Heartaches, High Stakes and Monday Morning Blues

A/N: Well, it's been a while since I said hello to this fandom. I haven't followed anything Naruto in years, but I recently found myself looking through my old fics and here we are.

This is a rough reincarnation of an old fic of mine, also listed here as Paper Flowers. I've had fond feelings for that story ever since I wrote it, but when I reread it I contracted a terrible urge to write it again, this time with a bit more depth. So here it is. Seven years later, the all new retelling of Sakura's dread and insecurities. Now with all new grown-up vision!

Obviously you don't have to have read Paper Flowers to read this - this effectively replaces that version for me, and stands on its own.

Enjoy.

[General disclaimer: I own nothing but the words. Thanks to Kishimoto for the loan of his characters, even though I wouldn't trust him with them for all the kunai in shinobi-land.]

Oh. Naruto doesn't know.

That was my first thought when I realised Sasuke was gay. I mean, my first coherent thought. There was a whole lot of other stuff happening in my head at the same time, but that was the bit that formed up into something intelligible before the rest.

Naruto didn't know, that was crystal clear. I was fairly confident that just about nobody knew, but if Naruto had known then he wouldn't have been able to keep it secret, so I could be certain about him.

The next thought was: How do I tell him?

Then reality crashed in and I had to accept that it wasn't my place to say anything. Even if it had been, I had no proof. Talking about it would do nothing good.

It's hard to explain why I was so instantly and utterly certain of it. It was one of those lightning-bolt moments, with all of our weird social club together in the restaurant for Hinata's birthday, everyone talking loudly, arguing over the drinks, preemptively divvying up money for the next foray to the bar, the slurping of straws coming from where Chouji and Naruto and Ino were having a competition over downing their cocktails in the most annoying way possible, the sound of Kiba getting into a row with the poor concierge over his dog barking in the courtyard... It was chaos, like always with our friends, and I found myself looking at Sasuke, the one sanctuary of stillness amidst it all. After a moment, maybe feeling my gaze, he turned his head and looked back at me, and we sat like that, just staring owlishly at each other, for some time.

That was when I worked it out. Ever since I'd met Sasuke I'd liked him, for better and for worse, though he'd never seemed to offer me the same courtesy. My adolescent years had been full of painful crushes, but the one on him had been the worst and the most long-lasting. Well into my teens I'd found him fascinating, perhaps in the way that you do when you're a bit of a self-destructive emotional masochist, but there was just so much about him to unpack and wonder about.

And there it was. The answer to all the big questions, the reason I'd always had to assume he was just an ice-man, and why his figure in my life had always been so strange and yet so constant. The answer that had been staring me in the face for half my life, and there and then was sitting right beside me with his arm around my waist, snorting a horrifying mixture of liqueurs and fruit juice onto the table cloth, permanently dishevelled and embarrassing to be around and yet so passionately in love with life and the world that you forgot all about that and got swept up in his enthusiasm-

Sasuke was in love with Naruto, too.

My body shook with the reverberations of Naruto's laughter and he let go of me long enough to throw a bread roll at Shikamaru's head. The moment's spell broke as I moved, and Sasuke turned away again. The earth remembered to spin, and I remembered to breathe. But life as I knew it was suddenly changed.

I glanced around, trying to make sense of it all. Looking at my friends, I found myself wishing to be anywhere else, somewhere quiet and alone where I could think. Everything was new, and I had no idea what to do with my own thoughts. I didn't get my wish, of course, but objectively speaking I think I had a nice evening all the same.

All that was years ago now. I wish I could say that I've come to terms with my little epiphany, but that wouldn't really be true. If anything, I've gotten more messed up over it.

Naruto still hasn't got a clue, I'm almost certain of it. And that's what scares me so much. He doesn't realise how Sasuke feels about him, and because of that he can't see the games that Sasuke plays with my head.

I must sound totally paranoid. It's probably important to add that I'm no longer just working on guesses - I know for a fact that my suspicion was correct. I actually asked Sasuke once if he was gay, and he gave me this strange look and then smiled - which he never does, I might add, so that was terrifying enough - and said yes. I babbled something or other, I can't really remember now, just trying to make it clear that I wasn't passing judgment and that I wouldn't tell anyone or out him or anything like that, but he just kept smiling at me very faintly until I lost my voice. I may not remember the words, but I sure as hell remember the way his eyes seemed to be burning a hole in my skull.

