"Well?"
"I don't know," Shikamaru says, adult speak for troublesome. "More reasonable than I'd expected?" Ino, he remembers, was infatuated with and idolised Sasuke for years. Tiresome years, truth be told, because Shikamaru never saw the charm and Ino's incessant repetition of the same old Sasuke verse eroded what little liking Shikamaru might once have managed to scrape together for him.
He also recalls that it's been some time, now, since Ino mentioned him. He imagines it would be hard to sustain that kind of crush, once Ino grew old enough to understand about Orochimaru, whose appearance in the story rather undermines the idea of Sasuke as the dashing prince.
"Yeah?" Kiba says. "Huh. Reckon he understands his place, then? So we won't have to force him."
"How would you have done that?" Shikamaru asks. Hears his own lazy drawl tinged with irritation, and turns his back on Kiba to look at the clouds, visible through the haze of bullet-proof windows.
"It could be done," Kiba argues.
"Of course it could," Shikamaru says. "I'm just curious how you'd think to accomplish it, given that any harm done him is a harm done to Naruto."
"It hardly matters now," Temari cuts in.
Shikamaru shrugs. It will matter.
"Go on, then," Kiba says.
"All right, all right, jeez."
They were all curious, of course. And while nobody particularly likes Sasuke, it's imperative that his integration is accomplished in some manner that doesn't cause too much harm, to Naruto or to the rest of them.
So Shikamaru has been elected their unlikely ambassador, on the unmentioned, unmentionable premise that he too is a non-shifter bonded into the family.
On the strength of this rather dubious credential, he knocks on Naruto's door, and a little while later opens Naruto's door.
The room's a mess as usual, incongruous backdrop to Sasuke neat and crisp and cross-legged on Naruto's bed. Shikamaru reminds himself not to be alarmed that he appears to be doing something on Naruto's computer: they might have taken his mobile yesterday, might have locked him up behind a door composed of seven layers of reinforced steel yesterday, but today Sasuke is not a prisoner.
"Hi," Shikamaru says.
Sasuke says nothing, which is hardly unexpected. He just stares at Shikamaru, in that constipated way of spoilt children who have learnt to use their silence as a demand.
"I'm supposed to welcome you into the family," Shikamaru offers, rather dryly.
Sasuke lifts a doubtful eyebrow. Shikamaru's interested to note that he's entirely unmarked, that where Shikamaru had expected scrapes, some light bruising, there's only smooth skin. An enormous jumper is sprawled over the bed beside Sasuke's hip – what he'd ever wanted with that, in the unseasonable heat, is acutely unclear – and the slipping neckline of his shirt reveals the edge of the seal. Shikamaru would have liked, instinctively, to study it more closely, but of course closer perusal would tell him nothing.
He would have thought, did think originally, that there must be more written on the subject of magic: that it was censorship, secrecy, that kept the human libraries so empty. As Temari's bonded, a shifter inlaw with access to the internal libraries, surely there should be more. He's since discovered that shifters seem to adhere to the idea that explaining magic to humans is much like explaining colours to a blind man, and exorcist writings are esoteric and religious, you'd have to know more magic than Shikamaru does to be able to tell what's metaphor and what's instruction. Have humans, Temari asked him at last, written many volumes on how to move one's arm? Either you can already do it, and then you don't need it explained, or you can't do it, and then no explanation will help.
Sasuke could tell, he imagines. The exorcist texts that Shikamaru's pored over, Sasuke could tell what's prayer and what's spell. But he won't be telling Shikamaru.
Uselessly, he thinks of Eliot, of all bloody things. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. Shikamaru's not his kind, and will not be sung to.
"Do I know you?"
Shikamaru blinks. Eventually it becomes clear that Sasuke, frowning at him with no great interest and no little hostility, isn't putting on insulting airs. Sasuke genuinely has no idea who he is.
"I figured you did," he says at last. "Shikamaru Nara. I'm friends with Ino? Ino Yamanaka?"
Sasuke makes a dismissive gesture that Shikamaru can only interpret as meaning that of course he knows Ino. Well, Ino's a sociable girl, he supposes, and Sasuke's never paid more attention to her than he can help. It's not entirely implausible, in retrospect, that he'd have little recollection of a random human she'd befriended.
"I'm here with Temari Sabaku," he says.
