Chapter Twenty Eight
The sand is cold and gold and gritty under her feet, sparse between the stones. She wonders if it's the same sensation as that first night Naruto kissed her, can't remember past the alcohol and distance.
"You look freezing," says Naruto, who's kicked off her shoes and socks as well, and hiked up her jeans to wade in the shallows.
"I'm not." It's warm, for April, and Sasuke's used to being cold. Bad blood circulation, her feet and fingers going white and nerveless in winter. "It's a beach tradition."
It is, too. She can do without Christmas trees and birthday cake, the stale staging of holidays, but spring means bare feet on the beach.
It's more comfortable then getting sand in one's shoes, too.
"It was okay," Naruto says, making a sand castle with her feet, demolishes it, rebuilds. "They kind of liked him. Mostly." She bites her lip, smiles, a wedge of blood stretched over her mouth before she wipes it off. "I guess your parents love him."
Sasuke shrugs, brushing off a boulder and sitting down. Her legs are still too fucking short to reach the ground. "Mum likes that Dad approves of him." The stone is cold and very old. It lay under the ice, probably, when it covered the land. After a while she adds, "Really I suppose she likes you better."
Naruto's head snaps up. "Really?"
Sasuke's left shoulder juts up in a shrug. There are gulls circling overhead, screaming. "You're nice to her."
"Well, duh."
"I'm not," Sasuke says. Reminds her, really, it's not as though Naruto hasn't been there, enough times by now even if not during the worst of it. "Nor is he, really."
"But she's your mum."
"I told you the first time we spoke," Sasuke says. "Not everyone believes in forgiveness."
"That wasn't the first time. The first time was, we were outside Tsunade's office, you said you prefer archetype. Over stereotype."
"Oh. Right. It doesn't change that forgiveness if the last recourse of those too weak for vengeance."
"It takes a lot of strength to forgive people."
"Not really. What it takes is a lot of is stupidity." She tilts her head against the wind. "Tell me, if somebody hurt you, or hurt somebody you loved, would you forgive or forget? If they weren't punished, would that be justice? You'd just let them go?"
"No." The word is hard and aches like a pebble stuck in your shoe. It gives her a certain vicious satisfaction, which is the best kind.
"Exactly." She rolls her head back, staring up into the sky, until Naruto palms the back of her head and pulls her back down.
"Forgiveness is good," she insists. "It's just not really the same as justice."
"I'm not very interested in justice," Sasuke admits, slipping her arms under Naruto's shirt. For warmth.
Naruto grins at her, nuzzling. "I'm freezing my arse off."
"Idiot."
"Shut up."
Shoes are picked up, steps retraced, across the sand and gravel and finally tarmac, until the feet are mostly dry.
The beach house is quiet, all soft filtered light. It's always felt faintly fake, although Itachi likes it so much.
She hangs up her jacket, Naruto's dropping to the floor, Naruto cursing and laughing and ruddy-cheeked next to her. Sasuke hasn't slept with her in what feels like forever. The thought surprises her.
"Here," she says, touching a clothes hanger.
Naruto reaches for it and grabs her arm instead, grabbing it so Sasuke can feel the bones of her fingers. It's nice.
"Mmh," says Naruto, her chin finding the hollow of Sasuke's shoulder.
"No," says Sasuke. "Yes."
They do it right there in the hallway, the door closed but unlocked. The floor is scratchy, she realises for the first time, it's always felt smooth under the soles of her feet, under the sand dragged in by the feet.
Standing, stretching, Naruto is unselfconsciously naked in the light that makes her look like a panting, all thick oily colours and textures you want to touch with your eye.
Sasuke pulls on the closest jumper, which hits her at mid-thigh, and lights a cigarette.
"Would you have sex with him on the floor?"
It's asked mostly with curiosity, the competitive edge blunted.
"Certainly not. There's no telling how he might injure himself."
She collects her wayward legs, pulls them up to her body until she can rest her chin between her knees. Naruto sighs and plops down beside her, tugging a shirt closer with her toes.
"We should go upstairs."
"Sure," says Naruto. They leave the clothes behind.
It's still not really her room, in still not really her house. It's Itachi's house, Itachi's dream, coloured everywhere by what he wants to be. Sasuke's never been comfortable with that, prefers them to live in what they are, but it's easier today, cleaner somehow, now that everything has gone so dark and twisted. Shades of light, impersonal air, nothing consecrated.
