The seal gives under the bite: creaks and cracks, speared by the bond. Kyuubi bites into Sasuke's soul, forcing his way so deep inside Sasuke that Sasuke will never get him out, and for a moment Sasuke's just this torn howling thing, and Naruto bet everything, everything he had, everything he hoped to have, and lost.

"Bite," Sasuke hisses, and Sasuke's always been as relentless with himself as with other people, has pulled himself ruthlessly together.

Naruto gags as Kyuubi bites and bites, wanting to bury himself like a tick inside Sasuke's body. He still feels he's burning, but it's a different kind of burn, he's happy about it and he wants to burn…

The seal keeps bending and breaking under Kyuubi's assault, whitehot cutting edges and magic spilling through, the light of Heaven seeping into him through the cracks. He thinks: I've been living in dusk for the past seven years and finally dawn has come.

Only that's not true. That's how Naruto might think of this, if he were Sasuke, but he's not and he has to remember that, he has to remember that for Sasuke's sake.

Also for his own, because while God's grace is at home in Sasuke, while Sasuke can speak the name of the Lord without his tongue curling into a cinder, it is not at home in Naruto. If Sasuke speaks the holy name Naruto cannot hear it, just hears the rustling of wings large enough to enfold the galaxy, but starts bleeding from the ears anyway.

Meanwhile Sasuke claws at him, blunt panicked human fingers tipped with heavenly fire, scorching through Naruto's skin, burning Sasuke's fingerprints into his bones. It's the panic of overload, of every system crashing under the onslaught: Naruto's always been full to bursting with all his feelings, convictions, ideas, so full of them he can only see the world through them, and they're overflowing now into Sasuke through the bond.

And Naruto tries to swallow, tries to stop, fangs locked immovable in Sasuke's flesh. Because Sasuke's mind is straining around him, torn open by a cracked seal and a bond it was never made to accommodate. Drenched in desperation, in Sasuke's panic and Kyuubi's alien need, which is beyond any humanity, any sanity. Which makes it feel necessary to have Kyuubi push his thighs further apart.

It's not, though. Sasuke doesn't need this, and somewhere deep inside, so deep inside it feels far away from what's happening, Naruto's glad that Sasuke has remembered this.

"Get off."

Kyuubi growls at him and licks up his throat, rubbing between his thighs.

Sasuke hits him in the face.

Before Kyuubi bit him, this would have been a non-event. A fly swatting its wing at a fox. But Kyuubi did bite.

The hand of God upon this earth forces Kyuubi off, sends him tumbling across the floor.

Kyuubi rolls to his feet seething and feral, Naruto a small curled thing inside him. For a wild moment he thinks he's like an embryo, nestled safe and helpless as Kyuubi breaks the world to keep him.

Sasuke too snaps to his feet, faster than any human could possibly have moved.

Then he stops.

Naruto's reaching out, trying to find purchase in the burning red world of Kyuubi's berserker desire. And it's… he'd want Sasuke to be there, when he goes. When it ends. This Sasuke, bristling and harrowed and free, isn't the worst Sasuke to see at the end.

Kyuubi rushes him.

Sasuke doesn't back down, which is no surprise because he's never had it in him to back down. He also doesn't call down heavenly fire on Kyuubi, and so he's slammed up against the wall. Not twitching away from Kyuubi's hot mouth on his neck, or from Kyuubi's massive hands holding him up by the thighs, he's just there, limp as a hanged man.

Here in front of him is Naruto, Sasuke looks at him and there's so very little left of Naruto. A shade in Kyuubi's eyes, an awkward tenderness in his touch before his claw closes around Sasuke's leg, so hard the muscle tears.

And Naruto tries to speak, but the words that came so smoothly once have turned square, stick on his tongue and trip chokingly back down his throat.

Sasuke locks his legs around Kyuubi's hips to keep his balance and elbows Kyuubi in the head. Kyuubi growls at him, pleased with the contact, which leaves his skin inhumanly hot, pulsating with his heartbeat and slick with blood-sweat. The tails are out now, and the ears.

Sasuke's arm brushes against one of them, and the vermillion energy spills across his skin, spills aggressively through it.

He'd seen them before, Kyuubi's ears, but he touched them for the first time on a roof top, in November during one of the long years when the only magic he could have was Naruto's.

Naruto was sitting down, out of breath and still red-faced, from the wind or from indignation probably, it could hardly be from exertion.

It had after all not been difficult for him to pull Sasuke down off the ledge.

The ears were out, a manifestation of shifter magic and of Naruto's poor control. It was filthy, unclean, but it was magic. It sang to him, and it was a bawdy street song when he was listening for hymns, but he found himself reaching out for it all the same.

Naruto grew still, a stillness you'd have never suspected he had in him. Slowly, inexorably, his head tilted forward, towards Sasuke. "I was told – they always told me not to let people touch them. Humans. That it would sting them, burn them."

"Che. Humans."

Humans were irrelevant, because the ear was struggling towards his fingers, shifting its shape towards him, power rippling through it. And he did touch then, and his fingers sank through it and it enveloped them, and it was filth and it was sin and it was everything he wanted.

