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Bricks & Boys
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"So, you finally did it."
Naruto looked up from his chair behind the desk. His Hokage chair. Giddy excitement tried to rise to the surface and he had to fight it down.
This wasn't the time.
Sasuke lounged in the doorway, leaning against it and looking like an overgrown crow, as usual. Naruto could have teased him for that, but he didn't. Timing again.
Instead he just grinned and said, "Yeah, I did. What, you thought I couldn't?"
Sasuke scoffed. "If I did, would it have stopped you?"
"Wouldn't've even slowed me down," Naruto replied cheerfully. "And you can sit down, y'know. Instead of being all lurk-y. There's probably not a ton of chairs where you've been, am I right?"
The resident wanderer-slash-intelligence-gatherer-slash-Konoha-shinobi, sort of, blinked at him. "I haven't been living underground, moron," he said at last. But he did close the door and step into the room, at least, so Naruto decided to count that as a victory. He'd learned to take the small ones where Sasuke was concerned.
He leaned back in his (Hokage) chair and looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling. "Think this room could use a few more plants," he said. "Like, a lot more. It's kinda depressing in here."
Sasuke's eyebrow took an upward hike. "I know this isn't what you called me up here to talk about," he said in a way that implied it had better not be. Honestly, the guy was so prickly. Naruto supposed there was only so much you could beat out of someone.
But he wasn't wrong. Naruto coughed, suddenly nervous.
"Yeah. I had something—would you sit down for a sec already, bastard? Unless you think you're gonna shrivel up in the light or something."
Sasuke gave him a withering look, but he sat.
There was nothing but a desk between them now. Years of chasing and separation and everything else and now it was just a desk.
But then it kind of wasn't. Because there were still a lot of things they hadn't said, things Sasuke hadn't apologized for and things Naruto didn't know if he could forget. Forgive, yeah, always, because it was Sasuke, but forgetting was something else. Something harder.
The wall between them, built up of secrets and lies and the gaping wound of betrayal had come down a lot in the years since the Last Great Ninja War. It wasn't miles high like it used to be; Naruto was kinda fiercely proud of how many bricks they'd managed to pull from it. But there was still a distance, sometimes. Sometimes he wondered if it would ever go away completely.
That was why he'd called Sasuke in here. Another brick for the discard pile, and hopefully a big one.
"Well?" Sasuke pressed. "And I swear, if it's in any way related to interior decorating—"
Naruto groaned. "It's not, jeez, Sasuke, give me a minute."
He pulled open a desk drawer and rummaged around. Which was a total smokescreen since the thing he was looking for was right at the top, but last time Naruto checked the Sharingan didn't make its user psychic, so Sasuke could just sit pretty for a few more seconds while Naruto tried not to freak the fuck out.
He finally pulled the unrolled scroll from the drawer and set it flat on the desktop, smoothing out invisible creases to buy a little more time.
"What is that?"
Impatient jerkface.
Biting his lip, Naruto slid it across the desk. There was no going back now.
Then again, going back on things had never really been his style.
"Designs," he said quietly. "For the Uchiha memorial."
Sasuke's head came up so fast Naruto swore he heard something snap. His expression was impossible to read.
"The what."
"The memorial." There was no time now to wonder if this had been a really spectacularly stupid idea, so Naruto just barreled on and hoped for the best. "I didn't know which one would be right, or where to—I thought maybe at the entrance to the old Uchiha compound, but then I wasn't sure if that was too out of the way or—and I thought you'd want—I thought you could help me figure it out?"
He cursed himself when it came out sounding like a question, but Sasuke was apparently too stunned to pounce on the weakness like he normally would have. His eyes had gone back down to the page in front of him, sketched with a handful of designs and tentative details, and he was sitting so still Naruto couldn't even tell if he was breathing.
"Why did you do this?" he asked at length. His voice was tight.
Oh, shit.
Naruto tried to brush it off. "What, call you in? Thought you'd want—"
"Cut the shit," Sasuke snapped. His eyes were blazing, burning metaphorical holes into the paper. Warning. "Why did you do this?"
Naruto swallowed hard.
"Because what Konoha did to your family was wrong," he said. "They didn't deserve to die like that. Itachi didn't deserve—"
But he stopped himself there, because Sasuke tensed even more and Naruto was reminded how dangerous it could be to bring up his brother. It seemed like Itachi would always be the thin ice they had to tread on. Even after all this time.
