a/n: my dudes do not even think about attributing their canon personalities here. obliterate that from your minds. this is another version of my version of Naruto and Sasuke in All I See Is What's Left Of Your Ghost this is more Ghost!Sasuke than anything, no traces of canon Sasuke (or canon Naruto for that matter) here! (bc i can't get enough of writing them like this! i probably need help.)

long story short: this is self-indulgence at its "worst fucking degree", you've been warned folks.

also don't know what else to tell you except: if i'm not apparently writing at least one (1) sort of mind game unfolding between them i'm not happy...but hey, at least in this version they can actually touch? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

. . .

baby, let the games begin

"What's with the stab wound?"

It's the first thing Sasuke says upon finding him after... everything.

(And, God, what a shitty cop out it is.)

Naruto doesn't flinch. But.

Nobody else has even noticed, what the fuck. The dressing is literally undetectable underneath his clothes, he made sure of it. If he didn't know any better, he would think the boy has x-ray vision.

He knows better.

Doesn't mean he's gotta be any thrilled about his chilling perceptivity.

"S'just a paper cut." Naruto trivializes, unwilling to address the issue further because airing out his grievances (which includes physical damage, which he stockpiles like clockwork), makes him feel globally uncomfortable, like he'll burst out of his flimsy flesh.

Sasuke gauges him, unspeaking, unconvinced, uncaring.

Naruto swivels back the axis of the skull session. "What's with the unannounced turn up?"

Autumn is a chattering whisper eddying through nature's natural crescents, any late beams of a sunburnt summer's heat leaching back into the earth below. Finally, he peels his eyes off of the untamed woodland resting below the lip of the frowning clifftop he's sat atop to soak him in.

But even through the changing of seasons, Sasuke remains mostly the same.

Still, Naruto can't help the crackling fizz of annoyance from bubbling undersurface, because who in their right mind takes a hit with fucking sneakers on; but Sasuke's always lived in an unconventional no-holds-barred world of his own anyway.

Sasuke trades his nonchalance for casual glee aimed his way. "Shocked?"

Naruto lifts stiff shoulders in response. "Confused, mostly." And it's true.

It's been a while since he's last seen him, since they've last been face to face. It's been something like blue moons, something like the deafening crack slam of doors and fists splitting the drywall (something like but you wanted me there, something like get the fuck out).

Naruto quashes the pungency of the aftertaste this premeditated rendezvous leaves. That's a lane he doesn't want to throw himself through anymore.

But it does have him wonder if they're on speaking terms at all. Sasuke seems to have made up his mind on the issue anyway, and Naruto wishes he'd been part of this equation too.

"What can I say?" Sasuke sighs out the roundabout answer, just the faintest dash of flair to it. "I like specificity of plans."

Naruto refrains from the biting urge to call him out on his deflectionist bullshit.

"No offense." He bites out instead, definitely meaning a full-fledged offense. "But you don't strike me exactly as the vigilante type."

"Haven't you heard, I just have an outside-of-the-box approach to superheroing." Sasuke frames the quip with a toothy smirk, mocking from all angles.

"I'm sure you do, mister moral mercenary." Naruto can't help it this once, can't do much about the unbridled antipathy, the vitriol bleeding into the raw cut when he spits the last word out.

Sasuke's whole demeanor shifts beside him, painted the wrong splash of reticence.

The sharp edge of his smirk cuts. "...Seems you have me written down to a peg already."

Colder.

That's when Naruto breaks up this strung out eye contact. Suppresses cold-blooded chills of a cinnamon, golden-leafed autumn.

None of that explains why Naruto is currently spending the night on Sasuke's couch.

Again.

But, well.

Upon finding him anew, curled up on his fancy couch this time, Sasuke seems to share Naruto's lackadaisical approach to the issue at hand.

Overall, he's unsurprised. Distinctly unimpressed, too.

"Full disclosure, if you're not Santa or the little fucker from 5th Avenue who owes me a grand, imma need to take some drastic measures buddy." Sasuke nicks the casual threat with the shadow of his overfamiliar grin. "Hyper-powered vigilante freak or not."

Naruto blearily blinks the muggy sight into focus, he must've been asleep for a while.

Naruto doesn't really remember the last time he fell asleep. Must have been a while, too.

"Horrid foot traffic." He retorts plainly, cheek pushing back into the inviting luxuriousness. "Your place's closer, too."

Sasuke puts his phone away with the drag of a weary chuckle, acquiesces to the answer as if it makes any sense at all.

(Spoiler alert: it does not. Not even Naruto himself can seemingly find sense in the senselessness of it all.)

He didn't bother turning any of the lights on when he let himself (broke) in. Sasuke doesn't either. But now that his surroundings are digesting into an unblemished tangibleness, he can make out the untouched impersonality of the living space, flawless night vision zeroing in on crystalline dust motes polluting the air. Sasuke must not have used this safe house in quite a while.

Naruto's focus shifts subject matters, growing gradually aware of Sasuke's attire. He's in plainclothes, already blending among the masses. The brim of that old baseball cap he's so fond of obscures his expression further.

(Very detachedly, Naruto wonders if Sasuke will outstay his assignment this time.)