"Aren't they supposed to be better than shifters?" Naruto asked, a little cheeky but mostly distracted, pressing his head into Sasuke's hand.

"They can't do anything," said Sasuke, and allowed himself a long slow turn of his hand inside the ear before he stepped sharply back. "What good is that?"

"Heh." Naruto was grinning, but in a strange way. There was the sharp, brilliant, shit-eating grin, and anther one underneath it, not quite obscured, a softer grin, eyes closed on a wet sheen.

Afterwards he took to sometimes slipping a tail around Sasuke's leg. It was no more solid than the ears, just will and magic, Kyuubi wanting to manifest, and so spilled under Sasuke's skin, played against the dormant magic inside him.

"Anyway," Sasuke said, climbing back up on the ledge. "Don't get in my way."

"You've got to cut this shit out."

"I told you, I'm not trying to die."

His shoelace had come undone and got caught in the wind. Sasuke stared at it, rather than down at the people and cars moving about several kilometres down.

His feet looked funny, uneven, the left one visibly thinner, visibly not really shaped like a human foot, in tight-laced shoes. An upgrade, Orochimaru kept calling it. It didn't look like an upgrade.

It looked like a crippling.

This was a silly and childish impression, because it was ruthlessly practical: kicking through concrete, walking on burning coals, was suddenly possible and everyday.

His original foot hadn't been able to carry him as far as it needed to. It was just another thing left behind and now inaccessible, the foot that Kabuto preserved and kept as a some sort of pathetic trophy, as if amputating a restrained child was a triumph, as if Sasuke would really be unnerved by its presence. It's a little boy's foot. It wouldn't fit him anymore.

"If you keep this up, he's seriously going to cut down on the self-defence release."

Sasuke shrugged. It was still fairly new, that it was a jerky, one-shouldered movement. New enough he still thought of it as a one-shouldered shrug, rather than just a shrug. "Then I'd die. He'd hate that."

"But you wouldn't."

He turned then, at Naruto's voice, looked over his shoulder. Naruto's eyes were a searing blue and completely honest about their staring.

"I'm not afraid of dying."

The fact that that was true, Kakashi would tell him, was one of the reasons Orochimaru was really so obsessed with him.

"That's a really good way to get killed."

Sasuke smirked at him. Naruto was being serious, the wind was turning his shoe lace into a whip; it felt like an ending. "It's the only way to live."

He stepped off the ledge, quicker than Naruto could stop him, Naruto who could move faster than a human eye could track.

Only later, two stories down, did he realise that Naruto had jumped after him, and was shouting with the adrenaline rush of freefall.

Itachi would have dismissed it as a cheap display, falling glowing and eye-catching as a shooting star in the middle of the city. But what Itachi thought no longer mattered, because the light had come, light that burnt the weak parts of him – the human parts of him – a searing, unstoppable, inhuman light: a reminder that if man looks directly upon the grace of God, his eyes will burn, and it will be worth it. The holiest words, the purest, are such that they would scorch a human tongue, that they leave even an exorcist's mouth sooty and tingling. And Sasuke had come to understand, after being given to Orochimaru, about the martyrs. Pain, after a certain point, isn't really pain anymore.

That too was inconsequential now. Sasuke unfurled his magic like unfurling wings, insubstantial and gleaming and the realest thing in his life.

On his left Naruto let Kyuubi extend his claws, enormous claws, several times larger than Naruto's arms yet protruding from his fingers, and caught himself on a wall, sinking those claws through stone and metal.

Eventually, when they were on the roof again, the seal went on lockdown, its deadness spreading through his body, making it numb and dumb, something he lived in rather than something he was.

He could tell from Naruto's expression when it was done: when his eyes were dull and his shoulder ached, when Naruto's flushed, elated face softened into something almost solemn. He touched a single now-human fingertip to the inside of Sasuke's elbow. It was an alien, awkward touch, something done on instinct alone and no knowledge on how to do it. It was obvious he'd wanted to grab, lock his fingers bruising around Sasuke's arm.

Naruto swallowed but didn't hesitate. "I know you don't – that you wouldn't mind dying. And you'd like to die from him. But you can't." And his eyes were blue now, just blue, but they were searing as Kyuubi's. "Don't die from me!"

Five years later Sasuke grows still against the wall, and Kyuubi slams him into it a few times, until he hits his head. It's a coward's trick, Naruto remembers Orochimaru saying while stroking Sasuke's bruised forehead, getting someone to hit your head so you won't have to experience the rest of what they do to you. A smart move for a boy like you, Sasuke-kun. My shinigami-chan.

Only Sasuke has never been very good at cowardice.

Fights now after all, on instinct and not very well, not very hard. Elbows Kyuubi in the eye, battering his back with the metal foot. A human spine would have been beyond broken and well into pulverised, but of course Kyuubi isn't human.

Kyuubi grabs him by the hips and throws him on the bed.

Sasuke rolls sideways but is mostly still on it when Kyuubi jumps him, forcing him fully back up on the mattress.

Sasuke could use real magic, exorcist magic. Naruto, breathless, thinks for a moment that he will. Then Naruto will burn out.

