A/N: This is just my angst-y and different take on Sasuke's return. There's some NaruSaku, SasuSaku, and NaruSasu for you to enjoy, or not enjoy, if that be the case! Some things are implied and some are kind of blatant…oh yeah, and there's the f-bomb. You've been warned. Enjoy.

PLEASE READ AND REVIEW!

Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine, I swear…

Ghost

The night Sasuke crawled into bed with them was like someone had let a snake into the house. He was small, too small, and it was dark and he was broken and not the boy they had grown up with at all.

But there he was—all need without any passion or desire.

Sakura stiffened, but she couldn't say anything, could hardly move. It was like a muddled dream that might turn into a nightmare. But he had slithered into bed with them, nonetheless, and as cold as she expected him to feel, he was human and he was hot to the touch. He stared at her with empty, threatening eyes and she felt hollow there, curled under covers in the dark.

Naruto hadn't opened an eye. She could hear his shallow breathing in the tense silence as Sasuke moved in. For a moment she thought the dark-haired man was going to kill Naruto, and she sucked in a sharp breath, her heart pounding in her throat. Sasuke was leaning over the sleeping man, looking on the blond-haired's face—smooth and peaceful in sleep—as if lost in thought. And then he moved and pressed his mouth full on Naruto's. It wasn't a kiss; it was as if Sasuke intended to draw the very breath and life from Naruto's body. It was suffocation and Naruto's eyes flew open wide as Sasuke enveloped him. Then long, pale fingers were around the blond's throat, pressing and clawing. Naruto lay motionless, as if spellbound, and Sakura fought the urge to scream and tear at the dark-haired man. Why didn't Naruto throw Sasuke off? Why did he just lay there, as if accepting fate?

"Sasuke," Sakura breathed, breaking the silence. Naruto's hands were around Sasuke's forearms, Sasuke's legs straddling Naruto's torso.

"Stop it," she half-sobbed to the darkness. Naruto finally began to thrash, to fight back, and Sasuke let go suddenly, blinking in the dark.

They say you are never supposed to wake someone who is sleepwalking, and Sakura couldn't quite remember exactly why.

"Sasuke…" Sakura breathed and crawled out of the covers, naked as the day she was born, naked from where she and Naruto had made love earlier that evening. Sasuke stared at her coldly as she reached out for him. He didn't look back down at Naruto, but instead slid off of the blond-haired man with a predatory gaze at Sakura.

Sakura didn't cry out when Sasuke pushed her back against the mattress, his breath hot and close. She didn't lift her head the last few inches to kiss him—no, that would have meant she really wanted it. No, she was giving herself to him without any pretense of passion because he needed her in order to feel whole again.

But that really wasn't it at all. Tsunade had forced Naruto and Sakura to take Sasuke in, to protect him from the irate villagers who thought he should be put to death. They knew it was a bad idea, him living with them. He was harmless, really, Tsunade had explained. Sakura never asked what the Hokage had done to him to make him that way. All she knew was that he couldn't—or wouldn't—speak. He hadn't uttered a sound that she or Naruto had heard since he had shown up near the village months ago.

The elite ninjas had restrained him and dragged him off for questioning. The village was in an uproar and both Naruto and Sakura had been in shock. Had Sasuke really returned?

There was no mistaking the Uchiha heir. He was thin and dark and virtually unchanged. Sakura was barely shorter than he, and Naruto had outgrown him by a head. It seemed the ten long years since the dark-haired boy had abandoned his village were all a blurred nightmare, soaked in anger, blood, and regret.

And so, after two months of what Tsunade called "intense questioning," Sasuke was released from her custody and forced back into Sakura and Naruto's lives. It was what Naruto had promised her all along, to bring Sasuke back. But something had gone wrong; Naruto hadn't kept his promise. It wasn't supposed to be like this; this wasn't the Sasuke they remembered. There was a ghost living in their house.

Sakura told herself she let Sasuke have her the night he crawled into bed with them because he needed her—he needed human contact at its most primal. But it was a lie. He would never speak, not to her, not to Naruto. But his eyes told her that he had won, he was still in control, he was still better than Naruto.