This is the bed where she first slept with Naruto, but it doesn't feel like it. Doesn't feel like her bed, although it's welcoming enough, like in a hotel. She's never properly appreciated hotels before.
Naruto wears a shirt that she probably thinks used to be Itachi's.
The window's tinted open, just enough for the air to smell like sea; like water, salty moving water. The bed doesn't dip under her as she sits, gingerly, lightly. It does dip under Naruto, who rolls across it like a seal, the shirt flapping up above her waist.
"You're ridiculous."
Naruto snorts and sticks out her tongue. "You know you love me."
The problem is that Sasuke does.
"So if, you know, with the whole magic ninja thing – I think I've found the secret super technique."
Naruto fucking tickles her.
Red-faced, breathless, the tale is eventually continued. It's about ninja, and forgotten homework, and stupid parents, and dangerous missions, and did I leave my other jacket at your place? Sasuke even remembers to ask about that annoying brat she used to protect, where has he gone?
"I told him he was a coward," Naruto says, the skin of her fingers hot and rough up Sasuke's leg. "I let him take me on this, on this date, but then I had to tell him he's a coward."
"Oh," says Sasuke, which feels reasonable enough at the time.
"I just," Naruto says, eventually, looking up from where she was biting Sasuke's shoulder, her fingers tight over the scar. "I feel like a coward."
Later she's sitting on another bed that isn't hers, that has been theirs for years and was his before that, tied down and reassured by all her things, memory stored in material, the furniture and books and clothes and wallpapers. The Hatake diamonds circling her thumb glimmer softly in the flame of her lighter.
Kakashi's fingers too spill over her shoulder. Unlike Naruto he doesn't leave marks, so none of the bruises, none of the sore sweet little swellings he's touching, will be his.
He's the one she's coming home to. Stay classy, don't be ostentatious.
Unlike Naruto he would think before biting down.
"So what did you two do?"
"Stuff," she says, turning her face away, giving his hand full access to neck and shoulder and breast.
"I like stuff," he agrees, and it's a while before he says, "So what did you talk about?"
"Ask her," Sasuke says, sighs. "I'm not telling you."
"I don't like that."
"Take that up with her."
xxxxx
Talk to her, says Sasuke, which may actually be fair, though it doesn't feel it. He's not sure what he'd say, but he might want to talk to her, Naruto with the big smile and the hovering hands, nasty scars and sunshine hair.
His legs are mostly all right by now, like he's had a long-draw flu. They carry him down and out, into the early May warmth. Sannin Academy isn't far, eighteen minutes on the bus. He passes the bus stop, signals for a taxi.
They were on a bus that day, a year ago, two, when the world crashed to a stop. It's moving slowly still, every step gingerly, necessary.
The school buildings are bathed in spring light, made softer by it, careworn. The kids are smaller than they used to be, younger. Loud, loud voices, loud colours on their clothes. An impressionist scene in neon Technicolor.
Sasuke's classes will be over soon, Naruto's too – he found the greasy folded print-out, with the little teacher caricatures in the margins. He puts his hand in his pocket, takes it back out with an old packet of cigarettes and a lighter. They're Sasuke's cigarettes, not the brand he would have bought for himself, but then he doesn't smoke enough to buy his own.
He fiddles with it for a moment, catching it between his fingers. It's good to be well enough for vices.
There they are. In the cluster of students emerging from the buildings, he spots them, leaving together, with Shikamaru. Naruto is either insecure enough or secure enough to respect Sasuke's ridiculous rules about no hand-holding in public.
Shikamaru sees him first, veers off sharply around the corner of Ross Hall. Naruto visibly discovers him next; Sasuke's eye lashes are down, it's unclear whether she's noticed him.
"What are you doing here?" Naruto demands. "School is my time! Are you – are you okay?"
Worry tinges her mouth, but underneath there's desperation. It's true, Sasuke goes home to him, goes to bed with him, eats or doesn't eat breakfast with him. Naruto's are the days, the school hours and the early afternoon.
It was never formally agreed. It was perhaps better that way, simpler; he knew it, he assumed she knew it, would have had to infer it.
"Went for a walk," he says, finally lightening the cigarette. Sasuke takes it from his mouth, gets in one good drag before Naruto steals it, drops it, stomps it out. He adds, "I thought I'd run into you."