If Sasuke doesn't do that… if he's not prepared to kill Kyuubi, who is unlikely to survive serious injury in this state – then – then…!

Then there's not much else Sasuke can do, not much else that matters.

Kyuubi mouths the place where Sasuke's neck becomes Sasuke's back, bites there too. Tears off the remains of the shirt, which almost strangles Sasuke before the necklines gives, and is back between his legs, which he forces apart with his knees, forces as far apart as they can go. Sasuke kicks him in the face, breaks his jaw, but the injury's healed by the time Kyuubi rolls him around, onto his back.

The tails spill over him, seeping through his skin to interlock with his magic, and the sight of it, the idea of it, is too good. Naruto can't stand it, it's the unendurable moment before a crashing orgasm.

Sasuke stares at him, flat remorseless eyes. But that's all right, is something like all right, because Sasuke's still with him, greedy mental fingers grabbing for Naruto's magic, starting to get traction when Kyuubi looks up from his preoccupation with getting Sasuke's trousers off.

Rather than growling, he purrs. One of the tails abruptly pushes into Sasuke, a phantom burn, and Naruto whines and screams inside Kyuubi's head. Kyuubi's mouth falls open at the sight, and he clearly decides he's undressed enough to do what he wants. His shirt's clinging around his neck, his trousers open, pushed down just enough to release his erection.

He surges forward between Sasuke's legs, sudden and simple as rain, fumbling, grunting, and then–

"Sasuke." It's the only word left to say.

Sasuke stares past Naruto's face, up at the ceiling. He knows all the cracks in all of Orochimaru's ceilings. This one is strange to him, off-white with a few smudges.

Body jolting against the bed in time with Kyuubi's thrusts, he thinks how Genma was wrong. Naruto isn't nice about it, though it's true that it doesn't take long. Twenty-seven seconds after he pushed in, he shudders and ejaculates.

And then stillness, a wasteland nirvana.

Because it's obviously terrible, unforgiveable in the face of Sasuke's horror, but this is the best Naruto has ever felt.

Only below him, so close his lashes scrape against Naruto's skin, Sasuke's eyes blink open red and horrified, blind with the panic crashing through the bond. It's the whiteout panic of someone finally cornered, all killer instinct and kamikaze rage.

The bond is fully formed now, a red thread between them like a sudden extra limb, a bridge between minds. Realer than that, because unlike a limb it can never be lost, never be moved on from.

And to Naruto it means completion: finding the piece of himself lost so long ago he'd forgotten he was looking for it. The world is whole again, and right. Sasuke's given colour to everything else, given it life, given it relevance.

But to Sasuke it means the inner sanctuary flooded. There's nothing left now, no part of him that hasn't been violated.

And Sasuke, Naruto remembers, has always been the kind of person who'd burn his own fields, salt the earth, before he let the enemy have them.

"Sasuke," he demands. It turns to begging halfway through, and he scrambles up, off of Sasuke. Out of Sasuke, jesus fuck.

The instant he does, Sasuke too scrambles up. His movements are wild with this arid desperation, the movements of a child who hasn't learnt to control its body yet, like Sasuke never moved even when he was a child. He winds up in a defensive position, back against the headboard, legs pressed uselessly up against his chest.

It looks blisteringly vulnerable, because Sasuke has always, always maintained that the best and only defence is an unbeatable offence.

His head hangs forward, like his neck's a snapped thread. He dry heaves, nails scratching viciously at his own ankles, the ones on his left hand breaking against metal, the ones on his right leaving red lines.

Naruto never knew it was so easy to cross that final line. Fifteen years on this earth, not doing anything unforgivable. Now he has.

Sasuke pukes for real then, retches so hard he's spasming with it. Forehead on his knees, mouth open and hyperventilating; vomit on his lips, on his legs, pooling around his feet on the mattress.

Magic builds between them, and then shatters as Sasuke's mind is shattering around this final violation.

"Sasuke," and he's reaching for him on unstoppable instinct, reaching for the one thing he has to have, that he absolutely cannot do without. "Sasuke, I'm here. Get it the fuck together. Stay with me." His hand, closing around Sasuke's, stills the vicious scratching.

And Sasuke's mind screams and roars rejection, Naruto snatches his touch away because it burns, Sasuke feels it like a branding iron burn.

Kyuubi's screaming and trashing, because flowing through the bond is natural and right but Naruto has to stop hurtling into Sasuke, and his thoughts are crashing to sudden stops around Sasuke's panic and Sasuke's hunger for revenge, restitution, a hunger that could eat the world and not be sated. The seal keeps shifting, searing through Sasuke's mind, and the edges of Naruto's are singed with holy light made to eradicate him, and –

"Enough," he tells them both, and forces a block into place.

And then immediately he's recoiling, gagging on a sudden nosebleed and his ears ringing so loud it almost drowns out Kyuubi's howling.

Sasuke's slammed his mind shut so tight, the bond is numb.

