Chapter Twenty Five
In the night, after traffic has eddied away, she gets up to turn off the lights and get them appropriately ridiculous midnight food – the weird tea she's no longer worrying about being able to replace, the disgusting wasabi/cherry nachos he likes, cold fish and Itachi's fried apples.
It's much better than in the hospital bed, light falling from the right direction, their smells on the sheets, more space that strictly speaking isn't needed since Kakashi doesn't kick or even much shift in his sleep. He's larger and a horrible pillow-hogger, but he's never been difficult to sleep with, is something steady and warm to curve around.
By morning he's rolled over onto his side; burrowing deeper into the bed to avoid the light, she's nestled in the crook of his body; wakes to a snort-laugh and a tap on her nose. It twitches, keeps twitching until she tries to roll away and almost falls off the bed, caught at the last moment by an arm around her chest and a foot against the floor and sliding back to Kakashi in the middle of the bed, awake now.
"That's cheating," she says, hears her voice come low and rusty with sleep.
"That's my favourite sport." His arm's still cradling her chest, wrist pressing against her breast, and the pulse in his thigh thuds against her hip. She shifts onto her back and opens her mouth for him, opens everything for him until they're having sex again. Missionary might be awkward since she's facing his chest, but the weight of him moving is grounding, is even better than the breathy childish gasp of her name.
"Off," she mutters sometime later, nudging his shoulder with her forehead. "Shower."
It's different with a man's body, taller and heavier, bigger bones and less flesh.
"Ah, but I like being covered in you." He says it with a grin, with the dorky not-quite-sarcasm that accompanies sappy clichés he really does sort of mean.
"You do your exercises, I'll draw a bath."
"Fine."
Personally she can't stand baths, the pruny skin soaked in dirty water, Itachi's blood splashed over the side and never quite forgotten, always still there in the corner of her eye, but Kakashi rather likes them and she doesn't want him standing on any slippery surfaces after the exertion.
They pass each other in the bathroom doorway with a peck, like a 50s couple, when she comes out from the shower and, also very 50s, goes to make breakfast.
If you can call it making breakfast, taking things from the cabinets and the refrigerator and putting them on the table, starting the plug-in kettle. She's only on her second cigarette when he returns, fresh and damp, in real clothes now, fingering a patch of scar-tissue. "It feels rather odd."
"Like asphalt made into fabric," she blurts, promptly giving the cigarette a betrayed look. She's a far too dedicated smoker for the nicotine to go to her head.
"Mmh." Even as he kisses her he's picking up a sketch, the latest, left just where he put in on the counter going on two years ago. "This isn't – I'll need to rework these proportions."
She's leaning closer again, in a sort of response, never having quite left the oblong of his arms, when her phone goes off.
I'll call.
Not surprisingly, Naruto has left just short of 8ooo messages. Four are from Temari, the latest of which saying, I spoke to your mum… Oh my god, Sasuke.
"So I reckon it's out now," she says. "I'll have to go to her."
"Of course."
It doesn't occur to her until afterwards that she never clarified, that by her she of course meant Naruto.
To her eternal humiliation, she, unlike Naruto herself, knows Naruto's timetable by heart; checks the time on her mobile and realises Naruto's classes will be over, will have been over for the last ten or fifteen minutes. Already her finger's pressing speed-dial nine when she catches sight of blond and orange, Naruto's body stretched between hair and shoes. There's only half a parking lot between them, six cars and endless puddles.
She catches up just a meter from the Uzumaki family vehicle, a monstrous red thing suggesting Naruto's dad isn't as far away as one might have hoped from his midlife crisis. He is also not as far away from here as one might have hoped, peeking out from the driver's seat. He must have come to pick up Naruto. Of course he has come to pick up Naruto.
"I'll be here," he says, and Naruto turns, confusion melting off her face, leaving it so open it feels raw.
"Sasuke!"
"Yeah. Hi."
Perhaps it's good after all that Mr Uzumaki is present, because when they've walked a few paces, as many, she thinks, as they could bear, she doesn't know what to say.
"You didn't call," Naruto says, then, fast, "Mum says you took him home."
"Yeah."
Home. They've called it Kakashi's place or the flat on Lilypad for the past year.
"So he's… he's okay?"
"Yeah," Sasuke says for the third time. "He's with Itachi and Anko."
If she gives Naruto a few seconds she'll say, Huh, isn't that kind of weird, her face scrunched-up but smiling, and they can be on top of the words, using them as a lifeboat to make it through the deluge.
Perhaps it's childish but Sasuke believes in the captain going down with their ship.