I should have asked him the other question then, to get everything out in the open, but I was too confused and too scared to say 'do you love Naruto?' to that blank, creepily smiling face.

It's hard to put into words just how much I love Naruto. I want so badly for things to work out with him this time that it's probably not good for my mental health. We've been friends for most of my life, and we've dated on and off for nearly two decades - I've made my share of bad decisions and had more than my quota of crappy boyfriends scattered in among those years, but Naruto's always there when I finish screwing up each time, just as sturdy and smiley as when we were nine years old and he pulled my pigtail and asked shyly if I'd be his girl.

Whenever I come back to him, he's still warm and still with open arms. I don't deserve him, not even a fraction, but he seems to think it doesn't matter. The last time was five years ago, and I'm very relieved to say I haven't fucked it up any more since then. Even when I wasn't thinking straight and was off trying out what it might be like with other people, I'd still find my way back to his flat sometimes and cry on his shoulder over whichever asshole or idiot I'd shacked up with at the time, and every time he'd welcome me in without a hint of resentment or judgement or suspicion. Any and all of those things would have been righteous and deserved, but Naruto doesn't work like that. He's like this big, soft, golden ball of light and he will always share that with the people he loves, no matter what.

After I'd worked it out, though, every time I went away and came back I'd be waiting to see that light shut off. I'd always slink back there, head down and tail between legs, wondering if the inevitable had happened yet and I would find Sasuke had moved in and taken my place.

'My' place. Like I have some right to be here at all. But you get the picture.

I'd be lying if I tried to blame Sasuke entirely for why I kept leaving, but in a way it's not entirely inaccurate either. We were all probably less than twenty-one when I did my guesswork, so I had a good few years of making a mess to get through after that. So many times I remember lying in bed at night, with Naruto snoring gently in the tangle of bedclothes beside me, while I stared at the ceiling in the dark and wondered when he would work it out for himself and leave me.

It's stupid of me, I know, but I can never stop myself from feeling like if he knew, he'd be with Sasuke in a heartbeat. I haven't got any evidence to support that - Naruto's never even glanced at a guy like that in the whole time I've known him, which is most of our lives - but it's this nagging sensation in my gut that's impossible for me to get rid of completely. He loves Sasuke so much that in my head the lines get very, scarily blurred.

Maybe your average straight guy would laugh at me for thinking of it that way. Perhaps it's totally ridiculous to imagine that a nominally straight man might stop caring about gender or physical sex after a certain threshold of affection. I've never seen any indication that Naruto is bisexual. But that look in Sasuke's eye, that realisation that he was so, so in love with my Naruto, it tore my guts out and speared me to the wall. It still terrifies me.

Naruto and Sasuke have been friends for longer than I've known either of them. We were all at school together, the whole group of us who still see each other almost every week like the sad excuse for grown-ups that we are, but Naruto and Sasuke joined us later than everyone else. They were foster kids, and they were both placed with the Sannins, this rich business family in the area.

As soon as they started school there was this weird hierarchy that built up around them, with Naruto at the bottom and Sasuke at the top, and for years we all bought into that for some reason. I've never totally understood why it happened, because neither of them seemed to have anything to do with it and Sasuke certainly wasn't the more likeable of the two. Maybe it was just Naruto's puppydog-like enthusiasm for the world that made everyone think he was uncool, but for whatever reason he was the class joke for longer than I like to recall. Still, even while us jerks were picking on him and raining unwanted worship on Sasuke, Sasuke and Naruto quietly stuck together. They walked together to and from school every day, ate lunch together hidden away in some hideout that changed constantly, and chose desks next to one another in every class they shared. It was weird to the rest of us, partly because of our stupid biases and partly because they never seemed to really like each other or talk together that much. But they watched each other's backs.

It was only once we all started to get a little older that the dynamic changed. For my part, once we hit puberty and I started thinking about boys, my first reaction was to engage in tectonic-level crushing on Sasuke; my second was to abruptly realise at about the age of eleven that Naruto had suddenly sprouted from a grubby child into an extremely attractive young man, and that he was still asking me to be his girlfriend. And I wasn't the only one to notice the change. In the next two or three years, everyone's relationships altered, and the turn-tables shifted around to create a new in-crowd, with Naruto - charming, friendly, always happy Naruto - right at the centre.