When Naruto can see again, Sasuke's still sitting with his back to the headboard and his legs against his chest, but his head's up. The world tilts, so sharply that Naruto thinks for a long second that he's fallen off it and is hurtling alone through black space. Sasuke doesn't consider being raped or maimed a fate worse than death, but this – this is his absolute nightmare, and Sasuke is not afraid to die. It's not love that's kept him alive, or faith or hope. It's sheer stubborn vengeance, the need to finally win and grind the world into dust under his heel, burn the whole universe in the purgatory flames of his hatred.

Naruto's known this is how Sasuke sees the world almost as long as he's known Sasuke, but it's a shock to feel Sasuke feel it, to have the certainty of it brutal in his bones.

"More tails," Sasuke finally says, fingers twitching in a minimal and ultimately aborted gesture.

Following his gaze, Naruto discovers that he has six tails now, which is the most he's ever had and entirely irrelevant.

"Sasuke." It's all that makes it out. It's a ragged sound, the kind of sound Kyuubi makes when trying to speak. It means don't do this to me and it means what have I done.

He can see Sasuke perfectly well, can smell him and hear his breathing, feel the warmth from his legs, but none of that is real enough anymore. Not when he's been connected to Sasuke's mind, pressed soul to soul. Just looking at him, after that, is like looking at a photo when you want to see the real person.

He swallows. Sasuke's closed his eyes, his hand back at the bloody seal.

"Don't leave me," Naruto says in this new shaky voice that's somehow still a demand.

Sasuke's voice is even more wrong, regressed to the dull and childish tones of, Itachi-niisan gave me away. Orochimaru says I belong to him now. He says, "How can it be undone?"

Sasuke has known these things since before he knew how to walk. Naruto swallows again. "If I die."

"And if I die."

"Then I would too." The words are so simple, and really the reality of it is simple too. Just hard.

"So you'll always," Sasuke's whisper comes tentative, softened with shellshock. His eyes are open again, with nothing soft about them. "You'll always have to choose me first."

There can be no hesitation: "Yes."

Sasuke too swallows, wiping at his mouth. "And the magic."

"Yeah." He trickles a bit of power into the bond, in offering, and feels it ease cautiously open, until he's glowing with awareness of Sasuke's presence. With Sasuke's impatience, which is different from his own, more about crossing your arms than about drumming your feet.

Kyuubi's energy glows under Sasuke's skin, a duller orange trapped by Sasuke's exorcist lineage. Naruto stares, feels ridiculous about it and decides he doesn't care: Sasuke is so much. Ferocious and lovely, familiar and tired, cold and raw and unmistakable. And, after a few seconds of appropriating Kyuubi's power, entirely unhurt.

Naruto feels himself flush and then pale, amazed and ashamed that he hardly noticed how much it was, how bad it was, until Kyuubi undid the bruises Naruto left on him, and Orochimaru before that. Sasuke makes a dull fastidious face at the vomit and blood coating his feet, and then looks up at Naruto's face, which feels numb and strained but must communicate something entirely different, because Sasuke bites out, "What?" with his eyes still full of that full-frontal collision stare.

"I –" And words are no good, they went too deep for words bloody years ago, and now everything's gone wrong, a brave new world in ruins around them. Sasuke giving colour back to the world has turned it into an impressionist nightmare in Technicolor, screaming reds and yellows blurring and bleeding into each other.

Red which means Sasuke's blood, which he bled because Naruto tore him up. Yellow which means Sasuke's vomit, because – because Naruto tore him up.

"Che." Sasuke sneers at him, standing up in one of those movements Naruto has missed, that Sasuke must have gone crazy missing, the movements of someone no longer needing to pretend to be human. It's not the first time by far that he's looked at Naruto as though looking at something absolutely subhuman and filthy, but it is the first time he's done it naked, and the first time he's done it and got a different response than anger.

"Where are you going?" Naruto sounds like a child, reaches out a hand with a child's irrepressible helplessness.

"To wash off."

"Can I – I should – I want to–" Face burning, he adjusts what remains of his clothes. Feels more naked now, shrouded in them, than he did when they were… fucking, or whatever he's supposed to call it.

"Leave me alone."

For a long time, Naruto does. It's difficult to breathe, his body so heavy he can barely hold it up. His heart has become a loadstone.

In a minute, he knows, Kyuubi will want out again, want more. Want Sasuke, the only person who's ever been real to Kyuubi. Right now Kyuubi's rolling around inside him, so full of magic and satisfaction Naruto can't stand it, has to erupt away from it.

He's across the floor and at the bathroom door, fingers clawed but careful against it – and he wasn't going to force his way in, he wasn't – when Sasuke opens it. Water drips down the stiff line of his neck, past the damp hair clinging to it, and this isn't Kyuubi's desire.

And Sasuke, who met Kyuubi's desire head on, cringes away from Naruto's. "Move."

Naruto has to obey that clipped order, because ten minutes ago he banged Sasuke's head into the wall until Sasuke stopped ignoring him and started struggling, and then he threw him on the bed and ripped off his clothes, kicked his legs as far apart as they would go and – it seems impossible, that he's been inside of Sasuke's body. His mouth waters and aches with the memory of it, his cock already stirring again.

Sasuke walks past him to the door. "I'm leaving." His spine is the straightest Naruto's ever seen it, pulled up so sharply it seems about to cut its way out of Sasuke's skin.

