A/N: This is an AU story that takes place in the same universe as A Day at Bell Liberty and Nothing. Like those stories, there are a lot of characters from a lot of series making cameo appearances in this one-shot, but it's mostly about Sasuke and Naruto. Light Sasuke x Naruto; some sidelined original characters.
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Ladybugs
For all the prestige Bell Liberty had accumulated over the seven-odd decades since its establishment, most of its students could not claim they were receiving a very practical education. Sasuke felt he was the exception.
Neji was a lot of things. About half the time, Sasuke's most fervent hope was that Neji was wrong about him—that he was not a malcontent demon of discord preying on the lives of Naruto and just about everyone else. He didn't want the Bluebell dorm head for a life counselor, either, because a lot of the things Neji apparently held in high esteem (such as dorm foundation day, which he'd heard about from Achilles until he was ready to abolish the celebration himself) were things that Sasuke honestly considered ridiculous. But if there was one front on which he would give Neji his due, it was this: If Sasuke couldn't get into the police academy and failed to become an officer or a sniper or a bodyguard or a mall cop, for crying out loud, he would still be able to earn minimum wage pounding nails or weeding gardens or refinishing hardwood floors, and it was all because Hyuuga Neji hated his guts.
Sasuke leaned back to his heels to inspect the last patch he had applied to the screen in Kakashi's first-floor math classroom, checking the edging with his finger to make sure the superglue had dried properly. He was patching screens today because screen-patching was apparently the chore most closely related to his offense this time: releasing about two hundred and fifty ladybugs into the Bell Liberty dorms. Sasuke remembered that being decidedly more Naruto's idea than his, but Neji had made up his mind long ago that Sasuke was guilty, and Achilles, as usual, wasn't much interested in the details.
Look, Sasuke. Did the ladybugs come from your room or not?
Yes, but—
Well, maybe you'd better just apologize, then.
That had been Achilles' answer a lot recently. Sasuke had pretty much figured out his dorm head's reasoning on this: since Neji liked being mad more than just about anything else, Achilles wanted him to stop being mad at Sasuke as soon as possible so he could go back to being mad at Achilles. That was the part Sasuke didn't really get. Having spent a disproportionate amount of time in Neji's doghouse—overall a vastly unpleasant experience—he couldn't fathom why anyone would make a concerted effort to get on his bad side.
The patch seemed to be holding, so Sasuke moved on to the next window, testing out a few small dimples in the mesh with his thumb. Only one of them was worth bothering with; he cut a circular patch the size of a quarter from the old screen that has been supplied to him as reconstruction material, then ran a line of clear glue around the edge of the hole and pressed the pieces of screen together, careful to keep his fingers away from the point of cohesion.
He wasn't a big proponent of looking on the bright side, but to keep his mind off the mindlessness of his task, he tried to walk around his family home in his head, searching for screens that needed patching. At the least he could fix the tiny tear in Izumi's bedroom window screen, which was so small it wouldn't have been a problem at all if a harmless brown spider hasn't crawled in and started making a web against the glass, and even that probably wouldn't have been a big deal if Keita hasn't found it first and screamed bloody murder. Sasuke shook his head, the shriek echoing again within the walls of his skull. It was a little thing, but Izumi would probably appreciate having it fixed; his older brother had been too wary to open that window for about a week now, and it was getting hot out.
So, there was that—his usefulness around the house was improving. Which was a plus, he guessed, since of all the things his father could do, wielding hammer and nails with any skill did not seem to be one. It was just a shame becoming a handyman hadn't been one of Sasuke's long-term career goals.
Finished with Kakashi's classroom, Sasuke carefully screwed the cap back onto the glue to keep it from dripping and gathered up his scissors and extra screen, then crossed the hall to Yoru Nachtlin's room. At least the history classroom was on the west side of the building; the ledge under the window where he set his tools was bright with the afternoon sun, which warmed his hands as he rolled the window up into its frame. The weather outside reminded him at a glance that inside paying penance was not where anyone needed to be today, but he pushed that thought away—being outside would probably mean encountering one of the hundreds of ladybugs recently taken up residence on the Bell Liberty campus, and that would just remind him how many ladybugs were probably lurking in his sheets or under his bed, the unlucky ones that hadn't made it outside—like the one he had accidentally smashed turning off his alarm clock that morning.