He tried again. "Because I didn't want to start my time as Hokage by pretending everything's fine and nothing's gonna change. Because I'm going to change it, Sasuke, I swear I am." That got Sasuke to look at him, at least, even if looking did fuck all to help Naruto decipher how he was taking this. "And this is how I wanna start. Air everything out. No more sweeping this kind of shit under the rug. That's not how Konoha's going to be anymore."
Because I promised you I'd make things better, he doesn't say. Because you trusted me enough to believe me when I said it.
Because Sasuke had been willing to lay down his hatred and his revenge, to put his trust in a future Naruto believed in, and Naruto knew he'd never forgive himself if he didn't live up to that faith.
"This won't change what happened," Sasuke said eventually.
"No," Naruto admitted. "But it'll change how people remember it."
Well. The memorial, along with a few changes Naruto was planning on suggesting to Iruka and the other Academy teachers when they discussed the Uchiha Massacre, but one thing at a time. He didn't want Sasuke's head to actually explode in the middle of his office.
Sasuke glanced down again, reached out slowly to trace a list of names. Names taken from the last census before the clan was wiped out. They covered half the scroll; a few were underlined. Naruto tried really hard not to fidget.
"Figured you could also help us out with those. Make sure we didn't use the wrong kanji anywhere, stuff like that."
Long fingers paused carefully over one of the underlined names, and Naruto didn't need to squint to know which one it was. Or that it wasn't written in kanji at all.
Uchiha Itachi, as it turned out, featured pretty heavily in Naruto's suggested list of textbook revisions. And he put some big quotation marks around "suggested".
"This one," Sasuke said abruptly.
(And if his voice was a little rough, Naruto wasn't going to bring it up. He was getting decent at this whole diplomacy thing.)
Naruto held back a sigh of relief, opting instead to nod. Mature adults nodded, right? "Okay. And where do you think we should put it up?"
Sasuke visibly swallowed. "I—I'll think about it."
"Okay," Naruto said again. Still nodding. He had the feeling he looked less like a mature adult and more like a dipshit, but Sasuke wasn't looking at him. "I'll let them know to get started on the etching."
"It'll take a while. There are a lot of names," Sasuke said. There was something hollow about it.
The Nanadaime found himself trying to gulp down a lump in his throat. Maybe he was catching a cold or some shit from the lack of plants in this damn office.
"Yeah," he said once he'd managed to dig up some self-control. "An' I'm putting your brother's front and center. That one's not negotiable."
Blinking hard, Sasuke nodded, almost to himself. Then he straightened and pushed the scroll back across the desk. It sat between them like a white flag.
"Was there anything else?" he asked calmly, looking at Naruto again instead of the wood grain. There was nothing in his face to suggest he'd just been on the verge of showing actual human emotion, which kind of made Naruto want to bang his head against a wall. He sighed.
"No." Then, when Sasuke was out of his chair and halfway to the door, "Wait, yeah. Sakura told me she saw you scaring the shit out of the new genin again." He aimed a halfhearted glare at Sasuke's back. "If you keep terrorizing the newbies we're gonna stop being a ninja village real quick, y'know?"
Sasuke didn't even turn around. It didn't stop Naruto from hearing the smirk in his voice. "If they're so easily frightened, they have no business being ninja in the first place."
Naruto rolled his eyes. "Yeah, but you could try toning down the 'kill everything' vibe a little when you're around them."
"I could," Sasuke deadpanned. Unsaid but heavily implied went I could also give up jutsu and weaponry and start working for Ichiraku; that's an equally likely scenario.
Naruto gave up, turning his attention to a terrifyingly huge pile of paperwork he'd shoved to one side and muttering under his breath.
"Fine. Grumpy bastard."
There was a pause.
"Naruto."
Naruto looked up. Sasuke had paused in the doorway, still lurking like a lurker, and his back was to the desk.
"Thank you," he said. It was so quiet Naruto wasn't even sure he'd heard the words right.
Probably not. The day Sasuke thanked him for anything would be a cold one in hell.
But then again…
The door closed and Naruto missed his chance to ask or respond. He thought he might not have needed to, anyway.
He leaned back in his Hokage chair, ignoring paperwork for now in favor of contemplating plants and best friends and how thorny both could be. Or how brilliant, if someone helped them out a little.
One more brick down, he thought, and grinned.