Chapter Ten
Gobbling a generous mouthful of popcorn, Naruto snuggles up closer to Dad on the couch, somewhat embarrassingly delighted to watch Jenny Humphrey, the Evil Cinderella of Gossip Girl, get the dissing of a lifetime. There should be something more sympathetic about the character, the poor lonely girl trying to make it in a rich man's world, but Naruto's always had this sort of maternal crush on Blair, the wicked Queen Bitch with the brittle heart of gold. Jenny's crossed lines Blair never would, and although of course it's easy to say, intellectually, that Blair hasn't had to, has been born into socioeconomic advantages that lets her keep her hands cleaner than Jenny's working ones can be – well, emotionally it's a different matter.
"God, I hate commercial breaks," Dad says, slouching back from the previous tense forward crouch.
"I keep telling you, we should just download. Or stream, if you'd get us a better connection."
"And I keep telling you, I like it old-school – couch, popcorn, an actual TV. As for the breaks, well, they build tension."
She pokes him. "You only just said you hated them."
This sound argument is waved off, salt and oil raining over the couch. "So, you've been spending a lot of time with that cute girl lately, what was her name? Saskia?"
"God, shut up. Sasuke. Her name is Sasuke." Which, really, given the amounts of ranting, some of it rather wistful, that Naruto's done on the subject, she's quite convinced he knows.
"Of course. Everything going good? You've been over at her place quite a bit, right?"
"Yeah," she says, pulling her legs up Indian style, fingers closing around the familiar shapes of her feet, damp through the thick socks. "Her Mum's sort of, I guess unreliable's the word, but Itachi's cool. Also their house is fucking huge. I mean she's all, oh la this is just a modest summer abode, but it's like trice the size of our house and full of museum stuff."
"Itachi's her dad, then?"
"Ah, no, he's her brother. He's at uni but he mostly lives at home, I think. Her dad's not been around that I've seen, but the way they talk about him – it's like, like the sort of person who'd read Derailing for Dummies and think it was actually good advice. And that's supposed to be our head of prosecution!"
She was going to say, or thought she was going to say, I think he hits them, but she can't, not after the bathroom incident when she did, and particularly not after Sasuke looked at her all pale and tense and smiled that way that's worse than crying, that's like crying, which probably Sasuke doesn't do, because outside of fiction that means swollen eyes and runny nose, which isn't really Sasuke's style.
"But you're getting along, I take it? Despite the excessive bruising, which, by the way, be careful."
"I will. I promise." And she's glowing rather than annoyed, can hardly contain herself, because god, good is entirely the wrong, the inadequate, word; too weak, too simple, too… solid.
It's odd, really: Naruto's the one who says with every word and every gesture, as it sometimes feels with every damn breath, I want to be naked with you, but it's Sasuke who, twice now, has started stripping without further ado. Perhaps after the time she looked over her naked shoulder, and Naruto walked into a bedroom full of her bare breasts, there was little cause for surprise on top of that graveyard wall. And really surprise wasn't it, she was startled, a bit, but mainly something deeper, something huge and hot that startled was only a small part of.
Sasuke has them all marked out on her mental map, every graveyard in the city – apparently Itachi likes them, finds them peaceful, ethereal, with some eternal quality about them.
I used to like them myself, Sasuke added, in what Naruto doesn't think had to be reinterpreted into defence of Itachi.
Oh yes, he'd said, sadly, fondly, then extremely teasing: We used to play tag in them when she was little, and she'd use the flower ornaments left on the graves to dress up as Titania.
Which provides a mental image almost as adorable as ridiculous.
"Oh yeah," she adds, "Itachi's in this fancy program and skipping ahead like mad, he's going to be some sort of posh academic or law person, but he also has this course on Western culture, and he's writing this big paper on Gossip Girl for it. Well, it's about, like, the economics of power in 'tween pop culture, but it's mostly about Gossip Girl. How awesome is that? He said I could read it when it was done. Apparently the other students are scared stiff of him, since he's picking, you know, actually fun subjects and still getting A+ on like everything."
