Sakura noticed him too late; by the time she tried to step into a room and out of sight, he'd already called out her name, quietly. Her hand tightened on the doorknob – just a moment sooner and she'd have been able to open it and disappear inside – and he watched her twist it experimentally, as if she could still leave. It opened a fraction but she didn't enter, just stared down at the stairs, as if contemplating what laid past them, in the darkness.
Kakashi stood with his hands in his pockets, staring at the side of her head. She tilted her face further out of view as he cleared his throat. "You aren't going to be in charge of Naruto anymore?" he asked. It had taken him a moment to think of what to say. Her hand came off of the doorknob but she didn't turn toward him. He shifted, inhaling. "I heard from Tsunade."
She glanced at his feet, her face, still bruised, lip split, inching into view, and he set his jaw, pressing his teeth together until he heard a high pitched ring in his ear. Why didn't she look him in the face? It was too obvious, now that he saw her. He already knew – he knew the second that they met in the hall – that she was guilty. He cleared his throat, but the words didn't come.
"It's true," she said suddenly. "Everything she told you, it's true." She turned toward him and her cheeks were bright red against her pale face, as if someone had pressed their palms beneath her eyes. She asked, "Can you forgive me?" and in the next moment disappeared down the staircase. Kakashi listened to her hurried descent with closed eyes.
He was glad she hadn't waited for his answer.
He sat in Sasuke's room for as long as he could, but the Uchiha didn't wake. Couldn't wake. Naruto was gone, already packing. Come with me to pick him up if you want, Tsunade had said. He couldn't bring himself to go. He didn't have the energy anymore.
Sometimes he felt like his life was nothing but a series of disappointments and fuck ups.
The door was ajar and in the center of the empty room was a single suitcase, upright and already packed. Tsunade stood touching her hand to its worn fabric cover. Naruto studied her slumped shoulders before pushing the door further open. "You're late." The shampoo in the bag of toiletries he carried in his lap had already leaked out and formed a pouch in the plastic. He tossed it next to the suitcase. "Thanks for your help packing."
Her hand dropped to her side and she lifted her chin. "Hinata and Kiba wanted to talk to me. They're willing to house you, and so are Lee, Kakashi, and Iruka; I called each of them and they readily--."
"I'm going back to my old apartment," Naruto interrupted. "I don't need to stay with anyone." He shifted backward and moved away from her, into the kitchen.
"Your apartment was on the 13th floor, Naruto."
He opened and shut a few drawers in turn, looking for something but not finding it. "They have an elevator."
"It hasn't worked for 14 years." Naruto's shoulders tightened as the words left Tsunade's mouth. "What kind of nonsense--."
"I'll manage," he interrupted tightly, finally focusing his eyes on her. "Alone. I don't need anyone to do me any favours. I don't need that kind of debt." He slammed the final drawer shut and grasped at his wheels. Tsunade's shoes, those ridiculous heeled sandals, clicked as she followed behind him. Why hadn't she taken them off at the door like a normal person? Her hand grasped his shoulder.
"If you're going to think about it in terms of debt... Naruto, it's not as if you've never done someone a favour---."
"Like what, watering their plants while they're gone?" He shrugged her away. "I'm going to be living in their house, eating their food, and bothering them with these waste-of-time therapy sessions, and what would they get out of the deal? My company?" She shifted in her heels behind him; he covered the noise of her presence by sifting agitatedly though a few books he'd placed on the windowsill for lack of a bookshelf.
"They volunteered to be 'burdened' with you, if that's how you're going to say it." Her voice had grown harder in preparation for an argument. Naruto could imagine the tight wrinkle between her thin brows, the thin set of her lips as she formed her words: "Obviously they aren't thinking about all of this in the same terms as you are."
"They aren't thinking at all." Naruto turned. The wrinkle above her brow was worry; her voice had sounded so much harder than her face. His grey eyes flickered away from her. "Hinata and Kiba live in a one-bedroom house; where do you expect me to fit? Iruka has a family to take care of, he doesn't have time or money to look after me as well. I'm already indebted enough to Kakashi as it is, and his apartment is hardly the size of this living room. There's no way I'd shove into their lives like that and ever feel comfortable."
"What about Lee?" Tsunade said quickly. "Why not stay with Lee, then?"
"Gai visits sometimes," he blurted. His hands paused their pointless searching; the frown on his face collapsed and, briefly, he laughed. "I'd hate to be there when Gai visits."
It took Tsunade a moment to react to him. He suddenly seemed so otherworldly, so strange. It had become hard to remember how he looked when he truly smiled. Seeing him laugh, the wrinkle above her brows slowly disappeared, replaced with a growing tightness in her throat. He used to smile so often, but now she felt she hardly recognized him. The older he grew, it seemed, the smaller his smile had become.
"What if they gave me another full body suit?" Naruto managed, touching his hand to his mouth. "I can't believe I actually wore the first one..."
Tsunade snorted in disbelief. "You wore it?"
"They said it would make me a better fighter." He sighed, the corners of his mouth still upturned. "I was an idiot."
A slight smile tightened Tsunade's lips in the second before hazel eyes slipped from his face to his legs. She took in her breath, open mouthed. "I don't want you to stay by yourself." The corners of his mouth fell, and he was suddenly older again. "It's not healthy," she said, and silenced him with her eyes. "Show me that you care about getting better, and maybe then we can talk about it. But right now..."
"I'm not going to stay with anybody," he said quietly. His shoulders slumped forward and he was suddenly aware of the light streaming through the window, slapping at his neck. He turned his face toward the window and there was only a a dumpster, spray painted over. Where, he wondered, was the stupid light coming from?
"Yamanaka Ino offered you a room, too," Tsunade said suddenly. "She has her own house. It's small, but there's a guest room."
"I already said--," Naruto started, turning his gaze from the window. For a moment the interior of the room seemed impossibly dark in comparison to the outside.
"--And it's funny you should mention debt, Naruto," she continued, arms crossed, "because she said that was the reason she was calling."
He blinked, and her form was suddenly visible again. His eyes moved to his suitcase and the soggy bag beside it.
The Hokage stared at him in the pause, the wrinkle between her brows growing more prominent. "Does she fill your requirements, then?"
Naruto set his chin. "I'm going home." His voice was heavy and quiet. "I'm not staying with anyone."
