Lomonosov Current, a naruto fanfic

Death comes and death goes.

Naruto takes it like a sponge and it seeps into him, filling him, making him stronger and stronger until he is bursting with rage, sorrow, darkness turned to power. He feels everything and years have not been able to take the edge off of his strange sensitivity, emotions running just beneath his skin, hotter than blood and fire. If an ally falls, he rises, the morning sun, red with liquid iron, soaked to the bone with never-ending anguish, because if there is one thing that is limitless, it is his depth of emotion. Death for Naruto is a curse, something that he will not accept for anyone, because Naruto does not give up and, deep down inside, they all know his name will end up on that memorial stone.

Sasuke takes it like a wall, and every life bounces back because he has spent a lifetime perfecting indifference and no longer knows what it is to feel. His was a family of shinobi—to die in battle was honor, to take life a given. And then he had no family and there was no battle, for what parent would fight their own son? So the wall began and with each oblivion it grows higher and higher and thicker and thicker, so that if it falls now it will crush him utterly. Death for Sasuke is an enemy, and though the wall is pitted and scarred, it has yet to be breached.

Sakura takes it like a stone, each loss washing over her in a wave, wearing her down ever so slightly, until one day she will crumble, because she cannot be numblike Sasuke and she cannot overcome her exhaustion like Naruto because she is just so damn tired. Her hands have been steeped with death since the day she stepped into Tsunade's office and demanded to be trained, because there is always someone who doesn't make it, someone whose body, whose soul is grateful for the end. She stitches life back together, but just so easily takes it, watches it fall through her fingers like water and sometimes she can't breathe, the weight of so many souls are pressing down upon her. Death for Sakura is a mainstay, a constant companion, and it also eludes her, for sometimes she finds herself wishing for it in the heat of battle, where nothing is ever certain.

She is washing her hands after a surgery, the water running red beneath her fingers, when he comes in, standing off to the side as the genin she was training slips out. Her hands are so pale in this light, scars gleaming beneath the flow of water and she turns the faucet off carefully, cold metal clammy beneath her fingers.

"Naruto," she says calmly, because she can tell there is bad news coming, his face is the trained blankness that came with the diplomacy of his job. She never uses his title, except to remind him of who he is, nowadays—once she tried and he had scowled and shouted her down.

"They found a body," are his first words and already she is tensing because why is he telling her this? (It's the closing wounds that hurt the most, trickling lemon juice and salty water over them. How is that when you want to know the least, in your mind you already comprehend?) "They think he was dead for about a week—the corpse was in bad condition. They need someone to do an autopsy."

She hears the pleading in his voice and it makes her cold, because he should never have to beg her, not now. "Of course I'll do it," she tells him, looking up to meet his eyes. "And you don't need to ask." Sometimes she thinks that he forgets that he is her superior—it is her job to remind him in this, like a schoolteacher reprimanding a student. But she knows that, this time, it is to delay the inevitable, the words that escape his tongue's clutch as she pushes open the door.

"Sakura. It's Sasuke."

He used to think that he knew everything, that fighting was all about honor and never giving in and being the best was knowing all the jutsu and winning every battle. He used to have dreams, big ones, big enough to swallow this whole village and raise it above the clouds. He used to think that battle was a necessity, as obvious, as mandatory as breathing.

He used to think a lot of things as a kid.

Now he knows the difference, he thinks, as he watches her pause ever so slightly before continuing on to the morgue where, on some icy slab, an old face awaits her to peel back the binding, reveal the mystery within. To fight is to understand that if you do something wrong, even just one little thing, someone will die and that death will cut you deeper than any kunai ever could. Battle is a necessity because to not fight is to lay down your life at your enemy's feet, bend your head to offer them an easy swing at your neck. And now he knows that there are battles he never wants to fight and one of them is the battle for a woman's heart which now stands between him and a dead man. Here, in this now that they live in, she is unreachable, and though he is closer to her than ever, he has never been farther.

And then there are other matters, matters like burying friends—and he still thinks of him as a friend, even after all he has done, because he is Uzumaki Naruto and he doesn't give up on people, not even Uchihas, perhaps the most cursed clan of people now forever washed from existence. Tomorrow he will have to organize a ceremony because people should know—people should know what they died for and how sometimes what seems real isn't. And, in a way, he wants to justify him, to give him one last chance.

(It is a not quite secret, but one day he finds the ancient picture of Team Seven Sakura still has, tucked away, gathering dust, in one of her boxes, and he pulls it out, wrapping it against his palm and up his sleeve, because sometimes he can't remember what kept him going in those days and the picture is proof of a motive.)

