Two samurai, too stubborn for their own good and complacent enough to afford stewing inside their denial, fall in love...with each other. (and in which; trouble sometimes attracts the good kind of trouble, too.)

"Gotta say, this is the most unnerving version of 'I'll show you mine if you show me yours' I've ever played." (Their unconventional game of "chicken" escalates into...so much more; who could've guessed?)

Naruto and Sasuke, and their heathen survival in a paradisiacal, murderous island―if they don't murder each other first, that is. 'But the mightier the god, the harder the fall.' (Oh, how the mighty will fall...in love.)

It's just the touch of his hand behind a closed door.

All he can do is gasp for breath he doesn't have.

In the aftermath of Pain's raze, Naruto struggles through a fathomless loss, gray beliefs and the detrimental realization that the world as a whole never was a fail-safe system. Cue Sasuke; he's always had a penchant for showing up with the worst timing.

"... I've always liked kids like you so much. Kids with walls up so high they've buried themselves inside." {alternatively: what happens when two perceptive kids are buried deep inside their walls but try to tear apart each other's barricades once they find this same curious pattern in one another. What the hell might possibly go wrong?} (...and what could possibly go right?)

JD grapples with the inevitability of death outside the disillusioning walls of the hospital for the very first time. Doctor Cox has always seen through his bluff in ways no one else managed to. {Or: It's a chain reaction; in which JD loses his father, the drive to his ambition, and himself. The slow-motion stage of time and a support system collide.}

"Okay. Fine...but does this mean we get to be intimate friends now?" (Or; two stellar players disregard the world's rule set in favor of dancing to each other's scheming, lost inside their own gameplay.) [Shigeo Nagashima/Kazuhisa Inao]