Disclaimer: This piece of fiction is a product of pure fantasy and is being written for no profit whatsoever. All rights to the anime/manga series "Naruto" belong to Kishimoto Masashi and Jump, not little ol' me! Boo.

Sunripe

"The Incident" occurred on lazy, hot Summer evening in mid June. Naruto was just back from a long mission, having only been home for about a day, and it was one of those rare times when he and Sasuke's down time just happened to coincide perfectly.

It had been three years since he'd made his reluctant return to his hometown, and only about a year and a half since the dark haired boy had finished his initial sentence and accepted the blonde's offer to room together for the duration of his house arrest. Since then they'd managed to get used to one another again, and slipped into a surprisingly easy companionship.

Unfortunately, Naruto had been busy with one mission after another since the end of the war, many of them of a diplomatic nature as Tsunade groomed him for the position of Hokage, and Sasuke had been sent off on one mission after another the moment his year-long house arrest had concluded. So times like these, when they had both just come off of long assignments and neither had anything lined up for a few weeks, were pretty hard to come by.

As such, the blonde had been adamant that they spend his first night back together, catching up on whatever and watching the latest in Naruto's favorite series of movies. That night had found them in the living room of their apartment – a fairly spacious if spartan affair that was a big step up from the tiny place that the blonde had spent his childhood in and the series of dank hideouts that the Uchiha had lived in during his time underground.

The evening was unrelentingly muggy, to the point where Naruto, ever a fan of being comfortable in his own home, lounged around in nothing but a pair of loose pajama pants. His dark haired counterpart had opted for a slightly more modest black tank and a pair of sweats, which he had rolled up to just below his knees. The two of them had passed the last hour chatting absently, the blonde boy still somewhat worked up after the cliffhanger conclusion of the film.

For his part, Sasuke half-ignored his roommate's incessant rambling as he idly examined a thick scroll that occupied his lap – some complicated jutsu or another, the blonde suspected. Feeling mischievous and somewhat irritated that his friend was paying him less than his full attention, Naruto decided to mess with the other boy a little bit, hoping to at least get a nice verbal spar going. He carefully sidled up to the dark haired boy and pretended to be reading over his shoulder for a moment, all the while inching his arm around the back of couch, until eventually his arm lay draped around his friend's shoulders casually.

It took a moment before Sasuke took note of how quiet his companion had suddenly gotten and the soft weight across his shoulders.

"Dobe," he began flatly, by this time used to the other boy's almost constant need for attention.

"Hm?" came the decidedly nonchalant answer, as the blonde continued to glide his eyes absently over the contents of the scroll.

"What are you doing?"

"What do you mean?" Naruto countered casually, still not looking at the increasingly annoyed Uchiha. He had gotten better at holding his expression passive at times like these over the years, but Sasuke could practically feel the tasteless amusement emanating off him.

"Arm," he deadpanned. He had actually come to tolerate and even look with affection on Naruto's playful demands for his attention by now, but toleration and facilitation were two very different things, and he had long ago decided not to encourage his friend's idiotic behavior. Unfortunately, no matter how he discouraged such antics, it didn't take.

As if to confirm this fact, the blonde raised his eyebrows in feigned surprise at the Uchiha's blatant disapproval, his eyes lighting up with barely concealed amusement.

"Oh that?" he grinned, "Just gettin' cozy with my fa~vorite buddy."

Sasuke merely stared back at him with unveiled distaste for a few moments. Ordinarily he would have easily shrugged off the other boy's playful attempt at getting a rise out of him, but today he was feeling rather adventurous. His eyes slowly lit with dark humor.

As a matter of fact, Sasuke had been thinking an inordinate amount on Naruto's foolery and his own increasingly easy acceptance of it lately. The thought that the blonde might be looking for something more from him than friendship had crossed his mind briefly from the day that the other had suggested that they room together, but at the time the Uchiha had done little more than raise an eyebrow at it and keep going. He'd felt something – some unidentifiable tension between them since the day he had met the boisterous outcast, but to even entertain the thought that that something might possibly have a romantic bent to it had exceeded his ability to cope at the time.

Now, though, he found himself questioning his own behavior even more than he did the blonde's. Sexuality was a subject he'd never really had the luxury of contemplating very much. Besides the rather unsurprising realization that he definitely preferred men some years ago, he hadn't had much call to explore the subject further than an occasional, frenzied release of tension in the shower.

