Sasuke kept running. His lungs burned, his legs burned. His feet were numb with cold and stinging with chakra from overuse of the track-erasing technique.
"At your level, you ought to be able to run all day and all night." His last teacher had said that. He'd been proven right twenty-seven hours ago. The pain had started soon after.
"With intensive and specialized training, ninja have been known to maintain a flat-out sprint for five days." Some academy instructor had told him that. But he'd been training on other things. Stamina had never been his strong point anyway. There was a hitch in the movement of his muscles that would probably become a crippling cramp in less than an hour.
"A man is anyone with a man's work." That had been his father.
So the man kept running.
It was raining. There was much dispute, among those more sedate than him, as to whether that was a good thing, in general. Wet ground was treacherous, noisy, and apt to leave prints. But a good ninja knew techniques to insure silence, to improve footing, to move and leave no trace. The rain itself made its own noise, and covering noise is a very useful thing.
The arguments and debates, the lectures and lessons, ran through his head. He remembered them each perfectly, and hated them. He hated the advice of the unproven, the aid of the weak. The moralizing of the untested. But still, as he ran, he remembered the discussions, the points and counterpoints. Rain gave the pursuer the advantage, because the pursued had to spend more time and energy on not being tracked. Rain gave the pursued the advantage, because the reduced visibility made both evasion and ambush easier. Rain made detection more difficult, because it washed away scent. Rain made detection easier, because a specially trained man, a genius hunter, could track you by the distinct sound of water falling on human skin. He remembered every word.
It was also night, but there were no disputes or discussions about night. Any child knew what night did: it made everyone more dangerous.
The man - he must be a man, this was man's work if anything was - changed his direction suddenly. He circled back on his trail and left it again in the other direction. He ran through the branches of the trees for half a mile, then spent five minutes running up an icy stream with a rocky bed. They would have sent the best they had after him, but a set of tricks like that, in the pitch-black rain, ought to buy two or three hours. The only fast way to beat such maneuvers was to guess exactly what the prey had done, and when, and in what order. The faceless assassin-hunters of the ANBU teams couldn't do that to him, no matter how good they were.
A mile from the stream, the man found a place under a tree that wasn't quite as wet as the rest of the forest, and stopped. He leaned against the trunk, and looked back the way he had come. There was nothing to see but trees and rain, even for his eyes. But when he concentrated, he felt the presence again. It barely seemed to have slowed at all. Whoever it was, they had the stamina and stubbornness to run him into the ground, and knew him well enough that his attempts to hide his trail were just wasted energy. And yet at the same time they were stupid enough to come after him alone - oh.
Somehow, Sasuke was not surprised. He had been told it would come to this, by some part of him that still believed that anything that is begun must be finished. "The present began in the past." The man stood and drew a kunai.
He knew how it would begin, now. His opponent had a surprising command of tactics, in battle he showed a startling depth of complexity and foresight, but each plan had the same first step. Like a self-taught chess player with only one opening, the first move was always the same. So whether it would help or not, the man knew how it would begin.
"Up the middle with a kunai," he said to himself silently, not moving a muscle. "Up the middle with a kunai, from straight ahead. If one is thrown, or a shuriken, it will be from the left hand, he'll want the right for close work. That means the aim will be off to the right, my left, and high. Up the middle with a kunai." He had a kunai of his own in either hand, now, and he stood, waiting, looking back the way he'd come. Finally, he heard a faint sound, a footstep, ahead and to the left, and then, almost instantaneously, saw a flash of a blue eye ahead and right. No time to cross the distance between.
So he'd already made his shadow clones. Wise, as he'd have no good time for it once he'd engaged. And they were all approaching. "Up the middle with a kunai." It was a mantra, now. He tried to place, by sound and sight and the feel of the chakra, how many of him there were. Less than forty, and more than four, he knew at once. That meant the enemy was fresh, not yet conserving his strength, but hadn't splurged on his forbidden variation on the technique, which could produce hundreds of shadow clones. Between fifteen and thirty, he decided. More than twenty. More than twenty-five. The man licked his lips, very nearly deciding on twenty-six. Except it didn't feel right. Maybe there was one more. Maybe one clone, just one, had received everything the opponent had managed to teach himself about stealth, and was going almost unnoticed. Twenty-seven, then. It felt right. "Up the middle with a kunai."
