It's been said that when one's heart finds another to match, it will sing so loudly both occupants can hear it. That a heartbeat is steady and sure, rhythmic and repetitive, until the moment it discovers another heart, one it belongs with, and then it becomes irregular, as though it has been born anew. It's also been said that should one separate coupled hearts, that they will return to their normative pulse, seemingly unchanged. That is, until such hearts meet again their counterpart, their other half, so to speak, in which they will pound with such power it becomes a burden to separate them. A physical pain, burning, reaching, grasping one's insides because separating such hearts is wrong, should not be done, and is an act directly against nature. A love that calls upon hearts so strongly will surely fight to stay together, even if they must fight their own vessel to do so.

But what, exactly, was it that caused the heart to pound so heavily?

Was it a chemical reaction in the body? Was it the surprise of seeing someone you'd hoped to never see again? Or was it the unspoken declaration of one's own heart, beating out a drum-like rhythm, trying so hard to make you understand what it was calling out for? What it needed, yearned for, so much so that it constantly called to its complement? Even if you had grown practiced in the art of ignoring it, not wanting to admit to the truths that it proclaimed. Indifference was a lifestyle, one that he was more than comfortable with, and not even the pounding of such a strong muscle would alter him to stray from his path.

Not even when it's match—the special something it had been calling out for—was but two hundred yards from it.

Uchiha Sasuke had been on his way back towards his team, of which were deeply entrenched within the bowels of Suna under the guise of weary ninjas in need of a quick respite. His mission had been a simple assassination worth a pretty penny and had taken him no time at all, but it had brought him outside Suna's walls, across the expansive desert Suna was so known to boast over, and through a dense showing of forest that continued for miles. He'd raced through the trees with no specific thought in the forefront of his mind other than to return to his team and regroup, feeling the wind rushing past him, chapping his lips and making his eyes water. The air was much drier than usual, even for Suna's boundaries. Telling of an upcoming storm, and from the haste with which it took the moisture from the air, he'd venture it was already upon them.

His senses were keen and true, and by the time he managed to breach the edge of the forest that would drop down into the desert, he found his visibility swiftly taken from him in the form of a sandstorm as bad as he'd ever seen. Sand pelted into his skin and made his flesh sting, his hand lifting to shield his eyes. From such a height it was normal to be able to overlook the entirety of the desert and even manage to see the massive gates that led into Suna, though they appeared blurred due to the heat which cast mirage like images that could very well have been genjutsu, all over the land. But the storm wasn't what surprised him so much so that he halted his incredibly paced progress atop the precipice of a cliff overlooking the expanse of the Suna desert, his burning red eyes opened wide in surprise. It wasn't even the dim sound of battle a few hundred feet away, nor the tangy scent of blood that could just barely be detected through the howling winds.

It was a pair of hauntingly familiar eyes staring up through countless layers of dense, storming sand, unblinking and resolute, a shade of blue so intensely ignited they even managed to pierce through the veil of the sandstorm that erased all other sights.

Uzumaki Naruto.

Lub-dub, lub-dub, his heart pounded, so heavily he found himself lifting a hand over it, touching fingertips to skin as if there was some way to stop it. But still he stared down into those tenacious sapphire eyes, unmoving even in the midst of battle, and still his heart pounded on, calling, calling…

Lub-dub, lub-dub.