Sasuke thought he'd had enough of ladybugs for a month or so.
There was a long patch of frayed screen about an inch from the window frame that needed his attention—but just as Sasuke lifted the scissors and spare mesh to cut a patch, the door banged open behind him and slammed into the wall, startling Sasuke so badly that he stabbed the scissors all the way through Mr. Nachtlin's screen.
"Uchiha!"
The shout of his last name turned Sasuke's head to exchange surprised stares with a familiar redhead, who was scrambling to hold onto the door through the endless layers of his formal silk robes. Kazumi blinked at him through the gauze of his veil, which was covered today in a dozen small red dots.
"I mean, Sasuke!" Kazumi shook his head and a few of the dots flew off, confirming Sasuke's suspicions. "I mean—please excuse my intrusion," he finished, trying to bow.
Hiroshi appeared in the doorway behind the unstoppable boy just in time to catch him and prevent him from slipping down to the floor altogether. Kazumi looked up at the arms that had grabbed him around the waist, smiling with his natural obliviousness at the jovial upperclassman.
"This is the wrong door," Kazumi told him matter-of-factly. "The next door goes out to the yard!"
"So it does," Hiroshi agreed, half-supporting and half-lifting Kazumi into his arms to back out of the doorway. "Let's get these ladybugs out to the garden, cutie. Sorry to bother you, Sasuke…" Hiroshi trailed off as he caught sight of the scissor blades thrust through the screen up to the hinge, and Sasuke could feel his face getting warm as those cheerful green eyes shifted to his face.
"It's not—" Sasuke cut himself off and tried again, irritated with his own failure to explain. "I'm fixing it."
"Would have been my guess," Hiroshi returned, disappearing with a salute behind the closing door. His tone of voice was totally neutral, leaving Sasuke with no clue whether the older Snapdragon guessed what had happened or really believed he'd been taking a pair of scissors to Mr. Nachtlin's screen. Wakato Hiroshi's opinion didn't matter much to him, but the uncertainty bothered him all the same, probably just because he'd had a full two days of being guilty until proven innocent already.
All the same, Sasuke couldn't help shaking his head as he withdrew the scissors from the rudely punctured screen. Maybe he wasn't improving his practical skills as much as he'd thought.
"Sasuke! This is where you've been, huh?"
Careful this time to keep the scissors away from the screen, Sasuke turned to glance back at the door Naruto was leaning halfway in, his ratty old sneakers and the feet inside them a little off balance, to judge from how he rested against the doorframe. Naruto had an apple so red it seemed to be pulsing in his hand, and he took a tremendous crackling bite out of it as he entered the room, dodging around desks with a little unnecessary enthusiasm as he crossed to Sasuke's side.
"I was looking for you all over the place. What're you doing over by the classrooms on a Saturday?"
Sasuke moved his mostly square patch against the screen, trying to orient both sets of times. "Apologizing," he answered flatly, cocking his chin toward the hole.
Naruto shook his head, then jumped up to sit on the sunlit ledge, kicking his feet carelessly against the wall beneath the window. The sun made his hair almost too bright to look at.
"Geez. What's he punishing you for this time?"
Sasuke glanced over at Naruto, at the red apple in his hands and the curiosity and camaraderie and mild amusement glinting in his eyes, and pushed it down.
"Something I did in a past life," he said through his sigh.
"That sucks," Naruto told him, probably meaning to sound sympathetic. Sasuke decided to go with that and turned back to his patch.
"Can you hand me the glue?"
Naruto hurried to oblige, holding the apple in his mouth while he unscrewed the cap, and Sasuke took it from him carefully, making certain not to get any glue on his fingers as he pressed the corners of the patch in place. Then he handed back the small tube, wiping his hands against his jeans.
