Something worth waiting for
Summary: Sometimes Naruto still manages to surprise him. OneShot- Sasuke, Sakura, Naruto.
Warning: I'm establishing this as AU. I know most of my stories are – in one way or another. But mostly I mess with timelines. This time I'm purposefully messing with the universe. And I'm only doing it because I know it's of no great consequence… I just needed a different setting. You'll see why.
Set: story-unrelated, the main characters should be around 18
Disclaimer: Standards apply.
Für Carina.
(Warum sind meine Widmungen immer für Leute, die meine Geschichten nie lesen?)
The door closed with a silent thud and cut off the ramblings and shouts from the inside.
Finally free of the hot, stuffy confines of the locker rooms, Sasuke stood in the heat of a summer afternoon for a second, his eyes blinking to get used to the sun. It was hot outside, hot and humid, but compared to the air inside it felt good. Changing his bag from one hand into the other, then swinging it up onto his shoulder, he started forwards again, his steps purposeful.
Naruto waited where they had agreed they would meet.
Approaching the fountain in the middle of the big plaza, Sasuke almost immediately made out the shock of blond hair that was his oldest friend. He was sitting on the edge of the stone monument, his head bowed. He wore his usual jeans and one of his hideously orange T-Shirts, and his hands were turning something around restlessly.
After fifteen years of knowing Naruto, there was little about him that could still surprise Sasuke. Since the day he had stepped into the kinder garden on the hand of his mother and had been almost run over by an orange flash screaming at the top of his lungs, they had been together almost constantly. For his part, sometimes Sasuke wasn't sure whether he actually wanted to know Naruto as well as he surely did, but it didn't seem he had had any other choice. Not when the orange flash had clung to him like a vine and had annoyed him from the first moment on, and not when he had had the misfortune of being put into the same class in elementary school and in High School and College. And sometimes he silently agreed with Sakura that Naruto wasn't that bad. He was just – how did his mother call him? – Over-excitable. How on earth a boy with no blood-related family could be that self-confident, he had no idea. Perhaps his guardians were to blame. When Sasuke came to pick up Naruto on Saturday nights, or when he had visited him years ago, they always had been either arguing or not talking to each other. What a pair they were: the perverted author who never seemed to write a word, and the blonde doctor who seriously needed to work on her attitude. Sasuke had googled them, once, as soon as he knew how to use the internet. Jiraiya really was famous and Tsunade was one of the best surgeons Japan had to offer. How on earth they had ended up as a couple – well, there were some things Sasuke didn't want to know. (Jiraiya had hinted at alcohol and some very romantic poems once and had promptly received a devastating blow to the gut, courtesy of his wife.) Anyway, the end of the story was that even though Naruto could annoy the heck out of him, he was his best friend. And because he had the guardians he had, he had probably spent more time at Sasuke's as at his own home. Itachi and his parents had, somewhere along the road, started to see Naruto as what he was: a permanent fixture in their lives they wouldn't get rid of anytime soon, and really, he wasn't that bad. Actually, he wasn't that bad at all. A bit over-enthusiastic, a bit loud. On bad days, Sasuke wanted to send him to hell. On other days – and at one point those days had started to take over – he was the best friend one could wish for. Only Sasuke wouldn't tell anyone.
Okay, so he would tell someone, but this person, conveniently, wasn't anywhere near.
(He had told her already, anyway, and Sakura had a way of seeing the obvious.)
"Hey," Sasuke greeted Naruto and his friend flinched badly.
"Sasuke! Wow, you scared me!"
Naruto tried a smile and failed. Sasuke frowned.
"What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing."
Naruto tried to push the item he had been holding in his hands into his pocket but wasn't fast enough.
"Is that Sakura's letter?"
It was a rather rhetorical question since Naruto knew Sasuke knew there was only one person on earth who wrote letters on pink-flowery stationary. Who still wrote letters. In a world entirely connected by the world wide web, Sakura stubbornly refused to use emails for more than impersonal correspondence.
"So what if it is?"
Sasuke glared down at Naruto, who, at the moment, was doing his best to look innocent. He had long ago perfected the look, the puppy-dog eyes, as Sakura called it, but something was off today. And even if Naruto had been the same, cheerful self he always was; Sasuke would have been irritated as hell.
Because he had seen it clearly: the letter hadn't even been opened yet.
"Has the brilliant idea crossed your mind that she won't write back if you don't actually open her letter and answer it?"
Now, finally, Naruto's trademark bright grin erupted.
"Oh, wow, Sasuke. That was deep."