"You can stay with her." Tsunade unfolded her arms and pulled the few books he carried from his lap. He abruptly grabbed her wrist, but he held her for only a moment, as if realizing the aggressiveness of the gesture.
"We aren't close," he said at length, uncurling his fingers. He pressed his hand to his knee and then quickly moved it to the armrest of his wheelchair.
Tsunade fixed her eyes unwaveringly upon his. "That's why I offered you the chance to stay at everyone else's first," she said evenly. "You'll make the decision or I'm making it for you. You won't live alone."
Naruto narrowed his eyes. "I'm not living with anyone," he said tightly.
"Then you're living with Ino." She turned on her heel and dumped his books into a zippered pocket, pulling the suitcase's handle up. As she bent to pick up the plastic bag she glanced up at him. He sat resolutely by the window, his arms tightly crossed, face turned frowning toward the light. "We're leaving now."
"I'm not going." His arms tightened.
Tsunade straightened, shifting her weight to her left. Her hand came up to rest on her hip. "So would you rather stay here with Sakura?" she asked.
"I'm not staying either." His voice, pressed out from between his teeth, was flat.
She took a breath and felt her nostrils flare as she exhaled. "Naruto," she said. "We're leaving now."
His head turned toward her. With the light like it was, she couldn't see his features. He stared at her, faceless. "I'm going home."
"Go home, if you want, and if you can manage to get to the 13th floor, you can have a nice talk with the people that moved into your old room last week." She saw his head move slightly. His shoulders were high and rigid. "It's been sold," she continued. "You weren't living there and it makes no sense for you to." Tsunade set her jaw. "We're leaving, then. Aren't we?" Her eyes held to his sun-struck form. He lowered his head and put his hands over the wheels of his chair. She released her breath as he drew near. "Thank you," she said quietly.
He turned his face away from her as he passed.
Ino tugged his suitcase through the door. It was strange that all of his belongings – clothes, photographs, a couple weapons and scrolls, maybe the odd book – fit into something so small. Somehow it was depressing. The wheel stuck again and she yanked the handle from the suitcase's rectangular body; it fell with a loud and heavy thump onto the floor.
Naruto appeared in the entry way -- "What are you doing?" -- and Ino straightened, glancing at the handle, which she still held. "How long have you had this?"
"Since forever." He looked away from her and to the suitcase on the floor. "It'd never broken before."
"Oh. Well." Ino knelt and studied the separated pieces. "Sorry," she said and tried to slip the handle back into the body. It was surprisingly difficult. "Hey, I..." He'd disappeared, so she raised her voice. "I didn't think you'd be coming... I mean... The guest room is kind of... not ready..." She paused for an answer but there wasn't one.
The handle suddenly slipped back, and with a sigh she stood and wandered into the living room, where Naruto was looking silently at the books in her book shelf.
"I fixed it," she said. "Come on, you can see the room at least. I just have to move some boxes. Sweep, too." He turned his head toward her and she raised her brows slightly, stopping mid-step. "Are you coming?"
He shrugged.
"The bathroom is right down the hall from you, between our rooms. Mine's on the opposite side. If you ever need anything, or... See, here's your room..." She pulled the door open, pushed his suitcase inside, and paused at the threshold with her hands on her hips, surveying the room, before she strode over to the window to push open the curtains. "It doesn't look as dreary when you have the window open."
Naruto came into the room and stared for a moment at several boxes which laid atop the bed's wrinkled sheets. Ino followed his gaze.
"I'll take those off, so..." She raised her brows and pushed her hands into her back pockets. "The bureau is empty so feel free to put your stuff in there. The closet doesn't have that much junk... You can just push it aside." She sniffed and wrinkled her nose. "I'll dust, too."
There was a vase atop it that might have been filled with flowers before, transparent save for the dirty-looking white line where water had been left sitting inside it. The room was plain and ordinary and full of pale colours, but she was right; it didn't look too dreary with the curtains opened.
He still hated it.
"Why would you offer to let me stay here?"
She answered after a pause, "It seemed like the right thing. You needed a place." She paused and rested her hand on the box closest to her. "I didn't think you'd chose to stay here," she said conversationally. "Hinata--."
"I didn't choose here," Naruto interrupted.
Ino blinked. "Oh, so that's why you've been acting like this." She pressed a hand to her shoulder, awkward. "It must be because I have a bigger house."
"I chose to live alone." His voice was sharp and he swallowed. His fingers wiped at crease that had grown between his brows. "But apparently that meant forfeiting any choice at all."
"Well, it's only temporary." Ino shifted suddenly, clearing her throat, and pushed her hair behind her ear. It fell quickly into her eyes again. "You probably want to get settled," she said carefully, and quickly took the boxes on the bed into her arms. "I'll have to straighten up later; I've got work." She disappeared through the doorway and he watched her shadow move against the wall until it disappeared as well.
"The longer you do this, the less chance you have of recovering." Tsunade leaned against her desk. "I know you understand this."
He understood the words. She'd told him the same thing, in some variation, every day. But the word "chances"-- that was one he hated. "What are my chances of recovering now?" Naruto asked. "I don't think they can get any worse." He stared out onto the city. It looked small and dirty. Nothing to be proud of. The day was overcast, like it was every winter. It was his least favourite time of year, but lately he'd lost his distaste for it. What was the difference between this season or any other? He'd be sitting through all of them.
There was a group of birds huddling on the window ledge, looking miserable. They shuddered, wings flapping, as the wind blew by.
"Your bones are getting thinner." Tsunade straightened, pulling her hands from the desk. "Your immune system weaker. It's been 4 months since the injury. Some of the best medics would say that your window for improvement is beginning to close." She took in her breath and sat. "If you want any hope of--."
Naruto felt irritation froth in his chest, expanding to fill his throat. "Shut up," he snapped. Tsunade lowered her chin, eyes unflinching, as if she'd known it was coming. "You said it yourself," he spat. "It's hopeless."
"I never said that," she said slowly. "I said we didn't know how to fix it. That doesn't mean there aren't things you can do to improve your chances--."
"What chances?" he shouted. "Why do all of this work to prepare for a surgery that's impossible?"
Tsunade's fingers braced themselves again on the table. "Impossible. When did you start using that word?" Her eyes stared into his but she seemed to be seeing someone else. "You never used that word before."