He didn't mind talking to Naruto about the thousand things he swore he did not do to piss Neji off on a regular basis—actually, it was nice, being able to talk to someone who actually listened to his version of events instead of jumping down his throat, though sometimes Naruto did laugh at him—but he tried not to complain to his best friend about trouble that had originated with the Bluebell himself. Sasuke wasn't sure why. He wasn't trying to encourage any more ladybugs to show up at his door—or fireflies or muddy footprints, either, for that matter. But all the same, to gripe about that felt like it might ruin something important—like it might tell Naruto that some part of him wasn't welcome in Sasuke's room. He didn't ever want to say that.
"Sasuke," Naruto whined around a bite of apple, still curious about the origin of the dark-haired boy's punishment. Sasuke ignored him. After a moment the blond rolled his eyes, giving in to his urge to talk even if it meant changing the subject. "Fine. Anyway, I came to get you for basketball—Akutsu and Kirihara are going one-on-one, and I want to play. And just so you know: last I saw him, Neji was going off about something he found in Achilles' room that wasn't dorm-head approved." Naruto shrugged. "You're off the hook, whatever you did. So let's go play already, before they quit."
Sasuke considered whether leaving a job Neji had politely suggested to him half-finished was really wise. There was a good chance that Neji never checked up on the status of the punishment tasks he doled out, especially since he seemed to assign so many; there was a better chance that if Neji did check and Sasuke hadn't done all he could, nothing he'd done instead would be worth it.
Sasuke swallowed his sigh this time. "I'll just finish up. I'm almost done anyway."
"Well, hurry up, okay?" Naruto said through another bite.
Sasuke was inspecting the edges of the rectangular patch, which seemed, this time, very reluctant to bond to the screen, but he looked up at Naruto's careless instructions.
"Have you considered that they may not want any more players?"
"Why wouldn't they?" Naruto asked, blinking.
Sasuke rolled his eyes. "Never mind. Just hand me the glue again."
"Okay."
Sasuke turned back to the botched window patch, picking at the edges with his fingernail to find where, if at all, the glue had set. He wondered privately if trying to join a DeMarro game when Naruto was Naruto and he was himself was really the best idea on a day already off to a less than stellar start—but he was distracted from that train of thought a moment later by an urgent garble and a kick to the back of the knee, the latter probably harder than Naruto had intended.
"Mmphm!"
"Ow—what?" Sasuke asked, recovering his balance. Then he turned around and saw exactly what: Naruto was staring at him with wide blue eyes, the half-eaten apple wedged into his mouth, and all ten fingers wrapped around the tube of superglue—wrapped in a very awkward, frantic, unnatural way all the way around the cap and the tip and each other.
Sasuke pressed a hand against his forehead. "Oh, god, Naruto…"
"Mm hm hmm hm!" Naruto protested—muffled though it was, Sasuke knew that was a protest, which Naruto gratefully repeated once the Snapdragon pulled the apple from his mouth and set it on the spotless ledge. "I didn't mean to! I forgot to put the cap all the way on, so then I picked it up and it got squeezed and it all came out—"
"Okay, stop, stop," Sasuke interrupted, grabbing Naruto's hands with one of his own because the blond had been shaking them and drops of superglue were getting all over the place. "Just stop—you're making it worse. And don't pull," he added, as Naruto screwed up his face and prepared to yank his hands apart. "You can rip off your skin doing that."
Naruto stopped moving immediately, but he was still staring at Sasuke with eyes that were a little bit panicky. "But they're stuck," he protested weakly. Sasuke ran his free hand through his hair.
"Yeah… I gathered that."
"Ah—not good, not good," Naruto pronounced, trying in spite of Sasuke's hold to pry his fingers apart. "I didn't finish my L.A. paper yet, and it's gotta be typed. And Neji's going to give me so much hell for not being careful—"
"Naruto," Sasuke broke in, a little sharper than before. "Stop. We're going to get your hands apart—in plenty of time for you to write your paper, if you're actually doing that this week. The extra science classroom's just two down. It has a sink. If we can't get it off there, we'll go to the health room. And you don't have to worry," he finished, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Neji's only going to give me hell."
