Chapter Nine

Though Naruto sticks her tongue out, her eyes are dark.

"Why not?"

It's the eternal child's question, the question of the helpless. Why have you abandoned me?

She extracts her hand from Naruto's, giving her the ice princess smile. "Because friends don't kiss friends who don't want them to."

To drive it home she doesn't pick up when Naruto calls on Sunday, and if she sneaks over again Sasuke doesn't know about it, locked up with Neji and a staggering number of cigarettes in the library.

"You know you can't smoke those in here."

She gives him a nasty face, the one she'd direct at the head librarian too enamoured with her bookly calling to care for her betters or their bribes, had she not been concerned with a banning. "Just think of them as my comfort blanket."

"I'd… really rather not."

"Oh, fuck off."

Even after four years in the company of herself and Temari, Neji is jolted by every instance of foul language originating from a girly mouth, and while Sasuke would like to think she's above being affected by unintentional reverse psychology, spending time with a guy who has been known to say "darn" does tend to dirty her mouth.

"You do know that it's only social climbers who need to concern themselves so overly with these things, yes?" she says.

Being a lady is following all the rules; being royalty is breaking and remaking them.

Neji picks up the reading glasses he is far too young for, and which consequently Sasuke suspects of being window glass, and studiously ignores her. As he always has; he was a prince once too, before he was exiled.

Do you want to go back? Would it be like going home?

The place I called home doesn't exist anymore.

Isn't that the truth?

Then on Monday Naruto returns the jumper washed and incorrectly folded, a million creases unfolding under Sasuke's fingers to emanate the cheap-sharp smell of Uzumaki detergent.

"Thanks," Naruto says. "For the loan."

"Think nothing of it."

"Erm, no, I thought about it quite a bit, actually, seeing as it's, you know, a borderline nice thing you did, right before you went back to the bitchy ignore routine. Which, not cool, what is up with that?"

"I'm going to kill Gaara for giving you my number."

"Yeah, right." Naruto scoffs, but it's far too simple to ease her anger. "He's like the one person who's not afraid of you."

She always did talk to Naruto, said too much. It's been a very quiet year since everyone she used to talk to …became unavailable, a year of lonely staring into the abyss, and now here's Naruto and there's been build-up, of words and upsets, and it's really only logical.

She rubs a tired hand over her face, it slips out, just a little cynical, "Actually I'm like the one person he is afraid of."

Naruto's look of concerned confusion is almost comical; if she'd seen it on TV she'd have shaken her head at the poor, overdone acting. She moves her hands out of expanding reach. "Look, let's be clear on this. If I was interested in girls, which for the record I'm not, then I'd be interested in attractive girls."

"But you said! You don't even think girls exist."

"I don't think they have to, or that they should. I never said there aren't girls in existence today." Her phone beeps. "We're back at, it's complicated and you're stupid. I've class."

Naturally so does Naruto; from her seat by the window at the far side of the room Sasuke can hear her dejection at an apparently failed math test.

Sasuke chucks her own returned test. It's an A, would've been an A+ if she'd waited to smoke until she'd finished the last equation.

This gives her pause.

In all her life she has never once got a lower grade than A. There were many, many papers and tests she didn't write last year, but she has never tried and failed, never handed in anything that didn't exceed every expectation except those that mattered.

This is probably going to change, now, if she can't… snap out of it, pick up the pieces, become herself again, pull herself up by the bootstraps, whatever useless cliché you want to use.

This semester she's doing her work, just about, and it's not – it mightn't be sufficient.

"Who cares?" she mutters, with a certain bitterness, because she does want to care. It was a pleasant fever to study for and burn through the summer exams to make up for all the courses she'd missed, and if she could only have that… but it's too simple like this, it's not a challenge, she can't scrounge up any interest.

If she starts bringing home Bs and Cs, like a badly trained cat trying to curry favour with its owners by offering them mousse and birds, what would happen, if anything?

The therapist again, she supposes, the stupid one baffled as the idea dawned that her clients might lie to her.

