AN: This was a difficult chapter to write. Hopefully it came out OK; I'm sorry if Sasuke may seem like his ranting a little - he is HEAVILY channeling me. Also, I hope I managed to find the right balance for Naruto, hat was the hardest POV for me to write.

Chapter 9: Answers

"TEME!" The distant shout echoed just as they neared the first houses, filling the sky with fleeing birds. Sasuke could already feel the headache. Kakashi, helpful as ever, briefly put one hand on his shoulder and, with one last "Well, don't want to intrude!", shunshined away.

Sasuke sighed, trying to steel himself for the emotional mayhem this confrontation was bound to cause, and made it two more steps before a blond-and-orange whirlwind materialized in font of him, stopping just a few short feet away.

For a short eternity, Naruto just stood there, staring with an open mouth and wide eyes at the man he still considered his best friend, the brother that was lost to him for so long. When Hinata told him what she and Kakashi had discovered, he was incredulous. In that moment he felt so much, he could make no sense of it. He only believed her because he knew she would never hurt him with such a cruel joke. Even so, seeing him... He realized, suddenly, that until this very moment, when Sasuke was standing unhooded right in front of him, the knowledge hadn't sank in. Now that it did... Now, he managed to unravel one of the tangled feelings his heart was rendered to.

Naruto was pissed off. Royally.

"You lied to me." The low volume of the furious words surprised even him. Under normal circumstances Naruto didn't care much to control his voice, and it only got louder when angry. Now he felt too angered to even scream at him.

No... maybe he just felt too hurt.

It was all he could do not to throttle him and – probably – cause an international incident.

"Naruto..."

"You lied to me! You just sat there and told me you had no idea where my best friend was – when you were him! Why? Did you get some sick amusement out of watching me suffer? Seeing how stupid I really am still caring about you? Still looking for you?" Okay. Now he was shouting. This was better. This was Naruto.

This, Sasuke could work with.

"First of all, I had never lied to you. I don't recall ever saying that I don't know. I never tried to make you think I'm dead. I just told you, that some people don't want to be found – and I didn't. Not yet. Not now, even, but it can't be helped anymore. Not everything is about you.

"I'm sorry that my actions hurt you, I really am. You were always like a little brother to me and I don't mind admitting that now. But you are one of the most selfish people I know – which is so absurd considering just how selfless you tend to be. Believe it or not, but my decisions don't actually revolve around you."

Naruto's face did that funny thing, where they didn't seem to know if their owner was about to cry or attack. Knowing which won more often, Sasuke suggested, "Look, Naruto... no more hiding, I promise. I'll tell you whatever you want, but can we get inside first?"

For now, a subdued nod will have to do.

Naruto was staring at his tea, not even holding the cup. Sasuke took another sip of his, sighed, and put it on the table. "Just talk, dobe. This silence is actually scaring me."

Naruto couldn't help the twitch at the side of his mouth at the old nickname. Before, when Sasuke called him 'brother' for the first time ever, it didn't fully register among the other, less favorable, things he said. Now though, he knew they are alright. Everything was still kinda awkward, but he could feel his confidence returning to him. "I just don't get it. Why? Why did you just vanish like that? Why come here? Why contact us but not let us know it's you? Why... why can't you just come home?"

The underlying "why did you leave me" was left unsaid, and Sasuke really couldn't think of any way to put it other than "it had nothing to do with you" which wouldn't help in the least, so he decided to treat the question at face value. The rest of them he either couldn't tell or held the same answer, anyway: "I am home."

"Don't mess with me, Sasuke. You know what I'm talking about. I know that you care about these people, that you feel obligated to protect them, and this place is kinda awesome, but Konoha is your home. It always was!"

"No, it wasn't. It is your home. But it had never been mine." That is why it had been so easy for me to leave. That is what you could never understand.

Even before the massacre of his family, Sasuke didn't really know the village itself. His home was restricted to the Uchiha district – never having been anywhere outside of it other than the academy and the path leading to it. He hadn't really spoken to anyone not of his clan, too focused on his studies in the academy and not really having other occasions to. The village was there, sure, and the Uchiha supposedly a part of it, but to the child Sasuke was, it was almost something abstract. It lacked substance, feeling. He had no emotional connection to the place called Konoha, at all.

And then that night happened. And He had no home.

"You guys... Team seven could have become my home in time, I think. Maybe it already started to be, I don't know. But you were people. You, Sakura, Kakashi... just because you happened to be in Konoha didn't really turn you into Konoha. And it was too early, anyway." In the end, it didn't keep me from leaving.