Naruto looked a little surprised at this last, but it faded after a moment and the Bluebell shook his head. "He might give you more hell, but we're both in for it," he replied. "Well, let's give it a try, I guess."
Naruto shifted on the ledge, preparing to hop down, and Sasuke tried to step back to give him some room—but there was a problem with that, as Sasuke discovered instantly. Naruto's voice got a little more uncertain.
"Uh… Sasuke?"
Staring down at their joined hands—hands that were not coming apart anytime soon, if the chemical bonding going on between his left palm and Naruto's fingers was any indication—Sasuke decided that today was just not his day. It seemed like it had been a disproportionately long time since it had been his day, actually. With a weariness that was only getting heavier, Sasuke helped Naruto down from the ledge and led him toward the door, pausing only to wonder whether thirteen years was long enough to accrue this much bad karma, and to throw Naruto's apple in the trash.
"Hey—I was eating that," Naruto protested.
Sasuke shook his head. "Not the time."
The walk was only twenty feet long but at least twice that awkward. Sasuke did his best to hold Naruto's hand in a natural way, so that the sticky superglue mess hung between them and couldn't adhere to anyone's clothes, but it was hard for Naruto to walk that way since both of his hands were attached to Sasuke's left. The Snapdragon tried not to worry too much about the odd look that Gaara, of all people, threw him as they passed in the hall—why were so many students hanging around the classrooms on a weekend anyway?—and not too think too much about what he was going to say to anyone who might be using the extra classroom to catch up on lab work, which was allowed but not popular—but all the same he breathed a little easier after confirming that the room was deserted and closing the door behind them. Naruto, for his part, was preoccupied with other things.
"It's starting to itch," he said, twisting his wrists back and forth as though trying to rub them together. Sasuke wished Naruto hadn't said that, because as soon as he did his own hand started itching like crazy, but he bit down on that panic reflex and dragged Naruto toward the sink.
"Let's get it off. Come on."
The extra classroom had a full bottle of bacteria-killing hand soap and knobs that, like all the faucets in Bell Liberty, were about six times easier to adjust than those in a regular home. All the same Sasuke had some trouble coordinating the perfect water temperature one-handed, and they lost a lot of the soap in the application for relatively the same reason. The hand soap, which had obviously been purchased by somebody in the Hyuuga family, smelled so strongly of violets that it made Naruto gag and Sasuke's eyes water, but he persevered, swearing to himself that as long as this worked, he didn't care if his hand smelled like Neji's family perfume for two months.
After five minutes, he started caring again.
"Sasuke?" Naruto sort of asked, looking up at him as the Snapdragon tried in vain to scrub the glue off of their hands with a sponge. "I don't think this is working."
Sasuke set the sponge down. He turned off the water, but he kept his eyes on their tightly bound fingers, trying to think. What he wanted to think about was another solution, but the only thought that kept running through his head was the question of why he'd asked Naruto to hand him the glue instead of getting it himself, and where in the scope of the last two days he could have headed this all off. Did it all start with the damn ladybugs, or did the problem run deeper than that? What if Neji was right and it all started inside of him? He wondered what he'd done to bring this moment on himself, and then he was angry for wondering that, because it was Naruto who'd been dragged into a mess that had nothing to do with him. Or did it have everything to do with him? Either way, Sasuke knew Naruto and the superglue never would have crossed paths if it hadn't been for him, and that was not a great thing to know.
Sasuke didn't realize how long he'd been silent until Naruto nudged him urgently with an awkward elbow, tilting his head until he could catch Sasuke's eyes. "Hey, Sasuke. Come on. Talk to me here. What do you want to try next?"
Sasuke shook his head, half in answer and half to clear it, and then he rubbed his only remaining hand over his eyes. "We go to the health room, I guess," he said, watching Naruto wrinkle his nose.
"There's got to be something else we can do right? I mean, Neji's super nosy—he always knows what's been going on in the health room. I swear he's got spies everywhere."
