He woke to beeping.
His head hurt and his body hurt, and he was so very tired, but the only thing he could think about was the incessant beeping that had woken him in the first place. He wanted to close his eyes and go back to sleep, but he couldn't let himself. He didn't know where he was, after all, nothing in his room beeped.
Groaning with the effort it took to turn his head, Uzumaki Naruto caught sight of his beautiful, pale lover. He was slouched in a chair, his raven-crowned head resting on the wall behind him. He looked like he hadn't had a chance to get a decent night's sleep, and Naruto hated that he probably knew the reason behind it. There was a curtain at the end of his bed, a high television silently playing some news show. His hands were covered in machinery, and the beeping was his heart monitor. He considered taking it off, but the resounding, shrill deadpan would kill him completely. They weren't in a private room. They weren't in a house. He couldn't remember leaving his home, much less the reason for waking up in this public hospital room. But he had no doubt about what had happened.
He'd been stopped.
"Good," Iruka murmured, pushing the privacy curtain open. "I see you've woken up."
Iruka wasn't his father, wasn't anyone but his guardian. He'd taken Naruto in when the blond was a teenager, relishing his trouble-maker attitude. Iruka claimed it was all only because Naruto needed attention, he'd been deprived of it as he grew up, and in the right kind of environment, he would grow out of it. What he hadn't known was that when Naruto did grow out of his trouble-making days, he'd fallen into a depression so deep, it was hard to make the blond even smile and mean it sometimes.
Naruto tried to speak, but his throat was horribly dry. It scratched, like he'd swallowed dry rice and it had all gone down horizontally. The only noise that came out of his mouth was a rough noise.
"That's the medicine you took. And the charcoal that we gave you to neutralize it," Iruka explained. He kept his dark eyes riveted to Naruto's own blue eyes as he shook the pale younger man awake.
"Wha...?" he asked incoherently. Dark eyes glanced around the room, stopping only when they met confused blue.
"Naruto," he breathed, pushing himself up to his feet.
"I'll get you some ice Naruto," Iruka murmured, turning to leave.
"Damnit Naruto," the pale man growled. He pushed a hand through his own dark hair before stepping up to Naruto's side. Uchiha Sasuke, Naruto's lover, was a lot of things. But he was never this emotional. And it was confusing. There were tears in his dark eyes, something that never should have been there, something he couldn't recall ever seeing. "What the fuck were you thinking?" he asked the normally tanned man. He ran a hand through Naruto's blond hair, letting it play in the soft strands. "You could have died, you fucking moron!" Sasuke shouted.
Naruto turned his head away from Sasuke as a tear broke free, sliding down his pale cheeks. It was... he couldn't watch the beautiful, powerful, strong Sasuke cry. He couldn't. And he couldn't explain why he'd done it either. He'd actually hoped to have died this time. And that just wasn't something you could explain to another person.
"You'll have to forgive him for not talking, Sasuke," Iruka murmured softly, pushing his way into the small room. "Everything has made his throat hurt, he's not going to be able to talk for just a little bit. I'm surprised he woke up this quickly though."
He handed the cup to Naruto, smiling sadly as he took the cup and threw back a couple of pieces of ice. He grimaced as they melted slowly, sending cool water sliding down his throat. The blond closed his blue eyes in relief. The cool water was perfect, just what he'd needed. And he was grateful to Iruka for giving it to him.
"Fuck you, Naruto," Sasuke growled. He stood and left the room quickly, and as much as Naruto wanted to run after him, he couldn't.
"You and I are going to talk. Sasuke needs to cool off, so let him go. But you and I are going to talk about what you've done," Iruka threatened.