Chapter Thirteen
"Okay?" Naruto says, half-sitting as well, resting an arm in Sasuke's lap, around her waist. "I guess that means no public groping either, huh?"
"There's never going to be any public groping."
Naruto feels a frown coming on, her body still singing softly in contentment but her mind cooling by the second, heart falling like a loadstone. "Look, are you like, ashamed of this?"
Of me.
"There's nothing to be ashamed of."
Then there is a knock.
It's soft, polite, but it might as well have been an earthquake for how it makes Naruto jump.
"Honey?" Sasuke's mum says from outside the door, the door which Naruto, stupid impatient overeager Naruto, left unlocked, left fucking ajar. "Are you up?"
"No," says Sasuke, and doesn't need to add, Go away.
"Won't you come have breakfast with us? Itachi's made your favourite."
Sasuke closes her eyes for a moment. "Fine, I'll be there."
"Really? Honey, I could…"
Naruto smothers a panicked giggle in the curve of Sasuke's hip, the bone cutting into her cheek, the skin soft and wonderful and still smelling quite strongly of sweat and sex. It's a good smell, Naruto's always liked it, and she likes it even better on Sasuke. "Tell her you're wanking, that'll send her off."
"Shut up," Sasuke hisses in a scandalised voice, tugging at her hair. "I'll be down shortly."
It's a very final tone, and at last Mikoto's step fade away, and Naruto explodes into smothered laughter.
"Get up," Sasuke grumbles, standing and stepping off the bed. She throws Naruto's shirt at her. "Time to leave."
"No way," Naruto protests. "I want your favourite."
"Too bad."
"Oh come on," she says, lightly because that's the only way she can keep her voice from breaking into sharp dark bits. "You're not just throwing me out. Especially after I had to get that stupid security guy to let me in. Where are you manners?" She feels out of breath when she stops talking, like she's just run one of Gai's marathons, or had sex, except those are good sorts of breathless and this isn't, this is the tight-chested, thick-throated one.
"Fine," Sasuke says, retrieving a few items from her wardrobe. "Fine, whatever, just get dressed."
She stalks into the en-suite bathroom and Naruto starts hunting for her discarded outfit, lingering a moment over Sasuke's still-wet knickers before getting dressed, leaving the jumper lying.
Sasuke's unfortunately dressed too by now, glaring at a lovebite on her neck that she has no business complaining about going by the sound she made when Naruto put it there, a sound going on instant playback in her mind and just the memory of it sending a freaking shivery shudder through her.
Even stiff and angular with irritation Sasuke's body cries out to her, and it's a tempting prospect to just up and hug it, but, "I need to pee."
"Jesus Christ," Sasuke mutters, taking her things and slamming out of the loo.
"Touchy," Naruto mutters. What she needs is for Sasuke to be still a second, to just look at her, so Naruto can scream some sense into her, and have Sasuke scream back, and then they can fight and when they're tired they could get on with some belated post-coital snuggling. She has touches she wants to offer, to share, and words, and…
Still, there's something to be said for the relief of emptying your bladder.
Sasuke's waiting impatiently by the doorway, correcting something she's reading with aggressive stabs of her pen.
"So, hey. Is your dad home?"
Sasuke looks up from her paper with eyes that stab. "You wish," she snorts, in so far as you can snort with a voice trying to be cold and ending up sort of brittle. "If he were we'd be fucking on the table."
"Kinky."
The kitchen is arranged like the set of a historical film; silverware, cloth napkins, enough food to feed a large extended family, with crumbs left over for the servants that will have arranged it. Mikoto presides over the laden table, her smile more brittle than the china. "Naruto," she says with startled, wary pleasure. "Good morning."
"Hi," says Naruto, rubbing at a spot of mud on her leg, from when she took a roll through the flowerbed under Sasuke's window. Maybe she should've tried to borrow something clean, but everything Sasuke owns that would fit her seems to be inheritances from Kakashi.
