Story Title: Three Minutes
Rated: PG-13/T
Pairing: Sasuke/Naruto
Disclaimer: Naruto © Kishimoto Masashi
Summary: He won't let it die.
Steve's Notes: The ending is purposefully ambiguous. Forgive my ramen analogy too.
Warnings: Loose ends?
It's been thirteen days and the water comes to a boil with a shrill scream. His hands are steady as he pours the hot water from the kettle into a familiar Styrofoam cup, but his turbulent mind remembers Kakashi's too polite, too calm voice informing him that his Team had to go find yet another rich noble's missing cat and Sakura's heavy, anxious green eyes as she carefully avoided asking how he was as she struck up a conversation. And it's not just his former sensei now Hokage and former teammate now doctor but everyone that handles him like a defective paper bomb since it was eight days, wondering if he was counting to fourteen too.
Grabbing the cup of instant ramen, he sits down at his normal place at their small table in their small kitchen, the one where they have an excuse to press their bodies together that doesn't involve fist fights. He inhales the strangely comforting smell of cheap, too salty noodles, and waits for them to finish—three odd minutes when he wonders why it was arbitrarily decided that the fourteenth day past the expected completion of the mission, or last communication with the field operative, meant failure. Fourteen days is nothing, even though statistically those who did not return before said grace period usually never returned at all, and in those three minutes he can think of fourteen hundred scenarios that would have delayed a mission or mission update. He thinks of fourteen hundred more as the ramen grows cold, his eyes watching as the oil separates from the colloid broth and as the rehydrated vegetables disintegrate—a part of him, the part that hasn't dissolved like the noodles, understands that the ramen is now inedible, and he has to eventually pour the mess down the garbage disposal.
Yet, eventually is as ridiculous as thinking that something as trivial as time—three minutes or fourteen days or forever—means anything, because he knows, as sure as he knows that instant ramen cooks in three minutes, that Naruto will come back, and demand to know why he was about to throw away something so wonderful.
.end.