Author's Notes: Thank you Thatdragonrider, xxAkaAmexx, anon, pennypigeon, Fennekin, WolfSoulProduction, Frozen Skies, WinterPrayerOfTheMoons, keltieful, sensoray, sasufan, IWishIWasACheescake, Nashi-ossu, isis-yolly, Jennagle, lunnalovve, SoulSpirtHeart, Flamma del Cielo, Ello, GiveXYouXHell, Guest, CanineKitten, lom1234iu0, Legend of the Blue Eyes, Chileman66, ninaalmeida, peninekiss, magost, Isa, Vobi, and BettyeK for reading and reviewing. Without your support and encouragement, I wouldn't be motivated to keep writing.
Warnings: Nothing you don't already know by now. Unbeta'd.
Not
By LilPurplFlwr
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
He frantically righted the coffee cup on his desk and watched in abject horror as the chocolate brown substance formed small irregular lakes on his comforter and jeans and oh god, this was his only unstained white shirt—
"No, no, no," he whispered with a hint of hysteria as he wildly surveyed his surroundings for napkins. Or an inhaler. Or both.
"Naruto," came the disembodied voice somewhere above him, "did you hea—"r me? His roommate seemed to catch himself and rephrased carefully, "Naruto, you're," freaking out? Was it that obvious? He wiped down the splattered droplets and wondered how long he could milk this minor disaster than contend with the one standing in front of him. "Are you," Sasuke paused to search for a placating term, "all right?"
"Where's the detergent?" he asked in an oddly-pitched tone, trying his damnedest to regain a sense of normalcy because his head was buzzing with panic and disbelief and dread, and this catastrophe in his lap was the only thing holding the thin strands of his sanity together because there was no way in the darkest recesses of hell that he heard the other correctly just a moment ago.
"Under the sink," where it always is, his roommate replied without missing a beat. "Do you need help?"
Yes, he thought to himself in nightmarish haze, of the professional variety, please. Where was the clozapine black market when he needed it? He gave no verbal retort and instead just removed himself from the gradually absorbed mess on which he sat and went for the bathroom sink. His awareness of the other's trailing presence behind him was unshakable. Yet, when he risked a peek upon ducking to retrieve the formula boasting housekeeping acclaim, his roommate was nowhere to be seen.
Detergent in hand, he stepped out to robotically head for the laundry room and bumped straight into Sasuke, arms full of his blankets and sheets.
"It's okay, I can do it," he blurted out in a rush, reaching for his intimates. He would challenge anyone who claimed not to be extremely intimate with their bed. The heat rising to his face was going to melt what was left of his remaining brain cells. "Stop!" That squeak came out with a wave of desperation and underwhelmed embarrassment.
With an impassive nudge of rejection, Sasuke thwarted the impending tug-of-war. "Come on," his roommate said whilst gracefully elbowing open the door of their room with some ninja-like versatility. "Let's go."
Because the laundry room is as good as any for this discussion. Swallowing around this bitter truth, he reined in the urge to pull the passing fire alarm as he mechanically followed the other down the hall like a convicted man.
By the time they had scoped out an empty washing machine, he was genuinely surprised that it kind of felt like a typical day. Just another day with that incessant gnawing in his gut that boded an upcoming exam or caffeine withdrawal. Granted, he had suffered at least five minutes of teeth grinding and muscle spasms on the way here but even his magnificent self couldn't withstand another second of such high blood pressure. Hello, constipation, old friend. (He'd say shit, but that would be so ingenuously ironic that it would be mistaken as immaturity.)
His roommate was staring at him.
Shit.
"Uh," he stuttered and averted his gaze first. In doing so, he came upon the splotch of coffee on his not-so-pristine shirt. Oh. This shirt should really get washed. ASAP. He hesitated. He wasn't known to be self-conscious of his body, but he'd been swimming in an ocean of doubt and vulnerability long enough to not want to take his shirt off in front of this guy.
As if demonstrating exactly how broken an emotional sensor could be, the fucker (why, yes, he had regressed to perfunctory insults of generic nomenclature) suggested superfluously, "You should wash that."
"I know that!" he immediately snapped in return.