Sasuke was ready to swear to that, too. Honestly, he didn't want to go to the health room either—even setting Neji aside, Ms. Dumia was well known to be a very capable gossip, and if there was anything he could do to prevent it, he wanted to keep this story from making the Bell Liberty rounds. But he wanted the use of his hand back more, and he didn't have another idea right now. Other than waiting around while the glue solidified—and that didn't seem like a winner.
Naruto must have noticed his expression of surrender, because the blond groaned and dropped his head back, sending his best friend a desperate look.
"Come on, Sasuke. Don't give up on me. Let's think about this. I mean, this is a household product. People've gotta do this all the time. What do they do?"
"Izumi superglued his fingers together once," the Snapdragon offered, giving voice at last to the extremely partial memory that had been haunting him for a chaotic ten minutes. Naruto brightened instantly.
"Really?"
"Yeah." Though he was almost positive it was doing no good, Sasuke turned the water back on, rubbing his thumb between the creases in Naruto's trapped fingers. "He and Itachi broke my dad's reading glasses while they were playing, and he tried to glue them back together. He just ended up gluing the frames to his hand, though."
"So what happened?" Naruto asked, leaning forward eagerly, though Sasuke had a feeling most of his enthusiasm was situational. He shrugged.
"My mom got it off."
"How?" Naruto demanded, yanking involuntarily on their joined hands. Sasuke winced.
"I don't know. I don't remember." Actually, the only thing he remembered really well from the incident was the expression on his father's face when he read the note their mother had left on the table, accompanied by the bent and badly reconstructed frames: Small accident, no harm done—we fixed them. Love, Jennifer and Izumi. He had a feeling that part of the story only stuck with him, though, because his aunt Misao recounted it so often at family gatherings. Not that they had many of those.
At the admission of his faulty memory, Naruto's shoulders had slumped all the way down. A moment later they had perked back up, though, and a look of determination settled on his face, matched by a firm nod.
"Okay. So all we have to do is call your mom and ask her what you use to get superglue off."
Sasuke balked. "I'm not calling her. I don't want her to know about this, either." His mother didn't gossip, exactly, but she definitely couldn't keep a secret, and the last thing he needed was one more awkward call from his father or Uncle Ibiki about how important school was and how they hoped he would start focusing on his grades rather than "other activities," which Sasuke assumed was code for "getting in trouble." He was really tired of those calls.
Naruto didn't seem to understand the gravity of the situation. "Oh, come on, Sasuke! Your mom's really nice. I know she'd help us! What else are we going to do?"
"Go to the health room," Sasuke persisted.
Naruto shook his head. "I'm not doing that. Nehi's definitely mad at you already, and I don't want to be his partner on any more field trips. You know how long it takes to get through a museum when you're Neji's partner? I swear we were in the Degas exhibit for fifty-five minutes."
Sasuke thought Naruto's concerns were a little left of the mark right now, but he let it go, returning to the situation at hand—or hands, rather. "Fine. Not the health room. We'll look it up on the Internet. Then we won't have to talk to anybody."
"But we'll have to walk all the way back to your room," Naruto argued, beginning to pout. "And then we could run into Neji all on our own. Not to mention everybody else. Gaara's not going to say anything and you still looked really mad when we just ran into him."
Sasuke blinked, looking down at Naruto a little surprised. "I wasn't mad," he said, sure of that at least. "I was just… I just didn't want him to get the wrong idea."
As soon as he'd said it, Sasuke wished that he hadn't—Naruto stopped fidgeting and blinked up at him, his eyes that were usually so easy to read somehow suddenly opaque.
"The wrong idea?"
"That we were just… you know, walking like that," Sasuke tried, hoping specificity would clear away the hush that had descended on them so abruptly. "With our hands together."
Naruto became even stiller. "Would that be the wrong idea?" he asked, and in spite of its quiet delivery Sasuke got the sense that it was a very important question.