I suppose while I was busy dating and then dumping Naruto repeatedly, I was too busy with my own teenage self-obsessions to notice Sasuke's constant presence and the reasons for his tangibly growing hatred towards me.

And that's the hard part, for all I whine and whimper about it: The reason he scares me is that I can't deny it. He hates me and thinks I'm a terrible person who's completely wrong for Naruto, and I think he's right. It's only Naruto who seems to disagree. Of course I'm still trying and still accepting what I'm given of Naruto's love, but if I had enough self-restraint and common decency, I'd take Sasuke's advice and walk away. I'd leave Naruto well enough alone, where he'd be safe from the possibility of more years and years of pain caused by me.

But how do you make yourself walk away once you've realised that an amazing human being like Naruto has seemingly unlimited supplies of unconditional love for you? How can you make yourself admit that since you don't deserve it, you should go and never come back?

If there's such a thing as a perfect person, subjective though it will always be, then Naruto would be mine. He's a being of pure energy and laughter, a big fluffy animal who just wants to be cuddled and to share his happiness with you. There's no one sweeter, no one more thoughtful. People like my mother don't always believe that - I mean, he does come across as flakey sometimes, it's true - but when he cares about something, he's as single-minded as a brick. In all the time we've been together, he's never once missed a date, or a birthday, or an anniversary, or anything else that mattered - even though he's perpetually late for everything else, forgets doctor's appointments and meals with friends and never knows what day of the damn week it is. It's like some mystical power keeps on time-travelling him into just the right moment to impress me, but for everything else he's on his own.

Another thing no one expects from him is his weird talent for gift-giving. I still have the friendship bracelet he made for me for my sixteenth birthday, although it's worn through now - he made Ino teach him how to make it, knotting and undoing it again and again until he was satisfied. I'm not big on special occasions, and he's never swamped me in presents, but every now and then he'll pull something out of his sleeve that I wasn't expecting and it'll just take my breath away.

For my twenty-first he hustled me into his cronky old car, blindfolded me and drove us for hours into the night, teasing me and singing along to Frank Sinatra on his ancient cassette player until we stopped in the pitch dark. He carried me on his back, still blind and a mixture of thrilled and terrified, into a mysterious building, and when he took off the blindfold I realised he'd taken me all the way to the Sannins' holiday house in the mountains. We stayed there for days, just the two of us, swimming in the river and climbing the hills and playing Scrabble badly and staying in bed for hours and hours. I'd never been so happy for so long without a break. It was so simple and yet so perfect. The house wasn't all that fancy, just a little fishing hut really, but it was so cosy and homely that I would have stayed there forever if I could.

When we got back, I was on a high. We got teased mercilessly by our friends when we got back to uni, and there was a lot of debate on just how much sex we must have had while we were on our romantic retreat. But the thing that shattered my fantasies was much quieter. All Sasuke had to do was nod at my description of how amazing the hut had been and say, 'Yes, we used to go there every summer'.

Even though I'd known from Naruto that it had been their family holiday spot, some kind of illusion in my head had made me forget who else that included. The thought of them there all through their teens suddenly took the magic out of it, turned my memories of it strange and off-kilter. It stopped being our special place and I realised, meeting Sasuke's gaze over the lunch table, that he must be feeling the same way: Naruto had taken me, his hateful girlfriend who wasn't good enough for him and was only ruining his life, to their childhood sanctuary, the place that they had shared as family with no one else. The thought of that dichotomy of perspective made me feel cold and confused.

That's one of the things that I still find hard to handle: The way Sasuke's presence is always there when I'm with Naruto, even when Sasuke himself is miles away.

I'm sitting in Naruto's apartment, at his kitchen table. It's early, just before dawn, and the streetlights are making an eerie orange glow on the mist outside the window. Naruto is already out running, and the flat is quiet and empty. But I don't feel like I'm alone. It's like I'm being stared at from every corner, from every surface in the room, and it's the same all over the house. No matter how long I've been with Naruto, even though he's lived here for nearly fifteen years, it still doesn't feel like home to me.