They look up in perfect sync, identical question of very different faces, three eyebrows climbing foreheads.
"Okay. Let's go."
Sasuke walks fast, always has, walks faster than Naruto even though Naruto's legs are easily a decimetre longer. Four streetlights later the pavement isn't broad enough to accommodate three people, and Sasuke falls back into step with him, Naruto awkward and alone just in front. He would, he might have felt bereft if he'd been alone behind them, but he can't – it's the condescension, he's not glad his girlfriend chooses to walk beside him because she still fears he'll fall.
It's Naruto who stops them, tension erupting through her back until it stops Sasuke short. He'd thought it'd be more of a relief.
"I want to know you," he says.
Naruto stares at him with something like disbelief, with something like hope.
"All right."
When eventually she offers her hand he must take it. Her eyes are wet, no leakage.
"You're crazy," says Sasuke, very calmly.
"You love it," he choruses with Naruto, for the look on Sasuke's face, the look he's been watching out for, to tell him if this can be right. It comes.
She nicks a cigarette from the package she left in his pocket more than a year ago, smokes it fast and with relish.
"Is Itachi good?" Naruto asks. They take a left turn, to where there's room for three under the trees. He's okay with trees. Never been one for communing with nature, but trees are nice. She rubs the back of her head. "Haven't seen him in a while."
"He's fine," they say. This time the chorus isn't intentional, although it's not unexpected. He adds, "Anko's been good for him." Sasuke adds, "His thesis is coming along."
"Good," says Naruto. "That's good. He said I could read it." She scuffs the toes of her orange converse against the ground, stirring dust.
"He did?"
"Yeah," says Sasuke. "I remember. Although to be fair I'm not sure Interrelations between Moral and Narrative Collapses in Gossip Girl is quite up your alley."
"My alley's wide," Naruto says. "There's room for all kinds of stuff." There's a pause before she wets her lips and adds, "I really just said that, didn't I?"
He nods, closing his lips around a laugh. Sasuke smirks around her second cigarette.
"Never has that quote been more appropriate."
This seems to make her happy. He's made her – a little happy.
"You recognise it? Clearly someone understands the full awesomeness of Buffy."
"We already did Trashy Telly Night," Sasuke reminds her.
"Well obviously we didn't do enough of it! You should be ashamed of yourself."
"Season six always rang the most true to me," Kakashi muses.
"Yes!"
Finally even Sasuke yields a grumpy, "Fine, yes, it was clearly superior in every way."
"Another thing to know about me," Naruto says. "I like rubbish food. Often. Come on, you can buy me a hotdog."
There's a vendor close by, whose wares must have roused her appetite. Sasuke's busy stubbing out her cigarette; he finds some change in his pocket, forks it over.
"Hey, thanks. And they say chivalry is dead." At least that's the quip he thinks she's trying for, around the sausage in her mouth. "Want some?"
"Nah," he says.
Naruto transfers her intensely blue gaze from him to Sasuke, who eventually breaks with ill grace, dropping the cigarette butt and taking a tentative bite.
"Fine," she says, and then, "It's vile." She chews it though and she swallows.
Naruto laughs, a loud gleeful, joyful sound. It's how a grin would sound, if it were laughed, a shit-eating grin. "You almost done with the PT?"
"Yeah," he says. "Getting there."
He's going to start painting again. Has been sketching, some, still-lifes, Sasuke's feet and ears, the little quirk of her eyebrow and her mouth, the quirk of her little fingers when she raises a glass or a cigarette. He might go back to school next semester, after he's seen how the summer treats his fingers, his eye.
Sasuke wipes her mouth with her sleeve, the way she wipes her nose during winter, the way that drove Mikoto to tears six years ago. It's an old feeling, to have so many years to look back to, so many unlived days on his record. He doesn't quite feel twenty, but then he doesn't feel eighteen, either.
"Good," she says.
"Yeah. Yeah, it is."
"Are you going to keep the eye patch?" Sasuke asks. He hadn't expected her to bring that up in front of Naruto. It's either a concession, support, or it's pretty vicious. A vicious form of support, then.
"Haven't decided."
"Isn't there surgery?"