Are you seeing me? he wondered. I'm not what I was. Rain began to click against the windows. Nothing was what it had been.
Sakura began changing the moment Sasuke returned. He had fallen asleep with one woman but woken up with another,one who shared tense stares with the man who'd already left her once and stopped looking at the one who had always been at her side. She left and she stayed gone. Maybe he should have fought harder for her, seeing the look that he did in Sasuke's eyes; there was something so obviously hungry, so unsettled, unsatisfied. The emptiness become more and more visible every day, but he ignored it -- Sasuke wouldn't leave again, he told himself, not after everything that had happened, all the second chances, not now that he has Sakura at his side.
But it was difficult not to stare at her, even when he told himself that Sasuke needed her more than he did. Things were so different, almost lonely, now that he'd had her and lost her. He wanted to talk to Hinata but they'd already broken up and grown apart and she was out, gone on a mission with Kiba and some people he didn't really know. People seemed more wrapped up in their lives now that his was coming apart. He worked more, saw the city less. But at some point he came home, turned on the lights, and she was sitting in the semi-darkness in front of his window, one knee pulled up to her chest and her fingers curved against her mouth. Sasuke was gone, and she was back.
Of course.
Should he have known something was wrong when she started showing up again? Should he have felt like he was second best, a sub-par substitute for the man who'd left her twice?
Of course.
But he didn't. Maybe he was stupid, maybe he made exceptions for her because he'd loved her since he saw her and she was beautiful, smart, kind, and somehow, he liked to be there for her when she cried. A year passed and she flitted in and out, didn't answer the phone when he called, showed up when he hadn't invited her, when he was ready to quit everything and forget her. She kicked a hole in his wall so he smashed a vase. She cried about Sasuke over the birthday cake he'd made for her. But she kissed him so passionately, always when he least expected it. She sat next to him at the dinner table and sometimes took his hand.
He believed part of her, at least, loved him, and as pathetic as it sounded now that he he thought of it, that was enough for him when it came to Sakura; she was all he really had. Sasuke was gone again. Jiraiya had been dead for years. Kakashi worked, Iruka got married. People died, or, like Shikamaru, they wasted away for as long as anyone could stand to watch. Everyone and everything was serious. It was time to settle, to grow up, start a family before it was too late; time to find someone to keep close to you. One person, at least. All he wanted was one person; all he wanted was to make her happy. And where had that put him? His dream of becoming Hokage – Jiraiya's hope, the Third's hope, maybe his father's hope – was nothing if not unattainable. The only other girl he'd ever loved was married and pregnant. He'd betrayed the man he would call his brother, his best friend.
It was all for her.
"Naruto." The fingers on his face were cool against his skin, and he suddenly felt feverish. Tsunade's eyes met his, close, when he turned his head. "Stop thinking about her."
"Thinking about who?" He turned his head and pulled his chin from her grasp. The coolness of her fingertips quickly disappeared.
"You're still making yourself ill over her. At some point what's wrong with you isn't going to be her fault anymore." She straightened and her hands curled slowly into fists on her hips. "You have to want to try. It's been two weeks."
"Two weeks."
"Since you moved in with Ino. It was supposed to be a new start but you're thinner, weaker, angrier." Her arms hung from her sides. "You have a fever. Are you eating?"
Naruto raised his eyes to hers. There was a wrinkle of concern on her unblemished forehead. She seemed old, despite her body. Was it her eyes? "She serves dinner every night," he said, and it was the truth.
The wrinkle was suddenly more shallow. She took in a breath and released it. "Start asking for seconds."
Sakura glanced up from her book and narrowed her eyes as she looked out across the sun-struck yard. A nurse had opened the door to the west wing and spoke loudly as she helped her patient, limping, through. Sakura pulled her jacket further over her cold wrists, sniffing. It looked so much warmer than it felt, and she thought about getting out from beneath the hospital wall's shadow and into the sunlight, but in the end she couldn't be bothered. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs, finding her place in the text: Chakra Circulation and Motor Fiber (Motor Nerve) Compression. It was an outdated manuscript and she'd found several errors in it so far, but it was the first manuscript she'd come across so detailed and specific. Her notebook was flooded with notes, crammed into straight, dark lines. A forest of words which, for now, she wasn't quite able to navigate. Her hand moved automatically down the page, fingers growing grey with ink.
Naruto saw her sitting like this, her neck bent in concentration, through the wide windows that lined the hallway to the courtyard. Her face, tipped partially out of view, was only a smear from so far away, but she had always been easy to recognize. He'd never been able to get her completely out of his sight, no matter that he might be miles away.
Shizune stopped his chair, the sound of her sandals echoing into silence. Her voice was soft. "Did you want to talk to her?"
Naruto pulled his eyes from the window and fixed them sightlessly on the hallway in front of him. "I don't have anything to say to her."
Shizune knelt beside him and he noticed for the first time the peppering of grey strands in her hair before he looked away again. Her hand, rested on his arm, was cool. "I saw how you were looking at her just now, Naruto. You're making things so difficult on yourself and--."
He slid his arm from beneath her fingers. "Don't talk anymore,"he said abruptly. The hall was flooded with light and he turned his face from Shizune and from the window.
He hadn't always been unable to control his words. At some point in his life, he was charming. A smooth talker, maybe, as impossible as it seemed in light of his youth. He learned to keep his thoughts, emotions, opinions, in check; partly because he grew up, and partly because he knew that control was important for a leader, a quality people could trust. Even now, he was aware of his volatility, knew that the words he was saying were increasingly inflammatory, painful, and misplaced in their hatred. But the words he told himself were harder.
Idiot. The word and so many others circled in his head. Sasuke had warned him, more than once and even though Naruto had seen it himself -- the duplicity in her nature, how easily she could turn on him, or away from him – he wanted her. She seemed so frail, so powerless at times. Why did he want someone to need him so badly? He'd been blinded by her: her instability, her beauty, her volatility, her hair. He'd thrown away his life for the tenuous illusion of love she'd weaved with her wide, green eyes.
They sat close on the benches in the park; he found her asleep on his couch when he came home late from missions; she liked to lean her head on his shoulder; but it wasn't love. In the beginning, when she began meeting him at the gates when he arrived back in town, chatting with Hinata as they both stood in the cold, faces hardly visible beneath scarfs, he thought it was loneliness. When he put his arms around her shoulders were thin and sharp against him. She wanted company and he gave it. When did she suddenly start wanting something else? And when did he start looking forward to catching sight of Sakura's thin figure more than embracing Hinata's?