"Give me a good enough reason not to vault you over the railing right now." Sasuke threatens even more offhandedly.

Uncoordinatingly heavy-limbed and cottony numb, Naruto cavernously thinks if they belonged to any other line of work, if they were any two normal people plucked off the street, would they be having this conversation at all?

Would they even be standing where they are in the first place?

"'Cause I'm sleepy." Naruto slurs on the drowsy beat of a cocky grin he half conceals into the headrest. "And I'd crush you to bits."

Sasuke snorts haughtily at that. "...I'd like to see you try." He mutters under his breath, and it's probably meant to be out of earshot.

On most days he thinks Sasuke's made out of sinewy muscle and hubris.

Naruto is just starting to fold back into the thicket of his thoughts, when the other boy dumps a manila folder on the nearest wall shelf.

"What's 'at?" He asks out of a slow, tickling curiosity.

For the first time since he set foot inside his loft, Sasuke pauses enough to, seemingly, fully take him in. The suggestion of amusement spreads another grin over his features. "You'll be shocked to know I've got more pressing matters to deal with other than your shameless bumming."

Naruto acknowledges that with a lazy grunt, mind whirring, attempting to piece the pieces.

Sasuke snorts once again, more guttural this time, subdued. "So you either make it worth my while." He tacks on. "Or get the fuck out." He says, unkindly, but insouciant, like it doesn't matter either way.

(something like but you wanted me there; something like get the fuck out)

Naruto can't believe him. He's so—he's such a—

"God." Naruto breathes with eyes scrunched shut, sleep-warm and frustrated and lax and comfortably angered. "You're such an asshole."

"And you're a dick." Sasuke returns, accusatorily. But then the slant of his grin catches thin brushes of moonbeam breaking through the curtainless bay-window, and it's such a pretty, pretty shade of menacing. "But you're pretty, so that checks out."

Naruto huffs noisily into the sumptuousness beneath him, the chosen adjective pumping a blotched warmth up into his cheeks, coloring him bashful and moody.

He lethargically shifts from his stagnant position, and agonizing twinges he entirely disregards race up his overwrought nerve-endings.

"It's 'just a paper cut' huh?" Sasuke echoes him, focused on his injured knee now.

Not even a wince betrayed his discomfort, and Sasuke still spotted the lie in his built composure.

How does Naruto deal with that? Well, he doesn't. Not really, anyway.

And certainly not in a healthy way.

So he lets Sasuke's stare bore into his skull that little bit further, runs the risk of being set aflame.

"Guess I'm a fucking liar." Naruto whispers across the too many feet of distance, it rolls off of his tongue like an easy admittance.

"Oh?" Which in turn earns him a genuine, a tad delighted, if undersized, smile. "Are you, now?"

They can play at the denial game to burst of their heart's content, and they have, and they will, but they could never turn a blind eye to this unfolding fissure of tension that demands attention.

"Yeah." He utters low, deep, voice coarsened with remnants of a fitful sleep. "...I am."

Sasuke, for his part, goes very, very still across from him. He doesn't move to cut through the stifle engulfing them.

But now Naruto wants him to.

Emboldened by the lonely cradle of an all-encompassing starless dark and Sasuke's absorbed focus after this long, Naruto temporarily gives in.

"You gonna stare all night?" Beneath the weight of his leaden gaze, he gingerly bends his knee, ignores the stabbing ache, socked foot planted firmly on the soft cushion, like he's beckoning him, and Naruto vocalizes the request he's been chewing behind his teeth. "Or actually do somethin' about it?"

There's a spun-out, stuttering muteness, like the staticky end to a lengthy two hour phone call.

Naruto holds onto his bated breath, letting his lungs burn with it.

Until Sasuke carefully thumbs at this rift cleaving them in half, made up of crawling hesitancy, of too many stifled breaths.

"Handsome." Sasuke's voice drops throaty, timber rough around the unfastened line of his mouth. "You'll let me do something about it?"

A searing shiver slinks down the crumpled line of his body.

His mouth tastes syrupy thick, a little sweet, like honey, like blood, either or. "...You think I'd offer otherwise?"

Sasuke lets go of a breathless breath. It sounds scratchy. Punched out. He moves.

Naruto smothers down a weighty exhale of his own. (relief? fear? excitement? a hybrid of all the aforementioned?)

Sasuke takes the offered bait he laid out for him upon a silver platter, while Naruto lies moored, unglued, as if this were just the byproduct of a fever dream high, hankering impulse of his sucky mind.

Sasuke gets much closer, keeping a measured distance, he's taken a seat at the edge of the lavish coffee table. And if this was a dream, the level-headedness substantiality he owns at the moment would scare him.

Sasuke intersperses his thinking lines by reaching for him.

The first point of contact burns.

Naruto forgets the precise moment in time they last touched, but recalls the punchdrunk adrenaline rush of it. He managed to land a smarting few blows, whilst he himself had bruises to show for it, would watch in the mirror the faded violence he wore across his skin, fit his knuckles over the misshapen blueness of Sasuke's own.