And when he was done, she held him and he shut his eyes and she locked gazes with Naruto, lying on the other side of the bed.

Naruto, who had been watching them the entire time.

And where there had been warmth and tenderness, something hard and unyielding passed across Naruto's countenance. Sakura felt her stomach turn, as if she were going to be sick. Sasuke had already fallen asleep between them.

In the morning, Sakura left a still-sleeping Sasuke tucked in bed. Naruto was nowhere to be found as she stepped into the shower. She wanted to leave the house as soon as possible, and so she did, skipping breakfast in order to devote herself to her work down at the hospital.

She remembered how they had argued for the first few weeks Sasuke had lived with them. It was as if they were two people suddenly forced to raise a child. Everything had been unnatural, though, and it made them both tense. Sakura tried her best to cope, giving the dark-haired man soft smiles and making sure he ate and bathed. Naruto tried to make conversation with the other man, telling him random news or taunting him with childhood memories, but nothing ever worked. Sasuke remained mute but not dumb, preferring to sit near the kitchen gazing out the window when he wasn't staring at Naruto or Sakura.

They could never know what he was thinking; they could never guess. Sakura supposed she still loved him in the way that she was a woman and was supposed to love and care for everyone. And she knew Naruto still loved him, and that's why everything was so horrible and tense at first, why Naruto would slam his fists on the kitchen table in frustration when Sasuke shredded the morning paper to make origami cranes or tracked in mud from the garden or sat in the tub until the water turned cold and he was blue all over.

Sakura would never tell Naruto that she knew about his incensed visit to the Godaime after Sasuke had lived with them just two weeks; how she knew he had stormed Tsunade's office and demanded to know what she had done to Sasuke, and how he could be changed, or how he had broken down into tears and collapsed in front of her desk. Sakura still remembered how old Tsunade looked for a few days after that.

Sakura finally wept on her lunch break that day. A younger medic nin found her crying and tried to console her in broken, stuttering speech. The walk back to the house that evening seemed like a walk to her own grave. She found Sasuke lazily mending the torn sleeve of his robe with a bit of thread and a needle. He didn't even look at her when she entered the room.

Something was wrong. Naruto had not been assigned a mission, she knew, and so there was some other reason why he didn't return home. That reason was currently sitting in dingy robes at the kitchen table, poking his rice more than he was eating it. Sakura had fixed a bowl for Naruto, but now it lay untouched and cold near the sink.

At least Sakura remembered to change the sheets before crawling into bed that night.

She awoke in the middle of the night to Naruto sitting hunched-over on the edge of the bed.

"I'm sorry," he whispered harshly when she sat up and turned toward him. "I…" but his voice trailed off. She reached out to touch him, but he moved away. "No." His voice didn't falter that time. She buried her face in her pillow and sobbed open-mouthed when he left the room as quickly as he had entered.

And so her life became a little lonelier with Naruto gone so frequently. Before, he was always there, always energetic and sometimes loud. But now there was only the cold indifference of Sasuke to keep her company. Sometimes she would wake to find Naruto back home, sound asleep next to her as usual. At those times, though, she was afraid to touch him, afraid to curl in close to him lest it all be a dream. Sometimes he would be there for dinner, eyeing the dark-haired man with an expression that bordered on contempt, eating in controlled bites, his jaw set.

Sasuke still crawled into bed with her on some nights, his dingy robe falling to the floor as his thin shadow loomed above her. She could have easily overpowered him; he was so small and he no longer was allowed to train. Instead, she took his warmth in exchange for his silence, for some way to be connected to him, to show him that she needed him, even though he was broken and controlling and spiteful. Even though she felt guilt like the sharpest of pains each morning.

Then Naruto came home from a particularly long mission, and Sakura thought things were back to normal. Naruto wolfed down his dinner without a glance at Sasuke, then retreated to bed. Sakura cleaned up the kitchen and actually found him waiting for her in their bedroom; and they made love.

Two weeks, two short weeks this sense of normalcy lasted.