Sasuke was kind to her, even so; she made out as though she was the exception. Then they didn't talk to each other anymore, it was just Sasuke sitting in the over-stuffed chair in the office with her cigarettes and her iPod and a book, out-waiting the clock.

When she shakes a cig out of its package now, she finds her fingers unsteady from what might be her caring about it after all, or more likely stress, underfeeding, nicotine addiction.

P. E. on the other hand is served well by her occasionally-obsessive training, although for this unit they're dancing. With the notable exception of Naruto and Kiba tripping all over each others' feet, and Rock Lee bemoaning Sakura's unavailability, the class breezes through the gym building. She catches a strand of smooth brown hair that has fled Neji's ponytail, the same way that drove Itachi to distraction during their children's ballroom classes, but stops before it makes him uncomfortable. It's one of the things that brought them together, the dislike of being touched casually.

Mum brought her into the piano room for dancing from the age of six, when she'd grown from the chubby phase into the coltish one, her body all graceless shaky legs. So first there was Itachi tugging her around the room and dropping her on her arse in the way of big brothers, with Mum laughing encouragement from the piano stool, playing the instrument Sasuke was much more interested in learning than she was in dancing. She liked her fingers far better than the rest of her body, back then; her hands and her head were her, the rest was a dress she hadn't grown into yet.

Later on there was Kakashi, all the years when she was old enough to want but not to get, and then the years when she had everything.

The body was hers by the time desire happened to it, and she'd wanted him so much. The slow hot burn of embarrassed desire had become alarmingly close to permanent, a constant hollow tingle in her skin. Although this emerging woman's body was more hers than the girl's had ever been, her possession of it was new, tentative, awkwardness abounding. It's never been very clear to her why puberty would alienate girls from their bodies, since puberty is when they become useful, when they grow into you; still, there was a learning curve, and she was so breathlessly, dizzily desperate.

Love will do that, she supposes. Pure hormones never have, though it would have been simpler, cleaner somehow, if they had.

The summer of her twelfth year will always be the summer the aunts stopped saying, "Look how you've grown."

Kakashi said, "I remembered you as taller."

Height really is relative; she was a tall, gawky ten-year-old, turned an average, clumsy eleven, became a short, fine-faced twelve with aspirations on grace and curves. Her new sort of growing wasn't the vertical kind approved for comment by elderly relatives.

She's always wanted to smother herself in him, merge skins, slip beneath it, into the warmth, the scent, the deepest secret kernel of personhood. He wasn't keen on it, anymore, or if he was suddenly too keen, it wasn't very clear to her at the time.

The problem isn't the age gap, the problem is you're pre-pubertal.

She must have said something about Anko, can no longer recall what over the remembered sound of his voice, breathy and cracking with irritation. There weren't any scars on him then; could he still talk, now? The doctors claim he could, but then they also claimed things would be all right.

So she doesn't remember what she said, a more subtle version of, If I were pre-pubertal there wouldn't be an issue. There was a look, past the increasingly obvious curve of her chest, obvious mainly because they were both so aware of it, the nave around which the situation turned. She will have said something more, or he will, something about – what was it? Hypocriticsm, perhaps, or age being a cultural idea irrelevant in the fact of actual emotional and physical development. She will not actually have said, Don't tell me you wouldn't have killed for a lay at my age, but she must have said something, done something to prompt his response.

A short laugh, breaking halfway before his voice was light and even again, the deeper tones hidden away. She was lying back on her elbows, tense but not yet unpleasantly so; maybe she'd been trying to drag him down with her, maybe he'd pushed her, she's no longer certain, both scenarios have played out so many times.

"Urges… yes. Tell me, do you masturbate?"

She may have gasped before sitting up, very properly, legs crossed, hands on knees because otherwise she might have hugged herself. This was pulling off scabs, she was lost and raw and sore, a half-cooked butterfly abruptly out of its shell, no longer treated as a child.

As an adult, a few years later, she would have taken it for teasing, would have responded to it as teasing; now it was an attack, but a triumph too because he would not have said that to a child. This was different from their usual game of cutting with dulled edges, or only at the shielded places.

