Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, or any of its associated characters!

Summary: COMPLETE. This feeling is like a rose; he feels the thorns in his heart most of all. SNS, canonverse, one shot. Sasuke's POV.

A/N: Ahhhh so! So! I've been writing this one for quite some time. It's been something I've been writing intermittently, in wild 3 am bursts, after I've read a little too much of the compilation of Pablo Neruda's poetry I've been trying to get through. I can never seem to get through more than a poem or two, because, well...this happens.

A little different than my usual writing style, but I wouldn't get anywhere if I didn't try something new :) I hope you like it!

Rosaceae

Konoha.

It's hotter than he remembers. Stuffier. Crowded, with a sea of people that crash through each other like white water, ricocheting back and forth, cutting off Sasuke in his step, knocking against him as if that will make him stumble—

It doesn't. He's waded in worse before.

But the crowd is booming and Sasuke's impatient. He doesn't like to be seen. But waiting calls for it, even with his head down. Even with his hood up. His waiting must be obvious—to him, even if no one else. Sasuke is the lone boat in the middle of the water, obvious to anything in the sky, most of all—

The sun.

Sasuke blooms as it comes. It's a tackling hug, laughing and yelling and a different kind of heat—and Sasuke struggles to swallow his happiness, his sighs, his emotion. This feeling is like a rose; he feels the thorns in his heart most of all.

Naruto pulls back, and it twists. He takes Sasuke by the wrist, and it curves. It whispers to Sasuke that Naruto's hand stays for a little too long. He stands a little too close. And doesn't he smile, like that, like the way that he does, only for Sasuke? Doesn't it change when he looks away? Doesn't it return when he looks back, like a boat rocking in the waves?

Sasuke certainly feels the lurch in his stomach.

He's unstable and unsure. New, in this world, that everyone seems to have lived in—lived and learned and loved and been loved in—except for him. He feels it, sometimes—like he's out in this sea alone, no land in sight. No plan, no map, no stars to follow—

Just the sun. He's yet to escape the heat of this sun.

The burning calms, then, as Naruto's distracted by someone else. Talking to someone else—involving Sasuke, the way that he always does, with a pull and a smile and a—

"Yeah, I was just telling Sasuke—"

And Sasuke obeys the touch like an order. He hears it like a song. And he knows, obviously, it's wrong to feel lost at sea—if Sasuke is in a boat, then Naruto isn't in the sky at all. He holds the oars, takes over when Sasuke collapses, pulls him back when he tumbles overboard. It's a thought that has him feeling something little bit wild—something a little bit desperate, a little bit wanting, a little bit like that rose in his heart—

Sasuke breathes out.

And it's damningly immortal, too. Disgustingly persistent, like the man who had planted it there. Every moment that Sasuke had thought it might be wilting had only been the discovery of a new, beautiful bud. Cutting the branches only pruned it, renewed it, left it ready to grow and thicken—

Of all the times to develop a green thumb.

"Okay," Naruto says, voice free and untethered, nothing growing in his chest, "c'mon. Let's sneak back to my place before somebody else can steal us."

He grabs Sasuke by the sleeve, and Sasuke finds a new bud.

It grows.

Oh, it grows.

And it's the same flowering lump in his throat that steals his voice away, locks it behind the butterflies that visit the garden in his chest. He's quiet and flooded and feeling, and it's no wonder Naruto is left to lead the way. His grip is insistent and beckoning, and Sasuke is intimately familiar with the fight not to follow it—but today is a day for giving in

And so Sasuke gives.

Naruto shuts the door behind them and sighs, as if Sasuke's presence tastes like relief. And it doesn't, Sasuke knows—if anything, it tastes like ash and blood and dirt and charcoal, but—

But Naruto smiles, and there's the rose again.

Blooming.