"Ah." Still no particular interest, but definite recognition.
"Really?" Shikamaru drawls. "You don't know me as the friend of a fellow exorcist, but you keep up with shifter gossip?"
Sasuke snorts. "I know you as the loadstone around Temari's neck."
"That's a little harsh."
Sasuke doesn't sound combative, or no more than he always does, which is considerably. "Is it? A mate bond means magic becomes a shared resource, you have nothing to contribute."
"You wound me," Shikamaru dead-pans.
Sasuke shrugs. It's a strange movement, on someone so young: a brittle, jagged, uneven movement, born of a broken body. The shoulder with the seal can't move naturally.
Looking at it, it dawns on Shikamaru that part of the design isn't actually part of the design, but teeth marks. Kyuubi's fangs went in there, and must have gone in far more brutally than Shikamaru's experienced, for the mark of them still to linger.
Sasuke says, on that shrug, "You took the Sabakus out of the running."
Shikamaru supposes he did. An insignificant human, single-handedly settling the Namikaze/Sabaku leadership feud, and accidentally at that. Gaara's crazy, Kankurou's dead, and Temari – well, Temari has a loadstone around her neck.
"Well," Shikamaru says, carefully not looking Sasuke in the eye: giving the impression of looking elsewhere, so Sasuke won't guard his face so closely, "I suppose everyone was hoping for a match between her and Naruto." Which would have settled things conclusively between Naruto and Konohamaru, because with the Sabaku heiress bonded to Naruto, there'd be an excuse to allow the bastard to inherit over the legitimate heir.
But this will be old news to Sasuke, who merely shrugs again. "Everyone except Naruto."
"Mmh," Shikamaru says. It's an agreement, because no, Naruto didn't want that. "It seems a little unfair, that Naruto alone should get what he wants."
Sasuke, whose life has admittedly been something less than fair, says, "And is it Naruto or me that you're currently trying to suck up to?"
Shikamaru's interested to note that Sasuke says Naruto's name in an easy, proprietary manner, as though Naruto has always belonged to him.
He looks past Shikamaru, over Shikamaru's shoulder, which becomes less insulting when Shikamaru discovers Naruto approaching behind him.
Did Temari look at him like that? No, Shikamaru decides, not with quite that edge of helpless yearning. Shikamaru, after all, didn't make trouble about the bond. Something like ninety percent of Shikamaru's life is dedicated to avoiding trouble.
"Shikamaru," Naruto says absently. His distant, distracted nod tells Shikamaru the same thing Sasuke's supercilious scowl told him: you're irrelevant. Naruto's way of moving around him is the way Naruto moves around furniture.
And Naruto's always liked Shikamaru, and so will be sad, angry too and bewildered but mostly sad, that he can only register Shikamaru as an obstacle. Can only feel relief that very soon it's gone, and he can sink down on the bed next to Sasuke.
He's careful, so achingly careful about it, and being careful has never come naturally to him, it sits awkward and stinging in his bones. But it's like he broke through a physical barrier, breaking into Sasuke's mind, so that now there's shattered glass all over Sasuke's thoughts and Sasuke has to tread carefully, carefully through his own head or he will be cut to shreds.
"You're using my computer," Naruto points out.
"Sasukesux wasn't a very hard password to decipher even when we were actually seven," Sasuke informs him.
Naruto argues that it was in fact fiendishly cunning: he's not clever about this stuff, so trying to come up with a password too complicated to crack but simple enough to remember was never a realistic option. This way, Sasuke would have to humiliate himself in order to hack the computer, a much more efficient deterrent than tricky passwords.
Once, when Naruto was younger, at the same time more innocent and more vulgar, the password had been sasukesuxcox, but of course that was before Orochimaru.
"What're you doing?" he mumbles, sprawling on the bed, torn this way and that by the impulse to get closer, always closer, and his attempts to counter it.
"Checking exorcist reactions," Sasuke says without looking away from the screen, "to my abrupt change of residence."
"And?"
"None."
"None," Naruto repeats. "What do you mean, none? That's absurd. We basically – it was for a good cause and all but like, we kidnapped you."
"They didn't react seven years ago, they're not going to react now. At least not yet. They'll be waiting to see where the chips fall." Sasuke's fingers move over the keyboard, and angling his head Naruto catches sight of Neji Hyuuga's sullen, over-pretty face in the corner of the chat window.