"No, not—not a wrong idea like that," he amended, a little off balance at finding himself so abruptly in a serious conversation. The look of concentration on Naruto's face told him he hadn't made anything clearer, so he tried again, only half sure what he was even trying to say. "Not bad or anything. Just—I just didn't want him to assume something that wasn't true."
That felt like the message he'd been trying to get across, and for a moment Sasuke felt relief flowing through him; but Naruto's expression wasn't changing, and that made him uneasy.
"Why isn't that true?" the blond asked, shifting his feet. "I hold your hand all the time."
"But I don't hold yours," Sasuke countered, and then wished he hadn't said that, either—Naruto's eyes had gotten even more intense, if that were possible, and they bore into Sasuke's with a focus and lingering sadness that seemed too strong, somehow, for this bizarre, off-kilter moment.
"I know," Naruto said. He tipped his head like he wanted to run a hand through his hair, but settled for sliding a finger around the rim of the drain, staring up at his companion. "Why not, Sasuke?"
It seemed to Sasuke, in that moment, as if the attention of the whole universe was suddenly riveted to him, every particle in the room waiting for his answer. The neurons in his brain stopped firing—he couldn't think about anything but the look on Naruto's face, somehow hopeful and resigned all at once. He took a deep breath, but the air only felt uncomfortable inside his lungs, sharp with an imperative to speak. Sasuke pressed his lips together.
"I don't think I can," he said at last.
"Why not?" Naruto repeated.
The answer to that was something Sasuke didn't know how to put into words. "Well… I never asked," he stuttered out, feeling like an idiot and wondering how the conversation had wound its way here, wherever here was. His answer must not have been completely awful, though, because Naruto's face cleared a little, although he didn't reclaim his usual smile.
"You don't have to ask, Sasuke," the blond assured him, shaking his head. "You can hold my hand whenever."
The words started a funny little buzz in the back of Sasuke's brain. He felt himself stiffening, every one of his vertebrae locking into place. Naruto seemed to have noticed the awkwardness that had fallen over them, too—his face eased into a brilliant red, the color slowly creeping toward his ears. Sasuke hoped the warmth on his own face didn't mean he was blushing back.
"That's good to know," he fumbled out after a moment, cursing himself for the tact that generations of Uchihas had guaranteed he'd been born without. "I'll keep that in mind."
"Yeah," Naruto said, and Sasuke wondered if the blond felt as uncertain and off balance as himself. "You don't have to or anything, you know—I mean like I don't know if you even want to, ever…" The boy glanced up at him, and in spite of his embarrassment his eyes were so earnest that Sasuke choked trying to get words out of his mouth.
"Uh, that's… I can't really… remember…"
Naruto shook his head so hard that he set the hair flapping around his ears. "It's not a big deal," he said quickly, though Sasuke thought it probably was, somehow. "I just wanted you to know you don't have to ask. I'm not expecting anything, though. I mean—"
The blond stopped abruptly, staring up at Sasuke as though asking to be rescued. Sasuke didn't know how to do that. Everything about this moment felt ridiculous to him—having this conversation with Naruto while their hands were superglued together, the rush of the sink that wasn't doing any good and the memory of the half-patched screen he'd punctured himself in the middle of trying to fix it. But at the same time he knew, somewhere deeper that didn't need explanations, that there was nothing ridiculous about it, or about what Naruto had said to him. It was that deeper feeling he wanted to acknowledge, though he didn't know how. He didn't even know why it felt important. He just knew that it did.
With the soft hum of flitting wings, a ladybug landed on Naruto's nose.
Sasuke blinked and Naruto took a short step back, staring cross-eyed at the tiny intruder. "Hey," the blond objected, wrinkling his nose and shaking his head. "What are you doing, little guy? Get off there."
The ladybug obliged somewhat, crawling up the bridge of his nose until it was between his eyes, but this only made Naruto shake his head again, blinking madly as his eyes began to tear. "Hey! This isn't why I bought you guys. Come on, buddy—can't you see I've got other problems right now?"
The ladybug's wings flickered open as Naruto did his best to blow at it, but they stayed open only long enough to carry the insect into his bangs, which it climbed leisurely down, dangling from one golden strand right in front of his eye.