At her voice Itachi turns from his preoccupation with something on the stove, a tall statuesque woman turning with him.
It's light outside now, a soft precocious grey-yellow light. In it she recognises the woman from the painting exhibit at the university, Itachi's date, formerly Kakashi's.
Which is a disgusting male-centric way of thinking of any woman, of course, but Naruto can't for the life of her remember the lady's name.
"Ah," Itachi says. "You're here early."
"Er, yeah," Naruto agrees. "I came by with an assignment. For school."
"Early," Itachi reiterates softly, putting a tea caddy on the table and pulling back a chair for – oh, yes, right, Anko – for Anko, whose expression is one of sceptical bewilderment at the gesture but who does sit.
"Yeah, well," Naruto says, sitting down too, in between Mikoto and Sasuke, still full of this Christmas feeling she never has on Christmas, goodwill to all men. "She's been nagging me about it forever, demanded I hand it over the second I was done – what could I do, right?"
Sure she might be a bad liar, but at the moment technically she's not lying at all.
"Of course," says Anko, knowingly. "Yes, thanks, Mrs Uchiha, I'm a coffee girl. Irish, please."
There's a moment of absolute silence before Sasuke says, "Naruto, this is Anko Mitarashi."
"Yes," Anko interrupts. "We met at the uni exhibit."
"Pardon?"
Sasuke's voice and Itachi's face match perfectly: a stricken arctic wasteland.
"My mum brought me," Naruto says into silence like a still pool, treacherous depths, and if you stop swimming you'll sink smooth as a stone. "She's an art history student there."
"Right," says Sasuke, and it's like being thrown a rope.
Apparently Sasuke's favourite is burnt jam toast and some weird sort of tea that smells mostly like wet ash.
"But you drink coffee," Naruto says. "I've seen you drink coffee. Often. In large quantities."
"Coffee is for when you have to get up," Sasuke says dismissively. "Tea is for enjoyment."
Anko adds, "Also it goes better with nicotine."
Which is probably true, going partly by Sasuke's silence, partly by the cig-and-coffee heavy French films Mum becomes periodically addicted to. Naruto sticks staunchly to her orange juice, happy with a morning beverage shining like a private liquid dawn in her glass.
This is spectacularly awkward and particularly wonderful. She could, theoretically, put her hand on Sasuke's leg under the table.
"Sasuke?" Itachi offers her a plate of toast.
She sips from her tea cup, not taking it. "I'm not hungry."
"Oh, come on," Naruto says, exasperation and cereal filling her mouth. "You can sweat it off later when I kick your arse."
Sasuke raises an eyebrow, her forehead enlarging queerly as it disappears up under her fringe. "Are you suggesting I'm fat?"
For a moment Naruto can only stare at her. "No! God!"
I'm suggesting Itachi was right and you obviously do have a freaking eating disorder.
Which she seems to have under a modicum of control, but still. All that pro-ana bullshit notwithstanding, there's a difference between body-autonomy and illness, and Sasuke's certainly treading a fine fucking line.
Sasuke's snort is relatively amused, and finally she brings the toast to her mouth, nibbles on it the way she does her cigarettes. "I'm not in the mood."
"Heh," Naruto says. "It's just you know I'll have you flat on your back in two seconds."
Sasuke stares at her. Possibly she is not the only one, but her stare is of the consuming kind, level as a chain. "Fine. You're on."
The fight is major and explosive. It shouldn't have been; Sasuke's in her jammies, they're both barefoot, god, Sasuke has finger toes. Then again, Naruto has never believed in letting her life be controlled by 'should'.
So it's major and it's explosive. Sasuke hits harder than usual, and is more sluggish to avoid retaliation, shields instead of dodges. While Naruto imagines this is how Sasuke would ideally like to fight, burning through opponents, it's not her usual style, damn it, it's the antithesis of her usual style, and will only ever work for her in very, very short fights.