"No."

Sasuke doesn't turn around, even as Naruto approaches. Naruto would like to think it's a sign of trust, and not a sign of Sasuke not being able to bear looking at him.

"Yes," Sasuke says, his hand pressed to the door and full of magic. "We're done."

"We'll never be done."

Sasuke slumps a little, tension cut abruptly like a string. Turns around, looks up at Naruto with his back pressed to the door. There's the beginning of that half-smirk, half-sneer expression, it's what his mouth will settle into when his lips close; at the moment they're parted around the beginning of a snort.

His face blanks as he sees Naruto, sees the way Naruto's looking at him.

"You need to get over this," Naruto says. This too is something Sasuke taught him a long time ago, something he was reminded of up north: that he can be relentless, that he can be the beast that screams at the heart of the world.

"I need to go home."

Hearing Sasuke say home and mean Orochimaru – it guts him, the simplicity of it cutting him open and the conviction of it a poison in his exposed innards.

"Stay with me," Naruto says. Kyuubi's intensely awake now, boiling through his bloodstream, red denial at the idea of Sasuke leaving. He takes Sasuke's wrist in his hand; Sasuke kicks his knee out. Naruto hisses, leg giving out, he ends up on the floor, still clutching Sasuke's hand, the sleeve of the shirt he must have found in the bathroom.

"Let me put this in a way so you'll understand." Sasuke rips his hand free, looking blazing and absolutely ready to kick again. "If I go back now, there will be no trouble. Orochimaru will forgive this little kidnapping, he'll be so delighted. To have you tied to me, that'll make you his too, that's how he'll think of it. That I'm his voodoo doll, every time he touches me he touches Minato's firstborn. If I don't go back, now that I could, that's running away. That's my other leg. And it's war."

Naruto stares up at him, with those arresting eyes he's always had, vainly demanding to be seen. It makes no difference that he's on the floor, curled half-naked around a shred of cotton torn from Sasuke's sleeve. "I wouldn't let–" He sounds almost insulted at the idea that Sasuke should think otherwise.

Sasuke waves this away with a twitch of his fingers. "Right, right, nobody touches me without going through you first. Whatever. But then when he's gone through you, then what?"

The whisker scars are growing deeper, erupting like fissures in Naruto's humanity. Through the bond, through the locked gates at either end of it, Sasuke can feel Kyuubi stirring to murderous, possessive attention. "A leg is nothing."

Sasuke angles his foot to kick off Naruto's. It will have to be with his left foot, a clean blow through the knee, or it'll heal before it's severed.

"I mean, I meant – a leg is nothing to Kyuubi. And now, with the bond, it doesn't matter what he cuts off. Kyuubi will regrow it."

Sasuke doesn't doubt Orochimaru's ability to purify a wound beyond the reach of Kyuubi's healing, but it's a good point. Physical injury has to be understood in a different way now, with Kyuubi's energy lingering hot and perpetually healing under his skin.

It's reassuring, in its way. Perhaps Naruto would think this shallow – certainly Sasuke thought it was shallow, a few years ago – but it matters, having the aftermath of agony eased away. Sasuke can handle real suffering: faced with high tragedy trauma, you break or you don't, and Sasuke does not. It's the little grinding things afterwards that wear you down. Rolling out of a defiled bed and putting on the torn, stained clothes you wore before. Having to pick up STD meds for the fifth time. Walking slowly to the bathroom, which is a nightmare, you have to hold it in and hold it in, for days sometimes, because while rectal tearing heals fast, the risk of infection is painfully, disgustingly obvious. Imagine Kabuto's delight, if Sasuke were to come begging for relief, for his arse torn up and infected by his own shit.

"You don't care about the war?" Sasuke asks. He leans further into the door, arms crossed nonchalantly over his chest.

"I do," Naruto says, with no hesitation at all. "But some things you have to fight for."

"If you went to war over me," Sasuke says, in the hateful voice he's picked up from Orochimaru, soft as rotten silk, "and then people died. If your friends died, just because you wanted me with you. Wouldn't you hate that? Wouldn't you hate me?"

"I'd hate it. Hate myself, too. But I wouldn't regret it. I couldn't. You're more important." His throat moves visibly as he swallows, big gulping swallows. "Anyway I already hate you. You've already cost me people."

Sasuke grins like a skull. "Ah. Was this payback, then?"

"No!" He snaps forward abruptly, and collapses as abruptly. Hands clutched in Sasuke's trouser legs, claws needling through the fabric, his forehead pressed to Sasuke's knee, which is tensed to kick but doesn't actually kick.

It was after they had run away and been discovered, in the darkness in the back of a police car bringing them home, that Sasuke said, you know it was someone on your side, right?

Naruto's guts clenched, like Kyuubi had got loose and started biting at them. Dad would have found out.

I think he couldn't bear to. It would have to be – someone he trusted. Someone he still needs.

You can't trust someone like that!

Naruto, and Sasuke's pupils were huge with the midnight darkness, black holes in his face. I was involved. I thought you knew.

Naruto had thrown up then, projectile vomited denial all over the car.