But lately, Naruto's actions when they were alone were getting more and more difficult to brush off as mere idiocy, the slow, warm burn that crawled its way up from the pit of his belly more and more often during times like these getting harder and harder to ignore.

And right now was no exception. He was feeling an incredibly strong awareness of every place that Naruto's hot skin met his – it warmed the back of his neck, the top of his right shoulder practically burned, and he felt an urge building up inside him that he couldn't identify properly until suddenly he found himself turning on the blonde and leaning slowly into his personal space.

The dobe's face took on a wide-eyed expression as he registered the dark haired boy's sudden movement and reflexively tensed. He didn't move though, and instead his eyes darted from Sasuke's mouth to his eyes, as he tried to interpret the situation.

"Hey, Sa- wh...what?" he stuttered slightly. He had been expecting the Uchiha's usual withering look and a casual insult to his intelligence – certainly not...this – whatever this was.

"We were getting cozy, usuratonkachi, remember?" he murmured, surprised at the way his own tone suddenly dropped on those last three syllables. When the blonde answered his statement with a slight tilt of his head and an open mouthed expression, he could feel a somewhat sadistic amusement tickling the inside of his chest as his left hand slid up of its own accord to roughly grasp Naruto's arm at the wrist, and he pressed their bodies together until he could feel the other shinobi's warm chest through the fabric of his tank and hot breath fanning out against his cheeks. The other boy's eyes were swimming, and Sasuke's sharp Uchiha eyes didn't miss the way that bright blue irises had begun to be consumed by impossibly deep, dark pupils.

Caught up on the moment and acting on instinct moreso than any real understanding of the implications of his actions, he tilted his own face forward until their lips brushed and they were sharing breaths. His tongue flickered out across the other boy's soft lips, and he both heard and felt Naruto's breath catch for a moment. Unbidden his eyes, already at half mast, slid closed as he cocked his head and pressed forward, and in the next moment –

Sasuke blinked as in an instant he found himself being toppled over the side of the couch and onto the floor. Naruto's eyes were still impossibly wide and his lips half-parted as he pulled back his hands and sat bolt upright on the couch, slow realization of what he'd just done beginning to wash over him.

The blonde made a queer little noise at the back of his throat before he practically jumped up from the sofa and bolted for the door, leaving his roommate to stare after him in a dazed expression ill fitted to his ordinarily cool features.

Naruto didn't return for the remainder of the evening.

The next few weeks went like some kind of awkward dance – one that nobody had bothered to teach either of them the choreography to.

At home Sasuke would walk into a room, and if Naruto were there, the blonde would immediately rattle off some poorly concocted excuse before hastily making his escape. If Naruto even caught a glimpse of him in town, the other shinobi would quickly alter his route, regardless of whether Sasuke had any intention of approaching him or not.

It got to the point were, eventually, the blonde boy took to disappearing for long stretches of time – entire days even, only to come home and immediately scamper off to his room, complaining that he was tired.

They had been home together, in the loosest sense of the word, for almost two and a half weeks, and Sasuke had pretty much come to accept the other boy's behavior as their new routine when he got handed down his next mission.

After only a few days of Naruto's awkward, somewhat irritating, evasive behavior, the Uchiha had put in a formal request to be included in the next long-term mission that came in, regardless of what rank it might be. He knew that logically it made more sense for him to sit the other boy down and force him to confront the awkwardness between them rather than to keep avoiding it, but somehow every time he ran through the situation in his mind, his simulation ended in a manner that he just wasn't ready to handle. Add to that a niggling feeling of guilt at having abruptly shattered the easy companionship that they had finally achieved after several years of hard work on Naruto's part in a moment of...he wasn't even sure what, and he just couldn't bring himself to force the other boy into a confrontation that it was obvious the blonde was trying to avoid.

So in the end he had rationalized to himself that perhaps it would be a good idea for him to put some space between them for a while. His mission was only about a month long, but he figured that by the time he came home, Naruto would probably have come down from his heightened sensitivity to the Uchiha's presence enough for them to have a decent conversation...or at least enough for them to stay in the same room for more than the nanosecond that it took for the blonde to shoot off some excuse and disappear.

