Love no Jutsu Chapter 1: Drabble I, a naruto fanfic

Only Fools
Drabble
Steve-no-Berry
684 Words
Sasuke/Naruto

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Uzumaki Naruto wondered why, at the age of twenty, he still had not fallen in love.

"How do you know?" he asked Sakura when she showed him her engagement ring, her pretty face flushed with excitement. "How do you know you love him?"

"I just do," she replied confidently, as though there were no doubt in her mind concerning the subject. "I mean, he drives me crazy sometimes and we fight sometimes but he… he's just so… you know?"

Naruto thought about it for a moment before deciding that no, he did not, because the only person that drove him crazy was Sasuke and the only person he fought with was Sasuke. Still, he nodded anyway so that Sakura would not lose that pleased blush, and congratulated her once more on her impending marriage.

"-and she just said that even though they fought and drove each other nuts they still loved each other," he explained to his former teacher that afternoon over a bowl of beef ramen, hot and fresh and steaming. "Is that what it's like for you and Kakashi-sensei?"

Iruka laughed good-naturedly. "That's what all couples are like, Naruto. All healthy relationships involve disagreement; it's how the couple works through them that determines how strong the relationship is. Agree to disagree, and learn to compromise."

Naruto thought of how he and Sasuke tried to drive the other into the dirt to solve their disagreements.

"But it is like Sakura-chan said," the older nin continued, waving his chopsticks at the blond. "When you're in love with someone, you simply know that you're in love –you may not understand it and you may not want it, but those feelings are still there."

This left Naruto more confused than before. "I know what it's like to have emotions that are impossible to describe," he told Tsunade in the evening as he helped her file papers as part of his so-called Hokage training, thinking once more of Sasuke; so much lay between them, unspoken but acknowledged, simply content with being. "But it still makes no sense."

"Love isn't supposed to make sense, kid," Tsunade snorted as she separated the pile on her desk, handing half to Naruto. "It makes fools of those who are in love and makes those fools do foolish things in the name of it." At this the old woman smiled cynically. "Still, love is the most powerful force I know of. It gives cowards bravery and weaklings strength. It transforms us because we know, on a fundamental level, that we need to protect the people we love otherwise we have nothing."

"As in a precious person?" Naruto asked.

"As in a precious person," Tsunade agreed before hardening her expression. "Now, enough talking. Get those reports to Shizune," she dismissed him abruptly and he was left with his mind in a whirl. He remembered what it had been like to see Sasuke fall –on the bridge in Wave, to Orochimaru's hand, in the genjutsu of his now deceased brother's Sharingan- and how it had made him so angry that he had abandoned all of his senses in order to save the person he considered most precious to him.

"I still don't know what love is," he confessed to Sasuke when he arrived to their shared flat late that evening after the sun had gone down, gratefully accepting the meal that the Uchiha had prepared and reheated for him in the microwave. "It's like the more I try to figure it out, the larger my headache becomes. I keep on thinking that one day it will just hit me and I won't be so… I don't know."

Sasuke raised an eyebrow at him.

"I'm beginning to think that I'll never fall in love," he admitted, and Sasuke's dark hair fell into his dark eyes. "Do you think you'll ever fall in love with somebody Sasuke?"

The other man shrugged one shoulder. "I already have," he replied, and turned back to the scroll he had been reading as Naruto gaped at him. "I'm just waiting for the idiot to realize that he loves me back."

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