"I wasn't looking for one when I came here, but this place truly became my home. This goes beyond mere obligation. So yes, Naruto, I am home." Some days, it was almost like having his clan back. Almost.

Naruto got that. He really did. He could hear the emotion in his friend's voice, could see it in the faint glint in the eyes he used to consider inscrutable. Was glad for it, even. And yet...

Huh. Maybe he really was selfish where Sasuke was concerned, because he just couldn't accept that. "I don't believe you. Konoha was never your home? No way! You were born there! You grew up there! We... " he shook his head, dropping whatever he was about to say. "Everyone loved you! The kids our age admired you! Even the grown-ups adored you! How could you just abandon all of them? Those people... I don't get it!"

"And I could never understand why the fuck you care so much about them – you of all people!" Sasuke could feel his control fraying, and decided to let it, allowing his emotions free reign for the first time this entire shitty day. Harsh seemed to be their best way of communicating with each-other anyway, and better he lose his cool now with his friend than later with the hokage. "The citizens of Konoha... Those people... The people that hated you for literally no reason! That would abuse a child because they always need someone to hate, someone to blame, regardless of sense or logic, that they would latch on to the flimsiest excuse to justify it... Why do you care so much about them? They sure never earned it from you!"

"They are good people! They were scared, and I really can't blame them. Sure, they made mistakes – but so did you! They don't feel that way anymore, they..."

"They feel entitled to achievements you made despite of them, as if they were because of them!" Now that he finally started, Sasuke couldn't seem to stop, "Tell me, Naruto, did any one of them so much as apologized for their treatment of you? Did any of them even acknowledge what they did? Or did they act like nothing happened? Like who you are and who you were are two completely different people with no connection between them?"

Naruto took a deep breath, torn between the warmth in his heart at someone feeling so incensed for him and the need to defend those he couldn't help but view as 'his'. "They're not perfect. No one is. But I don't need them to apologize. I don't want them to, anyway. I'd just feel weird." and it was true. Besides, "And it wasn't so bad, anyway. I had Teuchi-san and Ayame-chan, that were always nice to me and gave me free ramen every once in a while. And Iruka-sensei was like a dad, even if he is kinda young, and I could always tell he cared, even when he was yelling at me. And hokage ji-ji always made time for me, even though I know now how busy he probably was, and cheered me up, and was as much a grandfather to me as he was to Konohamaru!"

"Yeah... the third... I'm sorry, Naruto, but to me it still sounds like too little too late." The way he saw it, Naruto never would have needed to hold on to so little in the first place if it wasn't for the third hokage. That law prohibiting anyone from directly speaking of the Kyuubi combined with not telling him anything about his parents... Who was it protecting? Sure as hell wasn't Naruto.

It never actually kept anyone from treating the boy badly, never stopped them from calling him a demon or monster, only kept the child from understanding why. Only kept those who knew better and may have wanted to come to help from being able to do so, from explaining the truth to those who were ignorant. And the fourth hokage was dead. What good was his son as a political bargaining chip? What was he to the leaders of Konoha that any other child of the village wasn't, when you took his father out of the equation? If anything, a jinchuriki held much more value to Konoha's enemies – a fact that was more widely known. If anything, the villagers may have been less harsh with him had they known of his parentage, if only out of respect for the fourth. Never mind how you would feel, had you been allowed to know.

"It was his decisions that made you grow up alone and hated. He had allowed me – and even Kakashi, before – to keep living in the house we had found our dead parents in. Konoha talks big. They like to lord their moral high-ground over the other nations. In reality, they have worse skeletons than all the rest – they just bury them instead of shoving them in a closet and shoot the undertaker for good measure."

Sasuke stopped in his tirade to take a deep breath and look at Naruto. He could tell that he had gone too far. He couldn't help it. Like in his confrontation with Orochimaru, he had kept those feelings so tightly locked, that once the chance finally came to release them it was hard to stop. Still... He knew that no matter what he was told, no matter how aware he was of the truth, for some unfathomable reason Naruto would always love those people. It is just the kind of person he is. And now, with Oto, Sasuke thought he could finally understand a little of it. The other's capacity to forgive will forever stomp him – he could not even completely forgive his brother – but the devotion to a place, to a people... he got it.

So he tried to gentle the blow a little, not liking how quiet Naruto had gotten any more than the angry tears refusing to fall from his eyes; "Do you know how Konoha came to be? Or rather, why?"

