Disclaimer: Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto. Along with Sasuke the wank machine, Sakura the lovesick anal girl, and Naruto who will hopefully break free of these nitwits, join a cult, and have sexy demon babies with Gaara. This may or may not give away the fact that I don't own Naruto or have anything to with production.
a/n: My attempt at being tragic and dramatic and full of meaningful insight. Yeah. Anyway. Feel free to number off the examples of my blatant pretension and Sasuke hate. Sai is the new Sasuke. Less angst and more midriff. W00t! However, I'm warning you: Keeping track of the timeline I myself created gave me a momentary brain spasm because of my really poor use of tense change in this thing. Simply saying Naruto is the magical boy that ages randomly might save a life.
Also, this does not follow current manga chapters. Well, I suppose it might, but not the storyline as I expect ... Yeah, right, shutting up now.
Time
"All my possessions for a moment of time."
-Elizabeth I
Sometimes, in the darkness of his own head, Naruto thinks achievement through hard work and a pair of stubborn balls is just a load of bullshit.
This thought occurs to him more and more readily, now that he's turned down the nomination as Hokage candidate twice in a row. The look on Sakura's face when a younger version of himself, seventeen and awkwardly polite, declined the first time had been bad, but somehow the blank expression in his former sensei's eyes when he waved the offer off two years later had seemed easier. Three years after that, the argument between him and the old hag over his resignation from ANBU hadn't even had the pretence of politeness; not after he threw her desk out the window and drop-kicked Raidou along with it.
Everything gets easier with time, Iruka had once said.
Three days after Konohamaru becomes a chuunin, Naruto moved to a smaller, shabbier apartment on the edge of the village, near to where Shikamaru's family raise their deer. Konohamaru and Ino took time off to help him pack (procrastination over chores was one thing that hadn't changed), and even Kiba stopped by later in the afternoon; the four of them, even Ino, shared a round of cheap beer in an attempt to clear out Naruto's refrigerator. When all the boxes were stacked by the door, Naruto hesitated before opening the drawer of his nightstand and fingering the lone object within. The slash across the metal of the hitai-ate was still rough against the pad of his thumb, even though he had traced the edges more times than can be remembered, enough that the tie was now a faded blue and ragged. He considered giving it to Sakura. He heard somewhere that it was bad luck to bring old objects to a new place.
As his belongings were shuffled out the door, the hitai-ate was hidden neatly in his pocket. As his belongings were folded away again in his new apartment, he forgot to give it to her.
On occasion, Shikamaru will drop by with homemade dinner and they'll talk about the latest missions and play cards. When Ino broke under the weight of her father's capture and prolonged torture (outcome? Obvious, of course), Shikamaru did the same thing.
Naruto doesn't have much to say to Shikamaru these days.
One night he wakes up just after three in the morning, shaken by a nightmare he can't remember, and finds a person sitting at the table in his darkened kitchen. The sound of a blade scraping across a whetstone greets him.
Naruto peers tiredly into the fridge. "You like the place?"
The rhythmic snick of metal on stone goes on for a while.
"It's smaller. I'll have to prepare at the barracks from now on."
Naruto nods; he's been expecting that. "You staying?"
"No." The sound stops and Naruto senses the knife being turned and examined. "I've been assigned to Thunder as well." Naruto nods again. Assassinated feudal lord. Earliest return time was half a month if you were recon. A person'd be picking out potted plants and apartment complexes if not.
Sai turns to look at him from the sad glow of the fridge. His lips curl in a Noh mask smile. "You'll have the bed all to yourself. Remember to wash the sheets." He picks up the ANBU mask resting at his elbow and settles it over his face.
Naruto has never understood how a mask can have more expression than the face underneath.
He stumbles back into the one bedroom of his one bedroom apartment, hating it for being a rank shithole, wishing he had a place at the barracks, too. But only shinobi taking regular missions live there; meaning it was loud, overpopulated, where the lights never went out. Naruto's apartment had two floors of vacancies and the people that did live in the building were either single women, kids, or single women with kids.
Even with an hour's sleep, the irony is too outright to miss. He kicks a leg out in a sudden rage, aiming for the pile of jutsu scrolls, knocking over a tower of untouched packing boxes instead. The lids are flipped open and a swatch of orange catches his eyes.
Naruto can't help himself - can'tcan'tcan't.
What he pulls out is an orange jumpsuit ten years too old to fit him, folded in a meticulous way that screams Sakura, with a note in musty paper partially tucked into a pocket.
He hasn't talked to Sakura in two years. He wonders when she could have done this, then wonders what they talked about last, and finally remembers her hands on his arms, screaming at him to go back to being Naruto.