On the day that he was supposed to leave, Naruto was, predictably, absent. He knew that the blonde was probably in either of two places – Ichiraku, or the small communal garden that the blonde helped care for on his days off. However, he knew that if he tried looking for the other shinobi to tell him about the mission, the other boy would run off the moment he got even the slightest whiff of Uchiha.

This meant that he had to settle for a quick note left on the kitchen table, briefly explaining his absence for the next several days. He didn't feel courageous enough to broach the subject of "The Incident" in his note, leaving it rather short and curt. But he knew that, despite his constant idiocy and Sasuke's claims to the contrary, Naruto was no fool – he would be able to interpret the young Uchiha's sudden departure for what it was.

Sasuke scowled as he gave the apartment's interior one last glance before heading off for the rendezvous point. He couldn't help but feel something tugging at his insides, urging him not to go. He reasoned with himself that perhaps it was just an aversion to leaving things unresolved – his pride always forced him to face his problems head-on.

But deep down some small part of him knew that it was because he had gotten used Naruto's cheesy send-offs whenever the blonde was home to see him off on a mission.

It was actually only three and a half weeks later when the young Uchiha found himself flopping down on the couch in the living room they shared, still rather grimy after close to a month's worth of living out of a rucksack and bathing in whatever body of water was closest at hand at the time. Noting that there was no sign of his roommate, he spent a few more minutes stretching his lean limbs out on the soft couch and clearing his mind, bringing himself back from mission mode to domestic mode. As he lay spread out on the couch, he let his eyes drift closed for a moment, as the light, masculine scent of the other boy tickled his nose a little bit.

After just a short while of this, Sasuke suddenly realized what he was doing and immediately got up, storming off to the bathroom for a long, much needed shower and a soak in the bath.

Once he was feeling clean and decidedly more relaxed, he remembered a huge pile of dishes that he had glimpsed in the kitchen sink from the hallway, and opted to take care of them right away. He wasn't surprised at all to see that the place was rather messy after his time away – usually when they were both home he and Naruto seemed to slip into a rather easy, unspoken agreement where the blonde did most of the cooking and he cleaned. Sasuke would bite off his own tongue before he admitted it to Naruto, but it was...nice.

Once he had drawn the water and added a liberal amount of dish soap, it wasn't long at all before the young Uchiha had made quick work of the dishes – a rather impressive feat as they had been particularly disgusting. He was just fitting the last of said dishes into the drying rack on the side, watching the water slowly drain from the sink, when suddenly there was a loud creak off to his left, as the back door, located on the other side of the kitchen, swung open.

Sasuke's head turned just in time to catch sight of his roommate struggling inside the door shoulder first, arms laden with what seemed to be a rather unwieldy burden. Apparently he was holding a very large basket full of something. It took barely half a second before the blonde seemed to sense his presence and immediately his head snapped up to meet his roommate's gaze, looking for all the world like a wild animal caught under a spotlight in the middle of the night.

Their eyes met, and for a few moments they just looked at one another – he with his hands still resting in the sink, and Naruto with a huge basketful of shiny, plump...tomatoes? The blonde stared up at him wide-eyed as he paused with his shoulder to the door, caught in the midst of wedging it open.

"S...Sasuke? What are you doing here!" the slightly shorter shinobi's loud, somewhat shrill tone cut through the heavy silence abruptly, almost comically, causing the Uchiha to grimace a little bit. The dark haired youth did not miss the way his voice cracked at the end, which piqued his interest just the slightest bit. The blonde's cheeks, already stained a soft red by the unrelenting sun outside, looked to be growing brighter by the moment.

"I live here, dobe." Grabbing a dish towel from the rack above the sink, he slowly dried his hands. He meant to sound exasperated, but he couldn't keep the hint of amusement from his voice. This was the first time they had spoken in weeks, and pride be damned, he had missed the idiot.

"But...y-you had a mission...," the other boy stammered as he stood stock still, "Your note said you'd be gone for over a month!" The flustered quality of his tone tickled something in the young Uchiha's chest. A few seconds later, he realized that what he was feeling was most likely hope.

"I finished a few days early," he began, tone dropping a few notches as he slowly approached the other shinobi. If he weren't so well acquainted with his roommate's stubborn nature, he would have guessed that the blonde was ready to drop his burden and bolt at any moment, if the increasingly panicked expression on his face were any indication.