Everything seems to scream in opposition to that last time, as Sasuke takes his sweet time. He's unhurried, open palm adjusting along the jut behind his knee, gentle tug, a slow motion quality to it Naruto can appreciate in his torpid state.

With all the languor of a hunter stalking his prey, he's mindful when lifting his injured leg to avoid further discomfort, meticulously settling the length of it over his lap. Sasuke's eyes are stitched to the task at hand, hands drowning in uncurbed warmth, the graze of his fingertips fitting just inside the hem of Naruto's slate gray sweats, haltingly pulling upward.

The slow ascent of his deft fingers, the threadbare drag of fleecy fabric; his skin blooms afire with his touch, goosebumps abound.

There's a long, long drop of weightlessness, of a smouldering warmth swooping low in his tummy, anxiety and the bad kind of butterflies, and Naruto refrains himself from pushing him further away, from pulling him even closer, from stop, from more.

Sasuke erases the distance with no warning, seals his mouth to the middle of the shrouded injury, above the gossamer-like bandage where his flesh lies at the seams, torn open and pulsing, an angry copper staining below.

No matter how soft his mouth is, the forced press of his lips as it is, is unforgiving, harsh. Sandpaper grating against raw flesh, salt drowning in a crimson cut. His nerves prickle in the worst kind of way, splintering hurt spreading like embedded shards of shattered glass.

And, this much is self-evident, this is Sasuke pushing the issue—because he's a nasty bastard who sometimes likes to shove highly uncomfortable issues out and in the open, who likes holding glittering perspectives to the sun just to frame the camouflaged ugliness rotting underneath—wanting to grouse a reaction out of him.

Sasuke receives a breathy hiss in response to his efforts, the literal knee-jerk reaction to him taking a kind of liberty Naruto allowed him to in the first place.

Naruto forcibly smothers down the unconscious, on-the-spot urge to push him off. Because he finally owns the elastic pull of Sasuke's attention, can twist it toward himself to his liking now, and that always manages to snuff any hurt back to a bearable degree.

And, then.

Sasuke, the cause of it, willingly takes it upon himself to ease said hurt.

It's in the way his touch morphs, only a penalizing try-out before, tinting silky now, almost a comfort. At the abrupt switch, his thigh and calf strain, wearied muscles clenching up.

"Sas–" He scrambles, elbows sinking and unable to bear his weight, but this isn't what he wanted, isn't what he meant. "Don't–"

But, as he's wont to do, Sasuke seems to have already chosen.

Naruto's eyes suddenly flash crimson, senses shrinking and liquefying, and here comes the fizzle of golden sparks, a split second shower of them. Then the heat of palms smooths up the distressed tension, and his protests are swallowed in the engulfing darkness their crackling absence leaves behind.

Sasuke's satiny lips graze the feverish patch of skin throbbing tender around his open, thinly gauzed wound, thumbs encasing it; strokes of what could be mistaken as a worldless apology.

And then the world tilts.

Naruto grunts out a chesty exhale, head dropping back, his torso caves, view caught in the trembling silk above of the charcoal ceiling.

The concentration of relief is so acute it actually aches for a beat, then skips two. And it's a soothing balm after days spent brewing in tight-lipped endurance, limping home alone when no prying eyes strayed his way.

Bursts of a stinging needle pain slowly dissolve into clouds of nothingness, leaving wake to a pleasant fuzzy smoothness that he chases.

Right to the drawn out stretch of the millisecond, Naruto feels his flesh knitting back together.

And he goes gooey with the subsequent transition, with the painless exhaustion of meteoric sleep and the borrowed warmth breaking an everlasting fall.

For a lingering moment his vision grows hazy, watery.

Senselessly, inexplicably, illogically, the moonlit backdrop silhouetting Sasuke reminds him of a downpour. Of rain smacking frigidly against rooftops in rows, their jagged profiles bringing the boy to mind in figurative lines, in evocative manners (pouring thoughts he doesn't want to grant weight to).

Sasuke slowly backs away, mouth drawing back with a noiseless hush, liquid silver irises meeting his own in the liquorice darkness.

Fuck, he's so gorgeous like this; smug, complacent, pleased, just that methodical bite to a soft meanness that stings so, so nicely (up to the point where Naruto doesn't even know what he should do with himself anymore, but he has yet to make peace with this admission).

But Sasuke doesn't let it linger; and the softness folds between them.

He's lenient finishing the task, though, heedfully setting his leg back down to join its twin on his couch. And if he deludes himself enough, Naruto could mistake this for care.

When Sasuke pulls away, he's doing so with his whole body.

Naruto breathes (relieved, dissatisfied, atrociously upset) in the abysmal absence of his touch.

"Better?"

He wonders if it sounds as hollow to his ears as it does to his own, but a leisurely smirk is already curling the shape of Sasuke's mouth, challenging.

Naruto wears the scalding evidence of his fingerprints cooling on his overly sensitive skin, wears his massively emptied heart into the sticky walls of his throat, and holds his provocation with a thick glare gleaming defiant in the night.

Game on, asshole.

. . .

a/n: also i wrote this after a boatload of insomnia and a super intense spur-of-the-moment whim, so feel free to shout at me about how much it sucks