There were a lot of things she almost said, wanted and didn't want to say. "Yes."

Sasuke is logical, systematic, had charted the developing territories and logged changes and reactions with methodical precision. She couldn't honestly say she enjoyed it; or, rather, enjoyment was not the primary emotion, what there was of it was dulled by curiosity and distaste. She couldn't bear to look at the raw places, after the first glance, but she'd analysed them by touch and taste.

Lying sideways in moonlight, sticky with summer sweat, she'd experienced her pubic mound like a baby creature – surely nothing so obvious as a kitten – between her legs, something quite alien from herself although – liked, mostly, something she might feel estranged from but, cautiously, welcoming towards.

And the wild, giddy, disgusting thought: how much weirder must a penis be, that alien contraption fastened to one's body.

He was taken aback but only very briefly, leaning minimally towards her. "Do you think of me, when you do?"

Adding him, the idea of him, would have exploded control away, would have made it not an experiment at all.

"Do you want me to?"

And of course he had, he was fifteen and in love, she could tell even then, although it was also obvious he didn't want to want it.

He wasn't even the only one. They were expected to be representative when Dad had people over for dinner, she and Itachi, ornament the table with clean and pretty faces, and the guests no longer looked only at her face. She didn't mind, although even then she knew she should have; she made a better woman than she ever had a girl, and being interesting, being desired, was the only power she'd ever really had, at that point. Suddenly there was so much more of it.

Right now there is Gai being customarily unconventional, clapping his hands and shouting, "Right! Beautiful, everybody!" Some griping about youth and love and sweat later, he decides exercise is the golden god of spring, and they're going to be playing basket.

Neji says, "Sasuke," then gives her a slow odd look and picks, "Naruto."

Shock becomes delight becomes a cheeky grin as Naruto joins them, and Sasuke considers that Gaara may not be the only boy she has to kill.

Iruka frequently protests that having students pick teams encourages cliques, bullying and insecurities, and should be abandoned in favour of the much fairer and nicer system of the teachers dividing them into groups, but Gai isn't known to listen well to criticism, and at least this method is efficient.

It breeds competition, Gai claims.

Yes, says Iruka, that's the problem.

Gai doesn't appear to understand this opinion. Sasuke's grasp of it is highly theoretical, and as the game starts it grows increasingly tenuous.

Naruto and she make a surprisingly fierce team. Sasuke wouldn't have expected it; Naruto's so sloppy, so erratic – an exciting opponent, but not somebody Sasuke would have thought she'd be able to successfully work with. Sinking the ball to the soundtrack of Naruto all but tackling Kiba out of the way, she finds she's almost laughing.

True to her word, Naruto doesn't peek in the changing rooms, and, absurdly, while Sasuke certainly wouldn't have considered it acceptable if she had, the restraint rankles.

Naruto not treating her as a piece of meat implies Naruto being serious, implies Naruto seeing her as a person and possibly caring for her, respecting her; makes Naruto a real person herself, instead of just another stupid stalker.

That was never the idea.

In some kind of twisted retaliation she deprives Naruto of any peeking opportunities when changing for what they call martial arts training but is really a good deal closer to brawling. They do it fairly regularly at the beach house, now, since Itachi has made sure gym personnel will not accept any bribes from her, and the trek out to Naruto's shack is atrocious.

"Your room," Naruto says, this time, revealing no obvious disappointment upon finding Sasuke fully dressed. "You just let me in."

"We do have cleaners walking in everywhere twice a week."

Her bedroom in the penthouse is different, and of course the flat on Lilypad Drive is beyond private, approaching sacred.

Like with the basket Naruto is sloppy, untrained but inventive, and naturally they are both stubborn. It's the best on offer, since Itachi prevents her from rejoining the proper classes.

Just gain the weight, he says, and there won't be any trouble. Fifteen kilos is all I ask, I'll even be satisfied with ten.