It was some time later that he'd forced the words from Sasuke: I didn't ask. People die all the time, I didn't care who it was. If I'd known – don't lie to yourself, it's not that I couldn't have. I might have wanted to, even.

Sasuke had known exactly what he was doing when he massacred the shifter population of Mist Town. When, right after that, he obeyed Orochimaru's order to cripple Jiraiya, weakened after a long draining fight with Orochimaru himself.

There's no excuse! I know you'd – that he'd do horrible things to you if you didn't, but there's no excuse, there isn't!

He'd been going to beat the shit out of Sasuke, but had to abandon that plan when he actually saw Sasuke, because one more hit and Sasuke might actually die. He had his face tilted oddly, to be able to see Naruto with the minimal slice of open eye he could achieve, face swollen almost beyond recognition.

I'm not making excuses, Sasuke said. His voice was raspier than usual, the sort of voice that let on he'd been screaming well beyond the point where he could no longer make sounds. Sure I would have been punished, but I'm punished anyway.

This was when Naruto realised he couldn't hit Sasuke: because right now, Sasuke wanted to die.

He sighed instead, and leaned on the wall next to Sasuke, who probably couldn't stand on his own. Then why?

Sasuke shrugged, and immediately, visibly regretted it. I never liked him.

If you went after everyone you don't like, the world would be pretty empty.

Sasuke looked like he quite fancied this idea.

He's not even dead, he said eventually. And he never liked me either, why should he expect to be spared?

That's nothing personal, Naruto said, watching the little twitches of Sasuke's left foot, which had started when he said 'not even dead' and then didn't stop. You know he doesn't like exorcists.

Sasuke snorted, rubbed at his mouth like rubbing this shameful human response away, and his fingers came away red. And you call me racist.

He doesn't like exorcists because they treat him like a rabid animal!

Whatever, said Sasuke, and had to tilt his head so far back it looked like his neck would break to be able to gaze up at the sky. Anyway fuck him. He paid them to sell me.

Naruto blinked. What do you mean?

Orochimaru got me in exchange for reigning in the anti-shifter exorcist faction. My parents don't care about that. They hate shifters too. It was your side that offered them incentives to agree.

Naruto had, after all, hit him in the mouth.

Sasuke had welcomed it, and had no longer really wanted to die.

Finally Naruto had to go home, to the howling quiet of Grandpa Jiraiya, strongest in the world, bent under the weight of his scars and unable ever again to stand straight.

They haven't spoken properly in years now, because if you convince someone to sell their child into slavery, you don't get to play the victim when that child turns on you. Naruto screamed this at Jiraiya once, and he meant it then and he means it now, so he can't take it back.

Jiraiya meant it then and means it now that a single exorcist child is a cheap price to pay for shifter safety, so he's not taking anything back either.

Naruto knows now that it was more a case of Jiraiya, as the main shifter negotiator, offering the humans incentives to offer the middle-ground exorcists incentives to hand over Sasuke. This just means that Ibiki and the rest of the human government are implicated too, the stench of it spreading.

"Never mind," Sasuke says in the present.

Naruto slumps forward, until his face is resting hot and aching against Sasuke's knee. "Just stay with me."

Sasuke's voice is breathy and stiff. "You hate me."

"I've hated you for years. I need you more. Not just – even before the bond. Long before the bond."

Sasuke says nothing. Someone is breathing harshly, wetly.

"I just," Naruto hears himself say, the words unstoppable as bleeding. "It's not right to need someone like this."

Still Sasuke says nothing.

Naruto's face is wet. The blood has dried, and the sweat, but apparently he's crying now. He feels too empty for crying, but the tears are there.

He's wet inside his pants too, so hard he's wet from it.

He grabs around Sasuke's ankle, the left one, the metal one that won't break under his possession. His knuckles are white, they look like the innermost flame of the fire, shadowed by Kyuubi's vermillion energy.

"I just," he chokes out. "I wanted it to be real. With us."

Sasuke lies to himself all the time, but he's never actually been any good at lying to Naruto. He's not lying now. "This is the realest we could ever be."

Shock throws Naruto's head back. Hope hurts. "So when we – when I – when you slept with me –"

"You masturbated inside my body," Sasuke tells him. "I wasn't really involved." After a very long moment, a minute probably, he adds, "Well, I let you." It might be meant as a kindness. It sounds like a condemnation.

Naruto pants for a little while, open-mouthed and pathetic. Sasuke can see all his innards, all the dark messy parts meant to be hidden, because Sasuke's gutted him.

Through it all Kyuubi screams, a wail like sudden tinnitus, which is something of a relief because it gives Naruto someone to scream back at.

Through it, also, he keeps clinging to Sasuke's prosthesis. Stone has shattered in his grip, but the metal doesn't buckle, even though he's clenching his fist so tight the little bones in his hand are breaking.

He's never really touched it before. Sasuke doesn't invite touch, and this would be – sticking his fingers into an incision, kneading a wound.

The surface is rough, so thickly inscribed with incantations that the metal is really just an anchor for them. Naruto drags his thumb softly over an inscription in a language so holy, it singes his finger.

Above him, Sasuke shifts. "Do you have a fetish or something?"

"No, I just…"

"You know I don't have any feeling in it."