At first he hesitated to say fate, because saying so would mean they were fated to fail, that he was meant to be as he was.
They tried to get him to exercise, but he wouldn't have it. What was the point? They tried to get him to speak, but he'd rather stare out of windows; he only had bad things to say, anyway. And back at Ino's, he knew, she would heap his plate with food, but he would rather sleep. The curtains kept out all of the light.
It wasn't such a bad room, after all.
Today he was silent in his room again. On the weekends she closed early, and she expected to catch him as he returned. She'd been sitting at the kitchen table smelling the cookies in the oven – almost done – when she heard him struggle up the ramp and onto the porch. He was at the door before she reached it and she stood in the kitchen doorway as he passed.
"I made some dessert," she'd said, but he didn't acknowledge her voice. The only sound from him was the creaking of the floor and the click of the door as he disappeared down the hall and into his room.
He seemed thinner. But Tsunade wouldn't let him starve.
Ino dumped the cookies into a jar. They'd burned and she wasn't desperate enough for one to force herself to eat it. The smell – blackened sugar - lingered in the hall. She paused outside his door before going to bed but those cookies had burned and she couldn't think of anything to say that might reach him. She'd wanted to be alone for months; who was she to force herself into his company? He would be better when he wanted to be better. His face, each time she saw him – tight browed, broad mouthed, narrow eyed – reminded her of the reflection she'd caught, years before, in the glass over Shikamaru's portrait, and she knew exactly what it meant: I only want to be left alone. She turned her back on his door.
In the restroom she washed her face, her eyes closed until the towel she pressed against her damp cheeks fell away. When they opened they flickered briefly over her reflection. In the artificial light the scars that twisted over her skin looked flat and white. The one beside her eye was worst, hard-looking and knotted, exposed now that her bangs were tied back. She pulled the band that held them away and turned off the light.
The night was cold and the wind kept her up for most of it.
His thin, pale face; the wrist bones that grew more prominent every time she saw him. If only those things would disappear, the success rate of the surgery – the surgery she hadn't yet planned, created, perfected – could double.
Sakura laid in bed with these thoughts racing, giddy, inside of her head: if she studied just a bit more, if he got stronger, if Tsunade approved her plans, if Naruto would let her operate, if it was a success, if he healed well enough to attempt another surgery... Could he walk again? Could he run? Sakura rifled hurriedly through her notes, spread them on the bed and stared down at them, memorizing, organizing, suddenly fueled with a tentative optimism. The moon was already waning by the time the nervous energy left her and she fell asleep.
She dreamt of cutting him open, the things she would encounter. The glance she had inside would show parts she already knew, parts she'd seen in everyone else. She would precede just like the manuscript told her; shifting tissue, organs, muscle, just enough to fit the pins through. She knew where to place them, each one; was prepared for the shock of chakra she would receive. She wouldn't jerk, wouldn't stab at the wrong point. She imagined the silvery yellow glow that would tell her she'd done everything perfectly. She imagined that she finished, smiled, and said:
"We fixed him."
The nurses exhaled, their shoulders falling, no longer tense. Sakura, too, might have breathed a sigh of relief, but a chill of foreboding raced up her back and up into her head, sweat beading in its wake, and she knew, suddenly, with painful certainty, that she couldn't remove her hand. Something wasn't right. She stood petrified and the nurses, staring, began to murmur, their eyes roving between her and each other and Naruto, lying with tissue over his face. Her own eyes stayed riveted to her hand. Her chest shook with the effort of withholding her breath. She imagined blood, pouring up over his stomach, running down his side. So much blood, if she only breathed. She stood rigid, one hand braced on the operating table, her eyes wide and unblinking, her chest swelled, and her heart rattling within it. She couldn't breathe, couldn't move, no matter what, if she wanted him to stay alive.
When she woke up she was standing at the kitchen table, gripping a chair's back rest in one hand, her other, with cramped fingers, outstretched toward the dishes she'd left there. Her body was cold with sweat, and her hair laid plastered to her forehead, as if she had a fever. Going back to sleep was a difficult process, and she only half succeeded, lying in a daze and thinking thoughts she couldn't remember, wondering if she fallen asleep and then realizing she hadn't.
Tsunade had met her in the hallway. He saw you today, she said. Don't come in anymore. Take a break. Leave him alone. It's what's best. She caught a glimpse of him but he didn't look toward her. He was someone else, a stranger. There was nothing she could do, she realized, that would take everything back. Of course, things only kept moving forward, and there was no way she could reverse - take back, redo – anything. If only she could talk with him. Try harder, she would say. I'm trying so hard. I'm treading water. I'm drowning.
The heater growled noisily. The ceiling fan turned and Sakura stared up at it, hot, sweating, even as the wind howled outside and the cold beat at the windows. With each revolution of the fan she wondered, what can I do?
What can I do?
What can I do?
"Naruto..." she started. But even when he wasn't there, glaring at her, she couldn't think of how to finish the sentence. It used to be so easy to speak to him; maybe that's what attracted her to him in the first place. At some point he'd transformed from this loud, brash idiot into someone she could almost call charming. She often saw him in street-side restaurants with Hinata and that strange little half smile on his face, his head tilted as he listened. He cut an impressive figure, the more time passed.
The first stab of jealousy had surprised her: an ache that rose from the very pit of her stomach to grasp at her heart as she sat at the table, staring at the backward window decals with a coffee raised to her lips, and Ino and Chouji across from her, splitting pastries and chatting. The weekend crowd seemed faceless, a conglomerate of people with no distinct identity, all wheeling around together through the streets, but he was suddenly visible.
What made that unfamiliar iciness rise from her stomach to her chest? The smile on his face, or the hand that he so carefully kept pressed to Hinata's back? She dreamt about that half smile and woke feeling strange and unsettled, restless. She saw Hinata on her way to work and even as she ignored the slight wave of acknowledgment the gentle girl gave her she knew that it was stupid, ridiculous to feel possessive of something she didn't have.