With distant horror that she tells herself is surprise, sick relief, not the frightening vertigo of freefall, she discovers that she has gained, a little. Nowhere close to Itachi's requirement, but for fourteen months every time the digits have changed it's been because she's shed, and now instead her volume is increasing, sneakily, marginally, but increasing all the same.

Good, she tells herself. This is good.

This is good and she will not go running, she will not stop eating, she will not take up purging again.

Probably she should set a number, forty perhaps or forty-five, and decide on it, force herself there, and so she will still be in control, she will still be reshaping herself, reigning in the situation in. Surely it would be better than these half-hearted shocks, the unintentional happiness of losing and the forced self-conscious non-terror of gaining.

It must be due to Itachi hounding her about the training, and to stuffing her mouth with food at dinner so as to not make room for words.

It must be due, also, to Temari dragging her to all those cafés, where Chouji orders for everybody and Shikamaru drags her into game after game of chess, which whets the brain appetite for caffeine and sugar. She always loses, but she's not very good at giving up.

Occasionally Sakura joins them, presumably a tool in one of Ino's spying schemes but welcome because Naruto obviously likes her; and if Sasuke is ever going to beat Shikamaru at chess she needs something to distract Naruto, and neither Kiba nor Gaara is fit for polite company.

As the seminars wind down, she even takes a public stand by inviting Haku to sit with her. Sakura looks startled, Naruto beams, and Ino can hardly believe her luck.

Haku gives her that serene, superior expression and asks, "Have you been learning tolerance lately, then?"

"I learned you're an interesting person."

It's what she should've expected from the ungrateful bitch, never mind that nobody has snubbed her to her face for years. She should have known there was a reason Haku isn't half as bullied as she ought to be, that the bullying is of the quiet kind.

A year ago she would have known it, would never have made any mistakes, shown any softness. Really, she only has herself to blame.

Still Naruto likes it, and Ino likes it even more: the freak show court, the queen and her fools, the fool queen.

On all accounts Sasuke decides she is rather beyond caring.

"You're really going to take that from her?"

Ino is staring at her, once again in the bathroom although a different one, her fingers clenching and unclenching on the taps as she stares at Sasuke, directly this time. There's something that could be worry in her face, apprehension soaking her.

"It's a little below me to put a fatwa on a transwoman."

"Face it," Ino snaps, her voice too soft for the tone she adopts. "You can't afford that anymore."

The thing is that Ino is right, that Sasuke knows that Ino is right.

It's standing with a blank test, on the scale, in the hospital waiting room, feeling control slipping like water through her fingers, eroding her until she can't even care.

"If you need to worry about what you can afford, you've no business playing this game," she tells Ino, which, depending on the level you interpret it at, is either a cheap barb or blatantly untrue.

Energized, high on and falling off the adrenaline, like at the end of a run, she decides it's no longer below her to put a fatwa on Ino, come to that. Even so, fighting for a title she gave herself as a joke at thirteen seems a touch pathetic.

She walks towards English, deciding, furthermore, that she will have to cut down on either the running or the smoking.

"You're coming, right?" Kankurou asks her outside the classroom, just a shade of humility saving it from being a demand. "To my party."

"I suppose," she says, oddly discomforted, moving as though through water.

In fact she's supposed to help plan it, it's a tradition of many years and Temari has given no indication of expecting otherwise. Neither has Sasuke; a year is a long time, considering, and events only have importance if you grant it to them, ignorance is bliss and control.

She wonders, not for the first time, whether Kankurou actually knows what happened. Gaara wouldn't have told him and neither would Temari, but there's the possibility he might have gleaned it all the same.

It doesn't matter. She's not going to grant it, or him, any significance, hasn't ever and won't now. He backs out of the way to let her slip past him into the classroom. It's colder now, a warm but definite autumn, and she pulls her cardigan closed around her.

Kurenai decrees they are required, on pain of receiving Fs, to write their own original poetry in addition to the historical and literal analyses, a task that falls largely on Neji, who actually does write poetry, and to an extent on Naruto, on account of her not being much good at anything else. No doubt her sonnets will be atrocious, but Sasuke is less concerned about this inevitability than about her fucking up the real texts.

