La Belle Dame Sans Merci: 04:
"Stand By Me"
Sakura meets Naruto and his burden outside the village, because she knows intellectually that life experience is a heavy burden, that Tsunade-sama has grown hard and remorseless under its weight. Because she knows everything about herself is calculated, and nothing about Naruto is.
(he can't learn how not to believe in happy endings)
She loves him for it, and it's brave and wonderful and makes him strong, but it also makes him weak; and I do not consider him wise on account of it.
"Hiya," Naruto says, so far removed from her by the presence of the person in his arms that he is apparently at a loss for words, resorts to a greeting. Even when his eyes flick briefly to her face, she can tell he's only looking at Sasuke.
She finds it strange she does not do the same, not with that automatic force compelling Naruto. Now she turns her attention to his unconscious burden, however, and for a second she feels twelve again, twelve and innocent and helpless, faced with so much death she couldn't handle and a life that she wasn't sure how to deal with either.
(it was child's love, naruto. i'm not a child anymore. he'll always be our darling, but i – he isn't for me)
"Did you do that?" she asks. Because she has seen Naruto furious, and heard whispers of evil chakra leaking out of him, of red stares from blue eyes.
Still, this is starkly unexpected: Sasuke looking more dead than alive, his forehead wrinkled unpleasantly even in sleep. Even from a meter away she smells the sweat and blood on him, registers ripped clothes and too much bone and muscle with too little flesh to soften them underneath the too pale skin in the gaps.
He looks very small. Precocious, might be the word she's searching for, except there is nothing childish about his too-fine, too-delicate features. He does not look a boy of fifteen – one of five, perhaps, or a girl.
"Itachi," Naruto answers, furious for a moment she dares suggest he would ever hurt Sasuke, before he remembers The Valley at the End, when they tore each other apart.
(am i gratified she thinks i'm capable?)
Catty green eyes, pale and watchful, widen in fear, but there's determination around the mouth, in the fisted hands. "We'll take him down."
"Sasuke already did. I reckon Kakashi-sensei will bring the body back with him."
"That's–" The automatic phrase, that's a relief – she wants to say it, oh how she wants to, but she remembers the Forest of Death and the curse seal bestowed there. Effective Sasuke seems to mean evil Sasuke, much of the time. "Is that so. Um, let's take him to my house, I'll probably be able to patch him up so he can face Tsunade-sama on his own two feet. Why don't you make a few clones and we'll work from there."
Team Seven sneak past the village gates shrouded in Sakura's genjutsu, run as hell as fast as they're through, leaving the transformed replications to keep the guards busy and distracted. Probably they'll think it a practical joke, those are common enough with Naruto.
Naruto has never been to Sakura-chan's house before, and perhaps they should have brought Sasuke to his place instead because there's no one else there, but on the other hand the neighbors tend to complain, even after all these years, whenever he so much as breathes too loudly, and the amount of junk assembled there probably is not conductive to a healing environment.
(my heart is trying to pound its way out of my chest)
Sakura thinks: I can do this.
She's hurrying through the village with Naruto in tow, heading for her home, because she knows it's the only thing she can do. And alright, maybe there's a bit of childish revenge mixed into all the relentless logic and care and worry, because putting Sasuke (who abandoned me) in her bed and nursing him, having him dependent and in gratitude, subjected to her family, is a suggestion more thrilling than sickening.
Sakura isn't going to argue with herself about it. Not when she can't forgive as readily as Naruto, for whom apparently the time without Sasuke never happened, not when she'd quite like to get back at him for all those months, those years, of constant anxiety and missing.
She loves him but she's starting to suspect she' never really been in love with him, not with all these maternal overtones thrown into the jumble of straining feeling; and you always hurt the ones you love, and being pestered and humiliated for a bit is the least Sasuke deserves.
(and petty, childish thoughts are all her head can hold, because her heart is overflowing, is washed over and drowned and breaking in new ways even as it tries to mend itself)
She doesn't deserve imminent humiliation, though, and because of that she hopes to heaven her parents aren't home.
Hoping isn't ever going to work out, she should've learned that long since. She hoped she'd win Sasuke's heart, she hoped she'd beat Ino, she hoped her parents would one day understand her choice of profession. It's all but a given none of it ever happened, isn't it? She's a big girl, now. Reality is her next stop.