"So they say. I don't know that it's worth it." They could lift the dropping eyelid, but the pupil would still be fixated, the world he saw would still be shadowed red. He doesn't want to be put to sleep any more, would like to sit up night after night after night, collecting his tomorrows.
"Okay," says Naruto. "Yeah, it's crappy, surgery and shit."
He can't help wondering what more scars she has, below her face, below her clothes. No doubt they're deep.
"I like scars," Sasuke says.
Naruto finishes her hot dog. Sasuke lights another cigarette. Kakashi catches a falling leaf.
xxxxx
The sunlight is a heavy cover, lightening over every curve of every piece of furniture, spreading over the flat surfaces. The drapes are pulled, letting it spill unfiltered into Kakashi's, into Kakashi's and Sasuke's, living room. It creeps over the back of the sofa, slithers up the walls to spill over the pictures.
Naruto's grown comfortable sprawling in it, soaking it in. It's warm as a touch on her nose, a tactile light, a weight of heat on her eyelids.
She rests her feet on a pile of books, mostly Bloomsbury, fiction and biography and autobiography in all its forms, memoires, letters, diaries.
The struggle between self-expression and self-protection, Kakashi said, which apparently made sense to Sasuke.
Kakashi likes, she knows now that Kakashi likes, Lytton Strachey. Desmond Morries was a bit of an arse, supposedly, divine talker or not, and Grant and Fry and the Bells were painters, and he doesn't so much take to other painters.
"I like Leonard Woolf," Naruto says. She does, too, and can elaborate under the raised brows that the poor guy's the one who really did something amazing, being a good husband, more or less, to his brilliant bipolar wife, and giving his all to the political struggle. The Village in the Jungle is pretty damn good, too.
"His autobiographies are disappointing," Sasuke says.
Kakashi snorts. "As compared to Nigel Nicolson's, they're pure genius."
"Yes, well, clearly."
"So you do read," Kakashi adds, to Naruto, and not in a tone that necessitates insult, either.
"Just a little," she says, opening her eyes then closing them again under the crush of sunlight. "I like Szymborska, too. And, and Random Acts of Senseless Violence. Like, dude, the title alone!"
"Yeah," says Sasuke, standing close to her so her thigh rests against Naruto's knee. Her elbow might brush Kakashi's shoulder, if he moves. It's all right.
She tilts her head sideways, squints at his hand moving with slow but terribly deliberate focus over a paper, leaving chalk links, shadows smeared over his skin from where he rubs the paper. The sunlight makes the hairs on his arm stand out in contrast, lights his nails corral.
She can see now that it's beautiful. Before there was nothing, now suddenly she is staring at his arm, his hands, and they are real and they are beautiful. Even having touched Sasuke they're beautiful.
Then she realises Sasuke's looking at her, a very definite, very indefinable look, soon shared with Kakashi, and though everything remains perfectly calm on the surface, Naruto has the feeling a beast, a leviathan, has rolled through the depths.
Something's different about her pulse, like it's adjusting to a new rhythm.
It's inevitable, perhaps it always was but after that moment it definitely is inevitable that they should eventually talk about sex.
Fittingly, they talk about lust while unleashing their gluttony on a pizza. So you're – not precisely gay or straight, then?
Naruto shrugs, "A nice arse is a nice arse", because she can't talk about feelings right now.
Later, not much later, Kakashi says, "I don't think sexuality is an identity."
"So you'd do a guy?"
"If I met the right guy, I suppose." But Sasuke's not a guy, and neither was Anko. Nor is Naruto.
She remembers Sasuke talking about how it can't just be anybody, man or woman, how it must be someone who sparks for you, how for that sparking to happen you must know them, a little, know them enough to take in their …aura, charisma, thing.
She drops back into the conversation in time to say, "But if Foucault is all, homosexuality is the necessary contrast that allows heterosexuality to exist, well, isn't that super heterocentric?"
"Well, the reverse is true as well." Sasuke puts the pizza in her mouth, bites down, grease glistening on her upper lip. Her cheeks and throat work around the food.
Kakashi's leaning back, eating pizza salad with chop sticks. "I suppose it's mostly about undermining the idea that heterosexuality is something in and of itself, rather than a fictional construct dependent on other fictional concepts."