It is like unwrapping a present, the slow way she peels back the skin, after cutting his chest into a Y, each segment revealing more and more. Infection, internal bleeding—one of his lungs had collapsed, the other pierced by a broken rib. Here, in this cold room with a rotting, unfeeling, (not much has changed, ne? she thinks to his soul and herself, almost smiling bitterly) she wonders how long the agony lasted, who inflicted it, but her voice does not shake as she recites her findings to the scribe. Moving to the cranial exam, she continues to take him apart, to understand him more fully than she could when she was a girl and utterly in love with him. Underneath the skin, he is just like they all are—veins and tendons and knots and anchors dragging him down until he vanished forever beneath the surface. When she finishes, she strips off her gloves, washing her hands once more beneath freezing water as the attendant covers him and rolls him back into his own private box and then, with more dignity than she ever possessed around him in life, she walks out, because he is finally gone, her hands have proven it, and that night she cries for all of the years she spent wishing for the disappearance of his burden, because there came a point when she just couldn't love him anymore, not even as a memory, because in fishing for answers in fast-moving rivers she has discovered that loss means never going back.

They fight.

"You can't just disconnect!" He roars at her back, because she is pressing herself into the window, shutting him away. "You can't just pretend that he wasn't ours! He was ours, Sakura, our teammate, our friend, and you can't disregard that!"

"He wasn't ours, he never belonged to anyone!" She snarls back, spinning, fury rearranging her features. "From the moment he left these walls—of his own accord—he wasn't ours, he wasn't anybody's! He left us and now he's left us for good and you know what? I'm happy! Because now he's gone and we never have to worry again!"

The moment she says the words, something in him goes cold and she watches his face, suddenly wary, but he doesn't come near her, because now he is putting himself as far away as possible as well, until soon they won't be able to hear each other, the distance will be so great.

"So you're happy. You're happy that he's dead and you don't have to deal with him anymore."

(What would she like to do? She would like to fall back, to change herself, to hold Sasuke back as he walked away, to smile at Naruto more often, to prove Kakashi wrong about her, but she can't revive the dead, the cold gods know she's tried.)

"Yes."

"Then leave!" His rage bubbles over, overwhelms the room and she wishes for the silence of the morgue, where the dead were finally, finally beyond her. "Leave and don't come around here anymore because if you abandon him you abandon me!"

That hurts and it fuels her because she doesn't even look at him as she walks past, and by the time she reaches the street she is high on wrath and agony because of all the tigers she played with, she didn't expect him to be the one to bite her.

It is a large service, but silent, people crowded around to hear the truth of a man who brought hell down around them. Naruto speaks calmly, only once losing his control—when he speaks of them as children, in a single cell, teammates—but regaining it quickly. He has come far, they think, no longer the noisy kid, the over-exuberant youth. Some of them regret that, wonder what it takes to change a person like that into the cool, collected man in front of them.

He's only thirty, they murmur to each other afterwards. So mature for thirty. But to be a shinobi you have to grow up fast and his growth spurt came in a mist of blood and bone and pain.

He doesn't see her head in the crowd and another small thing inside of him breaks, because his anger has become controllable, but her fury is more volatile, reaching down into the space of Young Girl Brokenhearted which he can only begin to wonder at, for yet again, he comes between them, and they are, as follows, Sakura (Denial), Sasuke (Colder By The Minute) and Naruto (Alone).

She stays at home, playing with Ayumi, the old calico purring and rubbing against her legs, pretending that it doesn't matter, that nothing can touch her.

"The past is past," she says firmly, and Ayumi licks her hand, mewing for food.

It happens that afternoon, as she is brewing tea. Walking out of the kitchen, she sees her cat—raised from a kitten, sixteen years of hairballs and a portable oven in her bed and a soft nose in her ear—her baby, lying so still in the sunlight and she doesn't let herself believe it as she strokes her fur, hands trembling.

"Not you," she whispers, voice cracking with sobs, "Not you too."

They meet by the memorial, as evening sets in and the frost rises. She is shivering, face blotchy and red, hands grimy with dirt, nails black, and he thinks it is the first time in a long time to see something on them other than blood. In silence they regard the stone, looking at all the names, reading between them to the ones that aren't there.

"My cat died," she says suddenly, breath creating a cloud. "I buried her in the garden out back. My cat died," she repeats numbly and her shivering increases. He doesn't know how to react to her—somewhere in the years between they lost themselves and every death was only pushing them farther apart. Naruto thinks, almost compulsively, of Team Eight, how, in the face of the final breaking, they pulled together, created something stronger than the canyon of loss. But, in the face of death, of sorrow, of abandonment, Team Seven shattered and stilted and fell apart and now, years in the future, he can't fix them, not with his hands that have fought so many battles, not with her hands so stained with life.