There was a flash of metal towards him, and he blocked high with his left knife. The thrown kunai thunked into the trunk, yards above his head, and then it had begun. The one in front was engaged and dispatched (with a puff of smoke; it had been a clone), then five shuriken behind him for the inevitable ambush (puff, puff, puff, fewer than he'd expected). Attacks kept coming, rapid-fire and without warning, in groups or singles, from the left, the right, behind, the right again, ahead, (puff, puff, puff, puff, puff). He saw them all; saw each attack, each step, each movement, each breath. Every time there was a puff of smoke, the man reduced his count by one. And every time he then wondered where the real one was.
Until, that is, when after he'd turned away from a "puff," he heard the body he'd kicked into a tree get up and slip away. That was the real one. He'd done a fast transformation, which produced the same smoke cloud, and escaped. The man was then attacked by four at once, and lost track of his opponent's movements. But he was here. Add one back to the count.
This was growing too easy, too routine. There was another trick in there somewhere. He was sure of it. It wouldn't be thrown weapons, the enemy was much weaker at range. What other trick could you add to attacks with random timing, random numbers, random direction? Or, more usefully, what mistake had the enemy made that would provide his quarry with a clue? The man ran his memory (his horrible, beautiful, perfect memory) back over the fight. Looking for a shifted gaze, an unexplained movement, a foreign sound. And he remembered nothing, back through the fight in a split second, nothing, nothing, nothing, back, back, back. Back until the very beginning of the fight. Back until that first, expected thrown kunai had been blocked high, and had thunked into the trunk above him. "The present began in the past."
He summoned chakra into his legs and jumped, twenty feet straight up, and grabbed that same kunai. He flipped himself over, using the reaction to pull the weapon free, and landed on the trunk, standing straight out to the side like an extra branch. Just above him were five of the enemy, standing the same way, surprised just as they had been about to jump on him. The man abandoned all subtlety and flew up at them with a jump kick. The front one blocked, but his wall-walking technique failed and he had to grab a branch. He ended up hanging by one hand as the man landed again. He got the kunai in the armpit (poof - eleven left) and the man moved on.
He concentrated on the legs and feet, as one was supposed to on bad footing - as all those remembered lectures advised. Trips, sweeps, and low kicks were the trick, and hands only used for distractions and feints. Two more fell; the last two learned to keep their feet but a brutal kick to one's groin and another to the other's knee that would have broken most of the leg dispatched them just the same. (Poof, poof, seven left.)
From up here he could see two groups of three. Each got a volley of shuriken, and the man leaped at the group most likely to have a survivor. As he flew, he saw two smoke clouds and heard two more - a survivor in each group, dammit. His current target parried him in the air, so he used that to flip over him and land on his other side. A quick kick back into the neck and he was down. (Poof - two left. Only two.)
The enemy was running, now, the chase was reversed. The man was faster in a dead sprint. Only slightly, but it was enough, he was gaining. But there were supposed to be two left; where was the other? He heard no sound, felt no third source of chakra. Perhaps he'd been wrong. Perhaps it was only twenty-six, and this was the last. The real one. He drew his last kunai and leapt. The other turned just in time to be tackled in the chest. He dropped his weapon and was slammed back into a tree. The man held the kunai to his sweaty throat. "You lose again, dead-last."
The opponent blinked, and grinned - and suddenly all the words Sasuke had used to stop thinking of names, of people, were gone. It was not the man and the enemy, him and the other. It was only Sasuke and Naruto, and though Sasuke had the knife it was Naruto that was grinning that annoying grin. "Can't you count, you bastard?"
Sasuke tensed. "There was another."
"I'm right behind you, Sasuke. Whoops, don't look! Might be fatal." Sasuke locked his eyes back on Naruto's. "You can't hear me now. I can't do it with more than one body at once, but I can move so you can't hear me." He was grinning, the little brat was enjoying this. "You can't turn to fight, or the clone kills you anyway. And the instant you cut him, I strike."