"Let me get changed," Naruto tells him, his innocent hand pressing its emphasis on Sasuke's waist. As if the touch won't burn and sear—Naruto should know—he should know he is the sun, he should know what he does to the sky and the seas and the waves and the flowers and Sasuke's heart, Sasuke's heart, it clenches and aches and leaves with Naruto's back, tumbles to the floor with the shirt Naruto leaves behind—Sasuke stands, heartless, in the middle of a white water sea—

But Naruto chatters on, through the wall, and Sasuke's waves calm as they come. He is just too much—it is all too much. Sasuke replies with an automatic intimacy and Naruto's laughter has him feeling like doing something insane. Something stupid and wild and chaotic, and Sasuke is prone to all of those things but they've never brought him anything good, only pain and betrayal and Naruto's desperate eyes and heavy breath, crying, screaming, begging—

Naruto's waves. Grey and thick and he hadn't been in a boat at all, Sasuke thinks. Sasuke had taken that, too—left Naruto to swim, left him to drown, left him as if there'd never been a flower between them at all, Sasuke didn't know how Naruto hadn't seen the blood from the thorns tightening around Sasuke's heart, but Sasuke had seen blood enough for the two of them. Stained the seas red for years, it was all he could seem to see when he looked out—forget land, Sasuke had just been desperate for something that didn't look like death—

It had found him...eventually. Naruto hadn't searched for land, either.

He returns, abandoning his reasonable clothes for a set of pants—loose, casual, comfortable. Sasuke's presence demands no decoration. Nothing delicate, nothing elaborate. Naruto is best like this anyway—raw and relaxed, no fake smiles, no too-loud laughter—

Just them. Just them, and this rose.

Naruto smiles and offers him food, and Sasuke isn't hungry and accepts. He leans over the counter as Naruto ducks into the fridge, swinging it as open as it goes, glancing back with quick eyes that wait for the remarks to come.

Sasuke is more than happy to oblige. The vegetables are a surprise, the milk is expired, the instant ramen doesn't need to be in the fridge—moron. Stupid. Idiot. Naruto protests and yells and laughs and laughs and laughs. It's a sound Sasuke has known and forgotten and then remembered again. A technique he's coming to be most proud of—he's honed it. Practiced it. Naruto laughs casually and often but not like this, not like them—this happiness is bottled and preserved for these moments, when the smiles are soft and delightful, when they force Naruto to turn around and meet Sasuke's eyes—or better yet, touch him, hit him, push him away and let Sasuke push back, let him snatch this excuse out of the air like a thief finding a key—

They end too close.

And Sasuke's rose lifts its petals, lifts its head, tightens its thorns and tells Sasuke he could. He could. What would stop him? Naruto's half-hearted, lingering pushes? His dark, low-looking eyes? His breathless lips, as dry and untouched as Sasuke's were? They ought to have something to bruise them. Don't they deserve it? Don't they look like they want it? Don't they need it? Don't you—

Sasuke pulls away.

The moment is broken like the shatter of a mirror—Sasuke tries to escape his reflection in the pieces. Naruto does the same, and Sasuke's gaze haunts his back as Naruto returns to the fridge.

He's unfazed, Sasuke knows. Unharmed. Sasuke is his friend, and that's all Naruto's ever asked of him.

Sasuke wishes he'd ask for more. But he wishes constantly, he wishes relentlessly, he wishes so perpetually that his thoughts may as well be made of the stars. It's a strange place for his head to be, after floating in bloodied waters for so long, but Naruto's made him hope again.

And so Sasuke moves back to the counter, and Naruto straightens up again.

"You want ramen?" he asks, with the grin of a man that knows exactly what he's doing. What he's asking for. He may as well have reached over the counter and pulled Sasuke's collar to him with the way he dares him to react—

Sasuke leans forward, and reacts.

Naruto's smile widens. The satisfaction clicks in his eyes, the challenge tilts his chin up. He meets Sasuke with a steady eye and steadier body, and Sasuke knows he's just relented but he wants to push forwards—he's stuck, again, between Naruto's eyes and his lips, between his hands and his hips—

Friend.

It echoes in his head, and pulls him into passiveness.

"Hopeless," he mutters instead, moving past him. Naruto laughs and nudges into him and stays behind him, hovering close and warm and too close and too warm. Sasuke digs into the fridge and slaps the noodles into Naruto's chest, the pretense of healthiness staying in his. Naruto knew he'd give in. He sees it in his smile, his cheeky little shuffle backwards.