"I take it we might cart you off to university yet," Dad says. "Do let me have a look if he lends you the paper – oh, finally. Go Blair! If only she'd realise Dan's the one destined for her, this storyline would be perfect."
It's true, Itachi writing about Gossip Girl sounds a hell of a lot more inviting than Mum writing about obscure painters. Maybe she could pick courses like that, if she manages to graduate with good enough grades to have anything to pick from.
Rockstar and social revolutionary still seem like more realistic career paths.
The episode's winding down when Mum emerges from her work at the kitchen table to do more than shake her head at their occasional squeals. "Ready to go, honey? And you're sure you're not up for it?"
Dad makes an eloquent gesture towards the swollen snot volcano his nose has transformed into, and is left behind as Naruto sets out to accompany Mum to the university's art exhibit. Some 'really interesting little pieces, a lot of student material, very promising' is supposedly going to be shown.
Since when does she says supposedly so much? It's such a Sasuke word.
The university is comprised of a sprawl of buildings, some stout and red, others bleak blue skyscrapers, and yet other models glimpsed beyond these ones, but Mum steers them confidently towards a low-slung brick house crowded by smoking, talking, gesticulating people. Apart from some obvious parents and academics, most of them are the typical black-dyed, second-hand shopping art people. Leather jackets, Palestine scarves, Converse shoes.
While the science and linguistics and law buildings are far off and presumably of a different character, it's difficult to imagine Itachi Uchiha attending the same university as any of these students.
Presumably though Kakashi will have had lessons in this building, with these professors, will have talked and smoked – did he smoke? – like these students.
She imagines him languid, jovial but with a sarcastic edge; a shadow in the sun, one eye closed, although back then he would've had two good ones.
Inside several rooms have been dedicated to the exhibit, and Naruto wanders around at random, caught by a glimmer of colour here, an interesting shape there. Then there is the left wall in the yellow room: a girl's naked back, her shoulder against a boy's leg. Sasuke's never sat like that, not that Naruto's seen, with that tense sort of relaxation, like – it's a trite, tired comparison but really the only one that does it justice: like a predator animal relaxing into the long tense wait for the prey to run out of its hiding hole.
Rather, that particular anti-tension's often been there, but it's never been paired with the calm, overwhelming trust evident in her leaning on that leg; a spindly limb, belonging to somebody not very tall.
And Sasuke's older now, broader if not a lot taller, and the scar isn't in the sketch, and the hair pulled forward over her shoulder in the picture is gone from reality, but there's no uncertainty.
After weeks and weeks of soaking in every part of Sasuke, inadvertently memorising, after splaying her own hands over those shoulder-blades, Naruto knows exactly what those coal lines represent.
"I didn't know you had an eye for art," Mum says, behind her suddenly.
"I have an eye for girls," she says, shaky around the brazen words that aren't even really true, anymore. She's not looking for more than one girl, now.
"We might pick up a copy in the shop, if you like it," Mum offers. "I'm not sure they have all of them, but there's a fair chance. It's quite nice, I'd be surprised if it didn't sell well."
And god, no. "I couldn't," she says, pathetically upset. If Sasuke should hang on somebody's wall it should be in full colour, oils, with a gilded frame; and not just anybody's wall, either. To find her exposed and produced for sale, cheap format for the students and the casually interested public, reduced to a glimmer of potential in an undergraduate sketch…
"All right?" Mum says. "Look, I'm going to go over to Dr Hyuuga for a bit. Tell me later if you change your mind."
A kiss dropped on Naruto's head, and she's gone.
Naruto would sort of like to go too, but stands vigil over the sketch for a moment more, before yet again there's a voice behind her, abrupt as a touch.
"The funny thing is, he was never satisfied with that one."
She twists around to face Itachi, his features drowning in a peculiar melancholia, rendered indistinct by it. It's weird, that his face is almost identical to Sasuke's and yet looks nothing like hers.
He's hand in hand with a tall woman in her late twenties whom she's never seen before but who is all shaggy hair and sharp-toothed grin, muscles erupting into motherly curves.
"The whole Titanic bit, he didn't do that," Itachi continues.
"I know," says the woman, not at all softly.