It wasn't a conscious decision to see more of Naruto. Sakura could say that, at least. But in the end she knew what she'd done, and what she was doing. Naruto appeared on her doorstep more and more often. He smiled at her and she thought she was happy; never mind that they still snuck around, even after the rift between Naruto and Hinata grew too wide for either to pretend to ignore any longer.
Maybe they might have have married. Sasuke had receded far into her mind, and Naruto was the one who brought her flowers randomly, who wrapped his arms around her. Maybe she would have married him, if Sasuke never came back. But he did. He'd left her once before, but so gently. Thank you, he'd said. Despite all the years that passed she still dreamed of that moment, woke up with an aching throb in her heart and all of the breath squeezed out of her lungs. When he came back and their eyes met – only for a second, just before he was lead away – she felt the same dull pain, a pull, as he passed. He'd stared at her for as long as he could. Even when he left the second time, she couldn't stop thinking about him. Naruto would never change that.
In the morning Sakura stared bleary eyed at the bulging folder on her desk. There were so many ways she had hurt him. There was no running away from that anymore.
The nurse froze as soon as he touched her and Naruto felt the pulse in her wrist abruptly quicken before he released her arm, pushing it away from him. "Just give me a break, alright?" he said quietly. "That's enough for today."
The nurse stepped back and glanced at the doorway. She was small and even the resolute look she suddenly plastered on her face looked frail. He was getting younger and younger nurses, and he wondered if word was spreading that he was difficult. It was always the lower ranking ones that drew the short straw.
"There are three more exercises scheduled today." She took a step toward him and laid a faintly trembling hand on his arm, smiling slightly. She reminded him for a moment of Hinata, with her dark hair. But the smile she'd painted over her fear –was that the look in her eye, or was it annoyance?-- screamed Sakura. "This one is very simple. I'll just help you up and--"
He grasped her wrist again and watched the emotions flicker over her features. Annoyance, fear, anger, and then fear again.
"I said, that's enough." He leveled his eyes with hers as he released her for the second time. "This is pointless." Outside the icy rain was coming down in sheets, tapping noisily against the window.
The nurse clasped her hands in front of her skirt and cleared her throat. "Please, we have scheduled three more exercises..."
Naruto raised his eyes to her. "If you touch me again--."
"Koyama?" The voice was so easy to recognize. It filled the room and sucked the air straight from his lungs. "Could you go to room 17A and help with the patient there? I'll take over in here."
The nurse escaped with a soft exclamation of relief and Naruto found himself alone with Sakura. She stared down at the folders she held, hands beginning to shake as soon as the door closed. She spent a moment trying to straighten her shoulders, trying to look more confident. Her frailty suddenly seemed like an act. The way she spoke, so softly, as she held the folders out to him in both hands; he found everything transparent.
"These are my notes about you," she said, when she'd managed to bring her trembling body within arms' reach from him. "I filled the blue one this morning. I was reading all night." She swallowed again. "It's a lot," she said. "If you give me more time... I just want you to know, I'll keep going like this until I find out how to fix what I did. I'll find a way, if you promise to work harder too."
Did she stay up all night rehearsing, too? Naruto glanced between her face and the folders. The soft voice, her downcast gaze, the paper in her arms. He held out his hand and watched her eyes widen as she saw the gesture. "Give me them," he said. His voice seemed so mechanical that for a moment he was tempted to speak again, to try to sound more like himself, more like the person he was. Or had been. She stood, lips parted, as if she didn't hear him. "Give me them," he said again, loudly.
She said something as she laid the folders in his hand, but he didn't care to listen anymore. For a second he looked at the notes, saw their many wrinkles, smudged lead and ink, scratched out page numbers, the upper quarter of a diagram. But he held it all only for that second, as Sakura looked on, wet-eyed, her empty hands fisted. He lifted his eyes to hers. "Fuck you."
The folders opened on the floor with a satisfying crack, spilling papers, throwing them into the air. He watched her through the falling slips of paper, eyes dark and hard.
"Do you think doing this will make things like they were?" His voice easily filled the room. "Did you think coming in here and acting like you're about to cry is going to make me forgive you?"
Now she closed her eyes briefly, as if collecting herself. Cry, he wanted her to cry, he wanted more to see through. "Please, Naruto." Her voice broke and he nearly laughed. "I have to--."
"I can't stand to see you. If I never saw you again, if I never heard your name again, if I could erase everything you from my head, it still wouldn't be enough!" The door had clicked open but he didn't lower his voice. As Tsunade entered it grew louder, as if he wanted all of the hospital to know. It didn't matter; most of Konoha knew by now, had heard rumours. She paused grimly in the doorway and Naruto, noticing her, tore through the pile of paper on the floor. "I'm done," he said, passing.
She didn't try to stop him.
Sakura crouched and began gathering the loose leafs into a pile. Her shoulders tightened as Tsunade's footfalls grew closer, pausing as she bent to pick up a diagram. She studied it for a moment, first with interest, then with disappointment. "Did you really think he'd be receptive to you?" she asked softly, glancing over the penciled notes.
Sakura slowly opened a folder and pressed a handful of wrinkled papers into it.
"I'm already having a hard time of getting him to do anything." Tsunade held out the diagram in her hand. One month, but neither of them, it seemed, was any closer to divining a strategy for combating Naruto's injury. Soon it would be too late. Maybe it was already. "Don't give him another reason not to come here. Sakura, I already told you to keep away from him."
Sakura turned her head to regard the page at her shoulder. For a moment she paused, as if expecting some further comment. None come and she ducked her head, swallowing. "I understand," she mumbled, and took the page in her hand.
The rain had long since ceased to be cold. For a while it was like fire, stinging at his hands, his face, but now everything was as numb as his legs. He heard his teeth chatter but his mouth didn't seem to be moving. His fingers creaked as they grasped and released the wheels of his chair. The ice against his face was no longer sharp and cutting. He hardly registered their dull impact.
The house was dark and quiet and cold. He sat in the room where he slept for a moment, listening to the crisp, random patter of water on the wooden floor. The wind blew against the window and he shivered, shivered, couldn't seem to stop.
The bath tub with the rubber mat. He hated it. His jacket stuck around his shoulders but he was too tired to cuss at it, too tired to wrestle with it. He tugged at it halfheartedly until it finally slipped free, and fell to the tiled floor with a sharp slap. The brace on his back, waterlogged, was beginning to chafe now that he was moving; he pressed his hand to it as he bent, grabbing at his pant leg, and lifted his foot onto his knee to unstrap his shoe.