"I know." And it's terrible, but then truth often is, and Sasuke's been lied to too often. "I was – curious."

Sasuke, who would probably have bolted at, I want to know everything about you, inside out, let me inside, scoffs at being treated as a curiosity.

"I don't," Naruto starts. This wasn't something he could ask before, but Sasuke's leg was taken years ago, and Naruto's been gone for years, because – because Sasuke told Dad to arrange for that, apparently. "I don't understand why he'd maim you. I mean, he wants… you know."

"He told me not to run away. The symbolism is not subtle." He snorts, this cynical sound he's too young for, so it sounds affected, faintly ridiculous. "Perhaps he wanted to make sure I was more of an acquired taste."

Naruto shakes his head in bewilderment, befuddlement. "You're beautiful."

It's an absolutely ridiculous thing to say. Sasuke knows what he looks like, has always made it clear that he assumes if someone were to take him from Orochimaru, it would be to use him, and with his magic sealed and his family having forsaken him, there's really only one use to be had from him.

It's never helped Sasuke, being beautiful.

He snorts again, like this is a normal conversation. "You'd think Orochimaru was beautiful if the bond compulsion pointed you his way."

Naruto makes an exaggerated face, slipping into the beautiful lie that this is ordinary. "I'd kill myself first."

"Thanks very much," Sasuke hisses.

"I didn't mean that," Naruto says. "I wouldn't. I would never."

"You could at least have made it a murder/suicide."

"Yeah," Naruto says. The word is unimportant. Half the time Naruto sounds like he's speaking a language he's only barely conversant in, like the words can only be approximations of what he really wants to say. Naruto has never been the sort of person who can be tied down in language, whose convictions can be fitted into words. "But you're free from him now."

Sasuke's face is implacable, like he might have got angry only he's so used to Naruto's stupidity. "I'll be free when I've killed him." His expression scrunches up into a headache frown. "Free from him, at least."

For the first time he moves the leg Naruto's been holding onto, signalling for Naruto to let go. Naruto's fingers twitch and burn with the sudden horrifying emptiness. He's never really been aware of them as empty before: they've just not been currently holding onto something.

Sasuke sinks to the floor, back against the door. So close his legs brush against Naruto's, which any other day would just be normal but today it's a gift. "I guess I never did find a cure for you."

They'd embarked on that plan before running away. If Dad could be cured from the bond imperative, then Kushina could go back home, and Dad could be with Mum again, like he wanted, and Mum wanted, and Naruto too.

"I don't want to be cured."

Sasuke's stare is a black demand, and Naruto tries to explain that sure he hates it, but it's like hating aspects of your own personality. You can't wish to be cured of them, because if you were, you'd no longer be you, so in effect you'd be wishing that you cease to exist.

"Didn't you want this to be real?"

"You said it was!"

Sasuke makes an impatient gesture. "Not the kind of real that you believe in."

Naruto swallows, starting to sweat again. Catches Sasuke's metal foot again, because Kyuubi is a raging desire under ever particle of his skin, a weak moment away from breaking through it, and this is – well, this is substitute Sasuke. He can touch, and Sasuke doesn't have to feel it.

"I ask again," Sasuke says, "do you have a fetish?"

"No. I – fuck. You know, Dad forced me to watch it until it stopped making me projectile vomit. When he cut it off."

And that is of course another violation, Naruto's selfish need making him thoughtless. Sasuke, nine years old and being amputated, Sasuke would've never wanted anyone to see that. But they've never been in the habit of sparing each other.

Naruto wouldn't unwatch it, if he could, not when it was done because Sasuke ran away with him.

"That was your thing, wasn't it," Sasuke says, in a distant and rather thoughtful voice. "Projectile vomiting. When did you stop? You were still doing it when Orochimaru locked you in that cage."

"I… I had to let Kyuubi out more, up north." His mouth feels dry around the sentence, even though he has to keep swallowing, to keep Kyuubi's drool from spilling over, spilling past Kyuubi's canines and Naruto's lips.

"He's not so bad," Sasuke says, and might mean it, because it's seconds before he adds, "I need to go."

Naruto's fingers twitch so hard around the fake leg, Naruto feels it all the way up to his shoulder.

"Seriously," Sasuke sneers. "I'm not losing my other leg because you can't sleep without a human comfort blanket. Let me go."

"No," says Naruto, which is unforgivable but also inevitable. "I can't do that."

"You have no right," Sasuke starts, anger delayed by what seems like surprise but coming now, flushing up under his chin, spreading red along his jaw.

"You had no right to have me sent away!"

And they're both on their feet now, somehow.

"I didn't pretend to," Sasuke says, voice calm again though he's still flushed with anger. "I did it because I had to do it, I never pretended I had any right!"

"And why, now –"

"Is that it?" Sasuke snaps, and his eyes have gone narrow and red. "You're planning to keep me here by force? You can't be this stupid."

"You don't even want to leave!"

Sasuke doesn't say, you don't know that or don't tell me what I want. Sasuke lives clichés, he doesn't usually speak them.

"Show me," Naruto throws at him, words hitting Sasuke like the slap of a glove. "If you really want to leave, open up the bond. Let me feel it."