Also Naruto deserves better. She offered better than stupid words, she should get something real back.
Sasuke has to tell her, "I did sleep with him. I love him. I always will."
"What are you, are you breaking up with me, is this the break-up speech?"
Over Naruto's shoulder she sees her own reflection in a car window, white and stiff and pinched, so silent her quiet becomes a visible quality. Although she's not looking at her, she sees from the shift of tension in Naruto's arm when she realises Sasuke can't speak, can't break up with her.
"So you love him," she says instead, doing the Naruto version of inflectionless.
"Yes."
A fast word that could be but or and, followed by, "you love me."
She can't look at her own face any more, but staring at Naruto's was a mistake.
"Fine. Fine, yes, I fucking love you, how does that make anything better?"
She feels like she's been crying, hoarse and blotchy, scraped raw down to empty bone. Naruto's by her side instead of in front of her, close but oddly not too close, her grin a relieved, loving take on gallows' humour. "Shit just got real, huh."
Sasuke's laugh comes out a bubbly choking sound. "That's stupid, that doesn't even make any sense."
Shit has always been real.
Naruto shrugs; they are quiet together before Minato calls, "I'm really sorry, girls, but I've got to go. Are you about ready or should I pick you up later?"
"Ready," Sasuke says, to Naruto. "Just. I will call, but." She picks up her phone, starts texting. "It's the landline, don't use it, he doesn't need this now."
Even Naruto knows better than to ask, then why are you giving it to me. Just squeezes her hand before she goes to the car, from the window of which she keeps staring and waving and making weird faces that are likely intended to communicate something besides her being immature and sort of ugly.
In the flat, after Itachi and Anko have left, Kakashi is playing with a camera – "looking for evidence of lost time".
There isn't any, not caught on film or in the digital equivalent thereof. It's standing right in front of him.
"I talked to Naruto."
He puts the camera away. "Yes, you said."
"She's in love with me."
"So I gathered."
The cigarette breaks between her fingers. "It's not – I can't say it's unrequited."
"Yeah," he sighs. "I gathered."
"Pardon?"
"I knew," he says, sadly, gently, backlit in front of the window. "I do know you. I knew back in hospital, if you didn't love her you would've talked about her in the past tense."
"Oh." Honestly she can't remember what she said to apparently indicate her supposed love for Naruto.
He catches her face in his hands, clearly visible, his outline no longer fuzzied by light. "You know I love you."
"Obviously." It comes out surly, but it's absolutely true and he doesn't comment on her tone.
"Tell me about her," he says, sinking down into a chair. "About you. She knows about me, about us, yes?"
xxxxx
Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death.
That's what Sasuke gave him, when he asked for Naruto. Well, huh.
If Sasuke were to have a lady lover, he would have expected it to be – to be somebody fitting rather more a quote along the lines of, She walks in beauty like the night.
He's at home, alone, in his own flat, in daytime, in silence. Sasuke went to school, Itachi presumably is at uni; what Anko is up to, god only knows.
It's a relief, the sunlight thick as cream, melting into the room. He slept late – woke when Sasuke left but not for long, dreamt of screeching tires and screeching voices, rolled out of bed too fast and fell. Bambi on ice.
For a moment, long and slow as his movements now, he considers, then picks up his phone. He updated the contact list by copying relevant parts of Itachi's, and was unsurprised to find a Scarface listed among them.
"Hi?" Her voice is loud over the background crackle of wind. "Sasuke?"
"No," he says. "It's Kakashi."
"Huh – oh. Um, hi? Why are you, did something happen?"
"I'm bored all on my lonesome. We should do lunch."
"But isn't Sasuke?"
"School," he says. Either Naruto is an awesome liar, or Sasuke's learnt to keep things from him, or they've coincidentally not seen each other all day. Although to be fair it was to be expected that they wouldn't have a lot of classes in common. "Then she'll have to hash things out with Temari. So how about it, I'm sure we could both use the company."
"Okay."
"Excellent. I take it you know the way?"
"To Blue? Yeah."
"I meant to my place, actually. On Lilypad?"
"Your place," Naruto repeats. "Right. I thought, I thought you were staying with Sasuke. Like, with her family."
"Why would I do that?" He's genuinely puzzled – she didn't give a Family Values impression, and surely if she's… close… to Sasuke she will know to stay away from the Uchiha parents. "It'd be a waste of silver lining." He doesn't like his in-laws, but at least he has no close relatives of his own.
"Lilypad," Naruto says, decisively, with a sort of buzzing energy just short of pugnacious. "I'll be there."
