Hello!
BIG SHOUTY MUST READ: This is a sequel to another story that I've written! So, for this to make more sense or for it to be more enjoyable it might be a good idea to read the story that came before it: 'The History of Normal,' that's the first part!
(That is not me vehemently plugging another of my stories honestly *getting super narcissistic* it just will read a whole lot better with the first story in toe!)
If you already have then, woo! First chapter of the sequel! I had soooo many amazingly lovely reviews from you majestic treasures that I just really wanted to write a sequel!
So I hope you enjoy chaps and chapettes, and that this story will resolve any questions still left open from The History of Normal! :)
Much love!
Chapter One.
Fairy Lights.
There comes a point in everybody's life, when they come to the realisation that they aren't singularly unique. It's a great crescendo of a realisation until you reach the zenith of self-awareness and begin to understand that perhaps, your baggage is not so dissimilar from the rest of the world's.
For a time, this insight comes as a sort of comfort. However, not every obstacle is relatable or resolvable.
Sasuke Uchiha had left his home town, just west of Knebworth, two years ago to attend Kirigakure University in Bournemouth. With him, he'd bought a whole horde of messes and hang-ups. In the two years he'd been gone, he hadn't been in contact with his parents and they in turn had made no effort to contact him. It was his guess that they felt he had picked his side, and that side was Itachi's. Sasuke's epilepsy was still out of control, despite the new cocktail of drugs the neurologists kept introducing. There was every one of his friends' failings and struggles inscribed on him.
Sasuke had not come to university alone however…
The alarm on his iPhone began to trill beside him and he jerked awake. He lay blinking for a moment, trying to ground himself; he was hot in his wrinkled bedsheets with somebody else's balmy limbs were weighing him down. Sasuke combed his fingertips over the body softened sheets until he found his bedside cabinet and then his phone, which he switched to silent. He turned his face into his pillow and inhaled its married perfume: Naruto's rose and patchouli mixed with his amber and violets. It was with regret that he began to push himself upright.
"Don't," Naruto's hand snatched out from beneath the periwinkle blue sheets and he closed his fingers around Sasuke's wrist. Sasuke admired Naruto's honey coloured and calloused fingers ringed around his own thin, bone-china wrist. "Your lecture doesn't start until nine," Naruto pointed out groggily.
Sasuke pursed his lips and shook Naruto off him.
"Yeah, well, I don't wanna turn into a plebeian beast like you," Sasuke sighed waspishly, sitting up and rolling off the edge of the bed.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Naruto inquired, peering at Sasuke with one bleary, dragonfly-blue eye.
"When they say a lecture starts at nine, Naruto, that doesn't mean nine is the suggested time; it means turn up twenty minutes early, not one hour and twenty minutes late." Sasuke snorted, pulling on clean clothes from the chest of drawers.
"I'm an artist, you Psychology swats wouldn't understand," Naruto waved a hand dramatically as he rolled onto his back with a yawn.
"I thought you were an animator, but all this crap would beg to differ," Sasuke said as he kicked a bottle of Part A Dragon Skin Silicone out of the way.
"Stop messing all my shit up Sasuke, no wonder I'm always late – I can never find anything; I've been looking for the hardening solution for that for months!" Naruto barked and Sasuke narrowed his eyes throwing his boyfriend and incredibly sour look.
"I'll give you a hardening solution," he muttered and when Naruto gave a throaty chuckle at Sasuke's inadvertent innuendo, Sasuke rolled his eyes and stalked from the bedroom.
He picked his way through his shared house. If he'd thought halls of residence had been bad, then renting a property with three other students had been a real eye opener. Sasuke could draw up as many chore rotas as he liked, make them as big and flashy as he liked, he could probably even staple them to one of his roommate's heads and there would still be a sink-full of dishes coated in grime, carpets with tumbleweeds made of hair and dust, and rancid pizza boxes maturing self-sustaining universes all of their own.
As per usual, his second housemate Suigetsu Hozuki, lay passed out on their second-hand, plum velvet, bridgewater sofa. Sasuke hadn't heard Suigestsu come home last night, and as Sasuke hadn't put away his laptop until four in the morning, he could only assume Suigetsu hadn't crawled back into the house until a few hours ago. Sasuke pursed his lips as he gazed down at the slumped student, he could smell the rum even from his considerable distance, it was shocking. For a Marine Biology student, Suigetsu's comprehension of the appropriate volumes of consumable fluids was appalling.