"Sakura, honey?" her mother calls from the kitchen when she opens the door; ninja though she may call herself, ninja though she may actually be by now, Sakura has yet to figure out a way to do this without the little bell attached to the inside handle chiming. "You're home early."
Then her mother actually steps out into the hallway and sees them, stops short, her eyes traveling up and down Naruto and his burden.
"Um, I'm, er, sorry to, uh, disturb," he says with a sheepish faked laugh, and Sakura is forcibly reminded that of course Naruto has never been to a friend's house before.
Her parents aren't ninja, could never comprehend the concept or the appeal of it, but even middle class like them, the normal average muddled-ness that Sakura denied and turned away from in pursuit of something grander, even they must have heard of the Uchiha, the greatness and the fall and the sole survivor. This knowledge notwithstanding, Sakura remains uncertain as though whether her mother would have recognized Sasuke for whom he is even decked up in the ceremonial outfit of his clan, much less in these circumstances.
Instead she sees a friend of Sakura's from the foreign world of death and glory, and stares.
It dawns on Sakura, catching a glimpse of them in the mirror, that she was wrong before; that Sasuke doesn't look like a girl at all. While too small to seem a man, shorter probably than she, he looks decidedly adult now: dark and dangerous and cold as always, and held like this in Naruto's arms, he looks a …a woman.
A woman of the kind who'd have nothing to do with Sakura, who'd drink imported alcohol and smoke expensive cigarettes in the company of powerful men opting to fight for and over her.
"Is this a, a school-mate of yours, Sakura?" her mother asks, tone wavering watchfully.
"Actually, yes," Sakura admits, refusing to glance at her two most precious people. "These are my teammates. Er. And this, obviously, would be my mother."
"Hi," Naruto says awkwardly, giving her the distinct impression he would scratch the back of his head if Sasuke's weight had not hindered him.
Her mother nods quietly, and Sakura breaks and excuses them, hurries up the stairs with Naruto in tow (if sasuke dies because we were too slow exchanging pleasantries…!).
Naruto has never been in her room before, and does not seem overly interested now he is.
(it does remind him, abstractedly, of a dream he had once. in which sakura-chan smiles love at him and invites him, holds him and kisses him, a single perfectly imperfect time, and it is all so horribly wrong: he has her backed up against a convenient wall, realizes dumbly that he's still a little shorter than she – and that he's about as wanted as he's been all those other times, when friends and parents and lovers took hold of each other's hands and walked away from him.
"it's not worth it," he discovers, meeting her filthy green stare. she is far too special to him, long ago when his silly crush began and in a different manner now: she's one of his precious people, and hell, he'll bloody murder anyone who even thinks of forcing himself on her.
"shut up," she mutters, but mildly, kindly, in that way she has when he has surprised her and she thinks maybe he isn't so bad. "it's just a kiss."
her hands firm in his hair, her chin knocks into his as she tilts her head decisively backwards: naruto muffles a squeak against her mouth and fists a hand around her hip to keep his balance.
she is slender and pretty and what he fantasized about for years in his arms, and I don't know her and I don't want her, and I'm afraid to break her, somehow.
he also has no idea what to do with the situation, opens his mouth tentatively but only feels a greater fool because he doesn't know what to do with that either. everything is so mundane and measured about sakura-chan, while naruto has shared a soul with kyuubi for far too long to be anything but a creature of instinct, and there is no fierce drive in him to have anything to do with sakura-chan's body flush against his. with sakura-chan at all. a liking there is, and traces of desire, but no fierce drive.
it isn't – isn't bad, but it isn't any more than that, either, nothing more than not-bad. leaves him with the leaden incurable weight of knowledge that sakura-chan is a concept he loves from a distance.
…probably the entire terrible occurrence is kakashi-sensei's fault. at least it is in the dream, and oh how that doesn't surprise him)
It's distant now, distant as everything save the limp warmth pressed to his chest.
"Put him on the bed," Sakura-chan instructs. "I don't think he's seriously hurt. But be prepared to run for Tsunade-sama just in case, alright?"
"Hmm?"
She gives him a hard, breaking look. "Put him down on the bed. I'll do what I can." She shakes her head, a fast movement against the confusion edging into pain. "We'd better save Tsunade-sama as a last resort. You know, well at least you ought to know, certain people might be – inclined to hurt him."