"I don't owe you shit." His eyes are as red and more importantly as feral as Kyuubi's, like Sasuke should have been the one with an inner beast.

Kyuubi responds to it, berserker desire to fight and mate. Naruto can't give in to that, he can't. "You can't want to leave to go back to him."

Sasuke smirks at him, a filthy, acid expression. He looks over Naruto's shoulder, towards the bed, which has been banged into the wall and which is irredeemably stained with Sasuke's blood, Sasuke's vomit, with Naruto's… Well, with Sasuke's pain and Naruto's pleasure. "How is this any different?"

Naruto stands absolutely still, the stillness of death. He's gutted like a fish, hook through his heart, and breathes like a fish, in helpless pointless little gasps. Air comes in, but it leaks out through his eviscerated stomach. It takes a long moment to realise his innards aren't sprayed in messy graffiti across the room.

For really the first time, Sasuke looks at him with actual scorn, actual betrayal. He turns from Naruto like he's turned from all the people in his life who have proven useless to him, which is to say all the people in his life.

His hand glows with magic brighter than lightning. The door doesn't last an instant.

Sasuke's past it and brutally out of sight when the realisation comes, when Naruto understands that he can move, that his innards are still safely inside, the evisceration strictly emotional.

Then he's after Sasuke, tripping through an adrenaline rush so intense his ears are ringing with it, he doesn't even know where they are when he slams Sasuke up against the wall, growling. It's a wild, incongruous, ridiculous sound to issue from a human mouth, but there's no escaping it: it is Naruto growling. Kyuubi's heavy and aflame inside him, but Kyuubi's beside the point right now.

The wall breaks.

Then all of Naruto's ribs break, and his heart, a little.

There are no incantations now, certainly no beate marie full of grace. Middling, minor exorcists channel saints in general, some minor angels if they're lucky; the real crusaders channel archangels.

Who did you get? Naruto asked, in the far-away days of childhood. Michael? He's the fighter, right?

It's not quite that simple. Not Sasuke's voice, that, but Itachi's. Indulgent still, at least when he looked past Naruto at his little brother.

Naruto scrunched his nose up at the interruption. How so?

Well, Itachi said mildly. I carry the power of Lucifael.

Naruto had blinked for a while before stumbling over the connection, and then not making it.

It's not really something you ask people, Kakashi said.

Sasuke shrugged. It was still a double-shouldered movement then, and one done quickly, rebelliously, because forbidden by his mother as uncouth. It's not a secret. Uriel.

Naruto crossed his arms behind his head. Never heard of him.

No surprise, Sasuke sniffed. Mummy wouldn't want to give you nightmares.

Hey!

It was weeks before he asked Kakashi, who lifted a brow. Uriel? Mmmh, yes. How to put it… To whom has been entrusted the vengeance of the Lord.

The hand of an archangel dedicated to avenging the wrongs of the world burns against Naruto's chest, burns through Naruto's chest.

And Uriel never made much sense to Naruto, because wouldn't it be better with an angel to right the wrongs of the world than to avenge them, and why did God make a faulty world anyway? He's tried these questions out on Sasuke over the years, to rile him, to understand him, but Sasuke's never been very interested in theology.

You're thinking about the whys because to you this is a theory. I know it as fact.

Facts are –

You don't think of the why of gravity, you think of the how.

So, what – you're fine living in a universe made by an evil god who, like, created a fucked up world for fun?

Sasuke's level face, as though he really couldn't understand what Naruto was getting reluctantly upset about, there beyond the facetiousness. They say he created man in his image. How could you think he's anything but evil after hearing that?

Now Naruto is on the floor, with an ashen handprint reaching into the broken cage of his ribs, just touching his heart. "Don't leave me," he says. "I can't let you."

"You can't think you can stop me."

Naruto forces himself to sit up, around the breathless redness of his heart's blood and Kyuubi's healing trying to function around an angel wound. His voice comes unexpectedly level, unexpectedly light. "I think I and every other shifter in the building can." His breathing, even the sound of his blood leaking out of him, is loud in the long silence. At length it gets easier to sit, his ribcage slowly closing. "It's – you're a liability now, if Orochimaru has you. To me. To everyone here – to the whole faction. I can't have that."

"Right," Sasuke says, in this low blunt voice, and seems to slump a little. Not a slump of defeat, but rather of lessening tension.

Naruto makes it almost all the way to his feet, and when he starts to fall there's Sasuke's hand to grab at, to keep him steady. "Dad wouldn't let you be taken away," Naruto says, when they're nose to nose again. "He – I know he never intervened for you, but he'll keep you safe for me. For his people."

"Right," Sasuke says again. It's another moment before he steps away from Naruto and turns around. In the enormous black shirt some guard must have left in the bathroom, he looks tiny and misshapen, his bad shoulder jutting up sharply like the wing of an injured crow.

Then he starts to walk away.

Not towards the door, though, and because of that Naruto's able to restrain himself, doesn't grab. Just catches up, walking so close their clothes brush before Sasuke steps sharply away. He's looking away, his voice monotone, as he says, "Your room's this way, right?"