"Or," Sasuke said coolly, "you are on the ground with steel to your throat, and the one behind me is just a shadow clone that disappears when I kill you."
Naruto swallowed. "Yeah. Or that."
Sasuke smirked. "You're scared."
"Who for?" the boy shot back. Sasuke sighed. That was the whole problem, the reason all this had happened, the one thing he didn't understand. Naruto meant that he might be scared because Sasuke was about to die. And it was believable. It had happened before. Any death, of course, would make the blond ninja remorseful, sad, angry; these were understandable, if juvenile, reactions. But the threat of Sasuke's death made Naruto actually afraid, a personal, threatened panic, and Sasuke had no idea why. That fear in his teammate's eyes had been the last thing Sasuke had seen when he went down in the fight with Haku, the very last thing written on his damnable memory before the blackness.
"Stalemate, then." He thought of something. "The real you must have a bruise on your chest, where I kicked you before."
"Check for it and one of us dies," Naruto promised.
"You know which one is real. If you're really behind me, what are you waiting for?"
"I wanna talk, Sasuke." Sasuke studied him. He could see every pore in detail, track every movement of every muscle and strand of hair. He was memorizing the shifting pattern of rain on Naruto's forehead, without even thinking about it. He would remember forever the precise way the water beaded at the corner of his mouth. The other senses were less acute, but the memory for them was just as good. The sound of their breathing, their voices. The warmth accumulating where their bodies were in contact. The smell of their sweat mixing with rain. All these, he'd remember till he died.
"Talk."
Naruto let out a breath. "Why are you doing this, Sasuke? Why are you running to that snake bastard?" The muscles of his face adjusted themselves into an expression of hurt and betrayal. It was a boy's face - was Naruto still a boy? Or was this man's work, too, this guessing game in the dark?
"You won't understand."
"Don't just say that, idiot!" Naruto yelled. "Make me understand."
"You can't. You can't, because you don't remember." Naruto looked confused. "You were just a baby, weren't you? You'd just been born."
"Your parents," Naruto said quietly, understanding. "You were older when they died. You remember more."
Sasuke shook the orange jacket roughly. "I remember everything." Naruto watched him, not understanding. "I have perfect recall, idiot. It comes with these." He pointed to his eyes, his Sharingan. "The hidden curse of the Uchiha. So I remember exactly what it looked like when I came back to that massacre. I remember exactly how my mother's blood looked, spattered over her own walls." He slammed Naruto against the tree. "Does that help you understand, jackass?"
Naruto looked at him, silent and sympathetic. "I remember before that, too," Sasuke continued. "I remember all their faces. My parents, my uncles, their wives. My great aunt. My little baby cousin, two years old. I remember the song my mother would sing waking me up in the morning. I remember all the pithy little sayings my father had, even though I couldn't understand them yet.
"And my brother. Uchiha Itachi. I remember all the times my parents said they loved him. I remember all the times I said I loved him. And then I remember every moment he hesitated, looking at his family and knowing he was going to kill them all." Sasuke spat, narrowly missing Naruto's cheek. "There were damn few of those. The fucker was cold."
"So you're going to Orochimaru. For power, just like he said."
"For vengeance!" Sasuke snapped. Then he sighed. "And for power, yes," he admitted. "I have to be strong enough. I have to be strong to kill him."
"And do you have to betray Konohagure? The old lady and Kakashi-sensei? Your friends?"
"I don't care about that."
"Liar!" Naruto screamed suddenly, loud enough to hurt Sasuke's ears. "Damn traitor bastard liar!"
"Shut up," Sasuke hissed, "or I'll end this right now."
"Tell the truth," Naruto shot back, "or I will."
Sasuke growled. "Fine. It matters. Maybe a lot. But nothing's allowed to matter more than this. This is my life, Naruto."
"Sakura-chan. . . you hurt Sakura-chan, Sasuke. You hurt her bad."