"I'll write the poems for you if you coach Special Needs," Neji offers afterwards in the library, when Naruto's been dragged off somewhere by Sakura.

"That's sweet," she says absently, "but really, if you wanted a date, all you had to do was ask."

It's probably true, too: she'd say yes. The last experiment in that direction may have failed spectacularly, but she's past due for a rebound fling, and also Naruto would be delightfully pissed off. Itachi might actually get off her back, even.

He gives her a look of disgust; it's something of a compliment, from him, an unveiled emotion. "I can imitate your voice well enough, it's better than downloading anything. But I've got enough on my plate with Hinata without being bothered by your special friend."

"Fine," says Sasuke. "I'll take Naruto."

"Good." After a moment he even says, "Thank you." There's a pearling of sweat at his hairline.

"Right," she says, sitting down next to him. "How's her doomed love coming along?"

For the first time today he meets her eyes; for the first time in years his are bleak and frank. "He asked her out. She asked me what should she tell him. How the hell should I know?"

She takes the cigarette she's been playing with inside her pocket out, offers it. He jerks it out of her fingers and lights up, rueful, for a second so full of hatred, whether for himself or for her.

"So what did you tell her?"

"I said ask her father."

"So not only did you tell her no, you told her to go get herself punished." She pushes back her chair and grabs the bag, stands. "Get cracking on the poems."

The leaves have finished changing colours and are busily falling when he demands, helpless, suddenly dangerous, "What would you, if you…"

"I'd never be Hinata."

He makes a sound of the kind that would be sighing if it were less aggressive. "I meant if you were me. You almost were. You were all set up for the perfect wedding, all of that, the perfect man, your parents couldn't have chosen better for you if they'd tried, you were doing everything right!"

"It wasn't really like that."

"Now, if they were to, if they choose somebody new…?"

She collects herself, trying to reassemble the pieces in a better order. "I think you only get to tell people what to do if you're better than they."

His laughter sounds like crying. So would hers, if she let it out.

That evening she must have let slip enough for Naruto to gain some base understanding of what occurred, or didn't occur; she scrunches up her face, sprawling over Sasuke's bed, dragging dirty feet over Sasuke's coverlet. Sasuke grumbles at her to stay on the floor like a proper pet, but instead of subpar repartee she gets a, "So your parents, not exactly politically aware."

The way they treat Itachi makes that painfully obvious; the fact they do it in front if visitors, implying they do not even realise the problem.

"No shit," she says, legs up, back against the wall, half a bed away. She hates them now, she does, she loved them too much, wanted their love too desperately much for anything else. She snorts, or that's what it comes out as, the choked-off sound that wanted for vocalisation. "I stumbled into this discussion with Dad once, after he'd ragged on another feminist editorial. I tried to explain, you know, you do realise there are cultural factors at play here, that there are certain policies that have become culturally institutionalised. He asked me do I menstruate."

"Jesus fucking Christ."

"Pretty much." She stares at the ceiling, her lips tight around the emptiness from the cigarette she won't allow herself. "I told him actually I don't, but apparently my opinions still weren't valid. I guess removing the womanly taint just makes you unnatural."

Mr Uzumaki will be an idiot, given the way he ambled around all awkward charm and the way he's raised Naruto – and yes, Sasuke believes he has raised her, which is alien; startling – and Mrs Uzumaki could be interesting. Clearly she's done more with her undergraduate work than Sasuke's Mum has managed with her PhD.

"You what – shit, you're that thin?" Naruto's turned towards her, just a little too close, her eyes ridiculously wide with alarm, which Sasuke's all right with only because Naruto's never nagged her about the weight. "I thought you'd chubbied up a little."

"I'm on the pill, you idiot."

"But I thought – I mean, you're not…"

"You can skip tree out of four periods, of course I'm on the pill."