His fingers recoiled slightly as they touched his skin. His lips tightened. It was never different, no matter how he prepared; it was impossible to recognize himself, like touching a stranger, and he wondered, is this what everyone who touches me feels? As if he was something not quite human, not quite right? He reflexively wiped his hand against his pants and repressed a disgusted shiver. Maybe those times that he'd grabbed her hand and she'd pulled away was because of this, the way his skin felt now under his fingers: alien and uncomfortable.
He hated it. He hated her.
The water that poured from the faucet began to steam. It filled the room and displaced all of the breathable oxygen. Everything was small and stifling. When he thrust his frozen fingers into the hissing stream they flared with pain, agonized with the sudden change in temperature. His skin grew redder. The fingers of his right hand were no different; his palms, his wrists, his face, neck, chest. They flinched at contact, protested loudly, stung in the heat and humidity. Next his feet. To the ankles. The knees. He held his thigh beneath the tap.
The skin began to blister, but he felt nothing.
The bathroom rug was damp as Ino brushed her teeth. She shivered and threw an arm tightly around her stomach. The front teeth, the left side. She spit. Tops and bottoms. Her eyes roved over the mirror, studying the reflection of the bath curtain, the high, dark slit of a window, the wet clothes balled beside the toilet. He couldn't put them in the hamper? She paused and her gaze flickered to the hallway. She spit. Back teeth and right side. As she brushed she crept to the bathroom doorway and stared toward his. No light visible beneath his door.
He didn't seem to be getting better. His silence was somehow a relief and a burden at the same time. She was glad he avoided her; she didn't like awkward interaction. But the longer he he stayed so isolated, the more uncomfortable she became. She'd realized as she stood misting flowers at work that she was worried about him, despite the casual distance that had always existed between them.
The toothpaste began to sting at her tongue. She turned from his doorway and spit.
In the early morning Sakura had come to work and disappeared silently down the stairs, to the medical library in the basement. It was dark and whether dawn had finally broken or not, she didn't know. Her hand formed letters automatically, cramped. Her eyes penetrated the blurry text of her manuscript. There was a neglected stack of current medical reports she was supposed to be filling out, but she couldn't keep her mind on birthdate, blood type, and maiden name long enough to finish even one.
A shadow appeared on the stairs, bent, and Sakura turned toward it, her hand twitching away from the folder. She shoved it beneath a pile of books and pulled the reports closer wit a hand, standing as Tsunade came into view, squinting into the dimness. She paused halfway down the stairs and sighed. "So you are here, after all."
Sakura swallowed. "Yes, Tsunade."
It was hard to see her face. She straightened and looked away, pursing her lips. "Since you're down there and you have the clearance, I need you to look up a secondary number for Hatake Kakashi. The one on public file isn't working." She turned back toward the door and with each step she ascended Sakura felt anxiety twist her stomach.
"It's early to be calling him, isn't it?" she blurted. And why call Kakashi, unless it had something to do with Naruto, or with Sasuke? Sakura laced her fingers together, tightly, and cleared her throat. Tsunade had stopped, head slightly cocked.
It was quiet enough to hear the distant sounds of the hospital above through the open door until Tsunade's feet began to move again on the stairs, her footfalls loud and clipped, like her tone. "Route the number to the front desk and have the nurse there tell him that the matter concerns Naruto," she called behind herself. "I'd like him to be here as soon as possible." Her shadow continued up the stair way until the the door closed.
The dimness was suddenly disconcerting.
"You don't have to say anything. Tsunade already bitched at me." Naruto had said it at the beginning of the conversation, as soon as Kakashi entered, and for a long while his teacher hadn't spoken at all, just stared at the angry red burns on his shins, sticky with salve and still uncovered. Maybe he would have stayed quiet with that unfamiliar sadness in his eye if Naruto hadn't, on impulse, brought his open hand down on the inflamed skin of his leg. It was that heaviness that he saw in Kakashi's brow that made him do it, the obvious concern in the fingers he laced tightly beneath his chin.
"Don't worry," he'd said and pushed himself up, first onto an elbow and then far enough that his hand reached, with a lunge, just below his knee. It struck his skin with a slap that left his palm stinging and he fisted his fingers against it. The imprint slowly faded from bright white to red and even as he opened his mouth he knew what he had done was stupid. "See?" He spoke but couldn't turn to Kakashi. "I don't feel anything."
Kakashi's hands slipped apart and one came up to rub at his face. He leaned on his knees. "You aren't even trying, are you?"
The words brought ice up into Naruto's stomach; his chest washed cold. He had the strange inclination to laugh, but the bubbling against his ribs only produced an almost soundless wheeze when it passed his lips. Kakashi was staring at him, waiting for an answer, he knew, but he couldn't bring himself to face him. His fisted hand was going numb. "Try?" he asked, when he could speak. "There's nothing to try."
"Bullshit," Kakashi interrupted. His visible eye narrowed as Naruto turned toward him, mouth opening. "Jiraiya wouldn't recognize you if he saw you today. Maybe you don't realize how much pain you're causing the people around you."
Naruto's jaw clenched. "The pain I'm causing?" His voice was flat, the sentence a statement.
"When I think about what you must be going through, I--." Kakashi broke off, his hand moving agitatedly against his face, the back of his head. "And you say don't feel anything? What are you doing to yourself?"
The nervous gestures, the unfamiliar tilt of his brow; none of it became him. Naruto looked up at the ceiling, laying back, but the image of his teacher's face was too easy to remember. His eyes roamed the tiles. "I don't feel anything," he said firmly. He uncurled his hand, turning it palm down on the sheets, and concentrated on the blood that rushed to fill out the depressed half moons dotting the flesh beneath his fingers.
Kakashi's voice softened the slightest bit. "I've seen you fight odds worse than this," he sighed. "Do you know what I think it is?"
His fingers felt cramped but he couldn't move them. Kakashi's question had him paralyzed. He had the idea that maybe, if he laid still enough, he could disappear completely and leave Kakashi speaking only to himself. His throbbing hand. It was the one sensation kept him grounded, tied to the bed and the room and the shithole that his life had become.
"I said, do you know what I think it is?" The voice at his bedside had grown insistent again. Naruto swallowed.