Sasuke had been like Suigetsu once, had lived on a diet of undiluted spirits, candied shisha smoke, and painkillers. However, a stretch on the drug MXE which had resulted in a catastrophic trip, culminating in a full-blown tonic clonic seizure; had taught him the need to take responsibility for himself and his condition, no matter how much of an onerous burden it felt to do so.
In an act of reluctant kindness, Sasuke chucked a blanket over Suigetsu before making his way to the tiny kitchen.
"Morning," Sasuke nearly fell out of his skin, so surprised to find Jugo stood by the small window overlooking their postage stamp of a garden, comprised entirely of concrete slabs.
"You're awake then," Sasuke observed, making his way to the fridge.
Jugo went through fluctuations. Some months, Sasuke would have to stand in the boy's doorway, launching the texts of Ivan Pavlov and Erik Erikson at his ginger head until the gangly giant tumbled out of his bed. Other months, Jugo was up and about so early, Sasuke wasn't wholly sure he'd even gone to bed.
"Ready for today?" Jugo asked, watching as Sasuke pulled himself up onto the travertine countertop, uncapping his Weetabix breakfast drink. He withdrew three strips of medication from behind the kettle, and decanted one from each into his palm. One hundred milligrams of lamictal, one thousand milligrams of ethosuximide and fifty milligrams of sertraline. Three pills all to keep Sasuke's neuron's and neurological transmitters operating. Two to stop him seizing, one to stop him from breaking down. One gram and one hundred and fifty milligrams of contrived remedies pumped all through his bloodstream, and then his busted brain might last the day.
It took Sasuke a moment to process Jugo's words, and then they fell into place. Today was no ordinary day – today was dissertation proposal day. That was why Sasuke had been awake until four in the morning every day for the past month. Discarding his half-drunk Weetabix, he dropped off the countertop and sprinted back through to his and Naruto's bedroom. They had the bottommost backroom in the three-bedroom maisonette. This set up had its positives and negatives, they were closest to the kitchen. However, the maisonette had been built on the turn of the last century, and therefore had no central heating, so the downstairs was particularly draughty given the amount of doors.
When he arrived in the bedroom, he found that Naruto had made no move to get out of bed; he had instead rolled into the space Sasuke had just evacuated.
"If you wait, I'll drive you to uni," Naruto offered as Sasuke dove down the side of the bed to wrestle his laptop's power-pack free of the plug socket.
"No thank you," Sasuke retorted stiffly, shoving his laptop into its bag.
"Suit yourself," Naruto grunted, rolling his eyes and ringing out his wrists with a repulsive cracking sound, inspiring a noise of dissent from Sasuke.
"It's my proposal today," Sasuke reminded Naruto who elevated himself on his elbows.
"I didn't forget," He promised and Sasuke snorted.
"I don't care if you did, just don't forget your own, it's next week, the day before we go home," Sasuke's eyes lingered on Naruto's face as he scrubbed his eyes.
"Yeah, yeah," Naruto muttered.
Sasuke didn't take his eyes from Naruto's handsome face; rent at that moment with weary irritation. Naruto wasn't lazy, he was just indecisive and that was what worried Sasuke. Maybe it had been okay to push projects right up until the deadline in their first year, maybe even their second year, but their third year was entirely different.
"Well, I'll see you later then," Sasuke said, heaving his messenger bag onto his shoulder as he turned to leave.
However, Naruto caught hold of his wrist and pulled him back down. Sasuke scrabbled for a vantage, only just catching the corner of the mattress before he fell flat. Naruto fanned his fingers over Sasuke's solar plexus softly and smiled. Inclining himself forwards, he brushed his own mouth against Sasuke's, who felt every muscle in Naruto's chest stirring against his body.
"Good luck," Naruto grinned, pulling back mere centimetres so that his breath tickled Sasuke's cheeks and picked up strands of his tangled hair. "Call me when you're done."