"Orochimaru," Naruto says, pressing the side of his face to Sasuke's hip, so his cheek is squeezed flat against it, flayed on the sharp edge of Sasuke's hip bone. "He'll be furious."
"He's actually quite pleased."
"Uh, what."
Sasuke doesn't quite shrug. Shrugging is a flagellant movement, a punishing reminder of the crippling mark. "Kimimarou only confirmed what I already knew."
"Is this some kind of weird, if you love something, let it go? Because nobody said so, but if he'd been willing to part with you at any cost, Dad would've paid."
"Your father told me Orochimaru wouldn't give me up," Sasuke says quietly. "Maybe he believed it, maybe he was just trying to flatter me. But it's not true. If the price was right – this was just better. He'll have realised what Minato wanted me for, he knew if he refused then Minato would just take me, and then he'd be the victim. He'll regain a lot of standing with the exorcists that way, and he can demand more in compensation from Minato, to avoid open war, than he'd have been able to get support for extracting as a price if he sold me outright."
Naruto holds himself still for a long moment, a moment that shudders and eventually shatters. "I will never give you up."
"I know," Sasuke says. "You belong to me."
"Yes."
Sasuke's hand hovers in the air, no longer anchored by the keyboard. Naruto catches it, brings it to his mouth with the vague idea of making a joke of Sasuke' ownership, make it something so they can stand it, maybe kissing the back of his hand in parody of feudal tradition. He hadn't counted on it being so erotic, on wanting so much to suck on the sharp ridge of Sasuke's knuckles.
He must have got a little better at shielding, because Sasuke doesn't shudder away. Just extracts his hand, swats Naruto on the nose, and returns to the computer, typing something to Neji.
Naruto idly wonders if Neji's a stuck up little bitch generally, or if that's only to people he's being racist to. It's a better subject to contemplate than how mad Sasuke would be if Naruto tackled him.
He still hasn't reached a definite conclusion when Kiba appears in the doorway. "Guys! We're going."
Kiba hesitates there, on the clear impulse to do something, say something, to achieve some manner of clean slate with Sasuke. Kiba never has been able to stomach exorcists, and there have been years now of him trying and mainly failing to aggravate Sasuke. The hesitation grows, and then dissipates: Sasuke's bitch face has deterred people far more determined than Kiba.
xxxxx
They've been in the car for about four hours, after the long stint on the plane, when Sasuke finally decides to speak in more than monosyllables. He says, "Will you fucking stop it."
Kiba stares at him, until Temari kicks his leg; Shikamaru and the guards engage in tactful deafness.
"I'm trying," Naruto hisses.
"If this is the best shielding you can manage, there's not point to any of this," Sasuke sneers.
Unfortunately, this is true.
Naruto shouldn't have to try but has been trying, ever since they left: trying to feel at home, to soak in sudden health and familiar camaraderie. He could've laughed and talked naturally, could've done it and meant it, if only Sasuke didn't resent it so much. If he could just… press his face to Sasuke's neck, right under his ear, where his smell is strong. Sneak his hands under Sasuke's shirt, touching him and pulling him closer. He'd kiss the nape of Sasuke's neck, the bony part where shoulder turns into nape and Sasuke's skin heats under his touch, kiss the inside of his elbow, a sucking kiss and his mouth would come away red and – he gasps away from the fantasy, lightheaded and hot with nausea.
In his mind he's reaching for Sasuke, fingers snapping closed like padlocks around Sasuke's wrist.
"You okay?" Temari's hand on his arm, making his stomach twist because it's not Sasuke's hand. And the unspoken continuation, an unwelcome echo of this morning: you shouldn't be this desperate.
But Sasuke still doesn't want him, and anyway Temari and Shikamaru hardly left their room the first few days after they'd been bonded.
"I'm great," he says, and she says nothing but takes her hand away.
He looks at Sasuke's hands instead, helplessly drawn to long thin fingers, knuckles like a minor mountain ridge, bones and veins visible under pale skin and sparse flesh.
Kyuubi shades his fantasies red, turns them in the direction of breaking Sasuke's fingers, small and hard and exquisite, between his jaws. To swallow them down where they become part of Naruto, inseparable and more, unidentifiable as anything separate from him. Nuzzling Sasuke's heart, the tough red skin of it, the muscle pulsing in the open cradle of Sasuke's broken ribs. To touch Sasuke's insides, the deepest darkest places of him, and take him irretrievably into himself.