I asked Naruto once if he saw Sasuke as his brother. He laughed at that and wrinkled his nose and said no, that just sounded weird to him. They were more than that, he said, although he couldn't really elaborate - it was just more. Brothers sounded like a nice idea to him, but he'd always been very aware of the fact that his family was chosen, not born. And while brothers had love built in, even the ones who didn't like each other very much, he and Sasuke had learned and earned their relationship, through time and effort and mutual respect. It had been hard work to begin with, and he'd never imagined they could even be friends when they'd first met, but as time went on they'd found out how to care about each other, and they'd got to know each other so well that...

He couldn't explain any further. He left me hanging like that, only able to gesture abstractly at me and shrug. 'He's more like a piece of me than a friend,' he said. 'I dunno if I'd know how to be me without Sasuke around.'

The words hung in the air and soaked into the walls like a perfume, flavouring every breath I took in that kitchen every day after that. Whenever I went into the room it hit me like a fist and I would struggle to keep my composure. Naruto can't be Naruto without Sasuke, the room reminded me, in the dripping of the tap and the humming of the fridge and the creaking of the floorboards. Sasuke is a piece of Naruto, so Naruto must be a piece of Sasuke, too. How can you have one without the other? And if they complete each other, where do you fit in?

I know I'm a mess, and all my paranoia and my rambling is probably doing more harm to this relationship of ours than Sasuke ever could. I know I should talk to my therapist about it, and I'd probably get some breathing exercises and some stock phrases about trust and a stern reminder about using communication with my partner to get past these things. If I sound flippant, that's not exactly my intention, but... I guess it's just a hard thing to acknowledge. If I tell somebody what's going on inside my head, it makes it seem so much more real. When it's just me, wrapped up in my messy thoughts, I can tell myself I'm a crazy person and that I need to sort myself out and then I can go back to pretending there's nothing wrong.

The other problem is that if I started that conversation with her, I know my therapist would ask a lot more difficult questions. For example, it wouldn't be unreasonable of her to ask why, if I'm so in love with Naruto, I kept walking out on him and cheating on him with random fuckwads for so many years. That is a fair question, which I'm sure Sasuke has wanted to ask me on more than one occasion (although maybe he wouldn't have bothered to ask, I know he'd probably have preferred to just punch me). Unfortunately I guess the answer would have to be that there is no good reason, only a bunch of inadequate ones that can never actually absolve me. If it all comes down to psychology, I guess that's her job, but it sure as hell scares the shit out of me.

Maybe I'll never be able to explain it, anyway. After Naruto and I had gone on our first date - we were about thirteen at the time, I think, and it was suitably dorky and adorable in retrospect - I remember sitting on my bed and cuddling my pillow to my chest, knees tucked up to my chin, just thinking for hours into the night. It scared me even then. In some way that my thirteen-year-old brain could barely process, I think I was aware of this thing about Naruto - that his loyalty and his commitment and his stubbornness meant that once he'd set his mind to something, or someone, then that thing was going to remain his passion for the rest of his life. I'd been a Disney child growing up, buying into all of the true love fantasies, but I think those hours I spent sitting on my bed in the hours after I'd kissed him that first time, that was when I finally realised what it might mean in real life.

Most people don't do 'true love', in the sense that I think of, that sort of eternal permanence of affection, because we're just not really wired that way and besides that it's really hard work and it's impossible to tell if it's ever going to pay off. The thing my pubescent brain was trying to fit itself around that night was the realisation that Naruto, by some freakish accident of nature or maybe by personal choice, was the exception to the rule. He does experience true love, because once he starts to care about someone he can't stop. His feelings don't ever seem to diminish or fade away, they just stay constant or get bigger. The longer he loves you, the less it's going to be possible for him to stop.

Of course I didn't know that then, not in so many words, but I remember feeling the corners of it, just the outline of the idea. I'd kissed him on the porch when he'd walked me home, mostly because all my ideas of proper dates included that detail, and as I did it, giving my first kiss to this gangly golden-headed boy with his freckled honey skin and his beetroot blush, I felt a kind of gravity hit me that I hadn't expected. For all my ideas of romantic cliché, I'd never really assigned much meaning to the 'first kiss' phenomenon, and after further experience I can safely say that the kiss itself was pretty unremarkable for a first try, but something about him gave it a mental weight of something approximating a thousand tons.