Fuck, Naruto must be at least half again her weight, and she couldn't do it. This hasn't stopped her trying, anymore than it does Sasuke, but the results haven't been pretty and they aren't now. Naruto ducks, kicks, catches Sasuke's elbow behind her ear and spits a curse.
You just can't act like a rhinoceros when you're built like a bird.
So it's a very short fight.
She collapses in a heap with Sasuke mostly on top of her, sweating again and her pulse hot and hard and frantic just like before, only now it's painful.
She tries to kiss her, or something, tries to get it back, the good feeling, but Sasuke slips between her fingers.
"This was a really bad idea."
"Was not," Naruto argues. "It was great. Come here."
God, please, come here.
Sasuke doesn't want to; Naruto wants her to want to; insists she does because to hell with it, what else has ever worked on stupid stubborn Sasuke, who insists in turn that she in fact does not want to, don't want you, and you're bloody bad at it, too, one would think you've never been to bed with anybody before in your life!
"I've had sex before!" Naruto yells back, then continues in a much quieter tone: "Just not with, you know. Other people." Red-faced again, painfully so, she adds without thought, too raw: "Also if I suck so hard then you're pretty damn easy!"
And wow, she's slut-shaming now? Great going, Naruto, but she's can't take it back, would pour everything out if she opened her mouth, ever last bit of herself, and Sasuke's scraped her raw already. Panting and teary-eyed she stares back at Sasuke.
"Go to hell."
"Wait!" Naruto calls after her, struggling up and stumbling over the mats. "Wait, damn it! I'm sorry, you stupid bitch! God damn it, wait!"
Predictably Sasuke doesn't, leaving Naruto to stumble-jog alone and increasingly desperate through the labyrinth corridors, trailing sweaty footprints on the carpet.
She's made it back to the downstairs hallway when Anko materialises in front of her, looking more natural than Naruto's seen her yet, as though suddenly the memories of her in a short dress, in the oversized shirt this morning, are evaporating under the force of the utter rightness of Anko in combat pants and a ponytail.
"You going, then?" she says. "Come on, I'll give you a ride."
"No, really, it's fine. I mean, thanks, but I should probably…"
"Nonsense," Anko cuts her off, picking up a jacket and throwing it at Naruto. "There you go. Now get marching."
The jacket is Sasuke's and too small for her, but fuck, it's not her problem if the sleeves end before her wrists do, or if it's so tight she can barely move her shoulders. Sasuke can either stop being under-sized or she'll only have herself to blame if Naruto pulls a seam.
Anko's car is a four-wheeled jeep with serpent paint, flames and scales and claws lovingly sprayed onto the metal. Naruto swallows the instinctive lecture on how environmentally unfriendly and thus selfish and stupid these vehicles are along with some snot, and curls up gratefully in the shotgun seat. It's large as a stuffed chair and bloody comfortable, though the car stinks of weed.
"Where am I taking you?"
"Just Central station is great. I'll take a commuter train."
"Fair enough," says Anko, and floors it. While Naruto's initial, helpless reaction is to grab her seatbelt in horror, because dear fucking god, Anko is insane, this is way worse than how she and Kiba handled their drunk-driving, and this is a fucking residential area – well, while that's her initial reaction, she can't hold back a gleeful laugh at the sight of a couple Mr Securities throwing themselves off the road.
Anko grins at her, apparently not bothered about keeping her eyes on the road, and frankly why should she be because it's not like she can drive much worse, offering Naruto a high-five.
Two streets later, when Naruto's snuggled down in her seat, Anko says suddenly, "You can do better."
She startles, almost hits her head against the window, but she's sure about this. "Not really."
"Yeah, really," Anko insists, giving her a sharp glance before turning back to the road.
Naruto snorts. "Did you say that about Kakashi too?"