Except Sasuke hasn't needed to worry about periods for a long time, seeing as they stopped bothering her eight kilos ago, but there is no way on earth she's elaborating on the reality beyond the smokescreens. She doesn't bleed because she's on the pill, she's on the pill because she doesn't want to bleed, end of story.

Naruto rolls over onto her stomach, residual dampness from the shower sticking fabric to her body and hair to her face. "You don't think that's, like, buying into shame culture?"

"I shave my legs, Naruto. I wear dresses. If you can't beat them, join them and rule them."

"But I'm going to beat them!" declares Naruto, whom they both know can't get enough of Sasuke's legs in a skirt.

"You do that. Just stop paraphrasing Shikamaru in the meantime."

Naruto sticks her tongue out but keeps her peace, rolling over onto her back, arms behind her head, legs asprawl.

Although she'd like to believe, did once – only, no, no fuck it, she's grown out of that.

Admittedly it was a pretty damn good seminar, Shikamaru's concluding one; god knows what Iruka offered him to give that talk about body-shaming culture, with body- and sex-words used universally as insults and expletives, fuck and arse and wanker and crap thrown around as though there were something wrong with their signifieds.

Be that as it may, Sasuke is not going to embrace an inconvenience, nor a belittling identity. Her body is something she lives in, not something she is; has shaped her the way any external condition for her life has shaped her.

"Fine," Naruto grumbles, and this could be philosophy class except she sounds rather playful. "I just got to thinking. He's pretty smart."

"Duh," Sasuke says, a little playful too, to temper the desperation (I am a person). "He's a certified genius."

"Certified? Is that even possible?"

Sasuke shrugs, tugging the coverlet back up from where it's been kicked almost off the bed. "If a priest certificate is available over the net, I'd imagine a genius one is too. Anyway Mensa's been headhunting him for years."

When Naruto, full of snickers and disbelief, curves her hand around Sasuke's leg, Sasuke lets her for about ten seconds before she kicks the hand away.

xxxxx

It's light, a cold clear light tingled murky by reflection in puddles and bright rotting leaves; sound of wind and things being moved by it, water and rubbish pushed down the road. She feels a bit like a snake, leeching warmth from the sun-warmed stone wall she's sitting on. Her sleeve's unravelling and has got itself caught on it.

This isn't how it was supposed to be.

saying this as a friend, nota bene

No, fuck, Nauro didn't say nota bene, she said a lot of other stuff, a shit heap of words.

saying this as your friend, nota bene, this whole… I get that you miss him, obviously, but don't you think this is a little Twilight…

Naruto's never followed the plan, but she's never so thoroughly betrayed it before.

"Yes," Sasuke says tightly, ripping free her sleeve, "it's so strange and pathetic that the loss of what amounts to a family member should make me sad, or trigger any latent issues. It's really exactly the same as some dumb bimbo trying to kill herself over the stalker freak she's been dating for a couple of weeks. Thank you for pointing that out to me."

She'd imagined, or she would have imagined if it had ever occurred to her, that she'd cry or scream or hit something, destroy something, if such words were spoken to her. Instead she just feels destroyed, hoarding empty words and unravelling fabric to her as best she can.

Once she leaned back in a plush chair, two days before her therapist resigned, two weeks before her therapist lost her licence, and said, Do I perceive that I am being pathetic? Well, yes. However, do I perceive that it is pathetic of me to be being pathetic? Well, no.

There are limits. There are bridges that can't be crossed no matter how much water has flown under them, bridges that'll burn if you set foot on them.

Fuck you, Naruto Uzumaki.

This is worse than the bathroom, this is worse than the beach.

"I didn't know he was family!" Naruto says, a spazzy placating gesture accompanying the yelp. "Which, you should tell me those things."

Obviously Sasuke should do no such thing – she's not told Naruto anything that isn't semi-public info, things that anybody with the right connections and the right tenacity could have found out. Naruto wouldn't have, on her own, but still it was a liberty that Sasuke thought was safe.

She supposes she's been wrong about Naruto before, though not usually unpleasantly so.