Scowling, he hunched forward and reached back toward his shoulder blades to pull his shirt over his head. He balled up the white fabric and easily tossed the bundle on top of his sheets. As his roommate pivoted back to the machine to add the appropriate amount of detergent or punch buttons or whatnot, he glimpsed a brief hallucination of the other's ghost of a smile. Was the guy laughing at him? At his misery and utmost humiliation?
"So this was all a ploy to get me shirtless?" he blurted out, wondering if the cliché joke was enough to mask the acerbity he felt.
"I don't usually need a ploy," Sasuke responded after firmly closing the washer door to start the cleaning cycle.
For a scary moment, his brain registered this as flirting. But they didn't flirt. He wasn't even sure the other knew any social cues, so let's be real. Knowing this guy's method of sentence formulation, his roommate was simply implying he was frequently half-naked.
Which, of course, was true enough (relatively speaking). Hooray for sequential logic and not failing his high school math teachers.
"But I'll take it."
"Ow, fuck—what?" he exclaimed abruptly as he accidently closed a neglected dryer's door on his own fingers at the other's unexpected add-on.
"We should date," and with that statement, he knew how Bambi felt before an oncoming vehicle, "because I like you." That seemed to be tacked on for his open-mouthed benefit. God damn it. He should have joined his piscine brethren when he had the first chance.
Bruised fingers unsteadily stretching and contracting to rid the vague pain, he tried to jump-start his vocal chords for some sort of happy-ending response.
But all he could think was, this isn't happening, he's lying, he doesn't know what he's saying, he must be lying, I don't believe this, and he almost mumbled aloud I don't believe this but the déjà vu and residual hurt smacked him square in the jaw and he knew someone had to break this dysfunctional cycle so he scraped for the last dredges of courage (supported by just enough stubbornness) and said, "I can't be half-naked for this conversation."
As he pulled his favorite orange t-shirt over his head, he was not ashamed to admit that he hoped it would act like a good-luck charm. If not, maybe the obnoxious color would melt the Wicked Wizard of the West into a puddle as he made a swift getaway. Maybe the spiral design could hypnotize and stun the other long enough—
"Naruto."
Startled out of his reverie, he ran a hand through his hair in a futile attempt to stop the tremors that were creeping into his system. No. Stop. He could do this. He was a smart guy. He could ford this river, commandeer this ship, and—
"Hey," his roommate interrupted again, now close enough to bear witness to the unorganized dresser of clothes before him.
-stop making motivational metaphors. Yes. Okay. He was doing this.
He whirled around to face Sasuke, who took a disconcerted step back at their sudden eye contact. Hah, take that. "Let's pretend I believe you."
"Wha—" The space between those aristocratic brows furrowed.
He resisted the urge to fold beneath the likelihood of this discussion going awry. Again.
"Because I don't," he hurried to insert as an axiom to his theorem introduction. "But let's say I do. Believe you, I mean. That you like me." Boy, he was off to a roaring start, what with all his mental rambling coming out as disjointed ideas. "Too. Like me, too," he added, suddenly remembering that tiny detail.
"Okay," Sasuke agreed with a quiet amiability that discomforted him way more than any sort of repressed emotion. "So we date," the other concluded unabashedly and he grudgingly admired how undeterred his roommate was on this notion, "or whatever the term is." The flicker of uncertainty disappeared as soon as it appeared, like Sasuke had already grown accustomed to the inability to distinguish between semantics.
There was something incredibly off-putting about standing in his shared bedroom with this guy exchanging sparse dialogue about dating each other. This was about as surreal as life was going to get, he supposed. "And if we do…" It was meant to sound like an open-ended question, but his sentence trailed off. The concept of some variation of their relationship that wasn't something they already had… wasn't exactly panning out clearly in his head.
"Then," his roommate began with a faintly baffled expression.
"Then?" he echoed with matching perplexity.
He watched with mutually burgeoning horror that the other had not thought far enough into this hypothetical to clarify exactly what dating looked like between the two of them.
"Then," Sasuke echoed, "don't we go back to normal?" His roommate looked paler than usual. It was the look of a straight-A student not knowing the correct answer for the first time in his or her life.
Any remaining energy drained straight out from him like someone had yanked out the basin plug. "Really?" That sounded too trivial and, strangely enough, impossible at the same time. "Wouldn't that mean we were dating before?" He was pretty sure they weren't anything before all this.