"Sasuke!" Naruto protested, pulling back on their hands as his voice got slightly desperate. "A little help here?"
Sasuke lifted his hand automatically toward Naruto's face, trying to shake the lingering water from his fingers—but he stopped just shy of the ladybug, his hand hanging in midair for a moment before it dropped back to his side. He looked at the splattered counters and their useless hands and Naruto's cherry red face, and the ladybug hanging in between them, and he just smiled—and the same thing that had occurred to him must have occurred to Naruto at that moment, because all of the uncertainty and frustration on the blond's face suddenly broke and he burst out laughing, throwing his head back so that the echoes made the whole room laugh with him. The burst of sound and motion did what his entreaties could not—the ladybug leapt out of his hair and disappeared from Sasuke's view, just one more of them he'd lost.
Not that he cared. When Naruto laughed like this, he was the only thing in the world worth looking at. Sasuke felt himself starting to laugh, too, and for just a moment he leaned forward and rested his forehead against Naruto's, closing his eyes. When Naruto laughed like this, it made Sasuke want to breathe him in and hold onto him somewhere inside, somewhere around his lungs—so he breathed in and then backed up and looked down into those bright blue eyes as their laughter dissolved back into smiles.
Naruto blew his bangs out of his face, sending Sasuke his second-favorite grin. "Okay," he said, rolling his eyes. "So maybe today's a little screwed up."
"A little?" Sasuke repeated, eyebrows raised.
"A lot," Naruto admitted. "Maybe we shouldn't play basketball today. Maybe we should get unstuck and then go steal Neji's bad movies and try again tomorrow."
"Mm." Sasuke glanced down at their hands and the sheen of the water, and then shook his head, the memory flitting back to him now with almost infuriating ease. "Nail polish remover."
"Huh?"
"That's how you get superglue off," he clarified, finding Naruto's eyes again. "Nail polish remover."
The two watched each other for a minute, and then Naruto smiled, cocking his head to one side. "So, Hiroshi's room, then?"
Sasuke had a feeling that Hiroshi wasn't going to be that easy to find, but out of all the usual suspects, the older Snapdragon seemed the most likely to actually improve the situation. He shrugged. "Worth a shot."
"Well, let's get going, then. My hand still itches really bad."
Sasuke shut off the water and then got the door open for both of them, trying not to mind too much as Naruto swung their hands back and forth to dry them, getting both of their shoes wet. The hallway was empty now, except for the distant sound of voices and the echo of their footsteps side by side—maybe everyone had finally made their way out into the sunshine. Sasuke thought he didn't mind so much anymore if they ran into any of their classmates—and then he thought there was one more thing he needed to say. He glanced at Naruto and then set his eyes straight ahead.
"I wanted to say thanks," he started, feeling the other boy's gaze on his face. "For the ladybugs." Sasuke ran a hand through his hair. "And that I think I do, sometimes—want to."
Naruto stared at him, eyes baffled. "Want to what?"
Sasuke swallowed. "Hold your hand."
For a moment Naruto just gaped at him. Then Sasuke wondered if his best friend would burst a lung, he was laughing so hard. But there was a second in the middle when Sasuke was almost certain he'd seen his favorite of Naruto's smiles, the one that made his whole face shine. He tried to hold onto that second as he felt the blood rising into his face again, no doubt turning his pale skin a color he really didn't like.
"God, Sasuke—you're so red," Naruto teased, wiping his eyes against his sleeve.
"So are you," Sasuke told him, not glancing over to see if it was true.
Naruto didn't seem to care one way or the other. He just kept on laughing, leaning over to press his face against Sasuke's shoulder as they walked, and Sasuke led them with the jolts of that laughter tingling under his skin. Neji was probably lurking in the hallway ahead and he was probably going to kill him, if Sasuke's embarrassment didn't kill him first—but if it came to that, Naruto laughing wasn't a bad last thing to hear, so Sasuke kept going, understanding for a minute that even the bad days had their moments.