends with him,” he says. “It appears that you have softened his heart, Naruto.” 

“It’s so weird to see him smile,” Ino agrees.

“Oh yeah,” Sakura grins from across the table, all teeth. She’s drunk enough to gossip, having challenged both Choji and Lee to a drinking contest. (She won. Sakura always wins). “They got—” hiccup “Married last week.”

“What?! ”

Naruto winces. He tries to snatch his hand back before the others can mention the ring, but Kiba moves faster, mouth slack as he brings Naruto’s hand up to the light: “Uchiha got him a motherfucking ring.”

The group clambers over each other to peer at his finger, then his face, then back to his finger, the conversation reduced to speculative mutters and the occasional oh shit as Sakura grabs Naruto’s wrist and turns his hand over and then back again. 

“When did this happen?” Hinata asks, elbowing Kiba aside. She smiles up at Naruto, eyes crinkling. “Congrats.” 

Naruto slides down the back of his seat. “Earlier,” he mumbles, feeling his face go red. “He was—” Naruto makes an aborted gesture with his right hand, embarrassed when everyone turns to him, expectant. “You know,” he deflates. 

Tenten pushes Lee’s face away and says. “It looks good on you,” she says, raising a pointed eyebrow at the others. They fall back with muttered apologies, and Naruto slides a wobbling grin at her. “He loves you or what?”

Naruto freezes. “Wha?” he croaks, the question having caught him off guard.

“You love him,” Shino points out mildly. “That much is clear.”

“No, yeah,” Naruto says, shoving his hand into his lap. “I know.” 

It’s just that he’s never heard Sasuke say the words out loud. It’s just that whatever it is between them, Naruto can’t describe it in a way they’ll understand. When Sasuke pushes his way back to the table smelling like Konoha nightlife and the cold outside, Naruto shoots to his feet to meet him halfway.

Sasuke gives him a weird look. “Everything okay?” 

Naruto grabs his hand. “Fine,” he snaps. Sasuke looks down at their hands, then back up to his face. He’s starting to look concerned now, eyebrows drawn together as Naruto parades them back to the table and sits down with a glare.

“What was that hissy fit about earlier?” Sasuke asks, when it’s nobody but them, clothes stinking of yakiniku, the only source of light the lamppost, hastily built, on the street beside them. He reaches up hesitantly to touch Naruto’s face, as if checking to see if he’s been hurt. “Did something happen?” 

“Nothing happened,” Naruto mutters, fisting his hands in the front of Sasuke’s jacket. He can’t look him in the eye, and his head hangs.

Sasuke doesn’t reply, except to tip Naruto’s face up with a finger under his chin. His eyes are the same unlit black, the hollows of his eyes deep with shadow. “Are you worried about me?” he asks, bringing their faces so close Naruto can feel Sasuke’s breath on his lips.

Naruto tightens his fingers in Sasuke’s jacket. “I’m always worried about you, bastard.”

“You shouldn’t be,” he says. 

Naruto scoffs, but the sound comes out waterlogged. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he says, slapping weakly at Sasuke’s chest. 

Sasuke hums, which is as good of a concession as it gets for him. Naruto dips low to hide his face in Sasuke’s neck. 

“I just got you back,” Naruto says, voice strained. He chokes on the words, chokes on his next breath, feels Sasuke wrap an arm around his waist. “And they— and they—”

“Hey,” he murmurs, uncharacteristically gentle. “But you got me back.”

Naruto is quiet for a long time. Then he lifts his head from Sasuke’s shoulder, tear-streaked and upset. “Yeah?” he asks. Do I really?  

Sasuke looks back at him. “Yeah,” he says. You do.

Naruto reaches out, then, for the ring he knows that Sasuke wears around his neck. He feels his own shudder and rock against the ragged metal of Uchiha Mikoto’s wedding band, the one that Sasuke had slipped from his mother’s finger the days after he watched Itachi murder his clan. 

“In sickness and in health,” Naruto whispers, the words coming abrupt in the silence between them. “And until death do us part.” 

Sasuke studies him for a long time, fingers coming up to wrap lightly around Naruto’s wrist. But, “Death doesn’t know my name,” he says. The Sharingan refuses to die no matter how badly it is bled: that is its greatest sickness. He confesses now. “I’m done walking away,” Sasuke admits, the words coming out in fits and starts.

“And you will stay?”

Sasuke’s eyes close. His shoulders rise with a breath, and then another. “Yes,” he says quietly. "For you," he says. "I will stay."