"No. He was a bit of a twisted bitch, too. They all are, when you get right down to it." They're almost there now; traffic's sprase on late Saturday mornings. Anko pulls over, turns a smile on her. "But best of luck, you're both gonna need it."
"Yeah," Naruto says, slipping out of the car. "Thanks."
Anko waves and takes off, scattering pedestrians before her, and Naruto turns to head back into Central. On the way she stops at a vendor and picks up a hotdog; the weather's nice enough now, inside the jacket, although she can't warm her hands in the sleeves like she's used to, and there's a large supply of change in its pockets, more than enough for a soda to go with the food, sugared bubbles bursting on her tongue, burning against the cut on her lip. She'd have preferred the leather jacket, which would've been comfortably oversize on her – Sasuke drowns in it.
Seated on the train she finds she managed to bring the infernal mobile and plugs in the earphones. With the Juno soundtrack playing through her ears she dozes, realising as she can finally get up and off that's she's been sufficiently out of it to drool.
Mum stares at her for a moment when she comes through the doorway, gobsmacked, before breaking into laughter. "Oh, honey…! Are you all right?"
"I'm fine," Naruto says shortly. "What?"
Catching sight of herself in the hallway mirror, Mum's reaction makes a lot more sense. Her face and neck is swollen and red, from the sex and the fight and the upset, she's wearing a too-small, incredibly prissy jacket and her jeans are muddy.
Over-tired, to the point the world is brittle-bright and distant and her bones feel old, she stomps upstairs and into the shower, where she freezes, stands there stupidly in the cubicle without turning the water on. She stinks of sweat but also, a little, of sex.
Of sex with Sasuke, and she doesn't want to wash that away. Wants to keep it close forever, more like.
Which is frankly ludicrous, and she wrenches the water on full blast, spluttering when it hits her face.
How did everything go so wrong so fast? It makes no goddamn sense!
First there was the badness of getting dumped on her arse, yeah, but then, then Sasuke freaking slept with her, and now they're not talking again? What the fuck? Why is it always like this, everything knife's edge and overwhelming?
Eventually she settles in for a Gossip Girl marathon, which should be awesome as there's her favourite blanket, heavy rain outside, Dad and crisps both within easy reach, but somehow the soap intrigues of the Upper East Side are less effective as escapist entertainment when you're involved in the irl equivalent.
Dad's thankfully quiet, even though, as she discovers upon venturing to the bathroom, she has what is pretty obviously a bite-mark on her jaw to compliment the split lip. "You fucking bit me," she says aloud to the mirror, voice coming tender from her scowl, touching a fingertip to the bruise.
On the way out she dumps her clothes in the laundry basket, keeping Sasuke's jacket with her after some hesitation. It's black, woollen, almost knee-length on Sasuke, the sharply cut sort you tie at the waist. It looks a lot fancier now she's taken it off.
While it's probably all kinds of unacceptable, going through the pockets, it's also all kinds of irresistible. Paper napkins fresher than they have any right to be after their tenure as pocket-livers; a stub of a pencil; this month's subway pass, also curiously undamaged; half a packet of cigarettes; a lighter; the money Naruto didn't touch, the money that's not spare change. Ninety in bills, plus the leftover coins.
Of course there's nothing personal, anal retentive people don't keep personal stuff in their jacket pockets; what is, what she wants, is the smell, discernable over the one of wet wool. It's embarrassing how much she wants it, she didn't even like it at first and now it takes a struggle not to bury her face in it, to sleep with just Kyuubi clutched close.
Stupid fucking Sasuke, if she wasn't such a touchy bitch Naruto could've just clung to her instead and there wouldn't have been a problem.
In her dreams Sasuke's sitting in the water, staring at her and maybe speaking, but if she is her words are drowned out by the waves breaking all around her.
Stepping closer in the twilight Naruto sees her mouth is glowing, a small red ember in her face.
And clearly she wasn't speaking before, because when she does now Naruto hears her perfectly: "I really loved him, you know. I love him."