"Idiot," Sasuke growled, but not as angry as before. He dumped his bag on Naruto's feet, ignored his half-hearted Oi! and sat down next to him. From his bag, he retrieved his water bottle and took a few deep gulps. When he had put it away again, he turned to his friend.
"She's wondering why you always take that long to answer, you know."
"Sakura?" Naruto laughed. "If she'd email me, I'd reply sooner."
"What's wrong with letters?"
"Come on. Nobody writes letters anymore."
"Doesn't mean we can't."
"Hmpf." Naruto leaned back onto his hands and lifted his face into the summer sun. He'd get sunburned soon, Sasuke knew. But Naruto never seemed to catch one. It wasn't fair, especially since he was the one with dark hair and dark eyes, and Naruto was all blue-eyed and blond. "She should just come back, it would set an end to the whole hassle. Why didn't she stay here? She could have found an apartment to live by herself and could have finished college here."
"She wanted to be with her parents."
"So why did her father have to take the job offer in America?"
Exasperated, Sasuke pushed a few damp strands of hair out of his face. "Naruto."
"Just saying it's stupid," Naruto grumbled, but the fire that had been in his accusations when Sakura first had told them about her family's plans and that had colored their arguments for the last two months she had still been in Japan had left him long ago.
For a while, they just sat there.
"So why don't you open her letters?" Sasuke finally asked again.
It was Naruto's turn to push his hair out of his eyes. He stared off into the distance quietly, something Sasuke wasn't used to. Frowning, he watched his friend from the corner of his eyes. Naruto sighed, took a deep breath and still didn't start. Suddenly Sasuke realized that he had been this way for quite some time now. How hadn't he noticed? They had spent almost every day together during the last months. And even though the hole Sakura had left had been there, Naruto hadn't seemed different. But now, suddenly, there was a distance Sasuke didn't think he liked.
Of course not because he worried about Naruto, that was just stupid.
"She writes about many things," Naruto finally said.
Sasuke could only agree. Sakura was one of those people who took up a pen and didn't stop writing for quite some time once they got started. Her neat, small hand-writing covered pages, sometimes, telling him about her life in the US, about her family, her new friends and her new school. How she missed Japan. How she missed Ino and Hinata, her two best friends, and how she had met someone who looked just like Sai. Her anecdotes were funny, and interesting, and reading her letters Sasuke found he really missed her.
She seemed to miss them, too. Letters were a poor surrogate for the real thing. Especially since…
He refused to finish the thought. But it could be safely said that he really, really disliked every single male person their age she wrote about. She teased him with it but he didn't think it was funny. Having a whole ocean between them didn't really help their relationship.
"It's Sakura," Sasuke replied, as if that answered everything. Naruto laughed.
"Yes. It's part of what makes it so hard to read the letters, you know."
"Wait." Sasuke turned to him slowly. "You said-"
Naruto shrugged. "I said I was okay with it. I never said I was over her."
For once, Sasuke had nothing to say. Naruto waved a hand and grinned. "And really, I don't mind. You're my best friends. I'm happy for you."
"So you don't read her letters because…"
"Because I still love her?" Naruto never had qualms when talking about his feelings, differently than Sasuke. Sasuke wouldn't have minded if the world packed up everything associated with the word emotion, locked it in a safe, forgot the combination and threw it into Mariana Trench.
He shrugged again. "I won't deny it's hard. But I like reading her letters."
"Why don't you do it, then?" Sasuke was starting to lose his patience.
Naruto offered him one of his patented grins, the one that had Sasuke's mother smile and blush like a sixteen-years-old girl, the one that got him almost everything he wanted.
"Because having something worth waiting for, sometimes, is even better than actually having it."
With that, he got up and turned to face Sasuke. "So what – are we going to sit here the whole evening? I'm starving."
Sometimes Naruto really managed to surprise him, Sasuke thought. But then, nobody would have expected something that deep from the happy-go-lucky man in front of him. He shook his head and got up.
Oh, well. That was Naruto. There was more to him than met the eye.
…
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"Just wondering how someone could eat that much and not explode."
"Better keep your mouth shut if you don't want Sakura to know what happened with Sayuri last week, idiot."
A/N: My only excuse is that I wanted to write something that wasn't either a) angsty, b)Ino/Shikamaru related (as much as I do love them) and c) too far into the future. Then I couldn't decide whether Sasuke was back or not, and, if he was, how his and Naruto's relationship was supposed to work out – so I took the whole story AU. And letters. I wanted letters. Because.