"Cut it out," Sasuke hisses.
"I'm sorry!" Naruto snaps miserably. "I'm trying!"
Sasuke sneers. Genma – and holy shit, Naruto told Dad Genma was the wrong person for this mission – abruptly starts screaming. Something light and unforgiving twists through Naruto's insides, something that feels like the end of Naruto, and Genma burns.
Amidst the yelling and the panic, Naruto fists his hands in the front of Sasuke's jumper, shaking him. "What the hell are you doing!"
Sasuke fucking smirks at him. "Distracted yet?"
"Yes!" Naruto roars at him. "Yes, now fucking stop!" He claws at the bond, punches Sasuke in the face.
Sasuke doesn't even try to avoid it. Makes a sound like laughter as his head is thrown back, and Naruto's fingers burn and splinter against the magic curled tight and alive under Sasuke's skin.
But Genma does, eventually, stop burning. He ends up curled on the floor, a lot of him…gone. The medics move him to another car, better equipped for treating him.
The stench of burning flesh remains, and the ashes on the floor where he lay.
"What the fuck," Naruto demands.
Sasuke looks at him steadily. "I don't have to put up with this kind of shit anymore."
"Outside. Now."
"Naruto," Temari cuts in. "We need to get Genma properly hospitalised asap. Fight later"
xxxxx
It's an incredibly tense half an hour later that they stop at a filling station outside a relatively large town. Naruto, for the first time, stops staring at Sasuke, because now that he can move again, can actually go outside – but they need to hurry. The seat under him is shredded, his fingers still clawed.
"I'm gonna see if Genma needs anything."
"Maybe bring lover boy along, okay."
It's nothing short of painfully obvious that nobody wants to be left alone with Sasuke, who smirks like a psycho but does let Naruto tug him along out of the car. "Do you think Genma will be happy to see me?"
"Cut this shit out."
Sasuke stares back at him, clearly on the verge of saying something incredibly spiteful.
"Look," Naruto tells him. Tells both of them. "We have a common goal here. Settling things up north, getting the demons exorcised. Uniting the shifters."
Sasuke doesn't need to speak to make it clear that uniting the shifters is no goal of his.
"It's my goal," Naruto says. "And we're a team."
"I'm not a team player."
They're interrupted there. A handful humans, and someone who's not, who smells wrong.
"Well, well, well, what have we here? A merry troupe of shifters? Travel permits in order, I hope." He smiles. "Don't growl at me now, you know very well shifters aren't allowed unregulated travel in these regions." He stops then, in the middle of a step. "Sasuke?"
"Mami."
Mami smiles far more genuinely. "I knew you'd come down in the world, but to imagine I'd have to rescue you from a shifter gang. Tsk, tsk, tsk."
Naruto steps in between them on instinct.
Mami lifts a hand. It's a lazy, negligent movement, the movement of someone absolutely sure he has the situation in hand. A strong exorcist then, possibly a crusader – will he try to wipe Naruto out, exorcise him? It's flashier and more efficient if it works, but it takes far more energy than just burning. Wiping people with material bodies is after all much more difficult than wiping demons, and only a crusader could wipe a powerful shifter.
He never finds out, because Sasuke steps up close to Mami, effectively cutting of whatever attack he was aiming at Naruto. There's an inside pull, something glittering sharply across Sasuke's hand, and then Mami's face erupts.
Sasuke extracts Kyuubi's claw in an artery spray of blood.
They're on the humans before the humans can even register what's happening. Naruto goes through them like a meat cleaver, with Sasuke like some sort of killing machine beside him. They always have fought well together, fought other people almost as well as they fight each other.
The matter is dealt with, is bodies on the ground, by the time Kiba and Raidou are out of the car. "Clean up," Sasuke says, wiping Mami's lifeblood from his face with his sleeve. He'll know to duck next time he channels Kyuubi's claws.
"Hurry up," Naruto agrees. "Get Shikamaru on the surveillance."
"Bring the bodies," Sasuke decides. "Easier than to dispose of them here."
Temari tugs at Naruto's arm, not gently. "Get in. Get cleaned up. Both of you. Now."