"What!" Naruto exclaims, but it isn't the right word. Stealing a glance at Sakura-chan's face, open and tired and serious (knowing he'd kill for her, knowing he'd die for her, and that still that means nothing compared to sasuke deadly and in his arms) he curses the fact he's apparently the only one still clinging to a world in which adults don't lie.
"Just let me have a look. Lay him here."
With the memory of something else so close, Naruto's arms feel the resumed emptiness as a bone-deep bleakness. He can't look away but has to, because there is so much between them, the hatred and the love, the kept promises and the broken ones, and this isn't right, to look at Sasuke's crankily vulnerable face, relaxed into worry-lines.
With the deft impersonal hands of one trained in healing (shaking and lingering and slipping and burning like those of a friend examining a lost loved one) Sakura starts stripping away the blood-crusted blue fabric wrapped around Sasuke. She's never seen more of his naked skin than she does now, and that too is painted over with browning blood.
Oh god. Then again she has reluctantly realized that it's exceptionally rare for anything to turn out according to your expectations. Even so, bending over Sasuke, who's lying half-naked on her bed in the finer suburbs of Leaf after three years' absence and lethal glory, probably constitutes a peak, a record of strangeness rivaled only by, say, her first kiss.
(which didn't go according to plan either, all those years ago when it happened. forced its sweet way into her life.
she'd planned for it to be with sasuke-kun in romantic light, surrounded by shared warmth.
it really, really wasn't)
It's been long since she thought about that, and the idea has never felt more distant than it does now, with Sasuke's breathing only a thin layer of skin away from her probing fingers.
(her first kiss, though she refused to label it as such at the time, took place in a field of flowers with the sun blinding and brilliant in her eyes and a thin blond girl atop her.
by mutual consent they decided it didn't mean anything, wasn't real. they were very young, still caught in the doctrine that female sexuality cannot exist without a male counterpart)
Lately she's started to think Ino's hands in her hair and Ino's weight on her body, Ino's mouth on hers, were a good deal more real than their insubstantial and equally mutual crush on Sasuke.
Years away from that, from Ino and the sunflowers and from dreams of Sasuke as her boyfriend, with Sasuke's blood on her sheets, she registers, with belated suddenness, what she is actually touching.
"Naruto," she says in a very calm and mature voice, touching his elbow lightly. "Take a look at this, alright? Tell me if I'm crazy."
Naruto looks then, breaks willfully and finally looks, and his eyes are staging a rebellion against confinement in their sockets, for suddenly it makes all the sense in the world that Sasuke was smaller and lighter and prettier than Naruto's memories can readily account for.
Unfortunately that's the only thing that makes any stray bit of sense anymore.
"Why," he starts, with a tendency towards hyperventilation. "Um, correct me if I'm wrong but aren't those – how come Sasuke has, holy shit, breasts? I mean, are they real?"
"I," Sakura says dumbly. "I don't know."
"Should," Naruto begins, then stops abruptly: he swears it, he can feel the crimson poring out of his pores and thinks he should at least get smarter from it, because with this much blood directed to his upper regions his brain has got to get a good deal more oxygen than usual. "Should we, like, check?"
"I guess," she says, but doesn't move, too occupied with the forming conclusions.
In the silence, giving her a wary glance, Naruto bends forward with overdone caution, like one preparing for solicitation with a particularly poisonous snake, and places a hand clumsy with gentleness against the soft curve of Sasuke's chest. "It's," he reports. "Um."
It's firm and soft and nothing particularly special. He's no idea whether that makes it real: has little hands-on experience with breasts and has had equally modest interest in exploring the topic further. Breasts are simply the heaviness on his front when he's used the Oiroke no Jutsu, a no-touch and no-look part on girls. Something to distract Jiraiya with, something that used to invade his dreams on and off to embarrassing effect when he was a little younger.
Before Neji's torso was flat and hard and perfect against his, only it did not look like Neji's.
And shit, what is he doing? Groping my unconscious rival, lost best friend?
It would be so like Jiraiya to have broken him in at long last.
"Naruto? Naruto, are you listening to me? Oh, good god, would you stop touching him?"
He blinks, stumbles away, regretfully reclaiming the hand that had remained curved over Sasuke's breast.