He ignores her. "If he wanted human models for something, he mostly used us, yes, but mainly he did still lives, some landscapes. Some sketches of separate body parts. It's – this is all wrong."
Naruto realises the leg was of course his, Itachi's, and not as she'd dimly assumed Kakashi's own. It's childish in a sort of horrible way that this makes her like the picture better.
"Au contraire," says the woman. "I think it's kind of right; do you imagine for a second he'd have liked the real pieces put up on display?"
"Well," says Itachi. "Well, no. I certainly would not have."
"I didn't think you would," the woman agrees, rather amused. "Not to mention your sister would explode, although maybe that'd be good for her. Now, I need a smoke, I'll find you later." She pulls her hand free and waves, walking off in hardcore leather boots that are awesome with her slinky dress.
"I'm sorry," Itachi says. "Hello. That was Anko. I'm a touch… preoccupied."
"It's fine."
"He's done much better ones," Itachi tells her, eyeing the sketch of Sasuke's back and the aquarelle rendering of clouds beside it; the still life of lemons and cups and the sketch of somebody's foot. The foot's actually very good, at least in so far as good translates to: I like to look at it, it's interesting, it's like a picture of a thought I'm about to catch hold of. "There's this gorgeous series of sketches called Sasuke Waking Up. But Anko's right, those were real, those were intimate, he never showed them to anybody."
They were best friends. As a matter of fact we had a bit of a fucked-up threesome dynamic going on.
It sounds more like a triangle than a threesome; siblings, best friends, lovers.
And yet it's obvious, it's extremely obvious, anybody seeing that sketch of the Uchiha children will know whose back Kakashi couldn't stop thinking about, whom he couldn't see enough of. Itachi's leg beside it is just a leg.
"She sounds like she knew him too," she says. "Anko."
"She did. A long time ago."
In the not-quite-awkward, not-quite-bewildered silence that follows she has one of those total brain blackouts: "So is she like your date?"
He gives her a tolerant smile, the one that makes Sasuke see red. "Something like that, yes."
"Wha – for real?"
His smile grows rather more genuine. "I think perhaps I'm a little insulted."
"No, no," she tries to explain, almost elbowing a passing lady as she lifts her arm to scratch at the back of her head. "It's just, you know, you never seemed interested in stuff like that."
"And my sister does?" He's clearly entertained now, using the tone that would be restrained sharpness in Sasuke's mouth but comes condescending out of his.
"Well, kind of, yeah."
Sasuke's open to people in a sense that Itachi just isn't; she's trying desperately not to feel, having to try desperately to keep it a bay, while Itachi is just struggling to feel.
"She's Kakashi's ex," he says presently. "Anko, I mean. He had a bit of a mother complex, really, he liked them about twice his age. But then – god. You know, I teased him to death that my twelve year old sister could hen-pick him into ceasing relations with them. Well, her, he was only seeing Anko at that point."
"Shit," says Naruto, with feeling, although exactly which feeling remains unclear to her.
"Ah, no need to worry – she and Sasuke quite like each other. Well, they had to, didn't they? Not liking one another would have implied there was competition, which, besides being completely untrue, would have naturally been quite beneath both their dignities. I – you know, I'm sad too. I lost my best friend." He flashes her a tempered version of Sasuke's ice princess smile, nodding politely before starting off after Anko.
For a moment she is running after him, thoughts rushing ahead and her feet just making to follow them, before Mum is back to collect her, and in the end she doesn't know Itachi as anybody but Sasuke's brother, he's not hers to comfort or rile. Anko will.
At last glance the sketch is very different from photos, which dilute and diminish Sasuke into a flat image of conventional beauty, no longer somebody who'd make you turn after her on the street. The sketch would make anybody gape, although in it she's not even pretty; she's something vaster than that, something beyond the scope of prettiness.
xxxxx
In real life, Sasuke can be nothing short of surprisingly petty.
Or that's what Naruto thinks when the redhead cries; when the brunette storms off in a fraught temper. It's a childish phrase but Sasuke will have made them cry, made them upset, and looks right smug about it, her off-white skin smudged, black under her eyes and yellow on her fingertips.