There's nothing particularly fictional about bodies, or about sexed bodies, or desire for them. She didn't use to want Sasuke so much, in his presence. She likes to eat with them, to watch them eat, Sasuke methodically, Kakashi with a sort of fluttery, lackadaisical enjoyment. A mouthful of wine, a glassful, two, and she sleeps over.
The bedroom is eight steps away, as counted from the doorway. The bed is eleven steps away.
It's also soft and blue, yielding under her hand, her weight. She's never laid in this one before, kicks off her jeans and the sheets are new against her skin. Sasuke has naked legs, Kakashi a naked torso. Naruto has naked feet, after some struggling with the clingy socks, and what feels very much like a naked heart.
Sasuke's light beside her, princess of air and darkness. The bed moves like Naruto's idea of being seaborne.
She sleeps, warm and heavy, with Kakashi's arm brushing her side. He didn't touch Sasuke where Naruto could see while awake, but as his eyes fall closed his body curves into hers, and his arm, draped over her hips, is too long to stop there, knuckles soft against the side of Naruto's chest. The hairs on her arm moves under the wind of Sasuke's breath.
She wants to say something pithy and poetic and meaningful, something like love, captured in words and offered, shared, something Winterson-ish, but words come hard at the best and worst and most casual of times. She half-mumbles, a little animal sound, fitting her knee against Sasuke's thigh.
It's somewhere between beautiful and sexyugly, focus on the ugly.
They sleep. They will wake up.
xxxxx
She wakes up with a heavy head and a heavy stomach, bloated under the press of arms. There's Kakashi's hand curling around her hip, Naruto's half cupping her breast. Normally she doesn't sleep on her back.
She sits up, not precisely carefully, limbs falling around her. Naruto burps, Kakashi sniffs. They're neither of them quite awake. Sasuke goes for the coffee, bare feet on the floorboards, two bodies left behind her on the bed. In the bed.
It's not really fair to leave them there, but then Sasuke has never much cared for fair. She does make enough coffee to sustain them all, at least through breakfast. She smokes, feeling submerged, waiting for the world to creak back to life, out of the grey-golden unreality of early mornings. Ashes sprinkle over the floor, over the sheets. She sits between their heads, with a newspaper and coffee and her cigarette, reading the headlines over and over because she is barely containable inside her body. Sometimes she just, what's the saying – some men just want to watch the world burn.
Her fingers are stiff with the temptation to stab the cig out in human flesh, not her own this time.
Naruto rolls over until her face is buried in the curve of Sasuke's hip, and there's the sudden vicious urge to knee her in the face. It would be so easy, it's not fair. Naruto should not make it so easy for her. Easy is very difficult to handle.
Probably she should adjust Kakashi's pillow, ensure a restful position for his neck. Very gently she kicks at it. She's sick of adjusting.
Naruto wakes up. Every morning it's a visible process, she stiffens like a dreaming dog, twitches, and then her eyelids fall open.
"Mmh," she says, right into Sasuke's hip. Her nose twitches as she rolls over onto her back, her face soft and swollen pink with sleep.
Sasuke is glad they won't be able to share biological children, because it is easy to imagine that this is how Naruto's parents saw her every morning through her childhood, and Sasuke will not have that kind of ruddy chubbiness deface the Uchiha progeny, will not have Nordic bone-structure or easy tans.
Kakashi might be acceptable, in case Itachi can't be persuaded to find a better egg donor than Anko. Sasuke has superior genes but Naruto likes children, wants them, so she could carry them. Surrogate mothering isn't that different from adoption.
"What?" Naruto asks, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. "You're looking all constipated, what're you thinking about?"
"Family planning."
Redness spreads over Naruto's face until her freckles are pale marks against it. She glances at Kakashi over Sasuke's thighs.
"Do you like sex with him better than with me?"
"No."
Still glancing at Kakashi, Naruto grabs onto her leg, hot and tenacious. "You said you didn't want children."
"I don't."
Naruto gives her what could possibly be a crafty look hidden under the sleepiness. "I'm better. If you don't want kids. I mean, I'm better anyway. But."
This is true.
This is annoying.
"Contraception isn't exactly rocket science."
Naruto tilts her head, its crown resting just under Sasuke's knee. "You're no good at rocket science."
Sasuke twists her nose until she yelps, muffling the sounds against Sasuke's legs and clawing at them to get free.
Eventually Sasuke says, "You want children, though."