Sasuke's eyes widened. "I thought that was an ANBU. Naruto, I swear. . ."
"Not like that, idiot. She'd never try to fight you." Naruto snorted. "You broke her goddamn heart, asshole. I left her with Fuzzy-Eyebrows, crying so hard she couldn't breathe."
"I'm sorry. I. . . respected Sakura. Sometimes, anyway. But she thought her love could 'heal' me, somehow. She thought she could hold me and all the blood and rage would magically go away."
"Nope," Naruto sighed.
"How would you know?" Sasuke asked, not cruelly, just surprised at the simple, knowing tone.
"Oh. . . " The blond tried a grin. "Everyone has their demons, Sasuke." Naruto was a terrible liar. The words, intended to sound offhand, had come out in a near-whisper.
"Tell it."
"Sasuke, I. . ."
"You made me say all that, and now you're keeping secrets? Tell it, dead-last."
Naruto bit his lip. "When I was little. . . five or six. . . I used to get these nightmares. I just thought of them as The Dreams. Every time, I woke up screaming and. . . and crying, at the top of my lungs. I was so afraid - afraid of all the blood. . . afraid of how it felt to drink the blood. . . afraid of knowing how to smile like that. . ." Sasuke blanched, knowing Naruto couldn't see it in the dark. What kind of a dream was that? And at six years old?
"I was living with Iruka-sensei then, 'cause I was too young to be by myself," Naruto continued. "He would always try to comfort me. But it didn't work. It was still there, all that blood, and I just kept screaming no matter how tight he held me. It usually took till dawn before I couldn't cry anymore. Even then it was still inside me. The lust for blood. The grinning fire." Naruto chuckled. "It's weird. The story you think you're never going to tell anyone, and when you go to tell it, you find you've already figured out just what to say."
"Do you still have dreams like that?"
"You'd have noticed, moron. We slept five feet from each other every night for months on the Wave Country mission. No, they stopped. I remember when it happened. I don't have your memory, but I can remember this. Iruka-sensei told a joke. I don't remember what one. He'd been talking at random, trying to distract me, and he told a joke, and I just cracked up."
"Idiot. You were hysterical."
"Yeah, probably. But it worked. It was still there, but it was like that didn't matter. 'Cause I was laughing. I always liked that about laughing, how nothing matters. . . I never had The Dreams again, anyway."
"Laughing. Huh. Only you," Sasuke said ruefully.
"How would you know? You never laugh!" Naruto shifted. "Are we really going to kill each other, or can we sit up? There's a root in my back."
"Shut up. You're the one who came to kill me."
Naruto grinned again. "What? No way! If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead."
"Or you've already failed and now you're playing for time."
The blond nodded, not smiling anymore. "Or that," he agreed, like before. "Or that. So. If we're not getting up until one of us dies, you might as well tell me. What's the plan, Sasuke? How is joining the Sound ninjas going to help with the big revenge?"
Sasuke bristled. "Oh, aren't you the obedient little ninja? Always pumping the enemy for information."
Naruto snorted. "You didn't think I was here on orders, did you? You're an S-rank mission, bastard, did you know that?"
Sasuke rolled his eyes. "Hooray for me."
"Actually, I was specifically ordered not to follow you."
"Because telling you not to do things always works so well."
The blond grinned. "Right. But seriously, bastard, why is swearing allegiance to Orochimaru going to help kill Itachi?"
"Because they're working together. Hidden Sound village has been hiring the Akatsuki group for missions."
"Uh. . . that makes even less sense than before."
"It gets me close, stupid. That's all I need. Then the curse - oh, you don't know. . ."
"I know about the curse now," Naruto interrupted. Sasuke raised his eyebrows. "Sakura told me, the night you left. But if you were going to release the curse, why not do it right at first?"
"It's too. . . feral. Too angry. Just too. . ." He shivered. "Too much. I'd be out of control. I'd have been pulled down like a demon before I got half way. A whole ninja village together can take down anything, the Battle of the Kyuubi proved that twelve years ago." It was Naruto's turn to shiver. "Better to keep control of myself, move with subtlety, arrive and look safe and harmless long enough to let the darkness out and kill him like the traitorous dog he is. I don't care what happens after that, if I'm killed or corrupted or anything. As long as I get it done."