But then Naruto realises, comes upon the cold implacability underneath – it's not pettiness, in fact it's a kind of vastness – Sasuke doesn't take pleasure in small acts of nastiness; she doesn't care about them, doesn't register them as real. In Itachi's phrase she considers it beneath her.
The boy whose hide Naruto rescued weeks ago, who asked her out, is connected to this partly because he's an astonishing example of Sasuke not caring about her social inferiors and, more importantly, partly because Naruto stumbles over him when wandering off in a disillusioned huff.
He's getting it good this time, from one of the guys she chased off and two others, vaguely remembered from when she first moved here, before being friends with people inured her from serious attacks. Gaara's friend, member of Kiba's gang, Sakura's acquaintance are not openly harassed, or not a lot at any rate.
They do their worst and then they just leave, just leave her alone, or left, even, because lately it's not been happening, and their worst is what used to be warm-up, used to be nothing, normal: they call her names and push her around, and that's it. They don't even hurt her.
It's made her curious, sometimes, what the official version says she is to Sasuke. She's heard the lacklustre jokes, the queen's fool who wants to fool around with the queen, whom the queen's making a fool of, etcetera.
But when even Naruto can't tell, of course nobody on the outside has any real clue.
So it's been a clean break, a wonderful break, but now she'll be hurting people, again, possibly a lot.
Konohamaru's yelling to cover his own sobbing, hands flailing protectively over his face.
Now the weather has turned, running has come again, and there's been ample fighting with Sasuke, but she's also hampered by that, because it's not so much fighting Sasuke as fighting with Sasuke, despite everything implying the contrary, and so she hasn't wanted to do real harm, at least (if she is honest with herself) not harm of this crude superficial sort.
Now she gets a bloody nose and a kick that feels like it chops her left leg clean off at the knee, but she gives as good as she gets and more importantly she gets Konohamaru away, gets him free and safe and the arseholes lumbering off.
They're not used to her, she discovered. They weren't expecting a real fight, weren't ready for it.
What really matters, Dad said, isn't brute strength, it's knowing how to use it and thinking fast, and more than you think is just plain pain tolerance. Be tougher, be rougher, and strength won't get you.
He was dead wrong about this at her old school, but around these prissy weaklings he's bloody Yoda.
"Hey, thanks," Konohamaru says, indistinct due to the mess his mouth is swelling into. "You sure you don't want to go out with me? Cos we could like just say you're my girlfriend and you could be really my bodyguard."
"Pretty sure, yeah." She presses her scarf under his nose, dragging her free hand under her own to wipe away the worst of the blood and snot. "Can you get up? We should get the hell away before they come back with reinforcements."
He's as wide-eyed as the bruising will let him be as he yelps, "They'll do that?"
"Haven't they before?"
"No. But then they've never needed to." His grin turns into a grimace as his lip erupts again, then becomes an even wider grin.
"What was it this time?" she asks, letting him take over holding the scarf to his nosebleed.
There's a certain pride to his skittish nod; letting her gaze follow it, it lands on the exceptionally inartistic rendering of soldiers, girls and what is either Kraken or Godzilla on the A-House wall.
"Really? Is it worth it?"
And god. Just Jesus bloody Christ, did she say that; simple, natural, the mature thing to say, to do. Fuck that.
Come on, Naruto, damn it, will you just stop asking for it?
"You're fine," she says, ruffling his hair. "You're fine, right?"
"Yeah," he says, cockily pleased. "Takes more than that to bring down the great Konohamaru."
For a while they trade brags and compete in spitting blood; with both his lip and his nose busted Konohamaru manages a greater quanity of it, but Naruto has far more experience and skill in the noble sport of distance spitting.
She's still sitting in the gravel, Konohamaru gone, wiping the last of the blood away with her scarf and trying painfully to massage feeling back into her dully throbbing knee when Sasuke appears, an imposing wraith from a lost world of civilisation; perfect, immaculate, controlled.
"What the hell are you doing?"
Naruto stares at her, eyebrows raised in unintentional parody of Sasuke's signifier gesture. "What?"