When the car starts rolling again they're still washing up. It's trickier than it should be, with no mirror and a limited water supply. With the aching urge to lick the blood off Sasuke's jaw.
Naruto says, he has to say, "What we did. I don't like to do that."
"Liar."
"I don't like that I like it." He rubs his hands dry on his jeans. Swallows. Moves on. "You knew that arsehole?"
The left corner of Sasuke's mouth lifts, a halfbreed smirk. "He had it coming. And I like liking it." He remembers, and Naruto remembers with him, a balmy evening and the taste of ash. This was before Naruto had ever met Sasuke, this happened in Japan, where Naruto has never set foot.
It was possibly the first time Orochimaru saw Sasuke. He was visiting, and someone he'd brought with him, some shifter driven to the edge, had become violent.
Because of this, Sasuke killed a man when he was four. What he chiefly remembered afterwards was the simplicity. How he just had to say it.
Deus vult, in a Japanese accent so thick, Naruto wouldn't have recognised the words if he'd heard them.
Sasuke said it, meant it, and he didn't go hot and he didn't go cold as the man burned and died. Natural born killer, Orochimaru said afterwards, his ruffling hand like a thorn crown on Sasuke's head.
In the present Naruto arrives at the far more salient point, "You had Kyuubi claws."
Sasuke smirks. "I've wanted to do that since…"
"Yeah," Naruto says, grinning back after all. Sasuke's wanted to do that since he saw Naruto accidentally eviscerate that child molester lorry driver when they were nine. He returns to his seat, Sasuke following. "And we obviously make a great team. Forming a shifter federation isn't incompatible with your goals, so suck it up. You're on Team Naruto now!"
Sasuke pointedly says nothing, and Naruto's distracted by Temari checking the snuff film on her phone. If a shifter kills an exorcist – that's unforgivable to both exorcists and humans, that will mean a shifter cleansing, several settlements burnt or bombed, thousands of shifters annihilated. But Sasuke's an exorcist himself, and a far stronger and more valuable one than Mami. The video's blurry and starts in the middle of things, but it's clear that it's Sasuke slicing up Mami's face.
"Thank god," Temari snaps. There's silence then, and Naruto manages an hour or two of sleep.
He wakes to hear Sasuke demand of Kiba and Temari. "You knew about me. Since when?"
Kiba snorts out a laugh, leaning forward. Kiba will forgive you almost anything, if you cut up an exorcist, and Genma after all is still alive. "Since Naruto tried to jump out of the car after you."
"I did not!"
"Gaara had to practically sit on you."
Naruto doesn't remember that. It might be true though, everything was hazy around that one searing image, just bleak background to Sasuke's centre figure.
"Really," Sasuke says. His pulse is visible in his throat, perceptible in his wrist where it presses briefly against Naruto's leg. Sasuke's here talking to his friends and it's not catastrophe, and Naruto had thought that would mean more. He can feel himself leaning closer, cutting the inside of his cheek on a fang. Presses his forehead against Sasuke's shoulder, which is bony even through two layers of clothing, alive with magic that sings to Naruto.
And if Naruto could just lean away – except if he leant back he'd be doing it with his arms already locked around Sasuke, would end up lying across the backseat with Sasuke all over him, fingers knotted in his hair. He wouldn't know how to let him up.
It shouldn't be like this again, because he knows now, knows from inside Sasuke's head how he resents this, and that should change everything, but here he is rock hard and red-faced again.
"Naruto," and Sasuke's voice is level and autocratic, despite being so low it would have been private, if this had been a human gathering. Sasuke must be more upset than he'd realised, to forget about shifter hearing. "Do you actually need to?"
The world slows down, until they're sitting in a frozen timeframe.
"We already – I'm not going to die, now."
"I know you sell it to the humans as a one-off sacrifice, but cut the bullshit. If I never touch you again – you won't die but you'll weak and ill and miserable. I'll feel you be weak and ill and miserable. And it would be a waste and – it's not like you're repulsive. So do you need to?"
And how is it possible to tell someone you've forced yourself into that him not wanting you is like death?
"No," Naruto says, shamed into proper shielding for really the first time. "I don't need to."
"Good. When you do, tell me. If you wait until Kyuubi goes berserker rapist on me, I'm going to fry him."