Presently Naruto grips the edge of the wall, tilting her face back to bask in the bleak sun. "Twilight, though, kind of enjoyed them actually." She laughs again, briefly and fairly close to embarrassed. The skin on her face has paled until it almost matches the freckles. "I mean, I get they're offensive as fuck in about a million ways, but all the same. Up until that creepy antiabortionist baby, they sort of had something going for them."

Her snort comes out perfectly even, not at all shaky. "I guess."

"Totally! It'd have been a lot less disgusting and a lot more interesting if she'd just had an abortion, like, with realistic consequences and dealing with having to do the mature thing, and it's not like it's difficult, right?"

"No," says Sasuke, utterly calm now. "It's very simple. You just go there and they give you pills and you bleed. It's not a big deal."

Naruto is warm beside her, warmer than the stone, so completely alive, trying to be concerned now and failing because nothing she feels is safe or soft enough for concern. "Are you actually telling me…?"

"That I had an abortion?" If Naruto can really be her friend. If she lets the cat out of the bag, all the cats – if this can be different, if this can happen. If Naruto. "Well. Yes."

"Holy shit. Whoa."

It might be a twig or it might be Naruto's knuckles touching her hand. She feigns ignorance because it'd be too revealing to actually move it.

This is freefall again, sink or swim. A challenge, a gift. She's never understood the pleasure of giving, but it's a sort of power all of its own, possessing knowledge and emotion and being able to share them as you wish.

"It wasn't – I'd stopped taking the pill. Wasn't any reason for it anymore, you know. And so. I made a mistake. Fortunately it was an easily correctible one."

Kankurou's birthday party last year, extravagant because finally Gaara was too medicated to ruin a proper celebration. She was drunk, drunk enough to shrug and comply when the bottle used in a game she'd never agreed to play pointed at her. Her memories of kissing Temari are fake, reproductions of the tape she's seen of it, before she had it destroyed.

Gaara was just there.

It was very easy.

He was the right combination of familiar, unknown and fucked-up, the perfect mirror image. When she pulled at him and fell, he fell with her.

"God," says Naruto, her face scrunched almost sweetly. "So it wasn't, would you have kept it if it had been his? Kakashi's, I mean."

"For fuck's sake, I was barely fifteen."

"Well, yeah," says Naruto, who clearly has no business calling Bella Swan a fool for love, "but, if he was so important, and it's not like you'd have another shot at it right?"

She probably shouldn't have said anything. "I've never wanted children."

"Not at all? I do. I want tons of them. Like, too many to count them."

"More than two, then, if it's enough that you lose track of the number," Sasuke says snidely. She recalls reading a quasi-scientific report to the effect that ugly babies, infants not conforming to the universal standard for symmetrical beauty, get less cuddling from their parents than cute ones. It'd certainly explain why Naruto's so desperate for some touchy-feely.

Sasuke doesn't remember being held by her mother, but she supposes she must have been. It would have been expected, conventional, and there are photos and Itachi's memories of it, empirically reliable and therefore in some sense real.

No, that's not true. She remembers her mother holding her, Madonna and child, it's just those reminiscences are drowned out by the more immediate ones of wanting to be held, and of the discomfort when she was; the itchy party clothes, the large warm hands, "she's such a doll!"

"Fuck off," Naruto dismisses, then visibly sobers, so bloody obvious it's downright shameful that Sasuke still hasn't got her figured out. "But, so, is this something else everybody knows?"

The vulnerability is viscous, tangible; like Naruto could touch her insides, has her fingers skimming along the nerves and bowels in her abdomen. Nobody's been able to do that, to touch her on the inside, since Kakashi didn't wake up and then kept not waking up.

"No," she says, dryly, "just you."

She'd been going to tell Itachi, had still been in the habit of telling Itachi all the important things, or letting them be understood between them if they were too raw or subtle for outright speech, but he had been torn up in his own way, which in a sense was much worse than hers.

At least nobody had needed to sit watch over her after she'd overdosed on medication, deliberately or not, although it would be demeaning and ridiculous to assume a collected genius could do it by mistake.