"It's different," Sasuke answered, attempting to inject some confidence into such a simple sentence, but he found dark eyes searching his for the right thing to say.
"Different," he repeated dubiously. "Normal, but different?" He hoped to high heaven he wasn't the only one who found these parameters counterintuitive.
"Right."
He suddenly had a clammy epiphany that they might not be anything after this.
He finished that term paper, by the way, if anyone cared enough to ask. He knocked it out just after he devoured the croissant, not because he was ravenous but because he was confused and frustrated and altogether unsatisfied.
If Sasuke noticed his these-are-my-current-feelings-for-you chomping after their faux resolution, the guy didn't say a word.
It was only after final exams that he realized maybe they should have somehow sealed this indescribable pact with something other than fading words. Like a contract. Yeah.
Where was his happy ending? Where were the cherry blossoms blowing in the wind? The slow-motion runs through fields? The splashing and castle-building at the beach? He was planning on adopting children, damn it! At least two, at most three—
Wait.
His racecar on his handheld console crashed in a tiny pixelated explosion and he knew his mind had run off without him again. He needed to calm down and not think about the golden retriever he was going to rescue, his 2.5 children, modest house, and white picket fence. All which, of course, had nothing to do with his supposed romantic affair with his roommate.
Hah. 'Affair' implied they did things. Illicit things.
He missed these nonexistent illicit things.
He was also hungry. It was 7:53 PM and Sasuke was due back from a final around this time. Reaching for his phone, he studied the other's contact information, contemplating whether to text or not. There was no harm in doing so, but needy wasn't a quality he—
Fuck it.
'I'm hungry.' He sent the succinct message and waited for a response. He picked up his video game and started anew. After a few seconds, he frowned and set the console down again.
'Hurry up!' He typed to accompany his lonely first text and glared at his phone like he could will Sasuke to reply.
Well, damn. If he was going to demand something, he might as well do it properly. He began to shoot off a myriad of messages:
'You're holding out on me.
'Cheating bastard.
'You better not be eating without me.
'How was your final?
'I don't really care.
'I was being polite.
'Are you back yet?
'Hey, roommate whom I am dating'
He didn't get a chance to finish his sentence because those infamous ellipses appeared from the opposite side of the text window, indicating the other party was typing. The symbol then disappeared. WHAT. He studied his screen and questioned his visual acuity. He counted slowly to ten. Then twenty. Then thirty-eight seconds before his fingers flew across the capacitive touchscreen:
'EXCUSE YOU.
'How dare you ignore me.
'I'm the greatest good you are EVER gonna get!'
Snickering to himself, he was about to delve into an assortment of quotable goodness when his ears picked up the unlocking of the door. An unreadable roommate entered a moment later.
"He-e-e-ey," he greeted, drawing out the syllable, and debated the advantages between acting like the guilty child caught in the cookie jar or the gloating child already full of cookies. "How was that final?" he asked with a winning smile like nothing was wrong.
"You're so polite," Sasuke deadpanned in response, scrolling through the long list of texts. "Bored much?"
"Work on your reading comprehension, man." He swung his legs off the side of his bed to stand and grabbed his meal card. "I said I was hungry about ten billion times."
"Once," the other corrected.
"Whatever," he said, brushing past his roommate so he could be out of the door first. He at least had his priorities straight.
Body blocking the door from swinging shut behind them, Sasuke grabbed his wrist. Freezing in place, he hesitantly glanced back. Expression serious, Sasuke stated evenly, "I won't ignore you."
It resonated like some eternal vow, and he felt faint. Maybe because his heart was pounding itself out of his chest and his blood was rushing through his ears.
"Whoa, look—" He gave a nervous laugh, because what was happening? He took half a step toward the elevators. "I'm kidding. You know me, I was—"
A firm tug pulled him back through the doorway, leaving the hallway empty. "Kidding?" Sasuke filled in, studying him, eyes trailing down from his eyes and then back up. He could feel the other's body heat radiating across the small distance between them. "Like usual?"
"Like normal," he rephrased. Not different. Never different. "Right? It works."
"Normal, but different," Sasuke reminded with such a small smile, he would have missed it if he hadn't been staring at the other's mouth. "I'm going to kiss you."
-tbc-
A/N: Reviews always very appreciated. :)