Naruto nodded. "Yeah. I can see that. That could work. Thing is. . ." He sighed. "Thing is, I do care, Sasuke."
"You fear for me. Why is that?"
"You know, I don't really know. Maybe it's like when you took the hit for me on the bridge." Sasuke growled in frustration. Naruto shrugged. "By the way, if you can think of a way out of this that doesn't get one of us killed, that would be really good."
"You could agree to let me go and not follow me."
"You idiot! If I'd wanted to do that, I could have stayed home! How about you come back to the Leaf and I'll get old lady Tsunade to not punish you?"
"What was that you just said about staying home?"
"Oh, yeah. Sorry. Um. . ." Naruto scrunched his face up. "In that case, I guess we're stuck."
"Yup." Sasuke thought about this for a moment, let it sink in. "You remember my father's pithy sayings, I told you about? There's been one running through my head since this whole thing started. 'A man is anyone with a man's work.' " Naruto cracked up laughing. "What?" He didn't stop, either. "Naruto, you. . ."
"Is that what we are?" he managed, gasping. "Is that what we are, a couple of twelve-year-old men shivering in the mud trying to think about death?" He let loose one last peal of laughter. "No way, Sasuke. That's bullshit. If we were men, we'd have settled this by now, we'd know whether one of us was going to die tonight. And we don't. We have abso-fricking-lutely no idea."
Sasuke sighed. "Well, it wasn't a bad fight. It would be okay, if that were the last one."
"Yeah," Naruto agreed, a little shakily. "End with a draw. Leave it open."
"You almost had me with that ambush from above," Sasuke offered.
"I could have kicked myself for throwing that first kunai. I knew you'd end up remembering that."
"Hindsight. You had no way to know it would hit the tree."
"Yeah, but that got you the high ground, which let you go on the offensive, and then it was pretty much over. Except for my super-secret stealthy reserve, of course."
"Yeah. That was good, by the way." Sasuke licked his lips and tightened his grip on the kunai. Though Naruto was half-blinded by dark and rain as Sasuke was not, he noticed this, and knew. How had he put it? Sasuke remembered, of course. "Knew whether one of us is going to die tonight."
"G-goodbye, Sasuke. It's been fun." Sasuke nodded, and smiled, and wondered which of them was going to be. Naruto, of course, already knew, but even seeing every detail of the fear in his friend's eyes Sasuke had no way to tell. Just one more thing to remember for the rest of his life. However short that happened to be. Sasuke gathered his nerve, looked Naruto in the eyes - and stopped when he realized he didn't know what outcome he was hoping for.
"Fuck this. I don't need another set of memories of a dead person."
Naruto immediately gasped out a great breath of air in relief, then sucked it back in again and started screaming. "SASUKE YOU BASTARD! HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO ME YOU LYING CHEATING SACK OF. . ."
Sasuke popped him on the forehead with the heel of his hand. "Shut up, dead-last." He thought for a moment. It was surprisingly easy, with the priorities changed. "There's another way. We go together."
Naruto blinked. "Not where you were going, we don't."
"No," Sasuke agreed. "But not back to Konohagure, either."
Naruto blinked, his mouth slightly open, as the force of the idea hit him. "Oh. Oh." He laid there and thought about it, for quite a long time.
"Of course," Sasuke thought, "he's got more of a life in the village than I did. He's got friends, maybe even something like a family. Iruka, Kakashi, Sakura, Hinata, that brat Konohamaru. Even the people at that stupid ramen place. He might not be able to. . ."
"Nothing against the Leaf," Naruto insisted. "Not one stolen shuriken."
"Fine. You back me up on anything against Itachi that's not actually a suicide mission."