In the morning after Mum had taken over presiding over Itachi's sickbed from the nurse – and Sasuke didn't trust her but Itachi was asleep and the nurse seemed solid, and the room was starting to swivel in front of her eyes – she went to the clinic and they gave her the pills, and it was all rather like the first day of a bad period; the cold debilitating cramps, the helpless warm flow.

She'd been very brisk about the entire business, testing herself then scheduling the appointment as fast as possible; had to get it over with; left with a bottle of painkillers when the abortive drugs had been administered, sitting clam-skinned in the taxi home. Some hours later, after Itachi had woken enough to be forced to eat, she flushed down the last thick remnants in her own bathroom.

"Did it hurt?"

"Not that badly." She'd bitten her knuckles bloody, face sweaty and hot with the panic of pain, crushed in between her knees, panting to keep from fainting. They'd said if she was worried about hurting, which was a possible though not an inevitable consequence, she should stay in the hospital until it was done, where they could give her stronger painkillers, but the narcotics had done worse things to Itachi than his actual condition, before a competent specialist was found for him. She'd gone home, never regretted it, hated the bleeding afterwards, four long weeks of it.

Physically her shoulder hurt worse, from where an overheated part of a vehicle had pierced it during the accident, and emotionally she didn't feel much, back then.

Now, when feeling's creeping back, an estranged relative, she's been – there's been too much else, too many actually important things.

She was required to produce a modicum of emotion to present the consultant psychologist with, before they'd schedule her for the procedure, but all she'd been able to come up with was: bothered, sick, really tired. But it wasn't as though it was a mystery why she, why anybody in her position, wouldn't want a child, and in the end she hadn't needed to lie much to avoid follow-up sessions; after all the consult was mere courtesy.

Cloth rasps over stone beside her as Naruto lies down awkwardly on her elbows, her upper body rather too long for the width of the wall, legs hanging over the edge and braced to keep her balanced. Looking at Sasuke with her eyes tilted somehow down behind her fringe, and god, is that Naruto looking shy?, she pulls her shirt up, exposing the massive mess of scar tissue and tattoo ink that Sasuke's glimpsed in changing rooms but never seen in its entirety. It's an uneven but roughly circular figure, elaborating into twists and points and unexpected angles, thick dark thin light concave smooth rough marks intertwining. "This–"

"Look, this isn't a sleepover secret sharing ceremony."

Naruto smiles, a softer expression than she usually gives Sasuke, bruised-tender and caring-tender all at once. "You actually telling me you don't want something to hold over my head in return?"

"Fair point, well made." She feels crisp; thin, sharp, crunchy.

Kakashi has scars too now, and she, and worst is Itachi's self-inflicted ones.

She can't imagine being dragged into a bathroom, have what seems to her revolting minions turn on her, spit running down her face, hands wrestling her down, and then the knife.

She would have had to react if somebody got their face cut up in Sannin, but she would hardly have cared; surely there'd be a reason for it. After all it's never happened to her, to anybody she knows.

Naruto's an obvious target, an obvious survivor, but Sasuke would've never … no, did she think her a victim, at first? She can't remember it anymore, not with any conviction.

"…and then I got the knife from him, they'd gone lax, I guess I wasn't struggling so much anymore, guess I was more screaming or something, and I just twisted, like forward, I don't know, I think I was trying to get away, get up and run away, but I'd want to think that – and I stabbed him, pretty bad. Like, a lot deeper than they'd done to me, none of that was very deep, it was just lots of it, and. And so then there was the hospital and some police stuff but I guess nobody wanted to make an issue of it, and then, and now here I am. It was – they said they couldn't remove all the scarring, or if they could but it'd be complicated and expensive or whatever, and I'd sort of, I guess I'd mostly got used to them, the ones in the face are kind of cool really if you look at them in the right light, but I couldn't just have somebody else's mark on me, you know? So it was just easiest to have it tattooed over."

Her stomach and Sasuke's hand, poised just a touch above it, tremble in sync.

"Shut the fuck up."

Naruto roars laughing.