When I pulled back and tried to look calm and collected I made the wonderful mistake of looking into his eyes, and they were so huge with amazement and so blue you could drown in them. I remember feeling so out of my depth and realising even in the moment that what had been a kind of playful theatre for me, ticking all the boxes of what you were supposed to do on a first date, had suddenly turned into something deadly serious. Before I'd really had a chance to learn what being in love meant, I found myself the subject of that sensation for a boy I'd never really noticed I could care for. Naruto was In Love with me, in the capital-lettered, full on emotional roller-coaster sort of way that I'd sort of expected to miss out on because I'd figured it didn't really happen outside of movies.

That's why I went to school the next day, told Naruto I was breaking up with him and went and found myself a new boyfriend within the space of a couple of hours. I can't stand remembering it now, and it makes me feel like kind of a monster, but I still understand it, too. The thing that was happening inside me over Naruto, and that I could see was happening in him even faster and more strongly, was so alien and so terrifying and so much higher up the scale than I'd expected that at the time it felt like the only solution was to take the quickest route out of the emotional building, even if that involved jumping out of the fifth floor window. I was evacuating before I could get any deeper down the rabbit hole, and in my somewhat primitive pre-teen way I think I genuinely knew that. It was self-protection, albeit misguided. I jumped ship, never expecting to look back.

So it confused the hell out of me when, less than a year later, I found myself sliding steadily back down the slippery slope towards him again. It was the start of over ten years of the same game, painful and stupid and messy all along, but so hard for me to get myself out of.

Very few of our friends ever really commented on our weird, on-again-off-again relationship, at least to me, and for that I'm eternally grateful. It was hard enough to handle without the running commentary, and having it all picked apart in real time would have made it a million times worse. I'm sure there was something of a riff track going on behind the scenes, because our group are a bunch of old grandmothers when it comes to gossip, but they were uncharacteristically restrained when we were actually present.

I'm not proud of it. I know a lot of people would probably call me a lot of nasty names for it, and honestly they wouldn't be wrong. It's really hard to think about the way I treated Naruto for all those years. But for Naruto that's all in the past, apparently forgotten about. In some ways I think it's my guilt about it that's the main problem now, my new method of screwing things up. That's certainly why I'm so scared whenever I hear Naruto say Sasuke's name.

The thing you have to understand about Naruto, the thing that isn't really clear at first glance, is that while he has the biggest heart in the universe and he'll love and befriend just about anyone he meets, the people he trusts are an entirely different matter. He's an incredibly guarded person, but because he wears his heart on his sleeve people don't often realise it. Underneath the sunshine and the gleeful misbehaviour there's this little hidden core that is dark, suspicious and wary of the world, because it's been hurt so many times it knows to keep itself protected.

That scares me because of how I began to realise it myself. It came a lot later than the professions of love and the complicated early relationship flip-flopping. It wasn't until we were eighteen or nineteen that I finally began to find out about this secret piece of Naruto's personality, the way he has this introverted little soul, hiding like a tiny mouse inside the circus tent of his personality.

It came to me one day when we were watching TV together on the couch, and I noticed his reflection in the dark patches of the screen. He was wearing this tiny frown that I realised had nothing to do with the show we were watching. He was lost in thought, distracted, far distant in his head; when I asked him about it he laughed it off and said he'd been trying to work out some plot point, but after I tried to engage with the point in question, I noticed that he hadn't thought about it at all, and it struck me that he'd just lied to me. He had been somewhere else completely, thinking about something he didn't want to share. It shocked me, not because I felt I had some innate right to his inner musings but because it had never crossed my mind that he wouldn't share them with me anyway. It showed me that there was some gap in what I knew about him, and as time went on that gap only seemed to grow.

The worst part for my self-esteem was when I realised that it wasn't that he was just secretive about those personal thoughts, it was just that he only shared them with Sasuke, nobody else.