Then Sakura walked into the kitchen one morning and found Sasuke lying on the floor, a look of mild astonishment on his face as blood dribbled down the side of his mouth. Naruto stood above the smaller man and Sakura realized that he had struck Sasuke, struck him hard enough to make him fall and bleed. And then Naruto was leaning over, grabbing Sasuke violently by the collar of his robe and jerking him to his feet. Naruto brought the dark-haired man close and shook him roughly.

"Yell at me," Naruto seethed, "Curse me, you bastard…Anything!" He raged. "Say something, damn it! Anything…" his voice trailed off into a whisper. He was crying and he suddenly clutched Sasuke to his chest like a doll. Sasuke's face was expressionless as Naruto held him, Sakura standing transfixed in the doorway.

"Was that your idea, to have Naruto get rid of him for you?" Sakura asked Tsunade bitterly a few days after the incident in the kitchen. The older woman just smirked and gave a small exhale of laughter. Sakura felt betrayed.

"You think Naruto will kill Sasuke?" Tsunade asked her in return.

"I think he wants to," she replied honestly. The older woman didn't respond for some time, and so Sakura assumed the conversation was over.

"Can't you see that Naruto cares about him too much to kill him?" Tsunade spoke again, catching Sakura off guard.

"That's the problem," Sakura explained. "He cares too much, and it's killing them both."

"And what about you?" Tsunade asked her former apprentice. Sakura gave a small laugh.

"I'm strong." She said, and Tsunade hoped it was true.

It shouldn't have surprised her really. It shouldn't have hurt like it did, when she found them fucking on the kitchen table. She had been gone for a few days on a short mission, as the medic of the team, and she had come home earlier than expected.

A ghost lived in their house, one that was good for nothing except filling the tense quiet with cold stares and paper cranes and little flowers plucked from the garden; a ghost that liked to fuck and be fucked.

So Sakura watched in shock as the two men kissed violently and passionately, tearing at each other with lips and teeth and fingers as if they were fighting, Sasuke's pale legs looking unnaturally long hooked tightly around Naruto's waist.

Something was wrong. Something was wrong because Sasuke could never, would never speak and Naruto had promised to bring him home, yet he was here and Naruto had failed, and Naruto knew it. Everything had gotten screwed up because it was too late and Sasuke wasn't the boy they had known, wasn't really human at all. And he was forced to live with them because this was how it was meant to be; only it wasn't, it couldn't be.

And sometimes, in the dead of night when the dark-haired man would crawl into bed with them, Sakura wondered if Sasuke still had a soul, if he wasn't just a hollow shell haunting them, punishing them for caring too much; if he hadn't died long ago, killed while trying to avenge his clan or on some failed mission of Orochimaru's.

She knew all too well how cruel life was; how her one wish had been granted, twisted into something ugly and unnatural and unwanted.

Sakura was only half-listening when Tsunade tried to explain to her that Sasuke didn't have much longer, how whatever Orochimaru had done to him, it hadn't worked as planned, and Sasuke was sick; he was slowly dying. It had been nearly a year since his return and Sakura was numb. The dark-haired man who lived with her, who caused Naruto so much pain, he wasn't Sasuke. Their Sasuke had died long ago.

When they found him cold and stiff in the garden one morning, months after Tsunade had told them the news of his illness, they were a little shocked, but even more relieved. He was curled near the footpath, his dingy robe barely clinging to his emaciated frame. Sakura thought of how peaceful he looked, like a child fast asleep, and for a moment she imagined him as they boy they had once known. For a moment she felt sad that he was dead.

The funeral was a small affair, just Sakura, Naruto, and Tsunade. Kakashi made a late appearance, after it was over. They all felt more regret than sorrow, for what should have happened. But nothing could be changed. And so Sakura lit the incense in memory of the boy she had known a dozen years ago, not the mute young man who had crawled into bed with her and Naruto for whatever reason, who had disrupted the peace of her life for a little while, whose death meant nothing other than one part of their past was finally laid to rest. No, he had merely been the physical manifestation of a broken promise and of guilt, and now he was dead.

That night she wept with relief, and Naruto held her and wept too.