"At least add some vegetables," Sasuke tells him, found out. Naruto rolls his eyes and protests his agreement, but he's pulled the cutting board out, and he's pulling things from Sasuke's hand. He's pulling Sasuke, too, but Sasuke says as still as he can.

He drifts, though. Like a boat on the waves.

Naruto drifts to him too, with his poking and prodding and laughing and talking. It's an old wound, echoing its pangs of pain in time with Naruto's voice, and Sasuke feels it like a memory. Like his memories. Each of the wounds he should have grown used to. Each of the wounds he hadn't.

Naruto, most of all. He's a light that never loses its brilliance, even when Sasuke had been hoping it would fade. Kept thinking it would. Surely, it would. No one lasted, like this. No one branded themselves into him, like this. In pain? Easily. Surely. Sasuke has been carefully crafted through the pain and anguish of his life's good graces, but Naruto's placement has been built all on its own—

No. It isn't quite...pain.

It is painful, yes. But it hurts in that way a cat could, when playing too roughly, too happily—when it is difficult to be angry and even tougher to stay in pain. It hurts in that way a hot soup burns a tongue, when the smell is too delicious to resist.

It hurts in that way someone might catch their thumb on the thorn of a rose, but be too blinded by its beauty to care.

It has the same tendency to linger, of course, but it feels different when the feeling steps to a song of happiness. Of relief. Of comforts and warmth and smiles and reassuring hands on a waist, gentle taps on a shoulder. Breathing the same air as Naruto feels like the sigh of falling into a deep, quiet, blissful sleep. Breathing in the same steam, as Sasuke stays over the stove, as Naruto shifts past him, darting back and forth, lingering over his shoulder—

"Knew I'd get you to cook," he laughs, and Sasuke elbows him in the ribs.

"Don't push it." Naruto laughs and quiets, but his smile stays loud enough for them both. Sasuke catches it twice more before he forces his focus back to the stove. The food. The cooking.

"I'm glad you could come though," Naruto says, unrelenting. "What happened to being too far?"

Sasuke lets his eyebrow raise, but doesn't look up.

"I travelled," he says, as if it's obvious. It makes Naruto laugh and shove into him again—Sasuke rocks back with the touch and does what he can not to follow it, as if he hadn't been the one to follow Naruto's letter back to him. As if he hadn't poured over the words like a man aching, a man missing, a man who thought he loved solitude only to find it was nothing compared to the best kind of company—

Sasuke could live in this company. He could stay. In his weak moments, like these, he's afraid he will stay. He knows the roots in his chest are planted here, underneath Naruto's footsteps, but...

"Asshole," Naruto laughed, shifting around to his other side. "Next time, I'm coming to you, though. Promise."

Sasuke smiles softly.

"Promise," he repeats, and the steam gets in his eyes. He blinks and swallows and tries not to think of the meaning of Naruto's promises. The familiarity, the comforts, the reassurances, the security. He wonders if Naruto knows, now, when he's faltering. When he'd concede just a little bit more than comfortable, a step over what he would regret. Sasuke cannot stay in Konoha. He knows that. He knows that. It's so easy to think he can, though, as Naruto stands here, blocking his view of the rest of the world—

"Yeah, I promise," Naruto says, with the smile of a man who could take Sasuke's heart and coax it back to beating, "I owe you by now. You've been too nice to me."

He nudges Sasuke a little, and Sasuke rolls his eyes to cover the truth. He has been. He's been relenting. He's been wanting to leave a little less and wanting to stay a little more. And he knows the rose in his chest is never going to die, by now, but he wishes it would at least let him say goodbye without tightening its roots around his throat.

…

He's grown so tired of saying goodbye.

"I've been no such thing," Sasuke says, starting on the seasoning. "How long?"

"How long—would I be visiting you, you mean?" Naruto asks, and Sasuke nods. "I—um. I dunno."

Sasuke's hand pauses. Naruto pulls back, running a nervous hand through his hair, shrugging his shoulders, shifting his feet. Even Naruto's smallest motions are like a scream—

"What d'you think of like," Naruto shrugs again, "a year?"

Sasuke stops.

Naruto's head stays down, but his eyes look up.