"Yeah, yeah," Sasuke muttered, pushing away from Naruto quickly to hide the flush creeping over his cheeks and the bridge of his nose.
"I'm ready, but I'm not ready, you know?" Jugo was saying as they walked through town central.
Everything was bedecked with tinsel and winking fairy-lights in preparation for Christmas.
"Sort of," Sasuke replied vaguely, eyeing a display of stuffed penguins in a garden centre window.
Soon, he and Naruto would be travelling back home for Christmas, to be reunited with all their friends and family; or what little of it Sasuke had. Sasuke had spent the past fortnight liaising with a thrilled Temari, her return to the U.K for Christmas, having spent the past two years re-locating to different army bases abroad with her husband Shikamaru Nara; it would be her first Christmas back. Her brother Kankuro would also be returning from Aurillac in France to see his sister. Coupled with Lee, Sakura, Shino, and Choji all coming back for the Christmas holidays as well, and that Sai, Ino, and Kiba had never left; everybody really was going to be back together again.
Sasuke just had to get past this proposal.
"Kimimaro is already on my case about getting tickets for graduation," Jugo sighed, watching a blackbird skitter across a frozen puddle. Kimimaro: Jugo's foster father. "I keep telling him, I haven't even handed in the work to know if I've passed so that I can graduate yet," he rolled his eyes and looked at Sasuke who smiled. "What about your parents, are they coming?" Sasuke stopped in his tracks momentarily. He knew so much about Jugo's life, the boy had entrusted him with so much in the two years they'd been friends, and yet Jugo knew nothing about Sasuke.
"Maybe," Sasuke shrugged.
The truth was, he wasn't sure that his parents even knew he was at university, least of all which university or what kind of degree he was studying. Maybe he should invite them to his graduation though, extend them that opportunity? Give them that chance? Maybe…Possibly…
"I've never met your folks," Jugo noted as they paused at a zebra crossing, "I've met your brother a few times and his Mrs…"
"Iz and Itachi aren't married," Sasuke said quickly, not sure why he was in such a hurry to correct Jugo, "and yeah, my parents are, yeah…" Sasuke focused his attention on a Bluestar bus, the side of which was plastered with a promo for some banal Christmas comedy. He didn't want to talk about his debacle of a family when he already felt so nervous about giving his proposal to their tutor.
Sasuke's dissertation got the go ahead from his professor Asuma Sarutobi, almost immediately. The next few months of his life would be devoted to identifying the behavioural differences between young and adult offenders and the extent to which they could be rehabilitated. Once upon a time, Sasuke was sure he had enjoyed his degree, but the mind-numbing monotony of data collection and surveying had long since quashed that enjoyment.
Sasuke contemplated what he'd gotten himself into as he watched the contents of a sachet of brown sugar, sink beneath the castle of foam floating atop his cappuccino. He understood now, why students inhabited cafes like sunken eyed, pot noodle scavenging, goblins: the cafes were warming than their actual homes. Kamui's café was just short of Hyde Place, the street with all the clubs, pubs, restaurants, and cheap off-licences.
"Hi," Sasuke picked up his phone on the fourth ring.
"Jesus, there you are, I've been calling and calling you!" Naruto seethed, an undercurrent of distress lancing his voice.
"Yeah, sorry, I've been walking," Sasuke murmured, picking up a wooden coffee-stirrer and twirling it between his fingers.
"So?"
"So what? The answers to that question are infinite, Naruto," Sasuke sighed.
"Don't be an arse," Naruto replied witheringly and Sasuke heard the distinctively wet squelching of sculpting clay.
"Up and model making then? It's only, what, two in the afternoon, pretty much the crack of dawn for you," Sasuke smirked.
"Yeah, well I've had mum on the poxy phone for two hours, haven't I? 'Have you filled your iron up with enough water?' 'Have you tried this new marmalade?' 'How's the cat?' She's a nightmare!" Naruto sounded extraordinarily distressed.
"Well, for starters, I fill up the iron. Secondly, the last time you even came close to licking an orange was probably at the bottom of a fishbowl of Pimms. Finally, that cat's never been fine, it's too late for that beast." Naruto was already spluttering with derisive laughter by the time Sasuke finished speaking. "How is Kushina anyway?" And there was a tight feeling in Sasuke's chest as he asked about Naruto's mother.