"Jesus Christ," Sasuke snaps, kneeling beside her in evident disgust, dainty calloused fingers too fastidious to quite touch the ruined scarf. "This is what comes of philanthropy, just like with that damned ingrate Haku."
"What the hell?"
It's a screaming match, very soon they are both on their feet, because Sasuke feels Konohamaru deserved it, is neither regretful nor ironical about exactly the kind of language Naruto gagged on; and Naruto doesn't think people like Konohamaru or Haku or herself need to do a damn thing to earn being treated like human beings; and Sasuke thinks not everybody is of equal value, and while obviously it's not their fault, necessarily, it's equally obvious that they are simply lesser; and of course Naruto hasn't exactly forgotten, as such, that Sasuke occasionally professes such opinions, but they're so absurd, so incomprehensible – like irl trolling, something that must be a tasteless joke, coming from somebody otherwise sane, wonderful for all their obvious flaws, somebody whom she – cares about, really cares about.
So it's a real screaming match, red-faced, like she's never had with Sasuke, like maybe Sasuke has never had with anybody; no, there's Itachi, she will have.
Naruto's hoarse very shortly, sweat breaking hot as pain over her skin, and the things she says – about the hypocrisy mostly, the way Sasuke treats people, the exact same way, isn't it, or close enough to hurt, to really fucking hurt, that Sasuke's parents treat Sasuke.
Afterwards there's no voice left in her, with her knee on fire and tears leaking down her face, new snot and new blood from the weeping, choking up phlegm on the empty gravel. All is quiet; the last classes must have left out while she was tending Konohamaru. That must be where Sasuke came from, the class Naruto didn't mean to skip.
Everything is very quiet; her panting, the crunch of gravel, the wind. There's the sound of her blood pulsing, sore against the flayed skin on her knuckles, palpitating through her heart, which is beating so hard she feels all bruised inside.
The things we said (the things we meant?)!
Sasuke doesn't talk to her again until the day of Kankurou's party, which Naruto might have predicted if she hadn't been too upset and unfocused to attempt any soothsaying. That talking happenings in Philosophy class, too, so there's little choice involved; Sasuke blank and polite the way she only gets when she's too furious to waste words on you, perhaps to articulate even to herself.
"Fuck," mutters Naruto. She'd have screamed it from the rooftops, except the roof exit was locked when she and Gaara tried to sneak up to have lunch there.
Her nose has unswelled and her knuckles are skinning over, which is fortunate; when Dad asked, uncharacteristically terse, if these injuries were because of her fooling around with that Sasuke girl, she said no, because they aren't really, but it came out a lie and he's been sighing and looking at her funny ever since. Beyond telling them about Konohamaru she couldn't explain, she'd used up her all words yelling at Sasuke, and she needs Sasuke to stop starving her of new ones.
"I'm so fucking tired of it," she tells Gaara, grabbing her sandwich pugnaciously. "Who the hell acts like that!"
If there were a vocal equivalent of an ellipsis, it's what would go with his corresponding expression.
"Are you coming tonight?" he asks abruptly. "Or tomorrow? Did they change it to tomorrow?"
"The party? Yeah. On both accounts."
All right, so it was Sasuke's friend not hers who invited her, but she wasn't invited as Sasuke's friend but as Gaara's.
According to the independent opinions of Sasuke and Gaara both it was a sugared pill she was offered: you've been good for him/me, obviously she'd bribe you with an invite in ridiculously good time to keep you being good for him/me, god, why else, she barely knew you but she does care for him/me, for some reason. No, it's not strange, lots of people would do far worse than being friendly to him/me to get that invitation.
She isn't sure what to wear, how you dress for these things; the last time she went to a party it was still customary to come in pigtails and ballerina dresses, or cowboy outfits if you were a boy or a notorious skirt-ruiner.
She tries on jeans, and then a different pair, and really it looks much the same. How are you supposed to tell which is the winning look?
"Screw it," she decides, turning a defiant back on the mirror and pulling a neon-orange tshirt on over the random jeans she tried last.