He texts her the building's door code before snapping his phone shut and inspecting the cabinets. His cooking is boarding school cooking, orphan cooking, based on microwaves and creative use of spices and leftover takeout to hide the burnt or undercooked parts, but he's had years to perfect it.
Half an hour later, give or take, she's knocking. Or he's presuming they must be hers, the hard arhythmical bangs.
"Hi," she says, face flushed, her hands tugging at the straps of her backpack.
"Come in."
Shoulders squared, she closes the door behind her and wrestles out of her winter clothes, scoping out the room. She really hasn't been here before.
Back in the kitchen, spatula in hand because it always makes him feel like the parody of a star chef, he extends the customary drink offer and is declined, Naruto standing around uncertainly but her eyes hungry, watching everywhere.
"I hope you like imaginative cooking."
She visibly breaks away from the wall she was staring at – from his grey phase, rather endearingly depressing in retrospect. "Trust me, if Sasuke can eat it, I won't balk."
"Hmm, I didn't picture you as a spiced bread girl."
The answering grin is dog-like; friendly, but baring all her teeth, her face with the scars on it scrunching up in origami folds. She scratches at them, or at her cheek in general, it's hard to see the difference. "I'm really not a picky eater."
No, she wouldn't be, so comfortably and empathically embodied. He's far reedier himself, starved down to Sasuke's proportions during the brutally extended sleep.
"We could be a support group for people with facial scaring."
"I guess, yeah." Her hand pauses, falls, her head tilting a little. "Do they itch? Mine did like crazy in the beginning, but I guess, I mean, I guess yours aren't technically new."
"No. I don't feel them unless I," he leans forward to adjust the stove settings. "Unless they're touched."
"Should I do something? Lay the table or, you know, whatever?"
"Please. I'm about done, here."
He watches her hunt down plates and glasses, the only difference is he's more discreet about the scrutiny.
"I admit I'm jealous. Yours look quite a bit more deliberate," he remarks. His are just a collage of skin tones, thrown together at random.
"They are." Looking up from setting the table, she meets his eye head on. "Deliberate, I mean."
He's expected to say, I'm sorry. Failing that, he's expected to say, You probably got what was coming to you.
"They're quite flattering. Milk?"
"Um, yeah. Thanks." She holds out her glass. "Milk is awesome."
"It is indeed." There could be, now – there is the opportunity for a conspiratorial smile, because they will both know Sasuke despises it, but. No, he couldn't do that.
"So, like, how are you feeling?" she asks, stuffing her face. "Hey, this is good stuff!"
"Smashing. You?"
"Weird," she admits, and launches into a tale of school and crazy rumours and Kiba and Gaara and people going mad, and… and the central part, the one they're not speaking of.
"Gaara's the Sabaku bastard, Kiba's…?"
"He's not a bastard! I mean, or, yeah, he is, but he's not. He's totally cool now! Like, I heard he was sort of bad before, when you were around I guess, but he's way better now."
"I was referring to his parentage."
"I knew that." But her pugnacious face is dissolved by a rueful grin. "Kiba's in our class too. And also awesome."
"I'm not familiar with that name, I'm afraid."
"Right. Well, you might know him as Bitch Boy. Or Bestiality Boy, depending on how much he's annoyed her."
"That does sound more familiar, yes."
The smile seems to catch her unawares, broader and softer, more personal, than any she's shown him before. She tilts her face sideways, possibly to secret it away, her eyes catching on something and the smile shifting, twisting into a more… sardonic is the wrong word, it doesn't fit her, but it's the closest descriptor.
"Dude, seriously, Leo DiCaprio much?"
He follows her gaze to a full-body picture of Sasuke, roughly half of it painted, her legs still only present as an outline – they'd been doing people in one of his few good art classes, and for all her whining Sasuke makes a very good model, beautiful and familiar and content to sit still for hours with a book or computer.
"Says the love poet. Anyway, aren't you too young for Titanic references?"
"Dad loves it," she says, offhand, but her face, her entire body, has gone defensive around the hurt. "She said that? About the poetry?"
"Itachi did."
And it would have been easy to say, yes.
It would be even easier to maintain he told her the truth because he wanted to take the moral high ground, because it's right. Really it was because Sasuke would have found out if he'd lied.
"Oh. Right. Good." It would be false to call that new smile private, since it's clearly intended for somebody, but it's extremely exclusive. "Why did you ask me here?"
"I was curious," he says, which is the truth if not the whole truth. "You're obviously important to Sasuke. I'm …glad you were there for her."
She's kind of cute when she looks up, too wary for a smile but glowing.