"I don't think you know shit." He brought his elbows up and put his hands behind his head, shielding his face from the older man. "That's what I think."
Kakashi's head tilted. "You could deal with this, I know you could." Hearing him, Naruto pressed his elbows tighter against his ears. There was a growing impatience in his arms and he suddenly wanted to get up and leave, but it was impossible to do anything on impulse, not the way he was now. There was no spontaneity anymore. Kakashi, beside him, took in his breath. "You still love her, even after this. That's what it is, isn't it?"
Naruto turned his eye through the crook in his elbow and found himself instantly caught in Kakashi's unblinking gaze. A sharp, short laugh exploded from his mouth when his eyes suddenly met his teacher's. Even to his own ears it sounded forced, unnaturally clipped and loud. "You really don't know shit." Beside him, Kakashi sighed heavily, his shoulders dropping.
"So you want to lie to me?" he asked quietly. "Do you really want to live like you are?"
"Would anyone choose to live like this?" Anger built in his throat, a hot pressure that he knew would tongue tie him and force rash words from his mouth. "Live? How else am I supposed to live, when I can't do anything for myself and no one can do anything for me, either?"
Kakashi looked pointedly at the awkward lay of his legs, at the back brace strapped around his stomach, and Naruto felt his stomach flutter with resentment.
"What do you want?" he shouted. Somehow his voice had become loud; it filled his ears, louder than the sound of his own heartbeat. "What can I do? It won't make a difference!" He fell back against the wall and threw his forearm over his face. "Get out of here. You don't know what you're talking about."
"You're the only one who can do anything about this."
"And I can't do anything." He closed his eyes tightly, and pressed his arm against them. Maybe the tighter he pressed the less he would hear. "Get out."
Kakashi shifted beside the bed. "Have you really tried?"
"Fuck off, Kakashi!" Naruto's arm dropped from his face and he grasped the sheets crumpled at his side as his words exploded into the still air. "'Have I tried?' What is there to try? 'Do I love her?' No, I hate her, more than you could ever fathom, more than I hate you and Tsunade and everyone the fuck else who tells me to try for something useless. Do you have your answers now? Get out!"
It took a moment for him to clearly see his teacher's face – his head was pounding, his jaw clenched. Kakashi stood quietly at his bedside, like a column, but his face -- maybe it flinched, but what Naruto most recognized was the weariness there, so evident despite the mask, the hidden eye.
The door opened and Kakashi promptly turned as if to leave. Tsunade, in the doorway, raised her brows, his name falling from her mouth, but Naruto had already brought his palms against his ears, slipping his fingers behind his head and obscuring his face with his elbows, didn't hear anything but the faraway, incomprehensible grumble of Kakashi's voice. His mouth opened on impulse. "You don't have to come back." He swallowed, staring hard at his knees until he heard Tsunade close the door.
"Naruto..."
He grasped a sheet and threw it over his legs before pressing his hands behind his head once again. They shook and he pressed his fingers tightly to his scalp. There were too many words he wanted to say, and no way he could say them.
"Naruto."
He would not look at her.
Tsunade sighed and her voice, when she finally began to speak, seemed far away, as if it didn't have the energy to traverse the small distance between them. "I wonder," she said quietly, "how many friends you'll lose like this."
Naruto turned his head further from her, arms tense. The sheet that he cast over his legs was nothing.
Ino stared at her shoes and for a moment she wished she'd never met him, that he'd never shown up and that she'd died out there next to Chouji, close to Shikamaru. It was because of him, tenfold, that she was standing beneath Tsunade's angry eyes, apologizing and blushing so red she was dizzy with the blood in her face. Her neck had a crick in it from bowing so long. She stared at her shoes and apologized again: "I'm sorry, Tsunade." She was acutely aware of the cluster of nurses around her, in the periphery, hanging out of sight and onto every single word being spoken. She remembered working here at the hospital, the gossip over lunch, the tittering.
"Didn't you notice?" The Hokage's gaze struck at her exposed neck as she bowed her head; she intuited the frustration in it and it was more than easy enough to incorporate that frustration into her own.
"I didn't know anything about it," she said quickly. She swallowed and cleared her throat. "I assumed he was eating here when he said he wasn't hungry."
"So I suppose you didn't notice he was wasting away. Didn't see he had a fever." Ino burned, listening to the words. As a nurse, missing these things was inexcusable: that was the message behind Tsunade's words.
"I assumed he needed space. I didn't see him for days at a time. I attributed his thinness to worry and depression." She swallowed. It was growing harder to swallow and she was tired of staring at her shoes. She closed her eyes tightly.
"He was depressed and you allowed him to sit in his room all day long? I'd think that you, of all people, would know better." Tsunade paused. "Did you want to be left alone after?"
Ino bit at her lip. "No," she answered. But the real answer was yes. Shikamaru died and yes, she wanted to be alone, felt safe when she laid on her side in the dark, loved being able to lose herself in day dreams of the past without the worry that someone would come and try to snap her out of it. Her throat was dry. "Is it bad?" She lifted her head. "His injuries?"
Tsunade sighed. The fire had suddenly collapsed, and it only smoldered now. "They aren't third degree. But every blister popped while he slept and I'm fairly certain he'll get at least one infection." She paused and looked around. The nurses who'd been listening so attentively had already scattered and closing her eyes she fell back against the counter, pressing her fingers to her forehead. "He doesn't give a damn about himself anymore."
Ino straightened slowly. "I'm sorry, Tsunade. I was trying to give him space. I didn't think we were close enough friends for me to impose on him."
Tsunade's amber eyes flickered up. "Always make him eat. Keep a diary on him for me. What he eats, his mood, whether he exercises. His routines. And you're responsible for bringing him here and taking him home. I want him to be unsupervised for as little time as possible."
She was suddenly desperately thirsty. "Yes." She hardly managed to keep from sounding as strangled as her throat did.
Tsunade sighed, straightening, and her hand dropped to her side. "Pick up the antibiotics I ordered for him. Make sure he takes them." She paused. "Talk to him." Her eyes pierced at Ino's. "I expected you to step up to the occasion. You said you had a debt to pay, after all."
The guilty blush that rose in Ino's face was unbearably hot.
And so she caught him in his room and told him dinner was ready. "I've set you a place," she said, and smiled.