"Yeah, same old, same old, obnoxiously loud and bossy," Naruto told him distractedly, seemingly not noticing the change in Sasuke's tone. "So anyway, tell me about your proposal," Naruto's tone brightened.
"Yeah it was good, I got the go ahead," Sasuke nodded, probing at the small mountain of sugar still adrift on top of his cappuccino with his stirrer.
"'Good,' that's high praise from you, Sasuke," Naruto whistled, "there must've been confetti and everything, I'm impressed. Sincerely I'm very proud of you though," he added earnestly.
"Thanks," Sasuke chuckled, crossing his legs beneath the table and ducking his head so as not to be overheard.
"So where'd you wanna meet to go celebrate?"
"Nope," Sasuke refused predictably.
"Oh come on, don't be such a wet wipe. You've basically morphed into a part man part laptop cyborg over the past couple of months, just give yourself one night to celebrate," Naruto implored and Sasuke pursed his lips, trying not to grin.
"You should be working on your portfolio for your proposal," Sasuke reminded and Naruto made a snorting sound.
"Fuck that, so Genbu's?" Naruto asked coaxingly and Sasuke paused for a long time.
"Fine, I'll walk over in a sec, I'm only in Kamui's down the Hexagon so I'll be ten minutes; I've got to make a call first." Sasuke conceded and held the phone from his ear as Naruto cheered. "Don't bring any of you knob animation friends." Sasuke warned before he hung up the phone.
Naruto always got under his skin and managed to dominate him. It was that relentless alacrity and that predisposition to support and encourage; he was like a hit of lysergic acid that robbed Sasuke of all his own comprehensive thought.
Shaking his head witheringly, Sasuke used the café's wifi to Facetime the next contact he wished to speak to.
"Sasuke!" Izumi answered as per usual shockingly quickly. Sasuke thought it either came from being a business woman who carried her phone about her at all times, or just being Izumi, who liked to know the whereabouts of her loved ones at every moment of every day.
"Hey Iz…" Sasuke said slowly, noticing how dishevelled she looked, "are you sat in the dark?" he peered behind her.
"Oh, no, well yes, but…" She was on her feet offering some rambling and muffled explanation. "How are you, anyway?" She asked, switching the lights on. When Izumi was thrown into relief, Sasuke saw that her face looked blotchy, rather like he'd just caught her crying.
"I…"
"How did your proposal go?" Whatever it was, she didn't want to talk about it, that much was clear.
"Yeah, I got the go ahead," he nodded. "I actually need to ask Itachi something, is he there?" At the very mention of Itachi's name, Izumi's face tightened, the strain in every line of her young face making her appear much older.
"No, he's not home at the moment," she told him calmly.
"Oh for fucks sake, is he ever home? I mean, seriously!" Sasuke said snippily, "I've texted him like ten times just this week and not once has he replied! He's the boss of his own bloody company, I know he works remotely on Tuesday's because he gave himself that day!" Sasuke ranted hotly and Izumi looked uncomfortable. "And how much time from the boss does celery really warrant anyway? It's not like it's a flight risk, it's a vegetable…"
"Sasuke, your brother's just incredibly busy," Izumi interrupted wearily.
Yeah, and you're the idiot for defending him. Sasuke thought privately. He could tell that Izumi was hiding something from him just by looking at her, the futile attempts to explain away his brother's constant absence only made things look worse. Sasuke knew that something untoward was going on with his brother, he was just too far away here at Kirigakure University to figure it out.
"Yeah, well, next time you see him, try telling him I've had an enormous seizure and fallen down a well, or in a pond, and that I'm desperately wounded, maybe then he'll remember he took wardship of me," Sasuke grumbled. "Anyway," he carried on before Izumi could accuse him of being unfair. "You can probably answer my question."
"Oh, what's that then?" Izumi furrowed her neat brows.
Sasuke took a deep breath, clenching his fists so tightly that the coffee stirrer splintered between his fingers.
"I want my mum and dad's address…"
Ooooh, what an enigmatic and cheeky cliffhanger to end the first chapter on! I hope all you hunnies enjoyed! :D please review! They literally make my little day when I receive them!