There's movement, rustle, as Kakashi stretches his arms.
Everything is quiet until he says, "You want kids?"
"Yes," says Naruto. "I mean, not now, obviously, but… Yeah. You?"
"It depends."
If it had been Sasuke speaking, Naruto would have demanded, Depends on what?
She clutches very hard at Sasuke's leg, then scrambles off the bed, mumbling, "Hafta bathroom."
Kakashi rustles the sheets again. Sasuke looks him over as he sits up. "If you knock me up I will abort it."
He lifts a lazy eyebrow over his lazy eye. "I've enough brats running around the place as it is."
Snorting, she edges closer to get her feet back under the comforter.
After a moment he says, "I'd be all right, but she'd freak. If you got rid of her kid."
She rubs her face. "I know."
Naruto would cry and scream and beat her up. She'd still love Sasuke, but it's a good thing she hasn't got a dick.
It's a good thing she has a certain naive propensity for double-think, too, and for depoliticising the personal, because technically she does realise that infringing on any woman's body autonomy ever is pretty much the definition of misogyny. Sasuke could never have liked her otherwise.
On the other hand, Sasuke could never have loved her if she couldn't say, it's different it's us and mean it.
Kakashi offers her one of his lazy half-smirks. "I was going to shower. Want to join me?"
As a matter of fact she does. "Later."
"If you'd rather get in with her, I could totally watch that."
For the first time it strikes her that he might mean it.
"I didn't think you fancied her."
"You do. Just because I don't see it doesn't mean it's not happening."
"I'm fine with it, if you want to watch."
"Is she?"
"You'd have to ask her." After a second under his steady, amused glance and the tension lines around his eye she amends that to, "I'll ask her."
Itachi saw a lot, although never with desire. It stopped being mortifying and started being comforting, somewhere around the twentieth time he walked in on them, when he smirked instead of gaped.
Naruto is comfortable naked, and competitive as fuck, but she won't have a history stretching back almost as far as she can remember of wanting to share with Kakashi everything that can be shared. That's little enough, really.
"Hey," Naruto says from the doorway, teeshirt riding high as she pushes hair out of her face. "What did I miss?"
"My enthralling company, I should hope," Kakashi drawls.
Naruto sticks her tongue out at him. "I want breakfast. I'm making breakfast."
"I don't know," Sasuke says snidely, for no good reason. "Does taking it out of the box count as making it?"
"No tea for you then!" Naruto says. "Or toast."
"Don't tell me Itachi's defiling the cabinets with toast again," says Kakashi, a yoghurt man at heart.
"I'll defile your face," says Naruto. "With toast."
Sasuke supposes that escaping to the kitchen is a workable way to get the last word. She drags her feet across the coldness of the floor until she's there too, in between the coffee maker and the sink, the counter pressed hard across her spine.
When Kakashi comes too, when he has put on a shirt and muscle ointment and slippers like an old man, fuzzy slippers with Scotch patterns which he loves with an unnatural passion, the kitchen will be very full.
Close, crowded. If someone moves too much. They will crash into each other.
Naruto's voice, brash as a bell in the mornings, shatters the silence in a hundred thousand pieces. Kakashi opens his mouth and swallows them, rolls them smooth with little sighs and creaks as he repossesses his body, grows back into it as he does after every night's sleep.
She decides to move.
The world stands, trembling but steady under her feet. There is all the room in the world to walk to the table. They sit next to her, sullen with sleep but sweetening.
Naruto snorts into her very generous helping of cereal. "I guess if I can still stand you now…"
"I like you better now, actually," Kakashi says calmly.
She's fuzzy from the earliness, Naruto, like a bright finger painting. Her clothes are haphazard, spilling skin into the room.
"Pass the sugar."
xxxxx
"Who would she pick, if she had to?"
Itachi is, uncharacteristically, leaning against the fence as he poses the question. Kakashi blinks and narrows his eye against the sun, and notices Kisame breathing in, standing suddenly alert beside Itachi. He imagines Bestiality Boy posing the same question, rather more belligerently and so far more obviously caring. Maybe Temari does too, although she can't be expecting an answer.
If Sasuke had one, Itachi wouldn't be asking him.
"I don't know," he says. Eventually he can add, truthfully, carefully, "That's why I'm comfortable with it."
"Comfortable," Itachi repeats.