"Sure." He grinned his familiar grin. "Sounds like fun, actually. I've got a hermit friend we can visit sometimes." He looked down at Sasuke's kunai. "Um, now that that's settled, could we maybe get up? That root hasn't moved, and I'm really, really wet." Sasuke smiled and pocketed the weapon. He got off Naruto and reached down a hand to help him up. Naruto took it and pulled himself to his feet, wincing. He rubbed his chest. "Geez, you kick like a horse, you know that?"
Sasuke smirked. "So you are the real one."
Naruto grinned and rubbed the back of his neck. "Well, yeah, about that. . . turn around."
Sasuke did. And for the first time in his life, he nearly couldn't believe his eyes. "Wha. . . you. . ." It wasn't a shadow clone, or even a successful technique of any sort. It was a distorted image of Naruto, pale, boneless, and wavering. It was Naruto's best attempt at the normal, genin-level clone technique. "You used that," Sasuke said finally. "You used that crappy, half-assed, fail-you-out-of-the-academy excuse for a clone in a fight to the death? That's your 'super-secret stealthy reserve'?"
Naruto laughed. "I knew it would work. Only you would be so ready to believe in something you've only barely sensed; you trust your senses like machines."
"Of course. It didn't put out strong chakra, because it barely has any at all. It didn't make noise. How could it? Noise is realistic, and this is too damn shitty to do anything realistic." He swiped his hand through it, and it dispersed like thin steam from a bowl of soup, without even the dignity of a puff of smoke. "I can't believe you held me for half an hour with that."
"You deserved it, for putting everyone back ho - back at the village," he corrected himself, "through all this." He shivered. "Damn, my feet are cold. Who came up with these stupid shoes, anyway? When I'm Hokage, I'm issuing shoes that don't make all the ninjas freeze to death."
Sasuke looked at his own cold feet, saddened by the reminder of what Naruto was giving up, what he was risking. "You'll go back someday," he promised.
"Sure, I will. Once I've helped you take out Itachi - we'll probably get Orochimaru, too, while we're there - you can retire and I'll go back to Konohagure as a hero. It'll make a great line in the history books. 'Uzumaki Naruto, Hokage VI. Spent five years as a missing-nin in his youth with the survivor of the Uchiha clan before returning and immediately passing the exam for. . .' What? What's so funny?"
"You," Sasuke chuckled. "You're impossible."
"What's that supposed to mean?" he said, starting to get angry. Then he noticed something. "Hey! You're laughing!"
"Yeah, I am. You were right, too."
"I know I was, I'm always right. Hey, Sasuke. . . we may still get ANBU chasing us. I'm not really sure on the rules for people who just want to leave."
"I doubt it. We're not really worth the resources right now, if we're not any threat. And it's not like they've caught me yet."
Naruto laughed. "They all went the wrong way."
"The wrong way, huh?"
"Sure. Your goal was to the northeast. The direct, stupid thing for you to do was to go northeast. So some people chased you northeast. The sneaky, tricky thing to do was to go southwest and double back. So some people chased you southwest. Only I knew the Sasuke thing to do. So only I chased you northwest."
"The Sasuke thing to do."
"Yup. Any attack from behind, four times out of five you dodge left. So I faced where you were trying to get, turned left, and started walking. Makes perfect sense." Sasuke shook his head in disbelief. "Let's find somewhere to sleep tonight, Sasuke. I'm tired. There has to be some kind of shelter around here."
"I spotted a laurel thicket about half a mile back."
"Of course you did." Naruto snorted. "Put those creepy eyes away, Sasuke. They freak me out."
"What, these? You're insulting the Sharingan, the only thing that's gonna keep you from freezing your butt off tonight?"
"Shut up, bastard, you don't need to find that thicket again. You remember exactly where it is."
"Well, maybe I do." Sasuke let his eyes turn black again, with some relief. As he did, he began to see the forest as Naruto did, the low light and rain presenting real barriers to vision. The perfect recall remained, but at least there was less to remember. "Let's go, dead-last. I've been on my feet too long." He grabbed Naruto, to guide him over logs and roots he remembered in the path. So, arms around each other's shoulders as they had walked home once before, they instead carried each other into the night, laughing.
--
"Recall" is the first in the Memory Cycle, a five-part series that continues with "Reverie."