"I should think it's obvious," Sakura says primly, covering Sasuke carefully with a blanket after hastily estimating that none of the blood seems actually to be his. Naruto wants to demand: No, don't hide him, let me see, let me see everything of this person who left and who returned, whom I've missed and claimed, let me see the weakness and the betrayal, let me see him. He doesn't. "Obvious that it has to be a version of your Oiroke no Jutsu."
Well, yeah, what else could it be? Too bad most of him is far removed from the childish voice inside him screaming in triumph about whose jutsu are the best now, huh, you bastard, reduced to my master technique, aren't you?
That spoilsport main part of him asks instead: "Shouldn't that have gone poof when he blacked out?"
"Yes," Sakura-chan agrees, forehead wrinkled like that of an old woman. "That's just it."
Naruto nods. "Yeah, he shouldn't have the chakra to maintain it." This is safe, this is normal conversation with normal people, and he could scream at the absurdity of it taking place with Sasuke warm and bloodied and home, not a meter away.
Sakura-chan looks at him until he feels like the idiot she so clearly sees him as.
"It has nothing to do with chakra, Naruto. True, people usually faint because they're out of charka, but he isn't. Oh god, he isn't." She looks a little wild around the eyes. "Do you remember Orochimaru's chakra, the feel of it, the immensity?"
That and the slimly sensation, snakeskin slithering through gore. He makes an effort to feel for himself, has never been any good at the subtle stuff but manages a brief, disturbing image of wave upon wave of power waiting to break over them. His neck itches from it, there at the base where chakra movement begins.
Sakura-chan makes a visible effort to calm herself, purses her lips and goes on, much like Iruka-sensei continuing a lecture against all odds. "So he's definitely not out of charka – but he should still have lost control over the jutsu when he fainted, it should have collapsed when he ceased imposing his will upon it."
"What that does mean?"
"It means," she snaps, tired and scared, "that Kabuto told the truth for once. He, he – joined with Orochimaru but won, and has the chakra of at least one Hokage now. It stands to reason that's not the only… change, which frankly makes it even odder that he managed to mess up the jutsu to this extent."
She closes her eyes, presses her wrists against them to forcibly push back tears. It means I have no idea what to do, because I don't trust him and I don't trust myself to stop him, should it be necessary. I don't trust either one of us to do that, because I don't stand a chance against him and you could never hurt him. You'd kill yourself before you killed him, I know that, Naruto, but it's not that simple anymore. I love him and I love you, but it's not that simple. It can't be about just what I love, because that can't be enough.
At approximately the same time she thinks this Sasuke stirs, and Naruto's world shatters until all he has is a distorted image of Sasuke, viewed from countless angles and robbed of sense. Urgent and immediate and he doesn't know what he's doing at all anymore. Sasuke sucks in the world around him and all its meaning and vividness like a black hole. Naruto is not immune to the gravity, but has his scars to cling to, as well.
By cosmic coincidence that some call fate and others contrivance, the moment Sasuke's eyelids flutter is also the moment Mrs. Haruno answers the door, opens it for a tall, washed-out man in his late twenties or early thirties. The lanky ease of his walk suggests the former, the careworn shadows clinging to his face argue for the latter.
"You're – Sakura's teacher," she says, surprised into rudeness, recognizing the mask and the distinctly silver hair above the Jounin vest from her daughter's occasional bit of gossip.
Sakura has failed to mention, Mrs. Haruno thinks with dim venom, that the man looks childish and elderly at once, is so thin she is surprised his skeleton doesn't rattle as he walks. How his scarred hand, lingering close to a knife strapped to his thigh, smells of tobacco and sake and wet earth.
She reminds herself that Sakura is a big girl, knows what she's doing, can handle this. Hopefully she can.
"Do come in."
"Thank you." His smile is picture-perfectly polite, the empty arc of lips.
Her opinions do not matter.
When he was a child his parents mattered, and his friends, schoolmates, teachers, neighbors, the entire village's opinions meant the world.
Then his father went through what he went through, and others' opinions went from praise to scorn, from solace to something ugly and traitorous.
He tried not to care until finally, in a silence that was not at all like relief, he found he didn't.
Then there was the Fourth, and Obito and Rin, and one day in a forest after he'd shown them Chidori for the first time he discovered he did care, again or still, he cared a lot.