"Aren't you jealous?" she blurts. "Because I am. I mean, not that I think… Whatever."
"Yes," he says. "Maddeningly."
"Cool. Or not, but you know what I mean." She takes a hearty bite of her sandwich, slurping milk and soup. "What?"
He shrugs. "I like your hands."
"Really?" The plainness of her disbelief is comic, her left hand held up between them to be scrutinised.
"Sure. They're interesting." Her eyebrows venture if possible even higher. "Look, it's – take Sasuke's hands. Now obviously I like them because they're hers, and they're aesthetically pleasing, but they're not aesthetically interesting. They're classic, symmetrical – predictable. Yours bring something original."
Love and war notwithstanding, it is not fair doing this to her. It is not fair at all.
Fair is for losers.
She's still goggling at him when the lock rattles, when Sasuke's steps enter the hallway, pause, and then tap quickly and decisively into the kitchen.
"What the hell?"
The talk with Temari must have gone at least relatively well, because she tensed when she saw him and Naruto, was rather soft before that, in one of the comfortable jumpers she wouldn't have worn two years ago.
"Hi," says Naruto. If she was glowing before, for a moment, she's positively shining now. Walking in, Sasuke might as well have said, let there be light.
"Have a seat," he says, gesturing towards the empty place between him and Naruto. There is a dining room but they rarely use it, having long since brought an extra chair to complement the two that came with the miniscule kitchen table snuggled up against the counter.
"Fine." Slipping onto the chair, she's glowing too despite her surliness, at Naruto but at him too, still looking at him like at a miracle. It might've been the Lazarus stunt, if it weren't the same look she's been giving him since she was ten, the same one she offers, grudgingly, to Naruto. She picks up one of the spice-fried breadsticks, biting into it even as she fiddles for a cigarette with her free hand. "I need a drink. Not milk."
Turning in the chair to open the refrigerator, he finds Itachi and Anko have polished off the wine as well as the juice but left half a bottle of champagne.
Sasuke drinks it from a water glass, Naruto declining, Kakashi tempted but advised by Genma not to indulge. He'll save that for the nightcaps which may be necessitated by nightmares or loneliness, if Sasuke leaves.
"So what were you talking about?" It's more of a demand than a polite inquiry.
"Art," Kakashi says, which Sasuke seems to find about as believable as Naruto did his compliments.
"So, being back in school," Naruto interjects. "Weird, huh?"
Sasuke says, "Yes. Yes, I suppose. Are you going back to university?"
"I haven't decided. Sooner or later, I assume. I'll have to call them."
"Yeah, that must suck," Naruto says. "I mean, like, you dropped out in the middle of the semester, right? I hate having to catch up."
"We'd hardly got started." He leans back a little in the chair, wishing it were padded where it cuts into his spine. "Done a lot of dropping out, then, have you?"
"No, well, not really. Sort of."
"That's enough," Sasuke snaps, dropping her cigarette butt and bread crust in the half-finished soup.
"All right." He glances at the clock. "If you'll excuse me, the meds are beckoning."
Out of the room he hears running water, clinks of porcelain and muted voices.
He takes his time in the bathroom, movements slow and deliberate rather than slow and pained, which would be quicker if more demeaning. Two pills to be taken after food, calcium mostly and vitamins. The muscle ointments are left for the night.
The kitchen tap has been turned off. Naruto must have prepped the dishwasher, because the dishes have disappeared and her hands are wet where they circle Sasuke's hips. They're standing so close together the scene would have qualified as intimate even if they hadn't been too focused on each other to notice him. Naruto mumbles something, something tense and sort of grumbly, and then they're kissing, Sasuke's mouth sliding open easily, naturally.
She tilts her head more, doesn't have to reach as high, but she kisses Naruto like she kisses him.
Like somebody she loves.
Naruto says, "We have got to sort this out."
"Yes," he says, and then Sasuke's standing between them, Naruto's fingers still curling around her hips, his hand cupping the back of her neck.
A swallow moves Naruto's throat. "I mean," she says. "We're," grip hardening, she tugs a little at Sasuke, "but," and she nods, in the wrong direction but her point still stands, "that's the room. The room where you sleep together."
"Yes," Kakashi says again, oddly helplessly.
"Yes," Sasuke echoes. She probably wants to move but any movement would bring her closer to one of them, further from the other.
Despite the clock above the oven he's not sure how long they stand before his leg starts cramping. "I'm going to have to sit down."
Sasuke follows him, her front brushing Naruto's as she turns to come with him to the closest chair.