This is it, then: she'd feel like a clown if she tried fixing anything else, like a child dressing up to go to the adults' party, which… no. There are smudges of purple nail polish left on her fingers from when she was bored this morning; that and her shoes and the present will have to be enough. Will be great.
She's giving him some stage makeup and weed, which, after turning down Gaara's offer to either ignore it or let him get something, is reportedly the only thing Kankurou'd like that she can afford. Which, fair enough, his atrocious costumes probably have to be privately ordered at hideous expense, since no way can they be sold at profit commercially.
"Take care, honey, have fun," Mum says, beaming up at her from her writing, a momentary lighthouse.
Dad, dropping her off close to the Sabaku building, adds, "Don't get too drunk."
The flat, or whatever you call it when it's an entire floor big enough to house several normal flats, is lit in a distracting fashion, every room a twilight zone of shadows and fickle lights; music pulses, a recording of what sounds to Naruto like a monk choir, and there's talking, laughing, shouting over it. People, drinks, movement, the smell of expensive alcohol spilt on expensive fabric.
Veering off towards the massive dining table to deposit her gift at the foot of the mountain of presents, she hears Kankurou telling somebody, "I wanted to rent out a club, but Pater Noster wouldn't hear of it."
He's wittier than she's given him credit for, unless it's Temari's nickname he's using, but it doesn't matter because over by the window there's Sasuke, talking to Neji, the lights shimmering over her red shirt, god, she's an annoying arsehole but she's never worn red before and it's gorgeous, she's gorgeous.
It's not that Naruto forgets to be pissed off, it's more that her pissed off-ness remains on the backburner where it's been simmering the last few days.
But she's not bloody here for Sasuke, in this modernised fairy land like something out of a high school movie-inspired daydream.
She looks around for Gaara, eventually stumbling across Temari and asking after him.
"He went out. Needed to cool off, he said."
"Oh." Of course he'd choose the party night to go broody and lonesome. "Where?"
"Nowhere you need to look," Chouji interrupts. "He'll be back." This, Chouji's tone suggests, is rather a lamentation, but he continues, "Come on, the games are starting."
"Games?"
"Indeed," Kiba grins, emerging from behind a pillar, somehow smelling distinctly, groundingly, of dogs and wet earth over the scent of over-enthusiastically employed men's perfume. "Half the fun of getting drunk is getting to do stuff you couldn't face up to sober, right?"
"Hinata's not here," Chouji confides in the wake of Kiba striding purposefully off ahead of them. "He's determined to drown his sorrows, I suppose. Right when he'd finally got up the courage to try and learn to dance, too."
Was Hinata even invited? But of course she was – she's Neji's sister or cousin or fiancée or something, must live in that ostentatious mansion with him. It's just easy to forget wealth and power that's never flaunted, doesn't seem a part of her at all.
There is a lot of dancing and drinking and extraordinarily stupid party games getting funnier with every round of drinks. Naruto was rarely invited to those so she might've got it wrong, but isn't Truth or Dare what you play at children's parties?
"Moot point," Kankurou declares. "I've got a bottle. You know what this means, guys – it's tradition!"
They sit in a jeering, pulsing circle, transfixed by the spinning of the leaking purple bottle. Kankurou must've rigged it, somehow, because he gets to swap saliva with both Tenten and Ino and Sakura before he's chased off to the dance floor for cheating, dragging a pretty girl from the another class along.
She's not gonna lie, watching Ino and Sakura kiss, and after a few whistles the peck indeed develops into a real kiss, lip gloss smearing over Sakura's chin, is definitely enjoyable.
Every now and then, though, in between the swirling, she goes distant from the game.
Sasuke's not playing; she's sitting on the kitchen counter, so deeply steeped in conversation with Neji that her hands are moving in time with her words, their heads close together.
"Maybe that'll come to something," Tenten mutters. "She could use a pick me up. They both could – hell, we all could."
Which is strange, because can't everybody see that Sasuke's looking at him the wrong way for that to be it?
She's looking at Neji the way she looks at Itachi; fond, exasperated, asexual. Interested in a familiar, devoted, entire intellectualised fashion.
