"Sasuke!" A pale hand, groping desperately through the darkness. A red tinge, like the tinge of blood, just barely visible over the skin of that hand.
"Sasuke!"
"Sasuke, help me, please!" A voice of desperation, crying his name, for salvation.
And then it was gone.
Sasuke awoke with a hastily muffled gasp, eyes wide and staring into the darkness in the underground bunker that was his teacher's newest abode. Feeling no one around, he sat up, rubbing his hands over his face in a surprisingly vulnerable gesture that he'd have never done in the company of another being.
"Damn it," he muttered, moving to the edge of the bed and bracing himself there as he tried to disentangle himself from the nightmare.
Three years. Nearly three tortuous, painful, and lonely years and still the spiky-haired blonde boy he had left behind plagued his dreams and sometimes his waking hours, screaming in pain and begging for help. And for nearly three years, Sasuke hadn't allowed his dream self to answer the call, believing that if he did nothing, if he didn't help, Naruto would leave him alone to walk this path he had chosen.
He'd underestimated him. Again.
First in training he'd underestimated the other boy. He'd seemed so clumsy, so helpless, the jokester who constantly screwed things up for all of them… Sasuke had paid for that mistake in blood and pain that day at the waterfall when so much went so wrong.
Then, just when he'd begun to believe that Naruto had given up on him after all, he and his new team, such as they were, against all odds, found their hideout. He'd paid for that one, too, in a different sort of pain, a pain that squeezed his heart and left him breathless. Those blue, blue eyes, so much harder and colder than they had been… What had Naruto seen, Sasuke wondered, that had so changed the other boy? What had made him stand there as the sword descended, willing to die for the once teammate who had also once been a friend?
And now the dreams that had never left since the day he turned his back on everything that had meant anything to him and walked away. The dreams where the Naruto he had known once upon a time still needed his help, still needed to be saved, and still died because Sasuke would not let himself feel the connection that still bound them together. The dreams that didn't cease, no matter how much Sasuke ignored him.
Three years. Three years of torture worse than anything Orochimaru could invent. Three years of listening to his worst fear come true. Three years of betraying, over and over again, the one boy who had been his first friend, then his brother when his real brother took from him everything that had ever mattered, and then became something more that had no words, no description.
He'd sworn to Itachi that day at the waterfall as Naruto lay broken at his feet that he would find his own way to become strong, one that didn't involve killing the person he was closest to, one that left Naruto alive and free. Sasuke owed a debt now to the blonde-haired boy, both dream and real, for giving him that way without even knowing what he'd done.
Sasuke knew what the Akatsuki wanted, what they'd do; he would die before he let them have Naruto.
A debt was about to be repaid.