The memory is a little too much and he's a little too woozy. He sits down with the orange jumpsuit in his lap and starts laughing until tears roll down his cheeks. After a while he rips up the note, and since his hands don't seem to want to stop, he does the same to his old clothes.
There's a bloodstain on one shred of orange; he remembers clearly where that's from: Sasuke stabbing him through the collarbone with the Kusunagi sword, down through his lung, coming out somewhere near his hip. For no particular reason, he had said, then that he just could.
He tears the shred up into smaller shreds, then lunges at his nightstand, ripping out the drawer with the worn-out hitai-ate. He hurls it out the window, sending glass shattering to the streets below.
The hitai-ate had bounced out into the corner of his bedroom. Naruto stares at it before crawling into bed.
Naruto was never good at readjustment. It was one way, one path, one ending, battling down it with tenacity and a grin at the ready, insurmountable odds and millions of unexpected outcomes be damned. Kakashi and Tsunade and Jiraiya trying to teach him the meaning of disappointment, temper him with reality, even him out with a little bit of truth be damned. He was going to take life in his hands and hammer out the future the way he wanted it, damn it, and that was a promise! One of the biggest regrets of his life is the day he finally convinced Tsunade to let him gather another retrieval team, the way she had signed the document with a barely perceptible shine in her eyes. Hope.
The memory was enough to make him gag.
Hinata had had the same look in her eye, a mix of optimism and her own brand of worry, when Naruto finished convincing her that yes, they were going to bring Uchiha Sasuke back and they'd have a big drunken party when they were finished! She hadn't wanted to go at first, was unsure that the team could find a lead, uncertain that it would be wise to cross into Sound territory. But when Hinata had her torso crushed right in front of him, when he got a mouthful of her blood as it splattered across his chest and face, the last thing she had said was, "Where's Sasuke-kun?" and died with that hopeful anxiety on her face anyway.
She hadn't wanted to go at first, is what Naruto remembers. She hadn't wanted to go.
Reports had said they were close, so close. Orochimaru's encampment was near enough that Sasuke could've looked out a window, seen them, decided he had made a horrible mistake and swept in to fight with them. He hadn't, of course. About the window thing, Naruto was never sure, but later he thought it was probably true and didn't feel anything but, perhaps, apathy.
After Hinata's death he couldn't bring himself to promise anything to anyone, and when Sakura slapped him full across the face with the desperation of needing a scapegoat, he didn't bother to apologize when he punched her bedroom wall and the entire thing had to be replaced.
Even though giving up had never occurred to him as a boy, Naruto had to admit, Iruka was right: it got easier.
I don't want to lose my friends.
He had said that when he was younger, when he was just a boy. Had made it into a promise for everyone and no one at all.
On a morning just like any other, he woke up and realized fantasy did not become reality simply because you wanted it to.
He wasn't going to bring Sasuke back.
Sasuke wasn't going to bring himself back.
They weren't going to put their lives and their memories and their dreams back.
He had run out. Of words, of reassurance, of actions, and maybe even hope. He had used it all up, had waited and begged and fought, and still... nothing. Half a decade of chasing after him, and he realized there was nothing left to tell Sasuke, to ask of him or beg of him. This was it. The end.
He rolled out of bed, dressed, and went to Hinata's funeral. Afterwards, he came back and went to sleep; even as he felt more awake then he ever had in his life.
He thinks maybe he left a large part of himself in that room that day, some part just poof, gone. He's glad of it, though. Even if he spends most of his time alone, made enemies of his friends, has a quiet chuckle that he's Gaara and now Gaara's him, drifts from place to place like a ship with no course. Even if.
Funny. He once thought he was going to break Sasuke in, but Sasuke broke him instead. Broke him down the middle like a rotten tree stump, enough that anyone could look past the likable exterior and see the dismal contour inside. If this is what truth was like all along, Naruto once thought, then he wished he had gotten a taste of it sooner. Maybe it wouldn't have been such a shock if he had.
Seventeen years later and Naruto thinks he finally understands why Kakashi seemed to be carrying a burden on his back even when he was standing tall. But Kakashi has something he doesn't. He has the final curtain. He has the end of the story. Even when the past feels like it will never scar over and fade away, he has the smooth, cool monument in the center of the park to talk to.
Naruto doesn't have any of that. Seventeen years, twenty seven, thirty seven, it doesn't matter. He'll never know. He'll never know anything. All he has are the true words of a shinobi (what if what if what if) and a waning memory of a twelve-year-old face with dark hair and hollow angles. All he has is time.
Naruto leans his head against the window and tries to remember the shape of Sasuke's eyes. He can't.
He wants.