So many adjectives: she tried to sum Sasuke up once, snare her in a list of adjectives for an English assignment that she pretended was about a fictional character, but it didn't work. She needed verbs for Sasuke, scenes, nouns, qualifiers, and could never quite pin her to the page.
Behind her Shino clears his throat, a noise Naruto is disastrously too late to reinterpret into, "Ahem, I fear it is our turn, madam". She turns, her inquiry interrupted by a pair of thin lips. Her face as caught in the reflection of his sunglasses is comically horrified, her lips parting around a laugh even as her stomach rolls at the thought of what manner of insects his mouth has recently been in contact with.
Shikamaru kisses light and dry, brotherly; Kiba with a flush and his eyes closed, presumably thinking with a guilty thrill of Hinata; Sakura is wonderful, sweet lipstick and gentle pressure; Chouji, surprisingly, is very good at it.
Sasuke is still in the kitchen; doesn't play, doesn't dance, barely drinks. Rather, Naruto's seen her drunk, has seen her loose and miserably gawky with it, and now she's nowhere closet to it, despite the handful shots she knocks back.
When Kankurou approaches them on his way back to the bottle-spinning circle, Neji whisks her onto the dance floor, where they float around as stilted and nineteenth-century as they did in gym class, looking almost drably comfortable together in the atmosphere set for wild romance.
Naruto sits back, legs sprawling in front of her in what looks like an impossible feat of contortionism but feels quite nice in a numb sort of way, watching most of the crowd edge towards the dancing. Supposedly the games have got them drunk enough for it, by now.
Sasuke passes from Neji's arms to Temari's, dancing in her stiff, beautiful, model-awkward way in the indisputable centre of attention. If Naruto made the same moves, it'd be a ridiculous robot dance, with nothing graceful or touching about it.
Beauty isn't fair, but then neither is gravity, neither one really negotiable.
When Sasuke slips away Naruto follows her, out of the main area and up a shady staircase where the music thins out. Sasuke doesn't remark on her presence, just walks, and of course she's perfectly at home here, of course the flat is familiar to her as the back of her own hand, slipping idly up the banister.
"I like your hands," Naruto says, rather stupidly, because she'd meant to say: don't keep this shit up, just let me in. "Like how you can see these little white bits on your nails."
"The lunulae," Sasuke supplies, her stride not altering.
"Yeah, those." It's an intriguing word, caressing.
Passing a snogging couple, skirting a furniture-crowded hallway, Sasuke steps out through an open set of glass doors, leaning her hips against the balcony railing as she light as cigarette. Inside air and alcohol keep Naruto warm, tint the moonlight soft.
It strikes her forcibly that this is where it must have happened, a year ago – not here, on the balcony, or she assumes not, that would be crazy, but then Sasuke was in a state and Gaara too, so who knows really, but in any case here in this flat, in the mirror image of this party – Sasuke and Gaara, when Kakashi was newly comatose.
It seems so preposterous it hasn't even affected her, hasn't stayed in her mind when she's talked to him.
Maybe she could have said something, reached for an, Are you all right?, if it hadn't been for that screaming fight and also, sort of, for the fact that a year ago Naruto spent hours spewing up toilet water after almost drowning from a dunking.
"I thought you were mad at me," Sasuke says.
Naruto's head snaps up. "You're not mad at me?"
"I'm angry, yes, but I'm not the one who followed you here."
"You and your fucking logic." Why is she here, though?
It is logical, really, if you think about it. Sasuke made her real, made her real-for-somebody-else in a way she's never been before; Sasuke gets it and she doesn't care about it, usually, the greatness and the darkness and the Naruto-ness, and Naruto's never had that from anybody else.
Also she's gorgeous and annoying and fucked up, rubs her the wrong way most of the time but keeps rubbing her which is the main thing.
"I guess Kakashi never said stuff like that to you." She locks her hand around the nape of her own neck, where it's gone automatically, to keep from pulling the cigarette out from between Sasuke's lips and just – make a mess of everything.
"He didn't go to school with me." She grinds the half-finished cig out against the railing. "Also he was a very theoretical Marxist."
Naruto says, has to say, although it's herself she has to remind: "You're such a git."
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