He shrugs, shading his eye from the sun. The movement makes his elbow jut out, outside the shadow, sunlight sniping at it. "Relatively speaking."
Parents will worry, as is their lot in life, or they will not. Unfair, really, that the good parents, like Naruto's, carry so much more pain, carrying it for their child. Maybe friends will worry too, until there is no worry left for they themselves, the – well. The three of them, now.
"I thought you rejected relativist ethics," Itachi says.
He squints at the sky, which is very bright. His eye tears a little. "Ever heard of trying too hard?"
"You don't believe in good and bad?" Itachi says it mildly, with some genuine curiosity. Kakashi knows that Itachi's phone is in Itachi's pocket, heavy with Anko's messages and perhaps his supervisor's, and with notes for his projects. He's put it on vibrate, and silently it moves the fabric of his trousers. Real trousers, Itachi was never one for jeans. All his trousers are tailored after the same lines as the boarding school uniform, the one Kakashi was loath to wear even when they actually attended the school.
There are the obvious objections and the less obvious ones. But she gets everything! He has actually heard Naruto's Kisame, the dog boy, say this.
Really of course what Sasuke got is what everyone gets who gets anything, a chance and a hell of a lot to lose. He got less and Naruto too, but they have a bit more to gain.
She's eradicated, it's been muttered, Temari has muttered. He's not sure whether she believes it. She's so silent now.
But Sasuke submerges in silence the way fish do, comfortable and awake. She'll break the surface where it glitters, when she's got her fill of the dark depths and whatever sunken, discarded treasures are to be found there.
"Are you still a stoicist?" he asks Itachi. The world has stopped spinning under his feet, although it is not yet entirely steady. He rides it like a surfing board.
"I'm trying to find religion," Itachi says. He shrugs. "I'm not having much success."
"Imagine that," Kakashi says, too lightly to be really dry. "Are you looking for an actual existing god or just for belief in one?"
"Ah, no. The concept of a personal god is far too – anthropomorphic. I'd like a system. Principles. Structures."
"Try Buddhism," Kakashi says, shrugs, reaches for one of Sasuke's cigarettes. He shouldn't smoke so much but talk of religion always makes him keen on vices. "I think you'd rock the shaved look. Also the orange."
Except orange is Naruto's, is Naruto. Itachi's silence confirms this.
"Well," he says eventually. "Perhaps. I have some difficulty with the myths."
"You would." Kakashi could believe in that part easily enough, the sheltered prince and the fall into grace, the lovely temptresses and the disciples transforming depression and laissez-faire into metaphysics. It's the philosophy he has trouble with, the projection of meaning and order onto life. Life is just life, until it isn't.
Suddenly Kisame breaks in. Kakashi had not forgotten him, in the same sense he's not really forgotten gravity or drawing breath. "If she were, like, a dude?" he asks. "Naruto. If she'd been a guy."
It is Itachi's turn to be silent, on a long indrawn breath.
"I imagine I would have killed him," Kakashi says. His voice is airy, without hesitation or falsehood.
Kisame barks a laugh that he must have hoped would be diffusing. "You can barely even run, I think she could take you."
"I don't fight people I don't beat." It wouldn't have been difficult. People die a lot more easily than they live, from being poisoned or tripped or stabbed.
"That seems a somewhat problematic attitude," Itachi remarks. He wouldn't say that if Kisame weren't present, diffusing after all. Kakashi can't leave in front of witnesses, can't hit back.
"It's a somewhat problematic situation," he says after a little while, measured. He drops the smoked cigarette.
Naruto, who must know the answer, has never asked him that question. He appreciates her tact, her not confronting him about it. Sasuke would hate her for it but he is genuinely grateful.
He will be asked one day, and they will know it's the future because it will be when his answer doesn't hurt anymore.
"I like Naruto," Itachi says. "Always did. Then of course I resented her, for having made me like her."
"Because that made things complicated."
"No," says Itachi. "No, things were difficult, but they were never complicated."
"From the mouth of babes and fools," Kakashi mutters at length, rather bitterly.
"Yes, well," says Itachi. "Go home to your babes."
xxxxx
A/N: I actually finished this story, in so far as it is finished, years ago, though it's taken me a long time to get all of it posted. While it's obviously flawed, I'm still very fond of it, but I don't imagine there will be any more of it.