"I know," says Naruto. "It's all right."
"No," says Sasuke. "The dead are far more alive to us than the living."
Naruto wakes up mortified that her subconscious, clearly talented at producing vivid renditions of Sasuke, couldn't have gone with less bullshit and more sex.
It wouldn't even be more unsubtle.
"That's not fair, though," she tells Kyuubi. "She never said that."
Kyuubi stares at her with blank haughtiness befitting a demon.
"It's not like I forgot," she says, "I mean she was wearing his ring when we were…doing it."
The words chase a laugh out her mouth, a blush up her face, but a good blush. Weak-kneed, soft-faced, she slips her hand under the sleep shirt, to the marks on her abdomen traced out by Sasuke's small hot hands. It was sort of like having a bee crawl over your skin; ticklish, and any moment it could leave or could perforate you, and for a moment you feel like a flower. Naruto's always been more of a fruit girl; sturdier, tarter, more lasting than a flower.
She would very much like to say that Sasuke's fingers cut her deeper than the knife. It would be a lie but she would like very much to say it.
It wasn't deeper but it mattered more, in its way. Stopped her short the same way the knife had. It was she supposes a relative kind of mattering – Sasuke touching her stomach wouldn't have been more important than Sasuke touching anywhere else, would it, had it not been for the scar.
Sasuke's hands there, they didn't take it away like she'd imagined once, before she grew thicker skin to cover the cuts, back when she'd wanted being cared for, caressed, to smooth away the sore edges, but they changed the whole thing, remade the meaning of the mark. It's still there of course and it was made the same way but it means something entirely different now, too.
She lives the majority of the day in her hands; spends most of it picking things up. First the last of the late-fallen apples in the garden, gone soft and scurvy, roofs caving in over the worms living in them. Mum is disgusted, but Dad's promised to make his fabled apple pie if they finish it up for him, which is a powerful incentive indeed.
"Right," Mum says at last, standing up straight and rubbing dirt off her fingers. "You go on in, I'll stop by the shops and get some fresher ones for the pie."
Up in the dusty cold of the attic Naruto kneels among the forgotten boxes, packed in a hurry before they moved and untouched since, their winter things lying forgotten. Most of it can wait, but it's gown too cold now not to dig some of it up, especially since being friends not only with Kiba but with Akamaru as well means needing a lot of spares to change into after all the playing in increasingly muddy parks.
In the end, though, Sasuke is everywhere inside her.
It's different now; before it was Naruto pushing and Sasuke letting her or not. This time it was Sasuke climbing into her lap and going wild.
The phone beckoning, she traipses downstairs and calls Gaara before she can call Sasuke.
Gaara's barely picked up before he calls, "Uchiha! It's for you."
"Hello?"
"The hell, you're at Gaara's?" slips out before she can stop herself.
"Naruto. Temari's my best friend."
"No she's not."
Sasuke sighs. "You don't get to decide that, Naruto."
"Neither do you!" she blurts. "I mean, I mean…"
She isn't quite sure what she means – no, she is, but she's not sure how to explain it, cut it down into words. She tries anyway, saying how people don't get to decide what to feel, they just do, just feel a certain way, and maybe they're told to change it, or they just want to change it, but really, if they can, if they can just up and decide not to feel it anymore, or to feel different, then they never really felt it in the first place: then it was never real.
Mum's always so annoyed by people lingering in grief after breakups, always says they should get over it, like it was simply a matter of deciding to, which is a view Naruto's never understood: controlled love isn't, really.
"True," says Sasuke.
Giddy, clinging with something like helplessness to the kitchen counter, Naruto listens to her breathing. She feels like she could give her the moon: like the incentive of giving it to Sasuke alone would enable her to pluck it down from the sky and hold it glowing and full in her hands, easy as a laugh.
Sasuke says, "Before, at the art exhibit. Which pictures were there?"