"I guess I should go," Naruto says. It's true, the feel, the tension, has shifted completely. She adds, "Thanks for inviting me," with the careful forethought of one who has to consciously remember to say these phrases.
Sasuke remains silent and stark while he goes through the exercises, bathes, rubs ointment into the areas he can comfortably reach until his fingers shake with exhausted pain, her back turned as she bends over a mountain of homework he knows for a fact she could copy from Neji.
"Everything went well?" he inquires at last, in the bedroom. "At school?"
"Yes." Her gaze lands on the ointment tube on the nightstand. "Should I…?"
"You really don't have to."
At that she gets up on the bed, sitting with her legs tucked neatly under her in what he did not use to find a painful position. "I can't break up with her," she says, her tone going brittle towards the end. "I can't."
But their knees are touching, there is the tangible understanding, I could never leave you, I cannot even speak the words, I could never.
"I can't," she says. "I don't know what, I can't, I can't."
"It's funny," he says, catching her body in his arms, her short sharp breaths against his shoulder, "I like Naruto. I hate her, of course, but I really like her."
She laughs, rusty and thick, roused enough to arrange for him to lay down in what Genma would consider an advisable position, she herself pressed close and incidentally supporting his arm.
In the darkness he says, "I always thought time machines would be cool."
"Yeah." She says it sadly, her chest moving evenly now.
Instead he's just a little out of synch with reality, with everybody in it. Potentially it's a fascinating perspective; the actuality is bleak, is terrifying.
Her heart's beating just above his and it's bloody well staying there, but she was glowing for Naruto, who smiled at them, glowing too and then sparkling.
Perhaps there is only one solution.
Of course, perhaps there is no solution.
xxxxx
"Honey?"
Her throat's too thick for her to answer, so she stands in silence except for the crinkling newspaper under her boots, looking anywhere but at Mum watching her unwind the Palestine scarf she's not allowed to wear at Sasuke's house but which is apparently kosher with Kakashi.
"Honey, what's going on?"
"I don't know."
And she loves adventures and surprises but she feels like crying with how much she doesn't know.
"Oh, Naruto." She leans into Mum's arm around her shoulders, letting herself be ushered into the living room and sat down on the sofa. "You talked to her today, right? You said somebody'd called."
"I, yeah, but that was, that was Kakashi."
Mum's eyebrows creep up her forehead, in tandem and a reddish brown, so that they really shouldn't remind her of Sasuke. "What did he want? Trying to warn you off?"
She half laughs, swallows it before it turns into anything else. "No. No, he was nice. He's pretty cool. I guess he wanted to talk because he knows I'm, like, important to Sasuke."
"And what did you talk about?"
"Stuff." She shrugs, caught again in the memory, in the flat Sasuke's never mentioned although it's clearly more her home than the beach house has ever been.
In fits and starts, little bursts of sickness, she's imagined their morning after, following one of those romance fantasy nights, all earnest talk and cuddling and lots of sex, a whole night and morning being one big I love you.
Realistically Kakashi doesn't currently have the stamina for that, and Sasuke gets very cranky on less than ten hours of sleep, but all the same she couldn't stop herself and couldn't stop being cold and desperate and disgusted at the thought.
Then there was the flat, with Kakashi in it and then Sasuke, was reality. There's lots of Sasuke's things in Naruto's bedroom, books and clothes and toiletries – anyone walking in could see she's a frequent presence. That's not at all the same as the Lilypad Drive flat, where every room was full of her, her natural backdrop, her home. Maybe Itachi's too, although Naruto's significantly less good at spotting his traces.
Certainly it was big enough for all three of them.
She pulls her legs up closer to her body, fiddling with a hole in her sock, where her toe nail has cut through it. They really need to get a new pair of nail scissors, one she doesn't dread using.
There was the weirdness of being back in school, after a weekend that might as well have taken place in a different universe, Kiba and Chouji coming through muffled, as though through a plate glass window, then suddenly too loudly; of knowing Sasuke was supposedly present on school grounds as well but not seeing her; and then the phone call, Kakashi's voice suddenly close in her ear.
How at home Sasuke was at Lilypad, how at home she was with him.
How it was everything Naruto doesn't get, fails at, fights about – the right look, the right food, the right manners, right clothes, accent, decorations.
Naruto's always been closer to the toad-shaped version of Prince Charming.
Mum strokes her forehead. "Did you get anywhere?"
"Maybe."
"It's, I'm sorry, it's a really difficult situation."
"No shit. Look, I'm just gonna go for a bit." Just going to run from everything until she finds what she should be running towards.