Author's Note:

This is my very first fanfiction.
It is probably riddled with language mistakes, the characters are horribly OOC, it is difficult to understand and weird. Still, I hope it is possible to enjoy at least a bit of it and – if you can't or you can, either way – you will leave me some constructive critism. Anyway, take a deep breath and have fun. (at least try, pretty please...? )

Disclaimer: Naruto ain't mine. But it's fine that way, I still can write fanfiction about it... :P

He stood by the entrance to the room which was only left open very slightly, and listened. While knowing that it was wrong to eavesdrop on someone who wanted to be alone, he did it anyway. What he snapped up were but fragments of words, pieces of a puzzle only the person inside the room could put together. He knew the meaning, the reason why the person wanted to be alone, what made him shun their society,

(Society?
Two people he'll probably think of as unable to give a flying damn?)

but he couldn't really reproduce it. He had never felt like the person did, how much they might be of the same kind due to their similar past. A voice in his mind sneered over that last thought. As if being orphaned, being the only one of his kind and being stared at by some were things to forge bonds of. He was loathed. You weren't. A barely audible sigh – after all, he had to conceal his very existence by this slightly opened door – escaped his lips.

And another one, when he heard the voice inside, that soft sound that was rarely heard, usually overshadowed by cheerful exuberance, break. The levees are broken, let hell break loose.

He wiped a few brown hairs out of his field of vision. He should have worn his hitai-ate. But they were staying in a damned inn, hiding themselves from the big issue. They weren't supposed to be here, in this place that now experienced his fifteen minutes of fame (damn, how he wished these fifteen minutes were over). Where a few people endorsed with the power over armies conferred and probably never came to a satisfying conclusion. He knew how these councils were going. The fact that they were represented by a far too mysterious man with questionable motives was not exactly helping to his peace of mind.

He realized that he tried to digress. It wasn't working. The sobs that quietly came out of the room bore themselves painfully into the flesh of his soul, digging out secrets. Things that he wasn't supposed to be revealing.
After all, he was a tiger. Hiding behind a intricately adorned mask of white porcelain, he was but a weapon on two legs.
Not now. Fuck it! You are not Tiger right now. You are a human with feelings. Get that twelve-foot pole out of your ass, he chided himself, deciding to try it at least.

And the secret manifested inside him by directly crawling onto his heart, deciding that he had to enter that room, stat. He knew the secret from previous times. Ever since he had been assigned to 'take care' of a socially inept pervert, a pink-haired, overly violent copy of Tsunade-sama and... him, it had been there. He had felt it as soon as the subject of his task was displaying himself.

Was it care? Was it friendship? Was it growing like a damned weed and growing into something that he would have never thought existed in his wooden mind while he was watching, always watching, like he was watching now and probably would forever if he didn't get his ass up?
It was useless to ponder. Now was the time to stop the simple watching.

With the silence he was used to (they had forced him to be as silent as the tiger he was, something he was very thankful for right now), he slid open the door. It felt like he was opening a gate to the star-speckled sky above, if it would ever look like an unlit room of a run-down inn in the night.

And like it was usual to the sky he had watched so often during his encounters with death, the sun was central. Here, it had eclipsed, broken down and crying.

The intruder knelt down behind his sun. His sun? Yes, for the moment, it was his, for that other lazy bugger was off somewhere reading his dreaded porn. He was glad he was. Carefully, he circled his arms around the person – was he fearing to catch fire when he was already burning? - and pulled him close. His secret feeling inside him began to grow as if it was on drugs, spreading, filling him out until he thought the entirety of his body to be a speaker of his heartbeat. It wasn't unpleasant.

The boy didn't flinch away, but turned to bury his face into the chest of the intruder, responding to the hug. The older man felt the tears staining his shirt. For all he cared, he could drench it, as long as he wasn't to pull away. He pressed him even closer, directing the gaze onto the head with the color of the sun. His ears now made out what he was mumbling about. He cried about his raven-haired friend that hadn't realized what the blond had – that there was a cycle of hatred in the things everyone did and it had to be broken. Only that the idiot was pouring oil into a fire that had already been responded to by the whole world. They did not watch any longer.

And he didn't want to, either. The feeling inside him made him move as if he was a puppet on strings that were controlled from within his ribcage. He lowered his head to the hair of the younger man, his lips brushing over the blond strands, then again, rinse and repeat.

He did not count the times he kissed the mop of hair. He only knew he stopped when he felt the head move up. Two oceans, rimmed with red from all the crying looked up, locking gazes with his own eyes. The blond opened his mouth and while doing so, he observed a little glint of happiness being washed ashore in the blue orbs. It made that dreaded feeling in his chest suddenly burn up with an agreeable warmth – the knowledge that it was him who had caused the eyes to smile again.

„Thanks for always being there, Yamato-taichou."

He could not help the soft smile appearing.

„With pleasure, Naruto-kun. I'll always be watching over you."