Naruto explains about the clouds and the still life, which were nice but nothing special, and the foot; and Sasuke's back, a child's back but unmistakably Sasuke's, leaning against her brother's leg, and Itachi saying the intimate ones weren't for show.
Would the magical ninja one count as private? Sasuke smiled in it in a way Naruto's never seen, private and wild and open, in a way she's pretty sure nobody's seen since Kakashi.
"The foot was good," she says. "I mean, I liked your back cause it was yours, you know? The foot I just liked. Or was that yours too? It had finger toes."
But it wasn't a girl's foot, it was a man's, and she's about to say, No, of course, stupid me, Itachi's, right?, when Sasuke says, "His, actually."
"Oh," says Naruto; thoughtless, distracted. "Huh, so your kids would've definitely had them too, then."
That, she realises in the following silence, is what social suicide sounds like.
This is possibly the worst thing she's ever said to anybody, and she has no idea how to take it back.
"Suddenly," Sasuke says in this bland tense voice, "I understand why everybody hates you."
"I didn't – I'm sorry, I…"
She might as well not have spoken. "I wonder if it will be worse, now you've been liked? I think it will be."
Is this what it means to be liked? This feeling of hypothermia, her mind overheated and choking, her limbs numb, like the important bit of her, the centre, isn't here anymore, is in Sasuke's hands now not her own.
She's never wanted anything else so badly in her life, has never wanted anything else, but she didn't realise this was it, that it's like this.
"Please," she says, because she needs this now, she needs it like breathing, and you have to listen, you have to, all my words are for you. "Those other things, about how you're way too much the same sort of jerk as your arsehole parents and how you should really do something about that – I mean that. I didn't mean this."
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Sasuke says, but she says it like she did in her bedroom, with a peculiar fondness to the irritation, like it's a real question.
Like she's looking for an answer.
"I don't know," Naruto says.
It's easy to see what's wrong with Sasuke: abusive father, alcoholic mother, difficult brother, lost boyfriend; social stress, mental strain.
It's not so easy to see why Naruto's always come off as wrong, what she did or was that made her strange and wrong to other people, that made them make her be wrong.
"Is there?"
"Something wrong with you?" Sasuke snorts. "Aside from how you were clearly dropped on your head as a child?"
"Was not," Naruto objects. "My mum's a nurse, for god's sake."
Grounded again, solid like a plant with reaching roots and sun on its leaves, Naruto pushes herself up on the counter, sits leaning against the wall, the phone cradled like the children Sasuke doesn't want, and again listens to their breathing.
She slips again, the entire conversation a frozen lake and Naruto a clumsy skater throwing herself across it with a child's courage, but doesn't land badly, this time: "Is it awkward? With Gaara."
"No," says Sasuke, the word almost a sigh. "He didn't have much to do with it."
"Erm…"
"I mean," she says impatiently, but the good sort of impatient, the sort that means, understand me. "It wasn't about him. It could've been anybody and it wouldn't have mattered."
"I guess that was the problem, huh?"
"On the contrary. It made everything simpler."
"Does he know?"
"I told you," Sasuke says. "Nobody does."
She does remember that, and feels for a moment that she's reaching through the phone, collecting Sasuke in her hands, but: "I'm not nobody."
"No," says Sasuke, and it's like somebody screaming: yes! yes! yes! "I reckon you're not."
"Heh," Naruto says, then, "I've been picking apples all day. I've been all jittery."
"Indeed. Just finish the damn English History project so we can hand it in before Neji loses it."
"I did hand it in. Sort of. The sonnet was the last bit, right? I've given you everything else already."
"Right."
"So I thought I'd call Gaara, and then there were you. What're you doing?"
"Hanging up," Sasuke tells her, in a voice trying to be flat but falling just short, falling over amusement, over something like warmth.
"Wait," says Naruto, bubbly and sunlit inside when Sasuke does.
"Idiot," Sasuke mutters at last, and the phone clicks off.
