Rated: T for language
Narusasu.
(When I write, the lines between fiction and reality have started to blur.)
He's been expecting it.
So, when Sakura leans over to whisper in his ear, her pink hair suffocating him in its usual reeking wave of perfumed affection, to tell him that Naruto's going out with Neji, Sasuke's fine with it.
Really.
It was Sasuke's fault in the first place.
Naruto was too unavoidably Naruto. And Naruto loved. He didn't bother with social boundaries or trying not to appear clingy or needy or any of the other pathetic thoughts that obsess couples nowadays.
Instead, he just loved. With every last strand of his lonely, battered heart.
So, on a cold February night, when Sasuke was right in the midst of suffocating in a blanket of unwarranted love, it shouldn't have been a surprise that Gaara could manipulate him as easily as he did.
It shouldn't have been a surprise that when Gaara asked him what he would do if he kissed him, Sasuke's mouth ran away from him and whispered out a "I hate knowing the difference between what I should do and what I would do."
It shouldn't have been a surprise that Gaara would kiss him.
Or that Sasuke would kiss him back.
Sasuke never lied to Naruto.
He would have if he could have, but he just didn't have it in him.
His thoughts ricocheted off internal walls he could already feel cruelly reassembling, eyes watching the glowing digits on his clock slowly tick past, stretching minutes into years.
He doesn't know what he expected. Maybe just that it would all stop. Maybe that he could just rewind his sin if he felt enough guilt, suffered enough pain, forced out enough salty tears.
Still there.
At midnight, trembling fingers fumbled for the receiver, dialed a memorized number, and a shaking voice belted out painful, guilty, dirty words.
He knew Naruto could forgive him. That's how the guy worked. Friendship and love could tolerate and endure all; Sasuke's heard this same tearful story told so many times he could repeat it in his sleep. Naruto would forgive him.
But he knew that Naruto shouldn't.
There are some things that deserve to be suffered over.
So, when Sasuke hung up by slamming his phone against the concrete wall next to him, he was single.
Guilt, he soon discovered, commands the most control over someone's life.
It intertwines itself with the soul of the person caught in its web to the point where intangible threads of it taint every exhale, every blink, every thought and every dream. It's the first thing that crosses your mind when you jolt out of sleep and the last thing that flickers through your head as you drift back. The stars and the trees and the freckles on your pale arms and everything that once used to be bright and colorful and beautiful because you believed that you could maybe someday be okay with loving someone as long as that someone was him become only messengers of more sore, aching guilt. The eyes of the people around you only repeating the same mantra over and over again in a dull, discordant beat that becomes synonymous with the raw thump of your heart.
It's impossible to separate. Once the burden of guilt is taken on, you become Atlas. Your guilt is your world.
The first and last rule of being Atlas: You committed the sin. You deal out the justice.
April greets Sasuke with a layer of frost that matches his status quo.
Sakura's watching him, a look in her eyes that screams that she thinks she can convince him of his own right to forgiveness but he knows better than her bright eyes and soft hair and humiliating acceptance.
"What's going through your head?" She asks, voice soaring over them and falling dead onto the cold, wet grass they're huddled on.
His heartbeat jumps into his throat because Sakura insists on asking questions when she already knows the fucking answers.
Every second of silence stabs another needle into his pin-cushion of a heart until he spits out a sullen, "I hope they go out.", fingers absent-mindedly pulling tufts of frozen grass from the wet earth.
She purses her lips in that way and he grits his teeth and she flicks her hair and he narrows his eyes and she raises an eyebrow and he fucking breaks because it's getting harder and harder to make it through each day, each minute, each second when he can't even stand being inside his own fucking head even when it's all he has left-
"I do." He interrupts his own train of thought, eye twitching, and pulls his gaze away from his too-attentive listener. "This is how it was supposed to be. He's a fucking susceptible child, you know that?" A hissed laugh falls from his dry lips. "He takes on the personality of the people around him, the people he most wants to be like, to emulate, because he doesn't even really know who the fuck he is yet."
Glare at the ground.
"Which is why this is for the best."
Clench fists.
"He can't be around me. I'll fuck him up."
Swallow.
"Again."
Shudder.
"And I'm fine with leaving him alone. Not a problem. He's just a person."
He looks up and Sakura's flipping her hair over her shoulder, lips still pursed and eyes tight shut.
"If you say so, Sasuke."
He bristles at her tone because all he sees from her anymore is patronization and so he grits out a, "I do.", between clenched teeth.
Inhale.
Exhale.
He's just a person…
"I don't get it. How are you ever going to get over him if you can't forgive yourself and accept that the past won't repeat?"
…
"You have to let go of the hope. Then you can start to move on."
…
"Sasuke, do you even listen to me anymore?"
…..
"For Christ's sake, I'm just trying to help you. Accept it for once!"
….
"You're an asshole, Uchiha. Say something."
…
"Anything. Insult me, pick on me, abuse me, anything."
…
"I know you're alive in there, Sasuke, fucking show it! Get angry! Get pissed off! Tell me I'm an irritating, meddlesome little bitch!"
…
"….Please…."
"You really should stop that, Sasuke. I don't even know why the hell you do it, it's gross."
He lifts his head to eye her coolly, unconsciously flicking the end of his cigarette.
"We all have our poisons." He says, exhaling a cloud of white smoke.
He remembers the hopeful days. When he could still give her a smile that wasn't a grimace.
He was laughing. "I'll stop smoking when we get back together, how about that?"
She had huffed indignantly. "Uh-huh. And if you don't."
He remembers his heart pounding, his palms sweating, his vision blurring. "Then I guess I'll smoke forever."
It's been one month, fourteen days, one hour, six minutes and fifty-two seconds since his first cigarette.
Is it forever yet?
He knew it was coming. From what he heard people say, his own inferences, the fact he wasn't a completely unobservant moron. Those were all factors that made him aware that Naruto had a …thing… for Neji.
One of those mornings when you wake up to find you're living in an abstract painting was when Sasuke realized maybe he had more of an issue than he had been willing to face.
He had sat up, rubbed his eyes, stretched.
And remembered a dream.
A party on a cliff face. Naruto next to Sakura next to Sasuke, all perched casually on the edge.
Sakura looks at him. "Naruto asked out Neji. And Neji said yes. The only problem is you."
And he knew he was still sitting there, with the two of them, but all he could feel was falling. Faster and faster. Down the side of the cliff, hurtling past jagged edges and spiny thorns and fragile hopes and idyllic memories.
He could still see Sakura, as clearly as if he weren't falling at all.
And him.
He could always see him.
He'd been waiting for it.
For the day when someone casually mentioned to him, "By the way, Naruto and Neji are dating."
And he's fine with it.
Sitting on a park bench in April, scuffing his shoes against the gravel, lost in himself.
Inhale.
Feel nicotine course through body.
Exhale.
The nicotine leaves, but Sasuke knows there's more poison inside him than he can ever exhale.
But he's fine with it. Fine. With. It.
After all, he hadn't allowed himself to expect a happy ending.
And then there's Naruto.
…still wishing that Neji's blank eyes would turn red.
Constructive criticism always welcome.
Been a while, I guess.
I miss innocence.
(That sounded pretentious.)
- T.N