I remember one day when I let myself into his flat, hoping to surprise him with lunch, and found that he wasn't alone. I heard voices, so I crept down the hallway and peeked around the corner, and they were standing in the kitchen together, both leaning against the worktop and staring into space, only inches apart. Naruto was talking quietly, and Sasuke just listened. After a few moments I realised he was talking about his parents, the family he'd never known, a topic I'd never even heard him mention before. I knew instantly that I was a trespasser there, that I had no right to invade their conversation, and I crept back to the door and snuck out again. Sitting in the car, with the bundle of food on the seat beside me, I rested my head on the steering wheel and wondered about the conflict between my shameful, selfish hurt at not being important enough for him to talk to about those things, and the deep, aching sadness I felt for him being so adrift and without anyone but Sasuke to really understand him.

Since then he has talked to me about that kind of stuff, but because of that one stupid day when I heard what I shouldn't have, I've never been able to get rid of the sensation that I'm the second choice; that he trusts Sasuke more, is closer to him, that their relationship is more important than ours. When it comes to the things that really matter, Sasuke is the one he will still run to. That shouldn't matter to me, but it does.

And when it's not the important things that scare me, it's the petty ones that drive me mad. Who does Naruto share food with? No one but me - and Sasuke. Who sleeps in his bed when friends stay over? Me - and Sasuke. Half the photos on the walls in his flat are of me - but more than half have Sasuke in them, hiding behind a book or scowling in the background but eternally vigilant, making his presence felt. And no matter how hard I tried to organise Naruto's kitchen after he moved in, to make sense of his cutlery drawer and to arrange his spices alphabetically, they would always return to their chaotic default state - until one weekend when I came around and found that Sasuke had bought a spice-rack and labelled jars, and had found a system for all the utensils, and by some miracle everything stayed that way forever after.

I virtually live with Naruto these days, and Sasuke avoids the place like the plague whenever I'm around. But sometimes when I come back after a few days at my place I notice that things have subtly changed, always in a Sasuke way. Pictures that have been hanging wonky on the wall for months or years because their strings are off-centre will suddenly appear straight and neat in their places; a chipped patch of paintwork in the hall will mysteriously disappear in the space of a few days and I'll find a recently used pot of paint in the hall cupboard; all the chipped mugs in the cabinet will mysteriously vanish sometime and be replaced with smart new ones. In any other situation it'd be like having a house-elf magically fixing all the problems that the absentminded human forgets to sort out, but it makes me feel like I'm being constantly watched because I know for a fact that it's not Naruto who's asking for help, it's Sasuke silently deciding to take charge on his own. He solves problems without Naruto even noticing they were there in the first place, and somehow that unnerves me.

Then there's the times I find Sasuke's clothes in among Naruto's washing. That always scares me shitless.

There's this little square mirror in Naruto's kitchen. It's quite high up, and I've never asked why it's there, but it's always struck me as a little strange. Still, he tends to stick notes to himself all over it, and photos and things tucked into the frame. Sometimes it's just a shopping list or a memo about phoning the plumber, sometimes it's a picture of he and I out somewhere, or sometimes it's a couple of lines from some rhyme or pop-song that caught his fancy. I always thought it was pretty sweet.

Then one day I realised that Sasuke leaves things there too. I remember peering at a little scrap of paper, trying to read the tiny scrawl, and realising that it was his handwriting; it was in German, a class they both took in school. I have no idea what it said, probably something completely innocuous, but it put me on edge, made me wonder why it was in a language that I knew Sasuke knew I wouldn't understand if I happened upon it. After that I noticed the occasional photo or little drawing appear there that were clearly from him as well. Once there was a short poem, just a few bars about life in the city, and it stayed there in pride of place forever, right next to the photo of us that Naruto took when I fell asleep on his shoulder in the park.

I know I'm nuts, and all this stuff probably makes me sound more and more unstable. The more I overthink and worry the worse our relationship will be, I swear I know that, but it doesn't help to make my brain stop running like a hamster on a wheel.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night panicking because I've dreamed about Sasuke laughing and taking Naruto away from me. My therapist would have a field day with that one, believe me.