"O...Oh..." Naruto managed, voice sounding a little bit dry and raspy all of a sudden.

"Usuratonkachi..."

"Eh?" the blonde nearly jumped at the sudden hushed quality of his voice. Even to his own ears it sounded a little husky with...he wasn't quite sure what, but it seemed to be having a strong effect on his roommate.

"What are those?"

"Ah! Y-yeah! They're from the garden!" Naruto replied right away. Seemingly having recovered his composure somewhat, the blonde carefully stepped around him to approach the kitchen counter. Though his back was turned, he could hear the other boy carefully depositing his burden in an empty space on the wide surface.

Sasuke wasn't sure, but he had the feeling that Naruto had done so more to hide his flaming cheeks than anything. As his mind slowly warmed to the possibility that maybe, just maybe he had misinterpreted his roommate's strange behavior before and after "The Incident", he felt something like determination solidify in his chest. Either way, he felt that he was about to find out how the blonde felt for sure right this moment.

Mistaking his silence for something else, Naruto breathed a hasty explanation, face still averted entirely as he proceeded to dump the basketful of shining red fruit into the sink and begin rinsing them furiously.

"The other day I-...and uh, you seemed kinda down, so-...!" his words trailed off abruptly as his dark haired counterpart approached him from behind, casually placing his hands on the counter on either side of Naruto's waist as he hung his chin over the blonde's shoulder, not quite making contact.

"A peace offering?" he intoned, allowing his voice to drop another octave. It was all he could do to keep from cracking a wicked smile, as his roommate made a weird little noise in the back of his throat.

Desperate to put some space between them, Naruto abruptly shut off the faucet and slid out of his personal space with a fluidity that reminded him of the fact that despite all evidence to the contrary, the blonde was a very skilled ninja. A single fruit in hand, his roommate reached for the paper towels, which were kept right next to the refrigerator, and hastily dried the tomato off.

"Well...yeah," he conceded, smiling a bit sheepishly. And with that the other shinobi hastily thrust his hand out between them, gently clutching the glistening fruit, "Want one?"

Sasuke's eyes moved slowly from the proffered fruit to his roommate's slightly nervous grin. The blonde's cheeks glowed brightly from a combination of time spent toiling under the hot sun, and his own embarrassment at being caught so off guard.

A soft smirk tinged the young Uchiha's lips as he slowly closed the space between them, once again entering somewhat brazenly into Naruto's personal space.

"Don't mind if I do," he murmured, eyes sliding from the blonde's soft cheeks to his equally full lips and back again.

And with that he leaned in, head tilted slightly, to carefully take one plump, shiny cheek between his lips.

He could feel Naruto's breath catch as his teeth caught against soft flesh, and he allowed his tongue to lightly caress the skin at his disposal for a moment.

The blonde stood stock still for a second, seemingly unable to properly register what was going on. But by the time Sasuke pulled back to examine his roommate's reaction with half-lidded eyes, the other boy's expression had softened into something warm and languid, and his limbs were already loosening up as the young Uchiha raised a hand to gently rest against the nape of his counterpart's neck.

"Not bad," he whispered huskily, pressing their foreheads together, "Mind if I have some more?"

Rigid silence reigned between them for the next few moments, before Naruto's warm, somewhat relieved laughter shattered it to pieces, and Sasuke's pale features broke out into a small smile to match.

And with that the blonde carefully tossed the fruit back into the sink with its fellows, before taking him gently by the hand and leading him off into the living room, grinning all the way.

Afterword:

And then they made mad, passionate love for the rest of the day. The End!

Phew! I finally got this one out of my system. This is a gift-fic for my lovely, lovely beta, Bishie Huntress, who has been a tremendous help to me with "Z". Happy Valentine's Day darling~!

I didn't mean for this to be a Valentine's fic at all. Actually I've been meaning to release it since Christmas! e_e;;; But I had surgery over the holiday, and then school, and life, and writer's block.

But now it's released! This is possibly going to be a two-part fic with a spicy(sour?) continuation to offset the sweetness of part 1, but I wanted to get it out there...so here it is!

I hope you enjoy, B.H.! I could never write such awesome, coherent chapters without you. vvvv

Love,

hachi!