"Um, because I—listen," Naruto says, stepping forwards, "I know you want to travel alone and I'm not saying I have to be with you every second of every day, but if—if I was nearby, or if—"

"A year?" Sasuke interrupts, breathless and frozen. The rose has him held tight, stiff and surprised, trapped in searching every inch of Naruto's face—

"I—yeah," Naruto says, and his hand drops. "Yeah. Um. My year off starts this week. That's why I...I wanted to see you before it—um. I guess I could've just come to you, but—"

He lets out a laugh, backing up and turning away. He's stopped meeting Sasuke's eye, like he's given too much too quickly, but Sasuke's never known Naruto to regret giving too much of anything—

He shuts the stove off before he forgets it completely. Naruto's eyes dart to the motion, but he says nothing.

"Why?" he asks, and it's like a breath.

Naruto breathes in and backs away, his eyes flickering like a man in fear, searching for an exit—

"I just," he says, looking anywhere but back at him, "I just...missed you."

Sasuke grows wilder.

"You've missed me before," he points out, and Naruto breathes.

"Yeah, well," he says, his lips thin and his shoulders tight, "it gets worse every day, okay?"

His eyebrows are furrowed. He meets Sasuke's eye for a scattered moment before he breaks—

"Just," he says again, scanning the world outside of the window, "just tell me if I can go with you. Because if I can't, I—I don't—"

He presses his lips together and shakes his head.

Sasuke's vision narrows.

"And then?" he asks, and it pulls Naruto's gaze back to him.

"What?"

"At the end of the year," Sasuke says, wild and raging and the sea thrashing through a storm, "you expect me to just give you back?"

Naruto breathes in. He swallows. He looks down and back up and down again, as if searching for any reason at all to move forwards. Sasuke gives him everything. Sasuke gives him every thought that's ever been in his head. If Naruto knows his heart then he's seen the rose, he's held it in his hands, he's the one who's been caring for it all these years—

"No," Naruto answers, and it's a whisper. It's a promise. An admittance of something, an acceptance of something, an answer to the way Sasuke is looking at him and a question as to what he'll do next. Sasuke's feet respond for him, and he grips the counter to stay upright as he steps forward—the ground feels uneven and new, like he's twelve years old, trying to learn to walk on water again. Naruto catches him by the arm and Sasuke thinks he must be just the same, because Sasuke's sleeve is tight in his grasp, twisted and gripped with white, nervous knuckles—

The waves rock them together.

Sasuke's lips press to Naruto's with all the hesitation of someone who's lived his life. For all Naruto's proven him wrong, Sasuke still can't bring himself to expect happiness. It feels foolish. Entitled. Idiotic. How presumptuous, to think happiness could be predicted when he could still count all the cuts in his heart—

He still hopes, though. It's a small step.

It's a small kiss.

He pulls back with the tender hesitation of running a finger along a petal. Sasuke thinks he can see it, as Naruto's eyes fight through their daze to get back to him—like Naruto has had one too, his own rose, sending the petals tumbling down his cheeks—

"I—" Naruto says, but he's already moving forward. He doesn't give Sasuke a chance to reply. Their lips are together and soft, delicate and adoring, Sasuke feels Naruto's fingertips on his cheeks and smiles into them—and Naruto replies like a reflection, laughing into his mouth, vulnerable and Sasuke's—in this moment, Sasuke's, Sasuke pulls back and stares at him like he's never seen him before—

"Hi," Naruto says, and it's bewildered. It's delighted. It's the sunrise over the sea and the first bloom of spring, Sasuke is breathless at the sight— "I...guess I should start packing?"

Naruto laughs with the question, and Sasuke's sight is made of roses. It's pink and red and orange and blue and yellow and Sasuke is laughing in colour, loved and belonging, at home in these hands—

At home, anywhere. Anywhere they could go.

"Start packing."

A/N: And that's it for June! Different, but still fun I hope! I've spent a longer time on this one than I normally do there was lots of rewriting and rewording to be done, but! I hope it was worth it and I hope you all had a wonderful pride month! I'll be back with more love stories soon :)

Until next time,

- Kinomi