A half an hour later Obito was dead, and Kakashi realized what a fool he'd been. It was too late not to care about Team Seven, but he could damn well protect himself in the future, even if he couldn't protect those precious to him. Because I couldn't protect those precious to me.
Gray years followed, peaceful and echoing in the way that empty time is. He was the best ninja in Leaf because fear was lost to him like love, like hope, like the childhood he never had – there was nothing in the world that could be offered him or taken from him, and death was nothing to him because life was nothing to him.
He would have been better off like that. But things happened (uchiha sasuke happened, like obito long ago, like terror and happiness, short and shady) and he steps into the hallway of the Haruno residence for reasons that should have centered on responsibility, on being a teacher and a faulty role model, but that have more to do with black hair through his fingers, with the scornful twist of a smirk that broke through to him and broke him.
He's already moving for the stairs when the woman says, "I'd offer you some tea, but I expect you are in rather a hurry to reunite with your team." She bites her lip, a childish spasm of movement. "That girl seemed badly hurt."
Almost every ninja has parents to pressure them forward, into glory, to ruin them, into lethal glory.
This woman is as far from that as anyone can be.
"Alright," he says, and reacts, somewhere beyond the light fog of sake and disorientation, to her words: there is no hurt girl on his team. Rin's dead. "Thank you."
Sakura and Naruto both hear the tell-tale light footsteps on the stairs; she registers it. Grabs his sleeve, tugs on it firmly until his focus is torn away from Sasuke and he realizes they might have a fight on their hands. She's rarely seen him look so grim.
"Kakashi-sensei," she says in abject relief a few seconds later, when she and Naruto are standing outside the room, ready to repel intruders as best as they're able. She with words, Naruto, she fears, with naked fists.
It's funny what different manners your pleading can take.
Your needs.
The relief is colossal and staggering: she can see Naruto ease down the tenseness a notch or two beside her, but knows their fundamental understanding of the new situation is really very much at odds.
Knows Naruto will be eased because he is certain Kakashi-sensei would never take Sasuke to the ANBU.
I'm just glad I won't have to.
"You two," Kakashi-sensei says then with what is almost his normal little grin. His voice is odd, though, shades of life surging and fleeing and fighting beneath the bright, airy deadness. "Stay here."
He nudges them aside and slips into her room, closing the door behind him.
Sasuke freezes in the process of sitting up, filthy and naked below the blanket falling over his lap. Thin the way that comes from training like a madman but throwing up most everything you try to eat, pale like someone who's spent most of his daylight time in caves and deep forests lately. He does not seem badly hurt at all: bruised mouth, bruises on both sides of his neck and an assortment of them across the rest of his body, the occasional spot on his arms and shoulders and stomach and chest. Nothing serious, no visible cut that the blood could have originated from.
Remains so the mystery of his, so to speak, female attributes.
"Um," Kakashi says, a smile warming his voice. It's easier to be amused than angry or anxious. "Don't answer if you feel it's too personal, but how come you are suddenly equipped with these alluring mounds?"
Even after all this time he can apparently still make Sasuke go scarlet. Good, he supposes. Steadying.
And isn't that ridiculous: after a mad dream of turning female and seducing Itachi, of killing Itachi and using the Mangekyou Sharingan, and finding Naruto suddenly by his side, after all this he wakes groggily to stare at a ceiling that isn't his.
And now there is Kakashi, so fundamentally familiar and fundamentally wrong that he can concentrate only on the first, or he'll break utterly apart.
Itachi... - no, no, no.
"Or," Sasuke says, collecting himself with an entirely new speed, not moving to cover himself, "you could walk out of the room and I could put on a shirt and we could pretend this never happened." A moment's pause, his brow furrowed in short but apparent thought: "Or we could skip the first bit and just pretend it never happened."
"Alright," Kakashi says. "Alright."
Kurenai suggested once that Kakashi has long since learned that with Sasuke it's better not to ask. This, like most of Kurenai's romanticized notions, is an utter misconception.
As far as Kakashi is aware, no one has ever tried asking Sasuke about anything real. Maybe he'd spill his heart out for a simple inquiry, potentially he might leak secrets like a broken bottle if invited to. Kakashi doesn't believe it for a second, but he's been wrong before.
Kakashi doesn't ask about anything real now because he never does. It's one of his lifestyle choices, like wearing a mask to cover a certain scar and having a series of adult novels for his best friend.