The change seemed to give Naruto whiplash. Sasuke didn't really blame him. "What?"

"The village. To make a long and complicated story short, Konoha was founded for its children." To give them a better life than they had during the warring clans era. To keep them from dying much too young. From knowing any pain at all... Sasuke was surprised when he first learned of it and his own clan's role in the village's founding. It was a noble cause. A dream not so different from his own feelings when building the Children's House. But the execution... "Somewhere along the way, someone forgot. The village we grew up in – it just didn't deliver on what it promised.

"And that's okay. Because I honestly believe the fifth hokage is trying to better it. And I know that you will, no trying required, once you step up as sixth. But I don't think that I could ever live there." Not after everything. Not even if Oto was not so important to him. He knew that if he were to tell his friend just some of the things he now knew of Konoha, it would have broken Naruto's heart. So he won't.

But his message was still clear. I'm never coming back there the way you want me to, so you had better stop trying.

"But..." Naruto sniffled. What Sasuke told him was painful. Naruto wasn't so naive anymore. He knew no shinobi village was pristine, and intention did not always translate well into practice. So instead, he focused on the resentment Sasuke seemed to hold for Konoha, his apparent anger toward them on Naruto's own behalf as well as his own, on his claims that the village that meant so much to Naruto was of no consequence to himself... he wondered why Konoha was the village he decided to reach out to at all.

It felt like too much too soon. Like his very soul was somersaulting and banging back and fourth ever since he "found" Sasuke. By now, Naruto was emotionally drained. He had no idea how he pictured their meeting – but it wasn't this roller-coaster, for sure. He was too exhausted, too spent, to avoid what really bothered him, anymore.

"And us? Kakashi-sensei, Sakura-chan... me. You said we could have been your home... but you still left us. You left me. Why? The last time we met it was like talking to an iceberg. You even said you didn't care if I lived or died. How could you do that? How could you leave us just like that?" he was shouting again. Funny. He didn't think he had it in him anymore... "How could you make us think you are dead? Sakura-chan actually mourned you, you bastard! And Kakashi-sensei looks even more depressed when he thinks we aren't looking! And I... I felt like I was loosing my mind! Because I knew it! I knew it! I knew it, dattebayo! A part of me always just knew you are alive but everyone kept acting like I'm lying to myself. Sometimes I wished I was! Because it felt like you just abandoned me again, and this time for nothing, and that felt even worse!" He was sobbing now, the last of the tirade coming as almost a whisper, his voice chocked with tears and emotion: "You were my best and first friend, Sasuke. A brother I really looked up to. And you just left me to deal with it alone, where no one else could ever understand. You left..."

Sasuke blinked, eyes and expression full of remorse. He wanted to go over there and hold him, but... but that wasn't them. They were never like that. Physical comfort just wasn't something they did. Not with each other. But he could feel his heart constricting. He hated seeing the stubbornly happy tornado that was Naruto so subdued. And to know the fault was his...

"I'm sorry, Naruto. I truly am." and Naruto could hear the honesty, but it wasn't nearly enough. "I told you – it was never about you. I'm probably just making it worse... but I really don't know how else to put it. Back then... when we last met... I wouldn't have killed you." With the weather that day, kirin wouldn't have done much damage if it didn't hit you directly – and it wouldn't have. I just knew you could never follow where I was going – I didn't want you to.

"It wasn't a whim. You were right – when I left Konoha I could have killed you. I even had a reason to. Had I killed you – I would have awakened the mangekyo sharingan years earlier." Naruto stared at him in shock. He never knew... suddenly, what Sasuke told him when verbally admitting their friendship for the first time ever made a bit more sense. "But other than not wanting to achieve power the way he did... the gain just wasn't worth the price. Never will be. I say it now, that these eyes are among my greatest assets. If I could keep from ever having them – I would.

"After I... after we fought, me and him... I learned something. Between that and everything else... I hadn't thought of you, but I hadn't thought about much at all." Back then, most of the time, I tried to keep from thinking. And then... then I had this place. I had a home I cared for, and emerging back to the world would have only caused more harm than good.

"I always planned to tell you eventually, but I didn't want to risk this alliance. I never imagined you will be one of those sent here, though I probably should have. But I never meant to cause you pain. I never thought it would."

Naruto took a deep breath and closed his eyes as he allowed the words to sink in. They weren't done here, but he felt it was alright. Things will work themselves out. Right now, they mostly needed time.