They've kissed, too. Did I mention that already? I remember enough of our stupid teenage antics to fill a whole embarrassing book, but that one is all bright and shiny in my memory. We were all about seventeen I think, the whole group of our friends staying over at the Sannins' place for the weekend while the grown ups were away. The inevitable vapid party games started after drunk o'clock, and spin the bottle seemed like a great idea once we'd gone through several buckets of beer between us. There was a lot of hilarity, lots of shrieking and complaining as everyone ended up kissing people they did or didn't want to, but Naruto was one of the drunkest and the most game for anything. He'd made Kiba scream by applying tongue, Ino had tapped out in horror at the threat of having to touch Lee, and there had been a great deal of cat-calling when I'd kissed Hinata, when Naruto's turn came around again and he got Sasuke. All sorts of mockery ensued, and Naruto, in his usual style of enthusiasm for any task, flung himself into Sasuke's arms and made out with him with embarrassing vigour. Even before I'd worked out Sasuke's feelings, seeing my ostensibly straight boyfriend snogging my old crush with such gusto was rather a shock to the system.

In later years, with the context to back it up, I can't help recalling just how flustered and strange Sasuke looked after Naruto had moved on. And it might seem like time I forgot about it, but only a few months ago Naruto brought it up himself, laughing about the good old days and all the crap we got up to. He remembers it, and if it was anyone else you might expect a guy to pretend it had never happened, or at least show some embarrassment over making such a show of kissing another man, but he seemed more nostalgic than anything else. It was a moment of unexpected and randomised intimacy, but the memory seems to have none of the complexity to him that it might to anyone else.

And having said all that, it's hard not to wonder: Was I wrong? Did Naruto know? Has he always known? It seems slightly mad, certainly pretty arrogant, for me to assume that Naruto has been that oblivious for all these years - and given their close relationship, that Sasuke has never told him that much.

But if that was true, what does that say about that kiss? It seemed so familiar, Naruto kissed him like it was the most normal thing in the world, perhaps like he'd done it dozens of times before... If he knew Sasuke's inclinations at the time then surely he must have known Sasuke's feelings for him, and in that case, Naruto wouldn't be cold-hearted enough to taunt him with a kiss like that - unless it wasn't a taunt, but a promise. Had they done it before? Would they do it again?

I shouldn't sit here obsessing over twenty years of imagined sexual tension. I have no logical reason to believe anything of the sort. It's idiotic, it's my paranoid imagination going off the rails again, but I can't make it stop happening. I'm getting unstable. I need to calm down and I don't know how.

The tap is dripping again. Drip, drip, drip. Sasuke, Sasuke, Sasuke. He belongs here. Who are you?

Getting up, turning on the tap and letting it run loudly into the sink until the gushing sound of cold water on stainless steel seems to be pounding its way through my brain- It probably doesn't count as psychologically healthy, but it seems to help slow my breathing to a steady pace. I know this panic is ridiculous, I know everything will be fine, but this waiting, this interminable endless waiting-

The front door rattles and clatters as it opens, and I turn off the tap abruptly and close my eyes.

When he comes into the room, Naruto fills it with warmth - in the light that he turns on over the table, emptying the shadows and casting out the remnants of night; in the scent of his sweat, fresh and crisp from hard running in the cold foggy morning; in the heat of his chest against my back as he wraps himself around me and blows in my ear, laughing and teasing me, buoying me up out of the dark recesses of obsession into the sunlit gardens of his affection.

Yes, it's cheesy. What can I say? When he's not there, I sit alone in the dark and listen the tap dripping. Somehow, he's always the one who comes in and remembers to turn on the light.

After rubbing his sweat all over me and making the world glow again he makes the tea. I stay by the sink, looking at my reflection in the water left standing in the slight dip in the metal. One day I'm going to have to face the fact that it's not Sasuke I'm afraid of when it comes to losing Naruto, it's me. But for now, that seems too hard to bear. If I'm going to sit in the dark every morning and watch myself go crazy, I have to at least have someone else to blame.

I'm not losing it. Not really. I'm just scared. So scared it's hard to breathe, and thinking about just about anything else seems easier than the alternative. The thing is, this one isn't going away. I'm going to have to deal with it sometime. I have to tell him. This isn't someone else's secret, this is mine.

How do I tell him?

Honesty. Integrity. Decency. The things in him that I admire so much. Why do they seem so easy for him? They're not.

How do I tell him?

Like you always do: Open your mouth and speak.

'Naruto?'

'Yeah?'

'...I'm pregnant.'