Were he ever to meet anyone pathetic enough to start blabbering their life's story without cue he'd have to make it clear he isn't going to listen (or just fall asleep, take a nice nap), but this far not asking has worked out fine.
He makes himself comfortable on the floor, sitting cross-legged and relaxed, shrugs, "Might be marginally less awkward if you changed back."
"You think?" Sasuke says, too light and scornful to be skeptical, because really, it is not as though either of them has forgotten. Then, with a snort that might or might not be mildly regretful, he adds, "I already did."
"Doesn't seem to have done you much good."
"No," Sasuke agrees calmly.
"I assume, then," Kakashi goes on, still distant and mild and lost, "that you'll have to grovel in the dirt at Tsunade's feet for a bit before she agrees to fix it for you."
"There's no way," Sasuke interjects flatly.
"I'll have word with her later," Kakashi says, some kind of sharpness underneath the bland tone. He recognizes it faintly, they both do. "She'll see to it that everything returns to normal."
He used the n-word. He could laugh. Doesn't, but only just.
"She will not," Sasuke says. "She can't."
Kakashi snorts, scornful and superior as ever any stupid Uchiha brat. "She can. The matter is whether she wants to, but a determined approach ought to settle that. I'd say an hour of groveling should be about enough."
"Absolutely not," Sasuke grimaces, bangs hiding most of his dark expression.
"Obviously it was a futile hope that you'd have grown past the spoiled brat stage," Kakashi remarks evenly, smiling and pleasant as he never is save when he cuts at you. "You're at the mercy of my limited knowledge in this field, then."
He says nothing about Orochimaru, all the raw words thick in his throat, sharp and bitter on his tongue (sasuke shivers).
"Don't bother," Sasuke dismisses, arrogant the way that comes with knowing your limits and knowing they are far off yet. "You've not grown past the spoiled brat stage yourself."
And there might be truth in that, there very well might be, because three years ago Kakashi's hand was in his student's hair, calloused fingers falling hard and fast for strands that were surprisingly soft beneath the coarse layer of sticky dust, thick and dark and smooth as ink.
He said, "I don't like boys,"
(obito, himself, those many many years ago)
and Sasuke was prepared to accept that much.
Certainly the claim begged the question of why, then, Kakashi stared complex cravings at him, adult desire and childish vengeance and masochistic narcissism, but Sasuke was used to reality being complicated, filled with inexplicable exceptions.
(every uchiha died, they said, and thinking about why he was able to hear them say it is too many shades of suffering)
He nodded, sharply, prepared to apologize or run or undress.
It was evening, shadows falling longer on the ground, transparent through his mind. Kakashi did that characteristic face with a raised eyebrow and a quirking at the left corner of his mouth, and, after a stretch of quiet time reaching beyond awkward into something hidden, he offered a long list of chakra control requirements he demanded Sasuke clear before he'd agree to give a pedagogic demonstration of the jutsu that had cut through lightning that once (a remarkably painful experience, after the rush had worn off).
With those words the interlude was assumed to be concluded. It should have been, shouldn't it?
Yeah, well. "Should" doesn't much matter.
Six nights later Sasuke stood bent forward, spidery hands on scratched knees, spine a gorgeous slope crowned by a dark head bowed in exhaustion but marked by a brilliantly triumphant smirk. Smoke curled from his fingertips, swaying in the weak breeze above the rock he had crushed into pieces.
Twisted brightness had been presumed to be over, spurned like childhood, like innocence: but Kakashi's hands placed themselves on Sasuke's hips, fingers hooked around prominent bones, palms stretched warm from buttock to thigh.
The one thing he'd wanted since he lost himself, and what did one more failure matter?
A bit of a startle ran through the child. If there was any surprise, though, and even that was doubtful, it was unclouded by disgust or pleasure or aggression.
"You want what I offered now," Sasuke commented, calm and concise, and the utterance was only a little bit a question. His throat moved around a swallow as he straightened in Kakashi's hold and turned under his hands until he stood with his head tilted back in inquiry, in challenge, his face fine-boned and scornful and arousing as only the untouchable can be.
(that's not exactly it, kakashi contemplated telling him, and in a way it wasn't, but hypocrisy is an art he has not mastered, and it wasn't exactly not what sasuke presumed, either)
What good are words?