"I'm not hungry," was his answer.
"Tsunade's hounding me." She looked away, the smile fading. Maybe, if she seemed as reluctant as he did, he would feel less pressure from her. "I'd rather not get in trouble again."
And he was quiet for a long moment.
"Just eat something. That's all," she insisted.
And he closed his book.
The corners of Ino's mouth might have slipped up as when began to move from the corner, but the soft frown that marred his face became quickly apparent. He glared as he left the room.
Ino pulled her shoulders back. She hadn't expected him to act as he had at Sakura's, especially not with her. She glanced over at him, sitting hunched over the table, as she filled his plate at the counter and wondered if she wouldn't prefer him being invisible again, locked in his room. She hardly knew him as a friend; she expected some level of politeness, some level of decorum which wasn't present now in his conspicuous frown, the hard corners of his eyes.
"It's convenience store food tonight," she said carefully. Already things were growing more and more awkward. Somehow she'd become less of a people person. Of course, he wasn't helping. "Not homemade. It tastes OK anyway..." She covered a wavering watermark on the table with his plate.
"It's just food," Naruto mumbled. "It all tastes the same."
"Chouji would be upset if he knew you said something like that." She caught his face as sat and saw his growing distaste, evident in the curve of his mouth. His words came to her in a flash. "When you stop being depressed, food will taste a lot better, you know." She paused and waited for his reaction.
Naruto raised his eyes from his plate. "Ino," he said "It isn't any of your business."
She paused, her rice raised halfway to her mouth. "I know," she started.
"Obviously you don't know," he interrupted quietly. "Because you're still talking."
She tightened her mouth for a moment before forcing a slight smile. "They're your own words." She was almost surprised by the growing tension there, in his mouth and his forehead, when his voice was so flat and lax. She dropped her gaze back to the food in front of her and raised her brows. "Remember?" She popped a piece of chicken into her mouth, chewing, shrugging. She tilted her head, casual, and said lightly, "it's good advice, anyway."
"My own advice." He speared a thin slice of meat but then dropped his silverware onto the table, his lip tightening further. He looked out of the window and toward the city. "I remember," he said suddenly. "When you were trying to kill yourself, right?"
Ino blinked, swallowing, and quickly forced a self-conscious laugh. "It wasn't quite like that, Naruto." Her throat suddenly closed and her words ended in a whisper. She quickly cleared her throat and nonchalantly pushed another block of rice past her lips. It was mealy in her mouth.
Ino's smile had quickly faded. He heard the uneasiness in her voice, and when she turned her head like that, looking away, so lost in thought, she looked so much like Sakura. The annoyance that had risen in his chest at the sounds of her conversational banter was suddenly anger. He felt it in his throat, the sudden harshness of his voice, the tighter knit of his brow.
"Didn't you collapse at Sakura's birthday dinner?" He'd carried her to the hospital, just down the block. Sakura hadn't missed him. She was too busy drinking and asking where Sasuke was, how he could have left her. Naruto blinked and the city lights came back into focus, looking dimmer than before. Why was he always thinking of Sakura? "Pathetic," he mumbled.
Ino's eyes had flickered back to him as soon as the words left his mouth. He was angry, she understood. For a moment she considered letting his comments, obviously intended to hurt her, slide, but in that moment his face showed a disgust so intense her neck prickled. She swallowed, leaned forward, and in her quietest voice, began to speak. "What the hell is your problem?" she asked. "Because it shouldn't be with me." His gaze suddenly shifted from the window to hers before she could look away and locked her there. Her fingers reflexively tightened on her chopsticks as his mouth opened, his eyes dark and hard.
"I guess you were too stupid to realize it's good that he died," he said. His tone was low but the voice was harsh and grating.
Her hand, half way between her plate and her mouth, slowly lowered itself onto the table. Tears welled against the back of her eyes, so quickly they ached. She wished they hadn't; she wanted to be pissed, to punch him in the mouth, but her body seemed incapable of obeying her. "What?" she managed.
He thrust his hand against the plate in front of him, forced it to the center of the table where it caught and flipped over, sending Ino's glass tumbling, spilling tepid tea over her knees. "He was lucky," he said. In the silence that had followed the sound of glass and porcelain, his voice, quiet again, was harsh and heavy in the air.
Ino had hardly managed to pull her eyes away from the tea on her legs before he'd turned silently toward the doorway, hands fisted over the wheels of his chair. Even now, she could see the strength in his arms, his hands, the breadth of his shoulders. Her teeth clenched as he disappeared into the hallway. He was alive. He was alive, and Shikamaru was somehow the lucky one?
"Naruto!" she shouted, fisting her hands. She beat the table again and his glass jumped onto its edge, spilling and clattering against the wood. She stood and her chair tumbled to the ground. It was anger that propelled her though the narrow hall, wedged her through the space between him and the wall, and it was in anger that she grabbed at the armrest of his chair, with anger that she stopped him. It was in anger that she suddenly realized she hated him.
Naruto pushed roughly at her hand. "Get off of me," he said.
His hand on hers – it sent a chill up her arm and she pressed it to her thigh, rubbed away his touch on the wet fabric of her pants. "Apologize!" She swallowed the ache that was starting to form again in her throat. "Apologize right now!"
Air slipped through his teeth and he looked pointedly away from her, bracing his hands on the wheels of his chair, as if he planned to move through her. "Get out of my w--."
Her tea-wet fist was only on his cheek for a fraction of a second, but the sound seemed to linger longer. "Do you think I'm going to let you walk all over me?" she hissed.
Naruto's eyes flickered up to her, blank and dark. There was something there, in his gaze, that made her abruptly remember why he was there, and what her role was in all of this. She slowly uncurled her numb fingers and hid the offending hand behind her , she broke her eyes from his and pressed her back to the wall.
"I shouldn't have done that," she admitted, quietly. "But you didn't have to bring him into it." There was a pain pulling across her sternum. It hurt to reign all of the fury in.
Naruto said nothing, and Ino set her jaw as he opened the door to his room, silent.
"Are you really not going to apologize?" Her voice grew louder as the door clicked shut. "You didn't have to bring him into it!" The lock slipped into place and in frustration she kicked at the door frame. "Naruto!" she shouted against the door. It smelled like paint as she rested against it, listening for an answer. None came.