Which is all right, now.
Less all right is her sonnet, which Sasuke returns to her littered with red ink.
"Fix it," she orders imperiously. "We need to hand it in."
This is easier said than done, since if Naruto knew how to spell the words or count the syllables, she wouldn't have done it wrong in the first place. In the end Neji is the one who does it for her, because while Sasuke declares she's not Naruto's secretary and Naruto's possibly clinically impaired English is not her problem, Neji is anxious enough about his grade average to fold.
"I can do it," Naruto protests, because he's apprehensive rather than annoyed. "I'll have it fixed tomorrow."
"I've got it," Neji snaps, and fine, it wasn't written for him to read but he can't know that, and if letting him at it will relieve her of dictionary duty…
"What do you figure we'll get for it?" she asks, playing with Sasuke's sleeve. "Cause I could really use a grade burst."
"If they do group grades you'll get an A," Sasuke says, as if it was the most natural assumption in the world and not a freaking miracle. "If they're individual maybe a B if they're feeling gregarious." And she says this too straight-faced, as though she really doesn't have any inkling that Naruto has always considered Cs a great success.
"Also, er," Naruto says, procuring Sasuke's jacket, snuggled and cleaned and rolled up in her backpack. "Here. Anko let me borrow it, I used some of the change, reckon you had enough it didn't matter."
Sasuke accepts it in silence, and Naruto half expects her to hand back the jumper Naruto left on her floor but she doesn't. Naruto prefers to believe she wants to keep it, so doesn't mention it.
They've migrated to a relatively secluded part of the schoolyard, close to where the teachers go to smoke pretending the students won't see them so they're not being bad role models, and Sasuke pulls a cigarette from her pocket, twirling it absently before plugging it abruptly into her mouth.
She says, "It was a stupid mistake. Okay? Okay."
"Stupid, maybe," Naruto says, moving up closer until she could take the other end of the unlit cigarette in her own mouth. "It wasn't a mistake."
"Yes," Sasuke starts. "It–"
"The hell it was," Naruto says, sure now because she has to be, because you don't doubt something you feel thrumming in every particle of your being, and presses closer still, one hand on Sasuke's waist, the other on her face; the wall against Sasuke's shoulder-blades, the cigarette falling away, their mouths…not quite colliding, but not exactly merging. Naruto's tongue slips over her lips, the thick damp curve of flesh lying taut over her teeth.
Sasuke's body is warm, pushed closer to her by the movement of its breathing. Her hands come up to Naruto's chest, curling around the fabric of her jacket before pushing her away.
She says something indistinct, still half caught between Naruto's lips and then stuffing another cigarette in her mouth, lighting it as Naruto makes herself comfortable on the tigh-high heap of leaves, says something that might be "fine" or "fair enough". Over the thick smell and murky frazzled sound of the leaves, Sasuke continues, "Uchihas don't make mistakes."
"I thought you thought your dad was basically the worst idiot ever."
The clouds are moving overhead, drizzling light like snowflakes. Sasuke's beautiful, Naruto's reminded. It's been easy to forget, how intimidatingly pretty she is, when you've grown more concerned with every shift of expression, the twists and bends of her features, so that the objective quality of them blends into the background.
At first she thought Sasuke was beautiful like art is beautiful, an unearthly and sort of irrelevant beauty. Then she awakened to the attraction, and forgot about pretty in favour of sexy; Sasuke didn't become sexy until she got ugly, but she's still sexy now, Naruto can't stop thinking about pulling her down into the leaves with her, and plunging her hands into all the secret depths, going treasure hunting under Sasuke's clothes.
"There's a difference between intentionally making what I consider bad decisions, being too stupid to realise they're fucking bad decisions, and making mistakes," Sasuke says, flicking ash from her cigarette. "If he didn't mean to fuck up it'd be mistakes, but the result is exactly what he envisioned. No, mistakes are for commoners."