"Sakura…" he tries, but she cuts him off, speaking rapidly, words falling over themselves in a race to escape her mouth.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Naruto, I forgot and I just wished that it would go away because we were always so unhappy and then we lost him forever and I just thought…and then she died, why did she have to die? I loved her longer than I loved him and yet he's the one who is destroying us, this, everything." She is crying, weeping, and her anguish is getting mixed up in her voice until he takes her by the shoulders, bewildered at the weight she is standing beneath, because he realizes that in her world, like his, it is always raining, but he has an umbrella and she left her rain boots at home. "I don't have—I can't forgive him, Naruto, and I never will be able to, but I can't forget either and…"

The rest he drowns out in his chest as he pulls her in, wrapping his arms around her, willing himself to be thread and sew them back up, a boy with dreams too big for the sky and a girl who always got left behind, no matter how strong she really was, because suddenly they are children again and he doesn't know what to do anymore. They have become people he doesn't recognize and all he wants to wake up to realize he is late to meeting his team on a bridge, only to arrive to wait two hours for a lame excuse. For a long time they stand like that as the lights in the town rise and somewhere far above stars prick in the sky.

"I'm sorry about Ayumi," he says finally when he can speak again. She nods heavily.

"I'm sorry about everything," she replies and he doesn't need to look at her face to know that some things go beyond tears, beyond words, beyond anything they will ever need to say.

"Want to get ramen?" Even with her face pressed into his jacket, he can feel her smile.

"Am I paying?"

"Being Hokage doesn't exactly draw a great salary."

And it's worth it to have her snort in disgust and punch him—lightly—in the stomach before hooking her arm in his and leading them away, never looking back. That night they feast on memories and hot noodles and more than once she heaves a sigh of disgust and says, "Naruto!" as he laughs and laughs and laughs.

You can't leave friends behind, just like you can't bleed without scarring, but you can learn to live beyond them and the memories they imprinted, traces of leaves on water and snow. You can't forget the dead and you can't abandon the living.

That night, back at Sakura's tiny house, they drink themselves rotten, and they both cry a little, for dead cats and dead friends and ghosts that never fade away, and they both laugh a lot, for the little things that happened and the big ones too, and what-ifs and might-haves and, just before they fall asleep on her couch, Sakura kisses him full on the mouth and says, giggling, afterwards, "I've always wanted to do that sober." And death comes and death goes and Naruto takes it like a sponge and Sakura takes it like a stone and Sasuke took it like a wall, but he likes to think, as he swims in the fog between waking and sleep, that they're learning how to take it just a little better and that someday, when it's their turn, they'll understand.

"Hey Sakura," he said once, under leaves of green and summer sunlight, "We should make a pact."

"What?" They were nineteen and it was a blissful day off, war in the past, war in the future, no war in the present. The girl put her scroll down to look at him, eyes quizzical.

"When one of us dies—and I mean any of us, you, me, Sasuke—we should have a big swinging party and every time one of us dies there'll be this great huge party on either side of the line until we're all there."

She was torn between laughing and scolding, he could tell, so he sat up, moving to crouch before her, blue eyes shining.

"But what happens when there's only one of us left?" She asked, undaunted by his grin. "Who will they party with?"

"The spirits! Duh! Besides, you have other friends."

"Me? Why am I last?" A shadow ran across his face and he redirected his gaze at her knee. "Well?" She poked him with her finger.

"I don't want to see you die," he mumbled. For a long moment she was silent and he thought that she was going to bark out how stupid he was sometimes, but instead she looked at him, cocking her head to the side, unable to tell him that she couldn't stand to lose him either.

"I'll agree to your pact if you agree to mine," she said slowly after a minute. He looked up at her, in truth slightly shocked. "My pact is that we both die, at the same time, when we're old, in our sleep." She had seen, even at that age, enough death to know that there was no peace to be had in any final moment, but she wanted at least to pretend it could be. "Agreed?"

"We have to swear it!" Face serious, he pulled her to her feet and gripped her forearm; she did the same, wrapping her fingers around the tight muscle.

"I, Uzumaki Naruto, swear on all things good and ramen-flavored that I will party big when one of us dies and continue to party long after and that when I die, it will be in my sleep with my Sakura-chan."

"And I, Haruno Sakura, swear on all things worth fighting for that I will party big also when one of us dies and continue to party into the hereafter and that when I die, it will be in my sleep with the one, the only Naruto."

"Don't break this one!" he warned her, wagging his finger and she laughed, long and loud, for being nineteen and unsure of everything beneath the bluest sky in the world.

She would like to fall into tomorrow, and be done with this sorrow forever, but she knows, like he does, that sorrow does not disappear but merely fades into the background, and instead, when morning comes, she gets up and makes tea for their hangovers and when he calls her Sakura-chan, she smiles and lets herself fall back into him, because it has been a long time since he called her that and maybe, just maybe, names will help them start this new, long journey into the future.

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Lomonosov Current: a deep current in the Atlantic Ocean.