Sasuke's fingers were on the edge of his mask, and Kakashi tilted his head downwards to study the closed-off face beneath his. With a certain determination clinging to the line of his jaw, with a spill or recklessness narrowing his eyes, Sasuke met him halfway, pressing thin lips flush against Kakashi's mouth. Kakashi's hand brushed up Sasuke's spine, flighty as a bird's wing, cradled the boy's head, tracing hair and ear and cheek until the lips let themselves be nudged apart.
Sasuke stood absolutely stonily still for a long, long second while Kakashi kissed him, then, fast when he did react, he snapped out of his frozen state as decisively as he had entered into it, heat radiating off his skin, strained pants echoing between his lips and palate. His hands sneaked underneath the Jounin ensemble, showing noteworthy skill in undoing its complicated clasps, nails scraping just a little too loosely over the bared skin.
Of course, Kakashi thought distantly, Itachi had a Jounin uniform as well, Sasuke must've played around with that…
He hadn't meant, honestly he had not meant, to have Sasuke's fingertips scattering like scared mice over the skin of his back. Now there they were, and there was something for him to have for the first time since everything he'd wanted had been stripped away, and this could be so good: Sasuke could be what Kakashi had failed to become, this distorted mirror reflection that wouldn't have to shatter like Kakashi had, and god, hell...
Only Kakashi could not handle goodness, could not handle dreams or hopes, and he did not think Sasuke could either.
He turned Sasuke over roughly, leaning him against another stone formation, trapping him between the rock and his teacher's body. Couldn't look at the eyes that Itachi had stared into when he broke Sasuke's world apart, so like his own.
The uneven stone cut into Sasuke's elbows and palms, kicked him in the knees and scratched at his stomach, partially exposed from how Kakashi was pulling up his shirt, fingers and mouth hot and furious on his skin. Then Kakashi's hand was thrust down his pants, and he hissed helplessly against the rock pressing into his front, not right knowing whether he was twisting towards or away from the man who was supposed to educate him.
He remembered the stuffy room Kakashi had brought him to immediately after he'd won the first preliminary round of the Exam Matches, recalled Kakashi sitting him down and producing an urn of thick smelly ink. The sort Sasuke's grandfather had used to write with.
Which had constituted a very disturbing association, because now Kakashi had been writing on him. With his hands, standing close and bowing over him, fingers spreading ink warmed by his body-heat over Sasuke's back, across his shoulder and down his chest. Over his stomach and down between his thighs, and hell, this is beyond embarrassing...
Kakashi hadn't said anything and neither had Sasuke, but there are other ways to communicate (like how kakashi had looked at him after he'd slumped, the instant before awareness had actually deserted him).
Weeks later, in this eternal instant, Kakashi had his hand in Sasuke's pants, and in a few seconds his …oh god, he was almost thirteen and the first phrase that sprang to mind to describe it was reproductive organ.
Afterwards, when Kakashi had cursed and picked him up and made sure he was patched together well enough no one could see there'd been anything to patch up, he said he wouldn't touch him again.
Sasuke nodded.
"I did believe you," he says, three years later, mostly naked in Sakura's bed with the man's eye hooded on him. "Whether that makes it better or worse."
Kakashi nods, on the far shore and fighting the pull of the water. "I bet Tsunade will stop by any minute."
She does, before Sasuke has answered – provided, of course, that he intended to, which Kakashi personally rather doubts.
The Hokage sweeps into the room accompanied by Shizune and a handful ANBU, followed by a frightened-looking Sakura and an angry, shit-scared Naruto who'd hurry to stand protectively between Sasuke and the Sannin if not for her telling him outside, "I'm not going to hurt him", and the knowledge there are certain things you don't lie about to the substitute for your dead brother.
Several of the ANBU startle, while Tsunade stands unmoved in the middle of the room. She does not immediately offer Sasuke anything to wear, because she is not the kind of person who grows uncomfortable from her adversaries being in humiliating positions, but discovers after a few heartbeats' time that Sasuke does not care about being nude anymore and gestures for one of her underlings to hand him a housecoat.
"I think there are some issues we should discuss."
Uchiha Sasuke would not have replied anything to that. Sasuke with a generous touch of Orochimaru smiles at her, the rotting sugary smile her lost one smiled. "Is that so."
Tempted to hit him she strikes deeper and dirtier than that. "Who knocked you up?"
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